Ron DeSantis has been determined as governor of Florida to privatize the funding of schools, and he has had a compliant legislature to help him achieve his goal of destroying public schools.
Most vouchers are claimed by students already enrolled in private schools—a subsidy for the rich and upper-middle-class—but the public funds are causing serious enrollment declines in some districts. Those districts are now considering closing public schools as tax money flows to unaccountable private schools.
Atterbury writes:
Gov. Ron DeSantis and Florida Republicans have spent years aggressively turning the state into a haven for school choice. They have been wildly successful, with tens of thousands more children enrolling in private or charter schools or homeschooling.
Now as those programs balloon, some of Florida’s largest school districts are facing staggering enrollment declines — and grappling with the possibility of campus closures — as dollars follow the increasing number of parents opting out of traditional public schools.
The emphasis on these programs has been central to DeSantis’ goals of remaking the Florida education system, and they are poised for another year of growth. DeSantis’ school policies are already influencing other GOP-leaning states, many of which have pursued similar voucher programs. But Florida has served as a conservative laboratory for a suite of other policies, ranging from attacking public- and private-sector diversity programs to fighting the Biden administration on immigration.
“We need some big changes throughout the country,” DeSantis said Thursday evening at the Florida Homeschool Convention in Kissimmee. “Florida has shown a blueprint, and we really can be an engine for that as other states work to adopt a lot of the policies that we’ve done.”
Education officials in some of the state’s largest counties are looking to scale back costs by repurposing or outright closing campuses — including in Broward, Duval and Miami-Dade counties. Even as some communities rally to try to save their local public schools, traditional public schools are left with empty seats and budget crunches.
Since 2019-20, when the pandemic upended education, some 53,000 students have left traditional public schools in these counties, a sizable total that is forcing school leaders to consider closing campuses that have been entrenched in local communities for years.
In Broward County, Florida’s second-largest school district, officials have floated plans to close up to 42 campuses over the next few years, moves that would have a ripple effect across Fort Lauderdale and Hollywood.
The district has lost more than 20,000 students over the last five years, a decline that comes as charter schools in particular experienced sizable growth in the area. Enrollment in charters, which are public schools operating under performance contracts freeing them of many state regulations, increased by nearly 27,000 students since 2010, according to Broward school officials.
Broward County Public Schools claims to have more than 49,000 classroom seats sitting empty this year, a number that “closely matches” the 49,833 students attending charter schools in the area, officials noted in an enrollment overview.
These enrollment swings are pressing Broward leaders to combine and condense dozens of schools, efforts that would save the district on major operating costs. So far, some of the ideas are meeting heavy resistance…
Enrollment among charters has increased by more than 68,000 students statewide from 2019-20 to this school year, according to data from the Florida Department of Education. More than a third of that rise happened in Broward, Duval and Miami counties alone.
Private school enrollment across Florida rose by 47,000 students to 445,000 students from 2019-20 to 2022-23, according to the latest data available from the state. Much of that growth is from newly enrolled kindergartners, with only a small fraction of these students having been previously enrolled in public schools, according to Step Up for Students, the preeminent administrator of state-sponsored scholarships in Florida.
A growing number of families also chose to homeschool their children during this span, as this population grew by nearly 50,000 students between 2019-20 and 2022-23, totaling 154,000 students in the latest Florida Department of Education data.
As all of these choice options ascend, enrollment in traditional public schools across the state decreased by 55,000 students from 2019-20 to this year, state data shows. But enrollment isn’t down everywhere. While Duval County has lost thousands of students, enrollment is up by more than 7,700 students at neighboring St. John’s County, the state’s top-ranked school district…
The state’s scholarship program is expected to grow, which could lead to more students leaving traditional public schools. While most new scholarship recipients previously attended private schools already, there is space for 82,000 more statewide — nearly 217,000 total — to attend private school or find a different schooling option on the state’s dime next school year.
Across the state, public schools are facing budget cuts, layoffs. and school closures, all to satisfy Gov. DeSantis’ love of school choice. Over time, billions of public dollars will flow every year to unaccountable private schools that are allowed to discriminate. And the outcomes will be worse, not better, as students flock to low-cost schools whose teachers and principals are uncertified.
It the main win for DeSantis is to subsidize the cost of private schools for parents whose children were already enrolled in private schools.
Here is the lead in a story in the Washington City Paper (Washington, D.C.) that describes not only how public school ratings and rankings work in the nation’s capital but also their impact in every public school district in the United States. Read this carefully:
“Before the pandemic shut down D.C. schools, each public school, like each student, got a report card. Every fall the school report card included a STAR rating, from one through five. The rating was based on a formula designed and used by the Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE), D.C.’s education agency. Federal law requires OSSE to identify the ‘bottom 5 percent’ of District schools, so that they can receive additional funding. In effect, OSSE’s STAR Framework ratings used a measurement of need to indicate a measurement of quality. And as a measurement of quality, the formula failed.” (Emphasis is mine.)
The author of the commentary is Ruth Wattenberg, who formerly served on the Washington, D.C. State Board of Education (SBOE). She explains that the 2015 federal education law, the Every Student Succeeds Act—the version that replaced the 2002, No Child Left Behind Act—requires all states to assign school ratings which are said to be a measure of need for the bottom 5 percent of “struggling” schools. However, in a place like Washington, D.C. with universal school choice, while ESSA requires states to rate schools to target the bottom scorers for improvement, parents use the ratings as an advertisement for the best schools in the system—perhaps the only evidence some parents consider as they choose a school for their children.
The ratings are always understood by the general public as a measure of school quality.
In a large city school district, when parents choose a school according to the ratings, these measures help resegregate the school district by income and race. Wattenberg explains: “In D.C., where families can choose to send their kids to any public school in the district, this flawed rating system is especially consequential. ‘Many kids have left their neighborhood schools’ because of the ratings, says Sheila Carr… grandparent of current D.C. students… A small exodus can trigger budget, staffing, and program cuts that have the potential to drive more families away from a particular school, triggering yet more cuts. A decade ago Carr remembers, this meant multiple school closings. Although DCPS (D.C. Public Schools) has avoided more closures recently, enrollments at some schools are way down. Anacostia High School enrolls just 287 students.”
Across metropolitan areas where numerous suburban school districts surround the central city, the ratings redline the poorer and most segregated school districts and encourage anybody who can afford it to seek the the school districts with the highest ratings: the homogeneously white and wealthy exurban school districts.
Across the states, legislatures and departments of education have developed their own rating systems to comply with the federal mandate, but these systems almost always feature each district’s aggregate standardized test scores, which have been documented to reflect primarily family income. Wattenberg explains the research she and her colleagues explored as they set out to redesign their rating system: “One expert showed us how high-poverty schools disproportionately got low ratings, even when test scores reported that their students had learned more than average. Education researcher and D.C. public school parent Betsy Wolf concluded that ‘our accountability system measures family income more than it measures school quality.’ Based on these findings, the SBOE resolved in 2022 that the rating system was ‘fundamentally flawed’ and recommended eliminating it… Education and poverty expert Sean Reardon says that average test scores ‘are the results of all the opportunities kids have had to learn their whole lives, at home, in the neighborhood, in preschool and in the school year. So it’s misleading to attribute average test scores solely to the school where they take the test.’”
Apparently in Washington, D.C. the board came up with a new system that is not likely to be much better: “At the SBOE’s early January meeting, some parents’ hopes of pushing to revamp the report cards faded. OSSE surfaced its new report card, and, instead of labeling schools with stars, the new proposal assigns each school a number, one to 100, called an ‘accountability score.’ The number will still be highlighted on each school’s online profile and on the central School Report Card, where it will be among the first and primary impressions of a school that parents will see. The formula that produces the new accountability score, while slightly revised and less toxic, is still biased against low-income schools. It is still the same formula OSSE uses to identify the neediest schools for the U.S. Department of Education.”
Wattenberg adds: “Less biased data on school quality measures educational practices and conditions known to promote student learning, such as teacher retention and the extent to which a school offers instruction on a variety of subjects, including social studies, science, and the arts, rather than an overly narrow focus on math and reading (which is what end-of-year tests focus on). Survey data showing student perceptions, such as the extent to which students feel academically challenged and supported is also an effective metric.”
From a parent’s point of view, the new summative grade tells no more about the teachers or the curriculum or students’ experiences at school. It is really no different than the five star rating system Wattenberg remembers in Washington, D.C.’s previous system. Here in Ohio, where I live, we have a five star system, which is no better than the A, B, C, D, F system we had before we got the new five stars. In Washington, DC, the new 1-100 rating number Wattenberg describes being earned by each school will only cue up competative parents to go for the highest rated schools in a giant competition. Most people choosing a school on the basis of the ratings will not be able to discern how the metric balances all the variables in each school or whether the rating really say anything about what is happening at the school.
Having attended school in a small Montana town, where we all went to the same middle school and high school, and having parented two children who attended our neighborhood elementary and middle school and came together at our community’s only high school here in a Cleveland, Ohio inner suburb, I prefer the old and more radical solution to the whole problem of school choice driven by metrics published in the newspaper or school report cards. In fact, for the majority of families in the United States, neighborhood schools are still the norm. A system of neighborhood schools embodies the idea that parents’ responsibility is to help their children embrace the opportunities at the school where they are assigned.
As parents when my children were in elementary school, we used the PTA meetings as places to strategize about how we could better support innovations and special programs to make school more fun and challenging for all the students. A district-wide school support agency in our community provides a tutoring program for students who need extra help, and there is a community supported, district-wide music camp for a week in June when the high school orchestra director and his staff, along with a raft of graduates from the high school music program, help students from across the middle schools to prepare for joining the high school band and orchestra. People from across the school district turn out for the concert that culminates the summer music camp.
This kind of community involvement connects parents with the community’s public schools in a qualitative way. When people engage personally with a school, the teachers and the students, parents can learn so much more about a school than any metric can expose.
At the very least, it is time for the U.S. Department of Education to stop demanding that states rate and rank their public schools. Wattenberg is correct that the ratings—a measurement of need—are misinterpreted by the press and misunderstood by the public as a measurement of quality.
If you are old enough to remember a different America, an America of neighborhood shops, of local bakeries, butchers, drugstores (with a soda fountain), shoe stores, bookstores, and dress shops, you may have wondered why most of them have been replaced by national chain stores and anonymous strip malls. Now we see even neighborhood public schools replaced by national charter chains, some even operated by for-profit corporations. Thom Hartmann explains the roots of this change in his new book The Hidden History of Monopolies: How Big Business Destroyed the American Dream. He is releasing the book a chapter at a time on his blog, which should whet our appetite to buy and read the book. This chapter describes the legal ploy that resulted in crushing local enterprise and creating billionaires.
He writes:
Robert Bork was Richard Nixon’s solicitor general and acting attorney general and had a substantial impact on the thinking in the Reagan White House—so much so that Reagan rewarded his years of hard work on behalf of America’s monopolists with a lifetime appointment to the federal bench in the DC Circuit, frequently a launching pad for the Supreme Court.
In the years following Lewis Powell’s 1971 memo, as numerous “conservative” and “free market” think tanks and publications grew in power and funding, Bork’s ideas gained wide circulation in circles of governance, business, and the law.
In 1977, in the case of Continental T.V., Inc. v. GTE Sylvania, the Supreme Court took up Bork’s idea and, for the first time in a big way, embraced the “welfare of the consumer” and “demonstrable economic effect” doctrines that Bork had been promoting for over a decade.
Neither of those phrases exists in any antitrust law, at least in Bork’s context. Nonetheless, the Supreme Court embraced Bork’s notion that the sole metric by which to judge monopolistic behavior should be prices that consumers pay, rather than the ability of businesses to compete or the political power that a corporation may amass.
When Ronald Reagan entered the White House in 1981, bringing with him Bork’s free market philosophy and a crew from the Chicago School, he ordered the Federal Trade Commission to effectively stop enforcing antitrust laws even within the feeble guidelines that the Supreme Court had written into law in GTE Sylvania.
The result was an explosion of mergers-and-acquisitions activity that continues to this day, as industry after industry concentrated down to two, three, four, or five major players who function as cartels. (A brilliant blow-by-blow cataloging of that decade is found in Barry C. Lynn’s book Cornered: The New Monopoly Capitalism and the Economics of Destruction.)
Bork’s reasoning—that antitrust law should defend only the consumer (through low prices), and not workers, society, democracy, or local communities—has become such conventional wisdom that in the 2014 Supreme Court case of FTC v. Actavis, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote a virtual word-for-word parroting of Bork: “The point of antitrust law is to encourage competitive markets to promote consumer welfare.”
Barak Orbach, professor of law at the University of Arizona, is one of a small number of scholars today who are genuine experts in the field of antitrust law. In a 2014 paper published by the American Bar Association, he wondered if Bork knew he was lying when he wrote that the authors of the Sherman Antitrust Act intended to reduce prices to advance “consumer welfare,” instead of protecting the competitiveness of small and local businesses, and the independence of government at all levels.
His conclusion, in “Was the ‘Crisis in Antitrust’ a Trojan Horse?” was that Bork was probably just blinded by ideology and had never bothered to go back and read the Congressional Record, which, he noted, says nothing of the kind.74
While Bork wrote that “the policy the courts were intended [by the Sherman Antitrust Act] to apply is the maximization of wealth or consumer want satisfaction,” Orbach said, “Members of Congress . . . were determined to take action against the trusts to stop wealth transfers from the public.” So much for that: today the Walton (Walmart) family is the richest in America and one of the richest in the world. They’re worth more than $100 billion, having squirreled away more wealth than the bottom 40% of all Americans. And they spend prodigiously on right-wing political causes, from the national to the local.
Amazon’s Jeff Bezos is now wealthier than any Walton; with a registered net worth of $112 billion, he is the richest single person in the world. Bezos is so rich that when he divorced his wife, MacKenzie Bezos, she received 19.7 million shares of Amazon worth $36.8 billion. She instantly became the world’s third-richest woman, and Jeff Bezos remained the world’s wealthiest man.75 While local newspapers are shutting down or being gobbled up all over the country, Bezos personally purchased the 140-year-old Washington Post in 2013 for $250 million. Now Bezos, like the Walton family, can use his sub- stantial wealth to obtain political ends that protect his wealth and allow Amazon to continue to grow.
Pamela Lang, a journalist and graduate student in Arizona, wrote for The Hechinger Report about her futile search for a school that would enroll her son, who has special needs. Despite Arizona’s budget-busting voucher program, she and he were turned away again and again. It’s time for her to check out her local public school, where her son would get the services he needs and he could not be rejected.
Please read her account.
If you live in Arizona, school choice may be coming to your neighborhood soon. As someone who has had more school choice than I know what to do with, I can tell you what may feel like a shocking surprise: Private schools have the power to choose, not parents.
I live in Phoenix, where the nearby town of Paradise Valley is getting ready to offer the privatization movement’s brand of choice to families. The district has indicated that it will likely vote to close four public schools due to insufficient funds. If this happens, other districts will probably follow: The state’s recent universal voucher expansion has predictably accelerated the diversion of money from public to private schools.
Arizona approved use of school choice vouchers, called Empowerment Scholarship Accounts, or ESAs, in 2011 on the promise that they were strictly for children with special needs who were not being adequately served in the public school system. The amount of funds awarded to qualified students was based on a tiered system, according to type of disability.
Over the years, the state incrementally made more students eligible, until full expansion was finally achieved in 2022. For some students, the amount of voucher money they qualify for is only a few thousand dollars, nowhere near enough to cover tuition at a private school. Often, their parents can’t afford to supplement the balance. However, my son, who is autistic, qualified for enough to cover full tuition.
I took him out of public school in 4th grade. Every school I applied to seemed to have the capability to accommodate his intellectual disability needs but lacked the willingness. Eventually, I found a special education school willing to accept him. It was over an hour from our home, but I hoped for the best. Unfortunately, it ultimately was not a good fit.
I then thought Catholic schools would welcome my son, but none of them did. One Catholic school principal who did admit him quickly rescinded the offer after a teacher objected to having him in her class.
The long list of general, special-ed, Catholic and charter schools that turned my son away indicate how little choice actually exists, despite the marketing of ESA proponents.
There was a two-year period where I gave up and he was home without social opportunities. I was not able to homeschool, so a reading tutor and his iPad became his only access to education.
I then tried to enroll him in private schools for students with disabilities.
These schools were almost always located in former office suites in strip malls with no outdoor access. My son’s current school shares space with a dialysis center in a medical building, while a former school was located in a small second-floor suite in a Target plaza.
Once a private school admits your child, they can rescind admission without cause. Private schools are at leisure to act as virtual dictatorships, and special-ed schools in particular are notorious for keeping parents at a distance…
Education is a human right, and public schools, open to all, are the guardians of this right. What privatizers call choice does not really exist.
Please open the link and read the article in full.
The latest jobs report was released a few days ago, and economists were astonished. The economy added 353,000 jobs in the past month, and unemployment remained low at 3.7%. This should be good news for Biden, But consumers are still concerned about inflation, which hits them in their pocketbook.
President Biden came into office in the midst of a global pandemic. Supply chains were disrupted, and prices were soaring in response. After the chaos of the Trump years, Biden set about hiring seasoned Cabinet officers and a strong economic team. Although the experts predicted that the instability of the COVID years would be followed by a deep recession, that’s not what happened. Throughout Biden’s term, unemployment remained low; the stock market reached historic records; manufacturing revived; and the U.S. economy outperformed nations in Europe and Asia. Yet public opinion polls showed a different picture: Consumers knew that the price of gasoline and grocery store staples went up and didn’t go down. Biden got no credit for the healthy economy because of the price of eggs, cereal, and other staples.
Joe Biden’s opponents focus on his age as something that makes him doddering, confused and ultimately unfit for office. So the great paradox of the 81-year-old’s first term is that he has presided over perhaps the most energetic American government in nearly half a century. He unleashed a surge in spending that briefly slashed the childhood poverty rate in half. He breathed life into a beleaguered union movement. And he produced an industrial policy that aims to reshape the American economy.
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There is plenty to debate about the merits of all of this. A steep rise in federal spending has aggravated the country’s worrying fiscal trajectory. Subsidies for companies to invest in America have angered allies and may yet end up going to waste. But there is no denying that many of these policies are already having an impact. Just look at the boom in factory construction: even accounting for inflation, investment in manufacturing facilities has more than doubled under Mr Biden, soaring to its highest on record.
What would he do in a second term? Mr Biden’s re-election motto—“we can finish the job”—sounds more like a home contractor’s pledge than the rhetoric of a political firebrand. Yet to hear it from the president’s current and former advisers, Bidenomics amounts to little short of an economic revolution for America. It would be a revolution shaped by faith in government and a mistrust of markets.
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Five elements stand out. The first is a desire to boost workers, mostly through unions. The second is more social spending, especially on early-childhood education. Third is tougher competition policy to restrain big business. Fourth, a wave of investment intended to make America both greener and more productive. Last, Mr Biden wants to tax large firms and the wealthy to pay for much of this.
As with any president, Mr Biden’s agenda thus far has been limited by Congress. The five elements were all present in the $3.5trn “Build Back Better” bill that Democrats in the House of Representatives backed in 2021, only to run smack into a split Senate. The result is that the most prominent part of existing Bidenomics has been the investment element, comprising three pieces of legislation focused on infrastructure, semiconductors and green tech. Signing three big spending bills into law nevertheless counts as a productive presidential term. They add up to a $2trn push to reshape the American economy.
If Mr Biden returns to the White House for a second term but Republicans retain control of the House or gain the Senate, or potentially both, advisers say that his focus would be on defending his legislative accomplishments. Although Republicans would be unable to overturn his investment packages if they did not hold the presidency, they could chip away at them.
Take the semiconductor law. Along with some $50bn for the chips industry, it also included nearly $200bn in funding for research and development of cutting-edge technologies, from advanced materials to quantum computing. But that giant slug of cash was only authorised, not appropriated, meaning it is up to Congress to pass budgets to provide the promised amount. So far it is falling well short: in the current fiscal year, it is on track to give $19bn to three federal research agencies, including the National Science Foundation, which is nearly 30% less than the authorised level, according to estimates by Matt Hourihan of the Federation of American Scientists, a lobby group. If Congress refuses to work with Mr Biden, these shortfalls will grow.
The funding directed at infrastructure and semiconductors is more secure, but much of it will run out by 2028, before the end of a second term. Without Republican support for funding, the investment kick-started over the past couple of years may ease off. High-cost producers will struggle to survive. Critics may see no reason to devote so much treasure to manufacturing when a modern economy based on professional, technical and scientific services already generates plenty of well-paying jobs.
But Mr Biden will have some leverage if Republicans try to water down his policies. Many of the big tax cuts passed during Donald Trump’s presidency expire at the end of 2025. Republicans want to renew them, to avoid income-tax rates jumping up. So one possibility is that Mr Biden could fashion a deal in which he agrees to an extension of many of the tax cuts in exchange for Republicans in Congress backing some of his priorities, including his industrial subsidies—never mind that such an agreement would be fiscally reckless.
The White House is also hoping that Mr Biden’s investment programmes will develop momentum of their own. “We are very pleasantly surprised by the extent to which private capital has flowed in the direction of our incentives,” says Jared Bernstein, chair of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers. Much of the money is going to red states, spawning constituencies of businesses and local politicians who would object to cuts. Meanwhile, there is, in principle, bipartisan support for federal spending on science and technology as a way of safeguarding America’s competitive edge over China. That is why a few dozen Republicans in the House and Senate, albeit a minority, voted for the semiconductor package. Given this constellation of interests and leverage, the industrial policies that defined Bidenomics in the president’s first term would probably survive his second term, albeit in somewhat more limited form.
But what if Mr Biden is less constrained? To really understand the potential scope of Bidenomics, it is worth asking what the president would do if the Democrats end up controlling both houses of Congress. Once they come down from their elation at such an outcome, the team around Mr Biden would know that they have a limited window—probably just two years, until the next set of midterm elections—to get anything of note done.
For starters they would turn to the social policies left on the Build Back Better cutting-room floor. These include free pre-school for three- and four-year-olds, generous child-care subsidies, spending on elderly care, an expanded tax credit for families with children and paid parental leave. Janet Yellen, the treasury secretary, has described this agenda as “modern supply-side economics”. She argues that investments in education would make American workers more productive, while investments in care would free up people, especially women, to work, leading to a bigger labour force. But it would also be costly, running to at least $100bn a year of additional spending—adding half a percentage point to the annual federal deficit (which hit 7.5% of gdp in 2023). And implementation would be challenging. For instance, funding for child care would fuel demand for it, which in turn would exacerbate a chronic shortage of caregivers.
Mr Biden’s desire to strengthen unions would also receive fresh impetus. The president describes himself as the most pro-union president in American history—a claim that may well be true. In his first term support for unions was expressed most clearly through words and symbolic actions: when he joined striking auto workers near Detroit in September, he became the first president to walk a picket line. Mr Biden would have liked to have done more. He had at first wanted to make many industrial subsidies contingent on companies hiring unionised workers, a requirement that did not make it into law. The labour movement’s big hope for a second Biden term is passage of the pro Act, which would boost collective bargaining by, among other things, making it harder for firms to intervene in union votes. That would represent a gamble: the flexibility of America’s labour market is a source of resilience for the economy, which has been good to workers in recent years.
The flipside of Mr Biden craving approbation as a pro-union president is that he has also come to be seen as anti-business. Members of his cabinet bridle at this charge, noting that corporate profits have soared and that entrepreneurs have created a record number of businesses during his first term. Yet the single biggest reason why Bidenomics has got a bad rap has been his competition agenda, led by Lina Khan of the Federal Trade Commission (ftc). Although her efforts to cut down corporate giants have spluttered, with failed lawsuits against Meta and Microsoft, she is not done. The ftc has introduced new merger-review guidelines that require regulators to scrutinise just about any deal that makes big companies bigger, which could produce even more contentious competition policy. Excessive scrutiny of deals would also use up regulators’ scarce resources and poison the atmosphere for big business. An alternative focus, on relaxing land-use restrictions and loosening up occupation licensing, would provide a much healthier boost to competition.
Captain of Industry
At the same time, Mr Biden may double down on the manufacturing policies of his first term. The $50bn or so of incentives for the semiconductor industry has been a start, but it is small relative to how much investment is required for large chip plants. Advisers talk of a follow-on funding package. There would also be a desire to craft new legislation to smooth out bumps in the implementation of industrial policy. Todd Tucker of the Roosevelt Institute, a left-leaning think-tank, advocates a national development bank, creating a reservoir of cash that could be channelled to deserving projects.
How to pay for it all? Mr Biden has long made clear that he wishes to raise taxes on the rich, in particular on households earning over $400,000 a year and on businesses. The president’s advisers argue that he truly believes in fiscal discipline. His budget for the current fiscal year would, for instance, cut the deficit by $3trn over a decade, or by 1% of gdp a year, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (crfb), a non-profit outfit. That, however, is predicated on Democrats exercising restraint as tax receipts increase—something that is hard to imagine, says Maya MacGuineas of the crfb….
Most of the action, then, would be in the domestic arena—the battleground for everything from child-care spending to semiconductor subsidies. Supporters argue that these policies would make America more equal, propel its industry and tilt the playing-field towards workers and away from bosses. To many others, they look like a lurch back to bigger government, with an outdated focus on both manufacturing and unions, which may strain ties with allies. Mr Biden was a most unlikely radical in his first term. If the polls head his way, he may go further yet in a second. 7
Jeff Bryant, independent education journalist, writes here about two federal education programs with disparate goals. One is the relatively small Community Schols Program, which aims to build and strengthen communities, and the other is the Charter Schools Program, which is wildly overfunded and which divides communities. His article appears on the website of the Independent Media Institute; it was originally published by The Progressive.
Bryant writes:
The Department of Education has separate grant programs for funding either charter or community schools; the latter provides money for what schools and families really need, the former, not so much.
Two education-related grant programs operated by the U.S. Department of Education—both of which dole out millions in federal tax dollars for educating K-12 children every year—present two opposing truths about government spending on public education: that it can be wasteful and misguided, or innovative and informed.
The first program enjoys the significant backing of industry lobbyists and wealthy foundations, and allows private education operators—some that operate for-profit—to skim public money off the top. It also adds to racial segregation in public schools, and squanders millions of dollars on education providers that come and quickly go, or simply fail to provide any education services at all.
The second program helps schools expand learning time and opportunities for students, especially in high-poverty and rural communities; promote parent engagement; encourage collaboration with local businesses and nonprofits; and become hubs for child- and family-related services that contribute to students’ health and well-being.
These strikingly different outcomes result from two different intentions: the first program’s goal to promote a type of school that is vaguely defined versus the second’s goal to expand a way of doing school that is supported by research and anecdotal evidence.
The first grant program is the Charter Schools Program (CSP), which funds privately operated charter schools and their developers and advocacy organizations. The program, started during the Clinton Administration and greatly expanded during the Obama years, gives money directly to charter schools and to state education agencies and charter school-related organizations to distribute to new, existing, or proposed charters.
In October, the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, the nation’s top lobbyist for the charter school industry, hailed the federal government’s release of $572 million in taxpayer dollars from the CSP, calling the money “the most essential funding to enable the existence of public charter schools.”
In New Mexico, local press outlets reported that a $52 million CSP grant went to a charter industry advocacy group called the Public Charter Schools of New Mexico, which in turn would award subgrants to individual charter schools. One reporter quoted the group’s leader who said, “There was a large application with several requirements in there. And we were scored based on, you know, how well we met the requirements and a peer review process.”
In Idaho, Idaho Ed News reported about the $24.8 million CSP grant going to Bluum, which the reporter called “a nonprofit charter support organization.” The grant is to be used “to grow and strengthen Idaho’s charter school network,” the article said.
Maryland’s top charter school industry booster, the Maryland Alliance of Public Charter Schools, celebrated its $28.7 million CSP saying it would provide “subgrants to open new charter schools and/or replicate and expand charter schools.”
Not all CSP grants went to advocacy groups. The largest—totaling $109,740,731—went to the Indiana Department of Education. According to Chalkbeat, one out of three charter schools in Indiana have closed since 2001.
A 2019 analysis conducted by the Network for Public Education, a pro-public schools advocacy group, found that over its lifespan CSP has wasted as much as $1 billion on charter schools that never opened or opened and quickly closed.
Another CSP grant of $37,579,122 went to the Minnesota Department of Education. In Minnesota, courts have grappled for years with the question of whether racial imbalances in public schools, caused to a great extent by the expansion of racially segregated charter schools, violate the constitutional right of students of color to receive an adequate education.
Other CSP grants went to credit enhancement for charter school facilities, essentially giving public money to real estate development firms and investment companies that finance and build new charter schools.
Jeff Bryant is a writing fellow and chief correspondent for Our Schools. He is a communications consultant, freelance writer, advocacy journalist, and director of the Education Opportunity Network, a strategy and messaging center for progressive education policy. His award-winning commentary and reporting routinely appear in prominent online news outlets, and he speaks frequently at national events about public education policy. Follow him on Twitter @jeffbcdm.
For the past quarter-century, American policymakers have been laser-focused on raising test scores. They assumed that higher test scores equals better education equals better economy. The cost of all this testing was billions of dollars, which would have been better spent on reducing class sizes, raising teachers’ salaries, and updating schools.
From No Child Left Behind to Race to the Top to the Every Student Succeeds Act of 2015, federal policy has made standardized test scores the most consequential measure of all schooling. Every release of scores by the National Assessment of Educational Progress produces a flurry of articles with dire predictions about the future (“a Sputnik Moment!) or the discovery of a miracle (e.g. the Texas/Florida/Mississippi 4th grade reading miracle, which strangely disappears by the 8th grade).
But an occasional outbreak of wisdom cautions us that we are looking for “success” in the wrong place.
Paul Bonner is a retired educator. He posted the following comment on the blog.
My first personal encounter with NAEP was around 2005. I was an eighth grade assistant principal facilitating the process between my staff and the NAEP testing officials who were to give the test. As I monitored the hall during the testing of selected random students, it struck me how disinterested our students were in performing on the assessment. My school at the time was a high performing magnet program with a highly motivated student body. I assumed, incorrectly, that due to the competitive attitudes of our students that they would want to perform well, as I had with standardized assessments in the 1970s no matter what it meant concerning my academic standing. What I learned in this first encounter was that students were already fed up with standardized tests particularly if it had no bearing on their academic standing. These students made a habit of blowing away all of the state tests and for them NAEP was a waste of time. The idea of NAEP as a report card might be significant if students were not already wasting three weeks of their year with state and district tests. In other words, no student benefit so why bother. How does this give us an accurate read on student capacity? Second, none of the standardized assessments, international, national, state, or local have shown meaningful movement in student performance over the decades. A few points either way does not reveal any real change in instructional efficacy or evidence of greater learning opportunities for students no matter their circumstances. The realities remain the same. Students prepared for schooling or provided significant instructional and experiential resources perform well. Those who do not have such privilege do not. Policy makers and educational leaders are simply fooling themselves when denying that fact. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs is telling in this regard. Piddling about a few point improvement in a NAEP test for fourth graders isn’t going to change the fact that Mississippi and other poor states provide far less opportunity for their students and poorer outcomes than wealthier states wiling to put more resources in the classroom. Testing has become a waste of time and money that could be better used elsewhere.
Nancy Flanagan, retired teacher of music in Michigan, writes here about how “school choice” has damaged the perception of public schools, turning them from a valued public good to just another consumer choice. when she started teaching, public schools were the glue of the community. Now they are forced to compete with multiple private choices, which claim to be better although they are not.
She explains why we could have good public schools in every community, but we have lost the will to pursue that goal. instead we have pursued a series of demonstrably failed ideas, wasting money and lives, while disintegrating the will to improve our public schools.
She writes:
The only contentious thing I ever talk about, at holiday hang-outs or on Facebook (our new town square), is education policy. I will talk to just about anybody—persistently and passionately—about schools, and what it would take to make our public education system not merely workable, but beneficial for all kids in the United States.
This is, by the way, a goal that could largely be accomplished. We have the human capital, the resources and the technical knowledge to transform public education over a generation. What we lack is the public will to do so—for children other than our own, at least.
This represents a sea change in our 20th century national approach to public education, that post-war America where the GI Bill and the Baby Boom made tan, rectangular brick elementary schools spring up like mushrooms in the 1950s. Teachers were in high demand, and state universities were adding a new dormitory every year. Education was going to lift us up, make us (here it comes) the greatest nation on earth.
We don’t think that way anymore.
Somewhere in between our rush to put a man on the moon and the advent of computers in all our classrooms, we lost our “public good” mojo, the generous and very American impulse to stir the melting pot and offer all children, our future citizens, a level playing field, educationally. Lots of edu-thinkers trace this to 1983 and the Nation at Risk report, but I think that the origins of losing that spirit of unity are deeper and broader than that.
A wing of the charter movement that is ideologically or religiously opposed to “government schools” was present at the charter movement’s creation, and has grown to comprise a sizable segment of the charter universe. With the election of Donald Trump and the appointment of Betsy DeVos as education secretary, it is presently empowered as never before. Public confusion about vouchers and charters continues to create opportunities. A lightly regulated charter school industry could achieve many of the same goals as voucher programs. They could drain funding from traditional public schools, deregulate the education sector, and promote ideological or religious curricula—all without provoking the kind of resistance that vouchers received.
I posted the article because it was true and thoughtful.
After I posted the article, the online conversation was revealing. Teachers (and a lot of my Facebook friends are educators) contributed positive commentary. But there was also a fair amount what Stewart calls public confusion.
A sense that charter schools are, somehow, de facto, better than public schools—simply by the virtue of the fact that they’re not public, but selective and special.
Assertions that public schools (schools I know well, and have worked in) are attended by children who haven’t learned how to behave properly.
Blaming teacher unions for doing what unions do: advocating for fairness, serving as backstop for policy that prioritizes the community over individual needs or wants.
None of these things is demonstrably true. The conversation illustrated that many parents and citizens are no longer invested in public education, emotionally or intellectually. School “choice” is seen as parental right, not something that must be personally paid for. There is now agreement with an idea once unthinkable in America: corporations also have a “right” to advertise and sell a for-profit education, using our tax dollars.
Education is a major major public good where we tax the rich in order to provide a public benefit that you get just by right of being a citizen. When they talk about needing to do away with the entitlement mentality, the most problematic entitlement for them is not Medicare or Social Security. It’s education. Education is even more of a problem for them because teachers are trying to encourage kids to think they can do more. And that’s dangerous.
It’s worth talking about—the uniquely American principle of a free, high-quality education for every single child—even if the dialogue is heated. We’re in danger of losing the very thing that made us great.
“Co-location” of charters inserts a charter school into the space of an existing public school, causing the public school to lose space for resource rooms, computer rooms, and other non-classroom uses. California has a law requiring public schools to make room for charters, no matter how crowded one or both schools may be.
Long plagued with bad feeling between public schools and charter schools, the elected board of the Los Angeles Unified School District will vote tomorrow on co-location policy.
MEDIA ADVISORY
For Immediate Release – September 25, 2023
Media Contact:
Alex McElvain, (630) 881-0545, cp-a.mcelvain@lausd.net
Los Angeles Unified Board of Education to Vote on Creating a Charter Schools
Co-Location Policy to Mitigate Impacts Caused by Proposition 39
A long overdue resolution seeks to protect innovative programs and prevent the worst impacts of
co-locations on vulnerable students and schools.
What: The Board of Education will vote on whether to adopt Resolution 026-22/23 “Creating a Charter Schools Co-Location Policy to Mitigate Impacts Caused by Proposition 39”. The resolution authors, Board President Jackie Goldberg and Board Member Dr. Rocío Rivas, along with parents and educators, will be available for media following the event.
Who: Resolution co-authors Board President Jackie Goldberg (LAUSD District 5) and Board Member Dr. Rocío Rivas (LAUSD District 2)
When: Tuesday, September 26
· 1:00 pm Regular Board Meeting
· 3:15 pmAgenda Item will be heard
· 4:00 pm Press Availability
Approved in 2000, Proposition 39 imposed mandates on California schools based on its obligations to share space with charter schools. Co-locations—where district-led schools are required to share space with charter operated schools—have raised myriad educational, operational, safety, financial, and legal challenges. Parents, educators, and students have described how co-locations have syphoned away needed resources from neighborhood schools, such as parent centers, computer labs, and even space for electives. Many are concerned that co-locations undermine District-led initiatives to support students and schools, such as Priority Schools, Black Student Achievement Plan (BSAP) schools, and Community Schools. This resolution calls for improvements, transparency, and accountability in the charter co-location process. The lack of clear guidance from prior Boards has resulted in co-locations on numerous Priority, BSAP, and Community Schools, and “charter pipelines” that actively encourage students to leave the District for middle and high school charters on their campus. Today’s resolution will not undo any of the District’s current co-locations, but will provide guidance in the future for new co-locations, and those where a charter school moves due to growth or other material revisions.
Alana Semuels writes for TIME magazine, where this article appeared. She rightly notes that dollars spent at Walmart hurt locally-owned businesses. In many parts of the country, you can drive through small towns and see empty stores that used to be owned by local folk. They couldn’t compete with Walmart’s low prices. Maybe mom-and-pop got a job as greeters at the Walmart twenty miles away. Walmart keeps its prices low not only by its buying power but by prohibiting its workers from forming unions.
Walmart destroys small towns and communities by killing their local economy. if Walmart finds that its super store is not profitable, it will close it and move on, leaving behind devastated towns and communities.
But that’s not the only reason to avoid Walmart. Its owners, the Walton family, are avid supports of school choice. They are the biggest supporters of charter schools, other than the federal government, which dutifully spends $440 million every year to expand new charters, mostly corporate chains like Walmart. Did you ever imagine that your local public school would be replaced by a chain school? Of course, members of the Walton family top the list of America’s billionaires. With a combined wealth of more than $240 billion, they are America’s richest family. Don’t make them richer.
Ironically, Sam Walton, the founding father, graduated from public schools. He graduated from the David H. Hickman High School in Columbia, Missouri. Unlike his descendants, he did not hate public schools; he did not want to privatize and destroy them.
Alana Semuels wrote:
Every week, I go onto Walmart’s website and order a bunch of groceries to be delivered to my house and then feel a little bit guilty.
Walmart is a multi-billion dollar corporation with headquarters more than 1,000 miles from my home; the money I spend there goes to shareholders and executives who live far away, instead of to my local grocery store, Key Food, an 86-year-old co-op of independently owned stores based near my home in New York. By shopping at Walmart, I am likely contributing to the demise of the independently-owned grocery store, which is disappearing across the country.
But the prices make the choice easy. On a recent day, the 42-oz tub of Quaker Oats I get each week was $9.99 at Key Foods and $5.68 at Walmart; a 500 ml bottle of California Olive Ranch olive oil was $14.49 at Key Foods and $8.37 at Walmart; Rao’s homemade tomato sauce was $9.99, while I could have gotten the exact same item on Walmart for $6.88. On these three items alone, I saved $14 by shopping at Walmart.
These prices are one reason that Walmart captures one in four grocery dollars in America, but there’s an argument to be made that Walmart and other big chains including Dollar General, which is expanding at a rapid clip across the country, come by those prices unfairly because of their market power.
There’s a law on the books—1936’s Robinson-Patman Act—that essentially says suppliers in any industry can’t give lower prices and special deals to big chain stores if it costs the same to serve them as other stores. The law also says retailers can’t try and bully suppliers into giving those discounts.
But because Walmart and dollar stores are so huge, representing a big part of a supplier’s business, they’re able to extract deals and low prices from suppliers, according to Small Business Rising and the Main Street Competition Coalition, two groups of independent business owners making their case in Congressional hearings and television ads. The pandemic highlighted just how unfairly Walmart can wield its power, the small businesses are telling regulators, because it was able to demand that suppliers stock its shelves when competitors weren’t able to get the same products for weeks or months. It’s not just groceries; independent pharmacies, book stores, auto parts stores, and other types of retailers are also struggling on an uneven playing field, they say.
Diane Ravitch's blog 