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John Thompson: Oklahoma’s State Chief Clings to Failed Reforms

By dianeravitch
January 20, 2024 //
8

John Thompson, a historian and retired teacher in Oklahoma, reviews the stalemate in education in the Sooner State. The cause: a state superintendent who will not abandon failed reforms.

He writes:

As School Superintendent Ryan Walters ramps up his attacks on public education, resisting his false, rightwing agenda has become Oklahoma educators’ top priority. While we need to unite and put the school reform wars of the last two decades behind us, the lessons of corporate reforms must be remembered. As Walters puts the doomed-to-fail, test-to-punish No Child Left Behind Act of 2002 (NCLB) “accountability” mandates on steroids, I’ve tried to be as diplomatic as possible in reminding educators how and why data-driven, competition-driven “reforms” did so much damage. Reading the Tulsa World editorial, “Current Public Accountability Systems Always Leaving Kids Behind” by Bixby Superintendent Rob Miller, brought me back to a time when I was one of many educators trying to reason with corporate school reformers. Then I read Peter Greene’s “VAM: Why Is This Zombie Policy Still Around?, and I was reminded of the history of so many Oklahoma administrators failing to push back against the Billionaires Boys Club.

My favorite memories of Rob Miller was when he pulled no punches in telling legislators the hard truths about NCLB. Miller is still candid about it, illustrating education’s “gap between those who make policy and those who suffer the consequences.” Research made it clear that “standardized tests are unreliable indicators of school quality,” and “nothing more than an elaborate sorting and labeling system.” Non-educators dismissed the experience of teachers, concluding they were “just falling back on excuses about student poverty, adverse childhood experiences, teacher shortages and unstable families.”

Miller recounts the loss of “recess, music and arts, field trips, class discussions and reading books for pleasure when we need to get these kids proficient at bubbling correct answers on multiple-choice tests.” He then writes:

Who cares if a 10-year-old learns to hate school because he’s been retained in third grade and his days are now filled with worksheets, practice tests and repetitive drill-and-kill curriculum in place of projects, puzzles and hands-on activities which nurture his natural curiosity and develop thinking skills? Suck it up, kid!

In my experience, the overwhelming majority of education leaders knew that test-driven accountability would inevitably lead to “tedious, time-wasting, high-pressure, spirit-killing, highly scripted instructional programs.” But few would go on the record about the harm done by focusing on test scores, as opposed to improving learning. And few of them were as eloquent as Miller when standing up for students.

Then, I read Peter Greene’s summary of what I believe was the worst of the worst corporate reform mandate, Value Added Models (VAMS). When the Billionaires Boys Club” saw the way that NCLB wasn’t working, they blamed Baby Boomers for accepting “Excuses!” and targeted individual educators, using invalid and unreliable algorithms to punish and replace veteran teachers with 23-year-olds they could train. I will always love President Obama, but his Race to the Top was even more destructive than NCLB. Virtually every educator and student above 2ndgrade were held accountable for increased “outputs.”

Greene first explained the inherent flaws in VAMS, doing an intensive analysis of the model’s flaws for teacher evaluation, and surveys documenting teachers rejecting them. He also wrote:

We used to talk about this a lot. A. Lot. But VAM … has departed the general education discussion even though it has not departed the actual world of education. Administrators still brag about, or bemoan, their VAM scores. VAM scores still affect teacher evaluation. And VAM scores are still bunk.

And that leads to what may be the most disturbing aspect of Greene’s piece for states like Oklahoma. He reviewed a range of studies around 2014 and 2015 that made the overwhelming case for abandoning the use of VAMs for accountability purposes. Since Ryan Walters has said he’s been consulting with the architects of the Houston IDS regarding a plan for taking over the Tulsa Public Schools, the most relevant and frightening research Greene cites for Oklahoma document the destructive role that VAMs played in Houston.

Reading Superintendent Miller’s and Greene’s work makes me, once again, rethink my efforts to persuade administrators and politicians to reject test-driven accountability. I worry that education leaders will revert back to the “culture of compliance,” and obey Walters’ demands. I keep remembering the time when one of the nation’s top experts, John Q. Easton of the Chicago Consortium on School Research, came to Oklahoma City and explained why it is impossible to improve schools without first building trusting relationships, and warning about untrustworthy accountability metrics. Afterwards, in the parking lot where administrators were more likely to feel free to speak their minds, the OKCPS’s top researchers agreed, but warned that the new types of tests resulting from NCLB (with Criterion Based Tests replacing Norm Referenced Tests) would completely corrupt our data.

Then, we had an agreement with MAPS for Kids volunteers that the OKCPS would be clear in telling teachers that their job was teaching to state standards, not standardized tests. When NCLB was implemented, however, I was in the meeting where top administrators recalled years of ridiculous mandates and then jolted us all by saying the district had no choice but to expand high-stakes testing. I was the only one who pushed back. A smart, sincere, veteran administrator replied, “John, I always say you don’t make a hog bigger by weighing it. But this is politics. We have no choice.”

On the state level, I joined an informal committee with superintendents trying to draft NCLB policies that would be less destructive. I was tasked with studying the Ohio standards. Because it was then a swing state, Ohio was granted the most freedom to get around the most destructive accountability mandates. The thought was that NCLB’s worst aspects would not survive the 2004 elections, so we sought to kick the ball down the field until evidence-based policies returned!?!?

So, I kept trying to be diplomatic, bridging differences with both – corporate reformers who would not reconsider their ideology-driven mandates and educators who felt they had to comply with those mandates. On one hand, unity is more important when our democracy – not just public education – faces existential threats. On the other hand, discussing these historic facts could be a unifying force. After all, so many of today’s teachers and parents have experienced the damage done by test-driven, competition-driven schooling. I suspect that many of them would appreciate a discussion of the history of those failures.

The 21st century is full of hard truths about the way that the holistic instruction students need for a better future was undermined. And then came Covid, and then came the Moms for Liberty. Reading Rob Miller and Peter Greene, and the science they present, is convincing me that I also must learn from failures to openly oppose corporate school reforms, in addition to fighting back against fanatics like Ryan Walters.

By the way, Walters just announced his plan to create a “one-stop shop” for teacher training, development and financial services. He unexpectedly ended the state’s relationship with:

The three organizations, which have wide membership throughout the state are the Oklahoma State School Boards Association (OSSBA), the Cooperative Council for Oklahoma School Administration (CCOSA) and the Oklahoma Public School Resource Center (OPSRC). In a news release, Walters said without providing examples that the three organizations “work in tandem with national extremist groups that seek to undermine parents, force failed policies into the schools, and work against a quality education in Oklahoma.”

The Cooperative Council for Oklahoma School Administration responded, “Last year, over 5,400 educators attended CCOSA’s professional development events to serve those members, focusing on topics such as school finance, special education law and teacher evaluations.” The OPSRC did not reply, but apparently, Walters broke ties with them because they hired a former district superintendent, April Grace, who was his Republican opponent for state superintendent. Before education leaders try to cooperate with Walters in order to avoid his full fury, they should remember that the OPSRC is funded by the Walton Family Foundation and other philanthropies that support corporate school reforms! That’s one more reminder that revenge, not school improvement, is his focus.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Closing schools, Corporate Reform, Disruption, Education Industry, Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), Failure, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Oklahoma, Race to the Top, Teachers, VAM (value-added modeling)

Thom Hartmann: Why Rightwingers Oppose Public Schools

By dianeravitch
January 18, 2024 //
23

Thom Hartmann continues to amaze me, with his steady production of powerful articles. This one is especially important for the readers of this blog, whose primary purpose is to strengthen and protect our public schools.

Thom Hartmann writes:

In 1776, British economist Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations, a book that laid out the principles that modern economies have operated under for centuries (with the exception of the Reagan Revolution years of 1981-2021). In addition to arguing for a strong domestic manufacturing base and high taxes on the wealthy, Smith pointed out that one of the things that most directly constitutes the wealth of a nation is its educated workforce and well-informed populace (as a result of that education).

From Thomas Jefferson creating the first tuition-free American college (the University of Virginia), to Horace Mann’s advocacy of public schools in the late 19th century, right up until 1954, this was an uncontroversial position. It’s why every developed country on Earth has a vibrant public school system and — with the exception of the US since Reagan ended free college in California — most developed countries offer free or near-free college to their citizens.

But in 1954, the US Supreme Court upset the education apple cart by declaring in their Brown v Board case that “separate but equal” schools, segregated by race, were anything but “equal.” That decision fueled two movements that live on to this day.

The first was the rightwing anti-communist movement spearheaded by the John Birch Society, which was heavily funded back then by Fred Koch, the father of Charles and David Koch. They put up billboards across the country demanding that Americans rise up and “Impeach Earl Warren,” who was then the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, for requiring “communist” racial integration of our schools.

The second was the private, all-white “academy” movement that has morphed over the years into charter schools and the “school choice” movement of today. It received a major boost when the white supremacist co-founder of neoliberalism, Milton Friedman, published a widely-read and influential article in 1955explicitly calling for what he called “education vouchers” to fund all-white private schools to “solve the national crisis” the Court had created.

In 1958 when the Virginia Supreme Court went along with the US Supreme Court’s Brown v Board decision and ordered that state’s schools desegregated, the governor shut downevery public school in the state. Prince Edward County’s schools were still closed in 1964, when they were finally ordered to open by the courts.

Hundreds of “segregation academies” opened across the South; in Mississippi, for example, 41,000 white students left public schools to attend these academies in just the one year of 1969. Parents had to pay the tuition themselves, but they were willing to do so to avoid their children having to interact with Black, Hispanic, or Asian kids.

The turning point for the Republican Party was 1964, when President Johnson and a Democratic Congress passed and signed into law the Civil Rights Act. Shortly thereafter, one Southern Democratic politician after another changed party affiliation to the GOP so they could continue to argue against “forced integration” of public schools.

The Republican war on public schools burst into the open with the Reagan Revolution, when Education Secretary Bill Bennett oversaw a 30 percent cut in federal aid to public schools following Reagan’s promise to abolish the Department altogether. Every Republican running for president since has made a similar promise or claimed the need to end the Education Department.

Bill Bennett wasn’t shy about explaining why it was necessary to gut public schools, after the Supreme Court had ordered they must be racially integrated. Bennett wanted to privatize public education — as did Trump’s former Education Secretary, billionaire Betsy DeVos — and is probably most famous for his statement that gives us a clue as to why this idea of ending public education is so persistent in the GOP:

“If you wanted to reduce crime,” Bennett said on the radio, “you could, if that were your sole purpose; you could abort every Black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down.”

LISTEN NOW · 0:17

Could it be that it’s all about keeping white children away from Bennett’s Black babies? Is simple racism what’s animating the GOP’s antipathy toward public education?

One clue is that the idea of ending public education in America goes back even farther than Bennett or Reagan to a single moment and a single court decision. 

When I was born, in 1951, Republicans loved public schools. Republican President Dwight Eisenhower led the charge to build gleaming new public schools all across the United States: I attended one, as did perhaps a majority of my generation.

But then came the Supreme Court, with their Brown v Board decision.

In 1957, President Eisenhower ordered the Little Rock, Arkansas, public schools desegregated. The “Little Rock Nine” — nine Black children trying to desegregate Little Rock Central High School — became nationally famous when Governor Orval Faubus prevented them from entering the school that fall, provoking Eisenhower to call up federal troops to escort the children to class.

Faubus called a referendum — an election — and the good citizens of Little Rock voted 19,470 to 7,561 to shut down their entire school system rather than comply with Eisenhower’s order. That, in turn, led back to the Supreme Court, which, in the fall of 1958, ruled unanimously in Cooper v Aaron that the Brown v Board desegregation order was, in fact, now the law of the land for public education.

In response, whites-only private schools and “academies” began springing up across the nation, many run by all-white churches. (Jerry Falwell tried, in 1966, to open an all-white school; in 1980 he became Reagan’s main advisor on merging the white supremacist faction of evangelical Christians — also triggered by Brown v Board — into the GOP.)

Thus, in 1958 the governor of Virginia closed all the public schools in racially mixed Warren County, Norfolk, and Charlottesville; Prince Edward County’s public schools remained closed for a full five years.

While that’s the foundational history of what has become the GOP’s war on public education, for most of the past 40 years Republicans have merely claimed vague libertarian principles when they try to explain what they ironically call “school choice.”

It wasn’t until Donald Trump gave them permission — and showed them how politically potent it could be — to unleash their inner racists that the GOP went public with overt white supremacy as a core value for the party.

While Critical Race Theory (CRT) was a little-known 1993 analysis of structural racism pioneered by Kimberlé Crenshaw and Derrick Bell taught only in law school, rightwing influencer Christopher Rufo popularized the term with an appearance on Tucker Carlson’s Fox “News” show.

From there, it echoed around the GOP for a few months before catching fire across rightwing hate radio, podcasts, and Fox. Pretty soon white supremacist militia members were showing up at school board meetings threatening members that “we know where you live.”

Republicans anxious to stoke the fears of their white racist base began inveighing against teaching CRT in public schools — even though such a thing had never happened — and passing laws so loosely worded as to bar any meaningful teaching or classroom discussion of America’s racial history.

All-white private schools funded with taxpayer dollars have become the darlings of Republicans. In most cases these schools don’t need to flout the law by declaring their segregated status: Black, Asian, and Hispanic parents most often simply aren’t interested in enrolling their children in schools that proudly proclaim they will not allow a drop of “CRT,” true American history, or real science education in their classrooms.

The issue of privatizing public schools came up in Arizona in 2018 with a statewide ballot initiative that would extend free school vouchers to every student in the state: it was defeated by voters by a 2:1 ratio. Writing for The Arizona Republic, columnist Laurie Roberts was unambiguous in her description of the state’s voters’ horror at the ballot initiative:

“Actually, they didn’t just reject it. They stoned the thing, then they tossed it into the street and ran over it. Then they backed up and ran over it again.”

Republicans in the heavily gerrymandered state, though, didn’t much care about the will of the voters. Appealing exclusively to their white racist “Christian” base, they pushed what was essentially that same proposal through the GOP-controlled state legislature and it was signed into law last year by Republican then-Governor Doug Doocey.

In giving every student in the state the ability to opt out of public education with a taxpayer-funded voucher, Doocey established a new benchmark in the war against racially integrated public schools that was matched this year by Florida, Arkansas, Iowa, and Utah.

Legislation to gut public schools and replace them with vouchers for private schools have failed in six states so far (Georgia, Texas, Idaho, Virginia, Kentucky, and South Dakota), but Republicans are not letting go. This year voucher bills were introduced in at least 24 states.

The fact that most of the nation’s public school teachers are union members has given Republicans another good reason, in their minds, to do everything possible to destroy public schools. As Trump’s former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo claimedlast year, in the minds of Republicans the American Federation of Teachers’ President Randi Weingarten is “the most dangerous person in the world.”

Republicans also love the fact that voucher programs mostly subsidize upper-income families, while educationally ghettoizing the children of low-income parents. Vouchers almost never cover all the costs of attending a private school, so they primarily serve as a government handout to the mostly upper-middle-class white families who already wanted to send their kids to today’s version of the segregation academies.

Once the public schools are largely dead, Republicans will begin lobbying to “reduce spending” by cutting the amount allocated for the vouchers, locking the emerging two-tier status of publicly funded education into place.

For the moment, though, private schools are a booming industry as a result of the GOP’s embrace of Friedman’s vouchers. In Florida, for example, they have virtually no rules or standards for the over-one-billion-dollars the state shovels into its private schools: while public schools must disclose their graduation rates, how they spend their money, and let anybody examine their curriculum, private academies have no such rules in many Republican-controlled states, even though they’re receiving public monies.

Many private schools across the country operate with untrained and uncertified “teachers,” have no clear standards for graduation, and refuse to teach “controversial” subjects like evolution, climate science, and the racial history of America.

Which brings us to organized religion, the other recipient of big bucks because of the school voucher movement. Schools affiliated with churches are now raking in billions every month across the US, and Republicans — who continue to push for unconstitutional things like mandatory public school prayer — pander daily to fundamentalists who don’t want their kids exposed to science or history.

Six corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court legalized this practice of shoveling taxpayer funds to churches and religious schools in their notorious Carson v Makin decision last year. As Justice Sonya Sotomayor wrote in her dissent:

[In just five short years this Court has] “shift[ed] from a rule that permits States to decline to fund religious organizations to one that requires States in many circumstances to subsidize religious indoctrination with taxpayer dollars.” This decison “continues to dismantle the wall of separation between church and state that the framers fought to build.”

Which is exactly what the GOP wants. As SenDem recently wrote for Daily Kos:

“Laura Ingraham claimed that ‘a lot of people are saying it’s time to defund government education or at least defund it by giving vouchers to parents.’ Fox’s Greg Gutfeld similarly declared that private school vouchers are needed because public schools are ‘a destructive system’ and described teachers as ‘KKK with summers off.’

“Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida has called public schools ‘a cesspool of Marxist indoctrination.’ Donald Trump declared, ‘public schools have been taken over by the radical left maniacs.’ And Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia called them taxpayer-funded indoctrination centers that need to end, which is a bit ironic since she is the poster child for the necessity of funding public education.”

Sweden has been flirting with libertarianism for a few decades and was the first developed country to offer American-style school vouchers to all kids so they could attend private, for-profit public schools. Just a month ago, their government proclaimed the experiment a disaster and is trying to figure out how to shut down the private schools and re-establish a public education system.

Public schools were the great social and economic leveler for the last century of American history; Republicans want to end that and instead advantage wealthy children over their lower-income peers, particularly those whose skin is darker than Trump’s spray tan.

Public schools (and free college) made it possible for America to produce an explosion of invention and innovation throughout the mid-20th century; now other countries are surpassing us, as the dumbing-down of our kids has become institutionalized in Red state after Red state.

And public schools gave many students their first experience of interacting with people who look different from them and grew up under different circumstances, awakening many young people to the discrimination and unfairness inherent in how America has historically treated minorities.

All of which explains why Republicans so badly want to put an end to public education in America.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Billionaires, Budget Cuts, Censorship, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Corruption, Curriculum, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Elections, Equity, Ethics, Extremism, Privatization, Racism, Religion, Resistance, Separation of church and state, Supporting public schools

Josh Cowen: 2023 Was a Banner Year for Vouchers, Censorship, and Attacks on LGBT Kids

By dianeravitch
December 18, 2023 //
7

Writing in the Washington Spectator, veteran voucher researcher Josh Cowen reports that 2023 was a good year for some very bad ideas, many supported by prominent rightwingers and Dark Money, whose sources are hidden.

He finds it unsurprising that the voucher movement works closely with book banners and efforts to humiliate LGBT youth.

Cowen is a professor of education policy at Michigan State University who has studied vouchers since 2005.

He writes:

Over the past 12 months, the decades-long push to divert tax dollars toward religious education has reached new heights. As proclaimed by EdChoice—the advocacy group devoted to school vouchers—2023 has been the year these schemes reached “escape velocity.” In strictly legislative terms, seven states passed new voucher systems, and ten more expanded existing versions. Eleven states now run universal vouchers, which have no meaningful income or other restrictions.

But these numbers change quickly. As late as the last week of November, the Republican governor of Tennessee announced plans to create just such a universal voucher system.

To wit: successful new voucher and related legislation has come almost exclusively in states won by Donald Trump in 2020. And even that Right-ward bent required substantial investment—notably by heiress and former U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and the Koch network—in state legislative campaigns to oust voucher opponents. Instructively, many of those opponents were often GOP legislators representing rural districts with few private schools to benefit.

As a scholar who has studied voucher systems—including through research funded by conservative organizations—I have been watching these developments with growing concern. It can all be difficult to make sense of, so let’s walk through it.

Vouchers Hurt Kids, Defund Public Schools and Prop-Up Church Budgets

First, why are these new voucher schemes such bad public policy? To understand the answer, it’s important to know that the typical voucher-accepting school is a far cry from the kind of elite private academy you might find in a coastal city or wealthy suburban outpost. Instead, they’re usually sub-prime providers, akin to predatory lenders in the mortgage sector. These schools are either pop-ups opening to cash in on the new taxpayer subsidy, or financially distressed existing schools desperate for a bailout to stay open. Both types of financially insecure schools often close anyway, creating turnover for children who were once enrolled.

And the voucher results reflect that educational vulnerability: in terms of academic impacts, vouchers have some of the worst results in the history of education research—on par or worse than what COVID-19 did to test scores.

Those results are bad enough, but the real issue today is that they come at a cost of funding traditional public schools. As voucher systems expand, they cannibalize states’ ability to pay for their public education commitments. Arizona, which passed universal vouchers in 2022, is nearing a genuine budget crisis as a result of voucher over-spending. Six of the last seven states to pass vouchers have had to slow spending on public schools relative to investments made by non-voucher states.

That’s because most new voucher users were never in the public schools—they are new financial obligations for states. The vast majority of new voucher beneficiaries have been students who were already in private school beforehand. And for many rural students who live far from the nearest private school, vouchers are unrealistic in the first place, meaning that when states cut spending on public education, they weaken the only educational lifeline available to poorer and more remote communities in some places. That’s why even many GOP legislators representing rural districts—conservative in every other way—continue to fight against vouchers.

Vouchers do, however, benefit churches and church schools. Right-wing advocacy groups have been busy mobilizing Catholic school and other religious school parents to save their schools with new voucher funding. In new voucher states, conservatives are openly advocating for churches to startup taxpayer-funded schools. That’s why vouchers eventually become a key source of revenue for those churches, often replacing the need to rely on private donations. It’s also why many existing religious schools raise tuition almost immediately after vouchers pass.

The Right-Wing War on Public Schools

Victories for these voucher bills is nothing short of an ascendent Right-wing war on public education. And the link to religious nationalism energizes much of that attack.

Voucher bills have dovetailed almost perfectly with new victories for other priorities of the Religious Right. Alongside vouchers, anti-LGBTQ+ legislation has also increased: 508 new bills in 2023 alone, according to the American Civil Liberties Union. As has a jump in legislation restricting book access in schools and libraries, with more than half of those bans targeting books on topics related to race and racism, or containing at least one LGBTQ+ character.

It is also important to note the longstanding antipathy that Betsy DeVos, the Koch Network, and other long-term voucher backers have toward organized labor—including and especially in this case, teachers’ unions. And that in two states that passed vouchers this year—Iowa and Arkansas—the governors also signed new rollbacks to child labor protections at almost the exact same time as well.

To close the 2022 judicial session, the Supreme Court issued its latest expansion of voucher jurisprudence in Carson v. Makin, holding that states with private school voucher programs may not exclude religious providers from applying tax dollars specifically to religious education. That ruling came just 72 hours before the Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson removed reproductive rights from federal constitutional protections.

To hear backers of vouchers, book bans, and policies targeting transgender students in school bathrooms tell it, such efforts represent a new movement toward so-called “parents’ rights” or “education freedom,” as Betsy DeVos describes in her 2022 memoir. But in truth this latest push was a long time coming. DeVos is only one part of the vast network of Right-wing donors, activists, and organizations devoted to conservative political activism.

That network, called the Council for National Policy, includes representatives from the Heritage Foundation, the influential Right-wing policy outfit; multiple organizations funded by Charles Koch; the Leadership Institute, which trains young conservative activists; and a number of state policy advocacy groups funded by a conservative philanthropy called the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation.

It was the Bradley Foundation that seeded much of the legal work in the 1990s defending early voucher programs in state and federal courts. Bradley helped to fund the Institute for Justice, a legal group co-founded by a former Clarence Thomas staffer named Clint Bolick after a personal donation from Charles Koch. The lead trial attorney for that work was none other than Kenneth Starr, who was at the time also in the middle of his infamous pursuit of President Bill Clinton.

In late 2023, the Institute for Justice and the voucher-group EdChoice announced a new formal venture, but that partnership is just a spin on an older collaboration, with the Bradley Foundation as the tie that binds. EdChoice itself, when it was called the Milton and Rose D. Friedman Foundation, helped fund the data analysis cited by Institute lawyers at no less than the Supreme Court ahead of its first decision approving vouchers in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris (2002).

From these vantage points, 2023 was a long time coming indeed.

And heading into 2024, the voucher push and its companion “parents’ rights” bills on schoolbooks and school bathrooms show no sign of weakening.

Prior to his political career, the new Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Mike Johnson, was an attorney with the Alliance Defending Freedom. That group, which itself has deep ties to Betsy DeVos’s family, has led the legal charge to rollback LBGTQ+ equality initiatives. It was also involved “from the beginning,” as its website crows, in the anti-abortion effort that culminated with Dobbs.

The Heritage Foundation has created a platform called Project 2025, which serves as something of a clearinghouse for what would be the legal framework and policy agenda for a second Trump Administration. Among the advisors and funders of Project 2025 are several organizations linked to Charles Koch, Betsy DeVos, and others with ties to the Council for National Policy. The Project’s education agenda includes dismantling the U.S. Department of Education—especially its oversight authority on anti-discrimination issues—and jumpstarting federal support for voucher programs.

A dark money group called The Concord Fund has launched an entity called Free to Learn, ostensibly organized around opposition to the teaching of critical race theory in public schools. In reality, these are active players in Republican campaign attacks around a variety of education-related culture war issues. The Concord Fund is closely tied to Leonard Leo, the Federalist Society chief, Council of National Policy member, and architect of the Roe takedown. Through the Leo connection, the Concord Fund was also instrumental in confirming Donald Trump’s judicial nominations from Brett Kavanaugh on downward.

And so while the 2023 “parents’ rights” success has been largely a feature of red state legislatures, the 2022 Carson ruling and the nexus between Leonard Leo, the Alliance Defending Freedom, and the Institute for Justice itself underscore the importance of the federal judiciary to Right-wing education activism.

Long-term, the goal insofar as school privatization is concerned appears to be nothing short of a Supreme Court ruling that tax-subsidized school vouchers and homeschool options are mandatory in every state that uses public funding (as all do) to support education. The logic would be, as Betsy DeVos herself previewed before leaving office, that public spending on public schools without a religious option is a violation of Free Exercise protections.

Such a ruling, in other words, would complete the destruction of a wall between church and state when it comes to voucher jurisprudence. Earlier Court decisions have found that states may spend tax dollars on school vouchers but, as the Right’s ultimate goal, the Supreme Court would determine that states must.

Closer on the horizon, we can expect to see each of these Right-wing groups acting with new energy as the 2024 campaign season heats up. The president of the Heritage Foundation—himself yet another member of the Council for National Policy—has recently taken over the think tank’s political arm, called Heritage Action. At the start of the year, investigative reporting linked Heritage Action to earlier voter suppression initiatives, signaling potential tactics ahead.

And the money is going to flow—they have all said as much. After Heritage’s merger of its policy and political arms, Betsy DeVos’s American Federation for Children followed suit by creating the AFC Victory Fund—a new group to spearhead its own campaign activity.

Their plan includes a $10 million base commitment to ramp up heading into 2024. “Coming off our best election cycle ever,” AFC’s announcement declared, “the tectonic plates have shifted decisively in favor of educational freedom, and we’re just getting started.” And, they warned:

“If you’re a candidate or lawmaker who opposes school choice and freedom in education – you’re a target.”

In that threat lies the reality of the latest voucher push, and of this moment of so-called parents’ rights. None of this is a grassroots uprising. “Education freedom” is a top-down, big-money operation, tied to every other political priority of religious nationalism today.

But coming at the end of this past year’s legislative successes, AFC’s warnings are also a very clear statement of what is yet to come. The push to privatize American education is only just getting started.

Vouchers have turned into a campaign to subsidize the tuition of affluent parents while cutting the funding of public schools. This does not augur well for the health and future of our nation.

Categories Bigotry, Billionaires, Catholic Schools, Censorship, Corporate Reform, Curriculum, Dark Money, Democracy, Education Industry, Extremism, Fraud, Freedom, Freedom of Speech, Freedom to Read, Funding, Gender, Home Schooling, Ignorance, Librarians, Libraries, Literacy, Literature, Privatization, Propaganda, Racism, Religion, Separation of church and state, Vouchers

Florida GOP Set to Abandon Jeb Bush “Test-and-Punish” Reforms

By dianeravitch
December 13, 2023 //
26

No wonder Jeb Bush wrote an opinion article defending his so-called reforms, especially high-stakes standardized testing.

The Republican-controlled Legislature is moving to dismantle the structure that Bush created when he was governor. Some legislators wanted to cancel recess but the outcry from parents made them drop that idea.

Leslie Postal of The Orlando Sentinel, one of the best education writers in the nation, writes here about the seismic changes in Florida:

The Florida Senate backed away Tuesday from plans to end the state’s recess requirement after objections from “recess moms” but moved ahead with proposals to scrap key, and controversial, parts of the Republican education agenda.


The Senate’s fiscal policy committee agreed by an 18-0 vote to end policies ushered in by former Gov. Jeb Bush more than 20 years ago. Those include requirements that high school students pass two exams to graduate and that third graders pass a reading test to move on to fourth grade.


Under the bill approved by the GOP-dominated committee, students would no longer have to pass an Algebra 1 and a language arts exam to earn high school diplomas. But the 10th-grade language arts exam would count as 30% of a student’s final grade in 10th-grade English classes, just as the algebra exam already counts as 30% of the final grade in Algebra 1 classes.


The bill also would allow third graders who failed the state reading test to be promoted to fourth grade, if that is what their parents thought was best.

Jeb Bush’s allies objected to the changes and said they would water down standards. It’s not yet clear whether DeSantis will go along. Moms for Liberty also objected.

But Republicans in the Senate have pushed and supported the measures, and two committees have now approved them.


Senate President Senate President Kathleen Passidomo introduced the proposals in a memo she sent to senators last month that was titled “Learn Local – Cutting Red Tape, Supporting Neighborhood Public Schools.”


The idea, she said, was that after the Legislature expanded school choice (HB 1) earlier this year, making many more children eligible for private school scholarships, it should look in its 2024 session to remove regulations on public schools, which serve the bulk of the state’s students.


In the memo, she called the ideas “bold,” “controversial” and, she conceded, ones that might “not make it across the finish line.”


Many of the Senate’s suggestions have broad support from school superintendents, administrators, teachers and parents.

Representatives from the Broward, Orange and Seminole county school districts all showed their support Tuesday, for example.


Simon noted that Florida’s new standardized test, FAST, is a “progress-monitoring” exam given several times a year starting in pre-Kindergarten.
“We’re able to find those students much earlier on in the process,” he said, making the current third-grade rule unnecessary.

Categories Accountability, Bush, Jeb, Closing schools, Corporate Reform, Disruption, Education Industry, Failure, Florida, Play, Standardized Testing

John Thompson: The Carnegie Unit in the Line of Fire

By dianeravitch
December 4, 2023 //
14

John Thompson, historian and retired teacher in Oklahoma, noticed that the Carnegie Unit is under fire. Do you know what a Carnegie Unit is? It’s a measure of time spent learning a subject. Here’s the definition on the website of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching:

The unit was developed in 1906 as a measure of the amount of time a student has studied a subject. For example, a total of 120 hours in one subject—meeting 4 or 5 times a week for 40 to 60 minutes, for 36 to 40 weeks each year—earns the student one “unit” of high school credit. Fourteen units were deemed to constitute the minimum amount of preparation that could be interpreted as “four years of academic or high school preparation.”

Why is this controversial?

John Thompson explains:

I was stunned when reading the opening paragraph of Mike Petrilli’s “Replacing Carnegie Unit Will Spark Battle Royale.” Petrilli is the president of the corporate reform-funded Thomas B. Fordham Institute, with a history of fervent support for Common Core. But now, Petrilli warns of the ways that the Carnegie Foundation’s and Laurene Powell Jobs’ XQ Institute’s competency-based model could open a “Pandora’s Box.” He writes:

The scant coverage of this initiative—and the limited number of players involved—implies that many see this as just a technocratic reform, one that merely seeks to replace “credit hours” with mastery-based approaches to learning. Don’t be mistaken: If it gets traction, this move is likely to spark a battle royale that will make the Common Core wars look like child’s play.

While recognizing the Carnegie Unit – where graduation standards are driven by time in class and credits earned – is flawed, Petrilli correctly argues “we can’t just focus on ‘disrupting’ the current system.”  Moreover, he says the heart of this disruptive model would be “a lot more high-stakes testing.”

Petrilli notes that a rapid, digital transformation of schooling “has huge potential upsides for high-achieving students.”  Even though Petrilli was one of the true believers in college-readiness who pushed Common Core without, I believe, adequately thinking ahead, he now asks whether they should set the graduation bar “at the ‘college-ready’ level” if that “means denying a diploma to millions of young people who are nowhere near that bar today and not likely to clear it tomorrow?” For instance:

How do we deal with the enormous variation in student readiness upon arrival in high school? Will the new system allow students prepared to tackle advanced material to do so, even if it means further stratification along line(s) of achievement, race, and/or class?

In 2019, Chalkbeat reported on the slow growth and mixed successes and setbacks of Jobs’ innovation schools. Back then, Matt Barnum wrote, “what kinds of change, exactly, XQ wants people to get behind remains unclear to some.” And he quoted Larry Cuban on the number of schools that abandoned the effort, “To have that kind of mortality rate at the end of three years — that would strike me as high given that huge amount of money.”

And, I’d certainly worry about transformative changes, such as those pioneered in Rhode Island, that are “driven” by XQ’s Educational Opportunity Audit (EOA). Given the failure of data-driven reformers’ efforts to create reliable and valid metrics for measuring classroom learning “outputs,” it’s hard to imagine how they could evaluate the learning produced by the large (perhaps limitless?) number of their untested approaches.

I followed the few links to Tulsa’s experiment, under Deborah Gist, to “re-imagine” high schools.” In 2019, the district received $3.5 million for three schools for “Tulsa Beyond,” using a “nationwide high school redesign model,” which was “funded through Bloomberg Philanthropies and XQ Super Schools.”  It would be hard to evaluate any reforms’ outcomes during the Covid years and today’s rightwing attacks. But, then again, those reforms were based on the claim that data-driven accountability can do more measurable good than harm.

Only two of the three Tulsa schools have published state “grades” before and after their experiment.  Daniel Webster H.S received a “D” in both 2017-2018, and a “D” in 2021-2022. Nathan Hale H.S received an “F” in both years. Again, I don’t have data to make a serious evaluation of the Tulsa reforms, but it is the corporate reformers who have promised a method of evaluating them. And they should carry the burden of proof, as opposed to dumping the costs of failed gambles on students.

Petrilli’s article, and the sources he cited, convinced me that the push to replace the current system without learning the lessons of edu-political history and adequately planning for a post-Carnegie Unit era is extremely worrisome. I checked with another corporate reformer who I have opposed, but also respect, about the lessons of history that mastery-learning advocates should consider. He said, “Nothing ever gets learned.” Given the failed track record of the disruptive change, as well as Petrilli’s advocacy for it, we need to pay attention when he goes on record saying that the under-reported story of “‘multiple pathways’—via multiple diplomas” could create “multiple pitfalls.”

Categories Accountability, Corporate Reform, Curriculum, Deregulation, Education Reform, Teachers and Teaching

Jeb Bush: Don’t Abandon High-Stakes Testing (Except for Voucher Schools)

By dianeravitch
December 2, 2023 //
8

Jeb Bush, a founding father of the corporate reform movement, was governor of Florida from 1999 to 2007. He implemented a regime of high-stakes standardized testing, third grade retention, school report cards, and choice. He vigorously championed charter schools and tried to change the state constitution to allow vouchers for religious schools. Now he is concerned that the legislature might undermine high-stakes testing, so he penned this opinion piece for the Orlando Sentinel bragging about the success of his test-and-punish regime.

Yes, Florida’s fourth-grade NAEP scores are high. But he does not acknowledge that the scores are high because Florida “retains” third-graders who don’t pass the reading test. Holding these kids back artificially inflated the fourth-grade scores. By eighth grade, Florida’s scores are at the national average. Nothing to boast about there. The moral of the story: retention raises test scores by removing from the testing pool the kids who were retained (flunked).

The other curious omission in this article is voucher schools. Jeb is a huge fan of vouchers but voucher schools don’t take any state tests. How does he explain this? He doesn’t.

He wrote:

For more than two decades, Florida has remained committed to educational excellence by ensuring that transparency, accountability and opportunity define our K-12 system. We’ve consistently pushed the envelope, transforming Florida into a national leader. This has not happened by accident.

When I took office, nearly half of Florida’s fourth graders had significant reading deficiencies. Similarly, half of Florida’s fourth graders were significantly below grade level in math. Only half of high school students graduated on time.

In partnership with state lawmakers, we championed the A+ Plan in 1999 based on core principles of high expectations, standardized measurement, a clear and achievable system of accountability, rewards and consequences for performance, effective teaching in the classroom and more choices for families to customize an education for each student.

Today, Florida’s fourth graders rank third in the nation for reading achievement and fourth in the nation for math achievement. Our high school graduation rate is approaching 90%.

This is why it’s concerning that some lawmakers now seem eager to throw out or water down key components of the policies that led our students from the back of the pack to top in the nation.

I understand the goal of the Florida Senate’s recently unveiled deregulation package (Senate bills 7000, 7002and 7004). Cutting red tape and removing outdated regulations is a worthwhile effort.

But this cannot come at the cost of our state and students taking a step backward.

Lawmakers have proposed watering down our third grade literacy policy, removing the backstop of retention and paving the way to reinstate social promotion. Requiring that students objectively demonstrate they are reading successfully before being promoted to fourth grade has been a core part of Florida’s comprehensive early literacy policy — one that research has consistently supported.

This is why it’s concerning that some lawmakers now seem eager to throw out or water down key components of the policies that led our students from the back of the pack to top in the nation.

I understand the goal of the Florida Senate’s recently unveiled deregulation package (Senate bills 7000, 7002and 7004). Cutting red tape and removing outdated regulations is a worthwhile effort.

But this cannot come at the cost of our state and students taking a step backward.

Lawmakers have proposed watering down our third grade literacy policy, removing the backstop of retention and paving the way to reinstate social promotion. Requiring that students objectively demonstrate they are reading successfully before being promoted to fourth grade has been a core part of Florida’s comprehensive early literacy policy — one that research has consistently supported.

Most parents believe their children are reading on grade level even when they are not. Florida’s retention policy raises expectations. We know there are grave later-life outcomes for struggling readers. Lowering expectations by watering down the retention requirement will not help students in third grade or beyond.

Moreover, abandoning the requirement that Florida students pass the tenth grade English Language Arts and Algebra I end-of-course assessments further reduces expectations and hampers Florida’s workforce development efforts. Removing this requirement may aid Florida’s graduation rates, but it will reduce the diploma to nothing more than a participation certificate.

If we expect less, we will get less. This cannot be the future we want for Florida.

Finally, part of the package would turn back recent gains for charter schools to be treated equitably alongside their traditional public school peers. The bill’s proposed changes would make it harder for charter schools to access vacant public school buildings and reduce the share of Title I funds made available to students attending charter schools. This is a step backward.

Maintaining Florida’s system of high expectations, clear accountability and robust choice is as important to our future as anything. We’ve spent two decades establishing, maintaining and building upon these ideals.

Now is not the time for lawmakers to get weak-kneed on policies that have played key roles in contributing to two decades of educational progress.

Jeb Bush was governor of Florida from 1999 to 2007. He is the founder and chair of ExcelinEd, ExcelinEd in Action and the Foundation for Florida’s Future.

Categories Accountability, Bush, Jeb, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Education Industry, Extremism, Failure, Literacy, NAEP, Standardized Testing, Vouchers

BOMBSHELL: Secret Documents Reveal $$ Behind School Choice in Tennessee

By dianeravitch
November 22, 2023 //
2

Confidential documents were leaked to the media in Tennessee revealing collaboration among out-of-state interests to buy seats in the legislature for anti-public school candidates. As you would expect, the funders included Koch and DeVos. The goal is to privatize school funding.

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WTVF) — Confidential documents reveal that a group of school privatization groups, each claiming to be separate entities with separate agendas, actually work together to try to buy seats in the Tennessee legislature for candidates who are willing to vote against traditional public schools.

The documents, leaked to NewsChannel 5 Investigates, show how those groups — working as part of what they call the “Tennessee Coalition for Students” — sometimes try to convince voters that politicians who support traditional public schools are just bad people.

Most of those in the “Tennessee Coalition for Students” do not live in Tennessee. Not Betsy DeVos. Not Charles Koch.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Corporate Reform, Corruption, Dark Money, Education Industry, Elections, Funding, Tennessee

Watch This! Gloria Ladson-Billings Speaks at NPE Conference about Attacks on Public Schools

By dianeravitch
November 15, 2023 //
6

If you missed the 10th annual conference of the Network for Public Education, you missed some of the best presentations in our ten years of holding conferences.

You missed the brilliant Gloria Ladson-Billings, Professor Emerita and formerly the Kellner Family Distinguished Professor of Urban Education in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Ladson-Billings gave an outstanding speech that brought an enthusiastic audience to its feet. She spoke about controversial topics with wit, charm, wisdom, and insight.

Fortunately, her presentation was videotaped. If you were there, you will enjoy watching it again. If you were not there, you have a treat in store.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Corporate Reform, Cruelty, Curriculum, Dark Money, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Equity, Extremism, For-Profit, Fraud, Freedom, Freedom to Read, Funding, Inequity, Injustice, Network for Public Education, Parents, Privatization, Racism, Supporting public schools, Teachers and Teaching

Thom Hartmann: Stop the Republican War on Public Schools!

By dianeravitch
November 10, 2023 //
11

Thom Hartmann is a remarkably well-informed journalist and blogger. In this article, he traces the history of the Republican war on one of our nation’s most important democratic institutions: its public schools.

He writes:

I remember when the USSR launched Sputnik, the first satellite to orbit the Earth. It was the fall of 1957, I was six years old, and my dad and I watched it arc over our house from our back yard one clear October night. My best friend’s father, a ham radio operator, let us listen on his shortwave radio to the “beep beep beep” it was emitting when it was over North America. I’d never seen my dad so rattled.

That dramatic technological achievement lit a major fire under the Eisenhower administration and Congress. In his January 27, 1958 State of the Union address, Republican President Eisenhower pointed to Sputnik and demanded Congress fund a dramatic transformation of America’s educational system:

“With this kind of all-inclusive campaign, I have no doubt that we can create the intellectual capital we need for the years ahead, invest it in the right places–and do all this, not as regimented pawns, but as free men and women!”

In less than a year Congress wrote and passed the National Defense Education Act that poured piles of money into our schools and rolled out programs for gifted kids.

I was lucky enough to be enrolled in one of those in 1959: by the time I left elementary school I was functioning at high school and college levels in math, science, and English. I’d had two years of foreign language and two years of experimental music instruction. IQ tests were all the rage: mine was 141 and my best friend, Terry, was 142, something he never let me forget.

Most all of those programs died over the following decades as a result of Reagan’s war on public schools, which began with his bringing private religious school moguls like Jerry Falwell and bigots like Bill Bennett into the White House.

Repudiating Eisenhower’s embrace of public education, Reagan put Bennett in charge of the Department of Education, which Reagan had campaigned on shutting down altogether. Bennett is probably best known for defending his proclamation that:

“If you wanted to reduce crime you could, if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every Black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down.”

Much like Bennett back in the day, the catch phrase among white supremacists and their fellow travelers today is that “Western Civilization” is either under attack or at risk because we teach history, tolerance, and critical thinking skills in our public schools, which are often racially integrated. The answer, Republicans will tell you, is to defund our public schools.

When Reagan was elected in 1980, the federal share of total education spending in America was 12 percent; when he left office in disgrace in 1989 amid “Iran/Contra” rumors he’d cut a deal with the Iranians to keep the American hostages to screw Jimmy Carter, that share had collapsed to a mere 6 percent. (It’s 3 percent today.)

Reagan also wanted to amend the Constitution to allow mandatory school prayer, and unsuccessfully proposed a national tax credit — a sort of tax-system-based national voucher system — that parents could use to send their kids to religious schools like Falwell’s.

Ever since Reagan’s presidency, the core of Republican positions on public education have been five-fold:

1. Let white students attend schools that are islands of white privilege where they don’t have to confront the true racial history of America,
2. Use public money to support private, for-profit, and religious schools that can accomplish this (and cycle some of that money back to Republican politicians),
3. Destroy public schools’ teachers’ unions,
4. End the teaching of science, critical thinking, evolution, and sex ed, and,
5. Bring fundamentalist Christianity into the classroom.

Earlier this year, Republican Senator Marco Rubio called America’s public school system a “cesspool of Marxist indoctrination.”

“Dangerous academic constructs like critical race theory and radical gender theory are being forced on elementary school children,” Rubio wrote for the American Conservative magazine, adding, “We need to ensure no federal funding is ever used to promote these radical ideas in schools.”

There is no more powerful urge humans can experience than to protect and defend our children. For most people it beats hunger, sex, and money. So if you’re a politician looking for an issue to motivate voters, just tell them their children are under attack. It’s cynical, but effective.

In an interview for Semafor, Trump’s Secretary of State Mike Pompeo laid it out:

“I tell the story often — I get asked ‘Who’s the most dangerous person in the world? Is it Chairman Kim, is it Xi Jinping?’ The most dangerous person in the world is [American Federation of Teachers President] Randi Weingarten. It’s not a close call. If you ask, ‘Who’s the most likely to take this republic down?’ It would be the teacher’s unions, and the filth that they’re teaching our kids…”

Just a few months ago, Donald Trump laid out his plan to deal with the “major problem” America is facing: “[W]e have ‘pink-haired communists teaching our kids.’”

Turning the Constitution upside down and arguing the Founders intended to protect teaching schoolchildren religion, Trump elaborated, arguing that mixing religion, politics, and education was the intention of that document:

“The Marxism being preached in our schools is also totally hostile to Judeo-Christian teachings, and in many ways it’s resembling an established new religion. We can’t let that happen. For this reason, my administration will aggressively pursue intentional violations to the establishment clause and the free exercise clause of the Constitution.”

As Jonathan Chait wrote for New York magazine:

“More ominously, at every level of government, Republicans have begun to act on these beliefs. Over the past three years, legislators in 28 states have passed at least 71 bills controlling what teachers and students can say and do at school. A wave of library purges, subject-matter restrictions, and potential legal threats against educators has followed.”

This isn’t the first time elected officials have used public education as a political weapon. In 1844, 25 people died and over 100 were severely injured in riots in Philadelphia over whether there should be daily Bible readings in that city’s schools. Two churches and several city blocks of homes were burned to the ground.

The Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925 didn’t provoke riots, but was a major event in the history of public education. Tennessee high school teacher John Scopes was charged and convicted of the crime of teaching evolution. Mississippi and Arkansas joined Tennessee in passing laws making such instruction a crime that stood until the 1967 repeal of the Butler Act.

While Republican Glen Youngkin successfully rode a wave of white outrage about Critical Race Theory to the governor’s office in Virginia, polls suggest the issue is really only meaningful to a fragment of the American electorate: a subset of Republican voters. 

The annual PRRI American Values Survey found:

“Americans overwhelmingly favor teaching children history that includes both the good and bad aspects of our history so that they can learn from the past, versus refraining from teaching aspects of history that could make them feel uncomfortable or guilty about what their ancestors did in the past (92% vs. 5%).

“There are no substantial partisan differences, though Republicans favor excluding aspects of history slightly more (7%) than Democrats and Independents (both 4%). There are few differences across religious traditions or demographics. This consensus holds up across different levels of exposure to critical race theory: 92% of those who have heard a lot about critical race theory, 94% of those who have heard a little, and 93% of those who have heard nothing about it state that we should teach children the good and bad of history.”

Nonetheless, they note:

“[A] majority of Republicans (54%), compared with 27% of independents and only 7% of Democrats, believe that teachers and librarians are indoctrinating children.”

America spent $794.7 billion on primary education last year. For-profit private schools and churches that run schools look at that pile of money and drool. Republicans are committed to delivering as much of it to them as possible, regardless of the damage it does to our nation’s schoolchildren.

Their strategy for privatizing our public schools is pretty straightforward, and echoes the plan of action Republicans are using right now to replace real Medicare with the privatized Medicare Advantage scam.

First, they falsely claim that they’ll deliver a better product at a lower cost. In the education realm, we see this with Florida and several other Red states now offering vouchers that can be used at private or religious schools to every student in the state.

(Nearly 2,300 private schools in Florida accept vouchers, but “69 percent are unaccredited, 58 percent are religious, and nearly one-third are for-profit.”)

As more and more students use the vouchers to flee public schools, the public schools sink into deeper and deeper financial troubles. Those cut the quality of teaching and upkeep of the school buildings, causing even more students to use the vouchers.

Because the vouchers never cover the full cost of private school tuition (typically they pay for half to two-thirds), the truly poor can’t use them: the result is the public school system becomes ghettoized, leading to even more flight by middle- and upper-class (white) people.  

Once the public schools are dead and the state has transitioned entirely to private schools, the state will claim budget problems and begin to dial back the amounts available for vouchers. (The same will happen with Medicare Advantage once real Medicare is dead.)

This will widen the relationship between the educational and wealth divides; the racial and class cleavage will become so great that the state will have effectively gone back to a “separate but equal” educational system. Which, of course, is the GOP’s goal.

Republicans are generally convinced that when people have a good, well-rounded education they will vote for Democrats, who explicitly value science and egalitarian social values. Thus, keeping our kids ignorant and destroying one of America’s largest unions, all while helping their education and religion industry friends get rich, is a complete win-win.

As conservative commentator Benjamin Weingarten writes:

“Red states are increasingly engaging in a broad push to purge public institutions of a Wokeness antithetical to the values and principles of their constituents…

“Yet at root, it is the schools — where our children spend much of their waking hours — that have disproportionate influence over American society, seeding every other institution that has succumbed to left-wing ideological capture. …

“It is incumbent on lawmakers and their appointees to use every lever of power they can, within every educational institution under their purview, to combat the divisiveness and forcible conformity engendered by DEI, CRT, and the like and to replace it with a system rooted in the values and principles on which Western civilization is based.”

Much of this battle is playing out in state houses around the country, but there’s a huge and well-funded effort to take control of local school boards as well. David Pepper has a great post in his Pepperspectives Substack newsletter about how to spot the extremists and GOP shills at election time.

Bottom line: the Republican war on public education is real, and if we want to stop it we must get involved. 

Lobby your state legislators and either run for your local school board or support good people who are. 

Our children’s and grandchildren’s futures are literally at stake.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Censorship, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Corporate Reform, Curriculum, Dark Money, Democracy, Education Industry, Elections, Extremism, For-Profit, Funding, Vouchers

Peter Greene: Fordham Institute Debunks “Study” of Charter School Innovation

By dianeravitch
November 5, 2023 //
8

Peter Greene writes faster than most people can read, and what he writes is always worth reading. In this article, he describes a remarkable occurrence: the pro-charter Thomas B. Fordham Institute debunked a study by charter advocates claiming that deregulation spurs innovation in the charter sector.

In his latest article, Greene writes:

It’s an ordinary day when a pair of charter school boosters conclude that charters work best when mean old government doesn’t make them follow a bunch of rules and stuff. It is an ordinary day when someone points out they’re full of regular non-innovative baloney. It is a less ordinary day when the baloney is being called out by a piece in the house organ of the Thomas Fordham Institute.

So let’s pretend for a moment that the question of regulations vs. charter innovation is a real question. David Griffith, the Fordham Associate Director of Research, frames this as the old tension between autonomy and accountability, which makes more sense than talking about charter school innovation, because after a few decades of charter proliferation, the amount of innovation they have produced is somewhere between jack and squat. Despite being billed as “laboratories of innovation,” charter schools haven’t come up with much of anything that public schools were not already well aware of.

The study argues for less regulation of charters. Greene responds:

The more regulation, the less innovatiness in charter schools. For charter fans, it’s simple–more options means they can move more product, and while I get their point, it is also true that we would have far more innovation in the food industry without all those government regulations about poison and stuff.

The study was thoroughly demolished by David Griffith, Fordham’s associate director of research.

Greene writes:

Griffith makes a similar observation. Their technique of quantifying “innovation” gives the charter points for being unusual, and that’s problematic:

From a purely normative perspective, an obvious problem with the authors’ approach is that it is content neutral. So, for example, a school that was grounded in Satan Worship would count as highly innovative (provided it didn’t start a movement), as would one that imparted no knowledge whatsoever (as seems to be the case for many virtual schools).

And he doesn’t think “innovation” means what they think it means either, noting that many of their “innovations” aren’t particularly new but instead include “longstanding programs such as Core Knowledge (est. 1986), Waldorf (1919), and Montessori (1907), not to mention “single-sex” education (Harvard, circa 1636) and “project-based” learning (the Pleistocene).” (That is Griffith’s snark there, not mine).

Kudos to David Griffith and the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Deregulation, Education Industry, Fake News, Research
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