Samantha Steckloff, a member of the state’s House of Representatives, tweeted that the House defeated vouchers by 56-51. Steckloff represents Michigan’s 37th district.
@SamSteckloff tweeted:
Public tax dollars for private vouchers FAILED the Michigan House! Majority of us agree that public dollars should go to public schools and public institutions!
Perhaps you remember the A3 charter scam in California. The online charter chain managed to collect hundreds of millions of dollars from the state for ghost students. Its leaders were eventually arrested, charged, and convicted. They are still repaying their ill-gotten gains.
Kristina Taketa of the San Diego Union-Tribune reports that the latest installment of their restitution was $18.8 million.
She writes:
An additional $18.8 million has been paid to San Diego County as restitution for the statewide A3 charter school scam in which the state was defrauded of hundreds of millions of school dollars, the San Diego County District Attorney announced Wednesday.
Sean McManus of Australia, along with Jason Schrock of Long Beach, led a statewide charter school scheme from 2016 to 2019 in which they used a network of mostly online charter schools to defraud the state of approximately $400 million and used $50 million of that amount for personal use. They did so by falsely enrolling students and manipulating enrollment and attendance reporting across their schools to get more money per student than schools are supposed to, prosecutors said.
In total, about $240 million of the $400 million has been recovered. The District Attorney’s Office said it is not trying to get back all of the $400 million because some of the money ended up going to noncriminal actors, such as teachers, youth programs and others, who provided services for the A3 schools and who did not know the money was obtained illegally.
Of the $240 million that has been recovered, about $95 million has been returned to the state treasury, with an additional $90 million expected to be returned to the state within the next few months.
Debbie L. Sklar of the Times of San Diego provided more details on how the scam worked.
More than $37 million in fines has been paid to San Diego County as part of a court judgment stemming from a charter school fraud scheme that took millions in public school funds and led to criminal charges against 11 people, the San Diego County District Attorney’s Office announced Wednesday.
The total fine amount includes $18.75 million recently paid by Sean McManus, CEO and president of A3 Education, who pleaded guilty to stealing more than $50 million in public funds and was sentenced to four years in prison.
Prosecutors say McManus and co-defendant Jason Schrock directed subordinates to open up 19 “A3 charter schools” in San Diego County and elsewhere across the state, and collected state funds by alleging students were enrolled in programs run by the schools.
The District Attorney’s Office, which called the case “one of the nation’s largest fraud schemes targeting taxpayer dollars intended for primary education,” said the men paid for student information and used the info to enroll children in summer school programs at their online campuses. Prosecutors say some parents were unaware their children were enrolled in a charter school at all.
The defendants then took measures to inflate the amount of money the state paid the charter schools by falsifying documentation, which included backdating documents to indicate that students were enrolled in the charter schools for longer than they were or switching students between different A3 schools to increase funding per student or per school beyond legal limits, prosecutors said.
The perpetrators were very clever and very, very rich until they were caught.
In a curious coincidence, I had breakfast at a hotel in January 2019 in Newport Beach, California, with a friend. At the table next to us sat a man and woman discussing education and a business transaction. I tried not to eavesdrop, yet found myself fascinated by the curious combination of topics. As they got up to leave, I stopped the man and said, “Excuse me, but I wonder if you are in the charter school business.” He responded, “Yes, I am Sean McManus, and I run a chain of charter schools.” The boom fell not long after.
Another fine piece by Jan Resseger about the sorry state of politics in Ohio, where the Legislature ignores pressing problems, but passes bills for spite and political gain.
She begins:
In its legislative update last Friday, Honesty for Ohio Education reported: “It was an appalling and heartbreaking week in the Statehouse as Ohio legislators passed two bills to arm school personnel and ban transgender girls in female sports, and held hearings for bills censoring education about race, sexuality, and gender and banning gender-affirming healthcare for minors.”
The Plain Dealer’s Laura Hancock explains how, without a hearing, the House banned transgender girls from female sports when legislators added the amendment to another bill: “The Ohio House passed a bill shortly before midnight Wednesday, the first day of Pride Month, with an amendment to ban transgender girls and women from playing high school and college women’s sports… As originally introduced, HB 151 would change the Ohio Resident Educator Program, which assists new teachers with mentoring and professional development as they begin their careers… But on the Ohio House floor late Wednesday night, Rep. Jena Powell, a Darke County Republican, offered an amendment to the bill, which a majority of the house accepted…. House Bill 151 passed 56 to 28 with Democrats voting in opposition. It now heads to the Ohio Senate, which is in summer recess and won’t return until the fall.”
A big part of our problem in Ohio is a long run of gerrymandering—leaving both chambers of our state legislature with huge Republican supermajorities. A committee of legislators from House and Senate were charged to create fair and balanced legislative district maps. The Ohio Redistricting Commission spent the winter and spring redrawing the maps, which were rejected five times by the Ohio Supreme Courtbecause a Court majority found the new maps gerrymandered to favor the election of Republicans. At the end of May, however, a federal district court ruled that the state must end the battle over gerrymandering by using maps—for this year’s August primary and the November general election—which were rejected twice in the spring by the state’s supreme court because they favor Republican candidates.
Citizens in a democracy are not supposed to be utterly powerless, but that is how it feels right now in Ohio.
The legislature also passed bills to increase school privatization, despite the woeful performance of charter schools and vouchers. The 90% of students in public schools will suffer so that the failing charter schools and vouchers may thrive, at least financially.
Stephen Dyer, former legislator, writes that two of every three voucher students in Ohio’s Edchiice program this year never attended public schools.
Yet legislators want to expand it.
No more nonsense about “saving poor kids from failing public schools.” The voucher program is simply a transfer of public funds to parents who never sent their children to public schools. It’s a giveaway of public dollars to parents whose children are in private schools.
And public schools are better than the private religious schools that get public money. The public schools have certified teachers, more advanced classes, a broader curriculum, and extracurricular activities that religious schools do not offer.
Dyer writes:
Ok. My jaw literally dropped when I read this bill analysis of House Bill 583 — a bill originally intended to help alleviate the substitute teacher shortage, but thanks to Ohio Senate Education Chairman Andrew Brenner, is now a giveaway to school privatizers.
Tucked away on page 7 of this analysis, I read this:
… (R)oughly 33% of the new FY 2022 income-based scholarship recipients entering grades 1-12 were students who attended a public school the previous year.
That’s right.
2 of every 3 EdChoice Expansion recipients this year never attended a public school before they received their taxpayer-funded private school tuition subsidy…
And remember that families up to 400% of poverty qualify. How much is that? For a family of 4, $111,000 qualifies as 400% of poverty That would qualify about 85% of Ohio households for this taxpayer funded private school tuition subsidy.
Oh yeah, the bill also eliminates the prorated voucher for EdChoice Expansion. What’s that mean? Well, until this bill, families between 250% and 400% of poverty would qualify for a subsidy, but at a reduced rate from the $5,500 K-8 voucher or the $7,500 high school voucher.
Not anymore. Under HB 583, those prorations go away. What else goes away? The recipient’s loss of a voucher if their income grows beyond 400%.
That’s right.
Someone could make $100,000 one year, qualify their kids for a full, $5,500 Grade 1 private school tuition subsidy, change jobs, make $200,000 a year or more for the next 11 years and keep the full voucher as long as their kid was in school.
Look, I don’t need to keep repeating this, but I will: In nearly 9 of 10 cases, kids taking a voucher perform worse on state testing than kids in the public schools they leave behind. Not to mention the racial segregation the program exacerbates.
Yet here Ohio lawmakers go and dump another $13 million or more of public money into a program that will undoubtedly subsidize the private school tuitions of wealthy, disproportionately white families whose kids never attended public schools.
Who loses? The 90% of kids who don’t take a voucher because the money comes out of their schools’ budget.
Maurice Cunningham is a specialist on dark money and its infiltration into education debates. As he watched the response to the Uvalde massacre of babies, he noticed the missing voices of the “mama bears.”
He writes:
Right Wing “Mama Bears” Hibernate on Uvalde
They’re fearless on Fox News—Tiffany Justice of Moms for Liberty, Erika Sanzi or Nicole Neily of Parents Defending Education, Keri Rodrigues of National Parents Union—self-proclaimed “mama bears” fiercely protecting their cubs from a public school education. But murder and traumatization in our schools caused by assault weapons? The mama bears hibernate. And there’s reason.
Parents for Education has had nothing to say about Uvalde but it has sent out four email blasts from Neily and Sanzi since the massacre in Texas—fundraising letters! They playact rage about a legal theory not taught in K-12 and promote terror of innocentLGBTQ teens. But on real terror, silence. This is defending education?
Moms for Liberty mustered a quick Facebook reaction of the ‘thoughts and prayers’ genre then went back to its specialties: demonizing vulnerable transgender children, book banning, and putting bounties on teachers’ heads.
Right wing papa bears are absent fathers on gun violence. Take Ian Prior of the Virginia privatization operation Fight for Schools. He plays an outraged parent on Fox News but this Republican communications pro isn’t touching any fight for schools that might involve making them safe for educators and children.
None of these individuals nor their phony parent groups can diveinto the fight to keep guns out of our schools for a simple reason: they are dependent on far right funding including the Koch network and the extremist Council for National Policy. Among the CNP’s members are Wayne LaPierre, executive vice president and CEO of the National Rifle Association.
No, there will be no criticism of the NRA from these “parents’ and “moms.” That would not only be condemning an ally, it would be spitting in the faces of the money givers.
National Parents Union, Koch and Walton funded, has a separate problem. NPU depicts itself as representing people of color, an approach that masks its corporate nature. So NPU president Keri Rodrigues produced a public letter to President Biden, laying much of the blame for inaction on Biden himself—a curious position for a member of the Massachusetts Democratic State Committee. As to denouncing Republican intransigence to any action on gun safety? Speechless.
NPU, a charter and privatization front, is fighting the Biden administration on regulation of charter schools. Privatization schemes are almost wholly dependent on Republican votes.
Real mama bears fight for kids, not oligarchs.
These groups aren’t speaking out because they can’t. They’re part of the problem. Follow the money.
Maurice T. Cunningham is author of “Dark Money and the Politics of School Privatization.”
When the Network for Public Education met in Philadelphia April 30-May 1, I was surprised and delighted to encounter David Berliner. He had never attended one of our conferences, and he flew from the West Coast to do so. David Berliner is the most eminent education researcher in the United States, a giant in his field. He is now retired but continues to write and contribute to education studies and debates. His most recent book, which he edited with Carl Hermanns, is Public Education: Defending a Cornerstone of American Democracy. It contains 29 essays about the importance of public education, written by well-known scholars and educators.
I recently received this note from Dr. Berliner about his reaction to the NPE conference.
Dear Diane,
It was so nice to see you and Carol Burris at the annual meeting of our Network for Public Education. I know how hard you and others worked to make it a success. I write to tell you and Carol that it was exactly that for me.
As I think you know, I live pretty much by myself since my wife’s illness necessitated a move from Tempe to Oakland. Thus, I no longer have the same support group that I had in Arizona. Reading your posts, and NPE articles, is certainly edifying. Both sources of information do inform me, but they do more than that. They also signal me that there are many others who share our beliefs in the necessity for, and importance of, a successful system of public education.
My attendance at the recent annual meeting of NPE, in Philadelphia, was so very affirming of our common values. It reminded me that others with similar beliefs exist and are doing important work. I got to meet some of the published heroes of mine, whose work I often read, and with whom I share common purpose. But I also got to meet heroes I had not known about before. These folks often work at the local level, doing the hard work of keeping public schools public, decently funded, and building programs that improve the outcomes for America’s most impoverished youth. They do the hardest work, I think, and I was so happy to listen to them and know that we have so many like-minded folks on the ground, at the local level.
Everyone I met at the meetings I thought of as heroes trying their best to stop the onslaught of the privateers and our slide into plutocracy. I thought everyone I met believed, as I do, in words written by the late Paul Wellstone. I keep Wellstone’s words nearby to me when I work, as a reminder of what should be reflected in my own work. He said: “That all citizens will be given an equal start through a sound education is one of the most basic, promised rights of our democracy. Our chronic refusal as a nation to guarantee that right for all children, including poor children, is a national disgrace. It is rooted in a kind of moral blindness, or at least a failure of moral imagination, that we do not see that meeting the most basic needs of so many of our children condemns them to lives and futures of frustration, chronic underachievement, poverty, crime and violence. It is a failure which threatens our future as a nation of citizens called to a common purpose, allied with one another in a common enterprise, tied to one another by a common bond.”
At the recent NPE meetings I witnessed participants called to common purpose, allied to each other in a common enterprise: To support and enhance America’s systems of public education. We shared our common bond. It was so satisfying to be there. I already look forward to attending again next year.
David C. Berliner
Regents’ Professor Emeritus,
Arizona State University
Christopher Hooks wrote in The Texas Monthly about the boundless hypocrisy and moral vacuousness of Texas’ elected leaders.
In the run-up to the 2022 primaries and election, they made a big show of “protecting the children.”
They obsessed about the danger of transgender children, even insisting on criminalizing parents’ efforts to get medical help for their children. They obsessed about teachers allegedly “grooming” children for lives of deviant sexual behavior. They obsessed about “obscene” books that might normalize sexual behavior they—these men of high righteousness— deplored. They obsessed about “critical race theory” and demanded the banning of books that taught children about racism, whether past or present, or anything about human sexuality.
Yes, the children of Texas would be protected from any teaching about race or sexuality.
But they would not be physically protected. They would not be protected from an 18-year-old with two AR15s.
When the bad man with a powerful weapon came into their classroom, the children were left to fend for themselves while 19 police officers stood in the hallway. The bad man killed their teachers. He killed children. Little girls called 911 and begged for help. One said 8 or 9 children were still alive. But the police remained in the hallway.
The parents in the schoolyard pleaded with the police to save their children, but the police had their instructions: keep the parents away.
Almost an hour passed before the police broke into the classroom and shot the murderer.
The Governor called a press conference , where he commended the police for their courage and bravery. He commended the men who waited in the hallway for almost an hour, while the children were dying, one after another.
Hooks writes:
Texas, a friend used to say, is hard on women and little things. That would come to mind over the years when reporting seemed to bear it out. In 2015, I watched a foster mother testify in court, via telephone from her daughter’s hospital bedside, that state cuts to the Medicaid acute therapy program were having disastrous consequences for her child’s incurable, debilitating genetic disorder. In 2021, an eleven-year-old boy in Conroe suffocated from carbon monoxide poisoning after seeing snow for the first time, as his family tried to keep their home warm after the collapse of a horribly mismanaged electrical grid. And then there were the perennial horror stories from the state’s spike-pit child welfare system—a three-year-old found dead, bleeding from the ears, after his day care repeatedly warned state agents about signs of abuse by his foster parents; a teenage girl who killed herself the moment she could despite orders that she was never to be left alone; and countless others who survive through the heavy prescription of psychotropic meds before being kicked out to the streets at the age of eighteen.
Each revelation of new misery brings a new wave of revulsion, but—I hate to say this—as you learn more about how the social safety net works in Texas, the revulsion starts to fade, and it becomes a dull undercurrent to an awareness of the world instead of something sharp that pokes through. As it fades, so comes the realization that it has faded in the same way for those in power—and that nothing gets fixed because leaders have been immunized from caring to an even greater degree. The grid remains unsteady; children in foster care still get abused. Legislators make a show of passing partial, temporary fixes and resist looking at problems head-on. The Texas Legislature, with all its self-regard and jocularity and pride in itself as an institution, turns out to be suffused with a very dull and banal kind of evil.
On Tuesday, though, something poked through. For me, it wasn’t the knowledge that there had been another school shooting. Who could be surprised by that? Every detail was familiar. A once-bullied eighteen-year-old, two AR-15s, 22 dead, and 19 injured. The thing that shocked was the pictures of the dead when they lived. They were so little! Do you remember what it was like to have a body that small? A round fired by an AR-15 at close range enters the human body at three times the speed as those fired by a handgun, disintegrating and liquefying bones and organs around it. “It’s like a grenade goes off in there,” one trauma surgeon told Wired. Parents had to submit DNA samples so their kids could be accurately identified.
This spectacular violence, it sometimes feels, has not left much of us. At his initial press conference, Governor Greg Abbott wore his traditional white disaster-response shirt and offered details of the massacre as if reading a weather report. At a press conference the next day, where the governor sat alongside Texas senator Ted Cruz and Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, Abbott told Texans that the disaster “could have been worse,” and the primary flash of anger shown by elected officials came when Beto O’Rourke, who appeared in the crowd, tried to talk over them.
Appearing on Newsmax TV the day of the shooting, state attorney general Ken Paxton suggested that more armed guards at schools would help, “because it’s not going to be the last time.” Can you believe that, as a response from one of the most powerful elected officials in the state to a massacre of fourth graders? “It’s not going to be the last time.” There used to be at least a perfunctory mourning period, some hugs given in front of cameras, before those in power turned to one another other and shrugged. But in truth, leaders are only handling this the way they think about the foster care system they oversee, and every other death trap run by the state. The revulsion dulls, the novelty fades, and it becomes normal.
The shooting took place on the day of the Texas primary runoff. The composition of the Legislature and the rest of state government for the next two and a half years was set that night, barring extraordinary circumstances, by the conclusion of the Republican primary, which in Texas is more influential than the general election. Paxton, who had shrugged off the Uvalde shooting on Newsmax while wearing a campaign T-shirt, won renomination and almost certainly a third term in office.
It is a grotesque and cruel irony that the Republican primary this year, and several years of political activity before it, have been dominated by an all-consuming and comically misdirected argument about the “protection” of children and by a war on public schools. There was essentially no policy contested in the GOP primary that could affect the practical and economic circumstances of all Texans. (There rarely is.) There was, however, ceaseless argument about the well-being of children, their morals, their internal lives.
The most acute panic was over transgender children. In February, Paxton’s office issued a formal opinion holding that the prescription of puberty blockers to transgender children represented “child abuse.” Shortly after, Abbott tasked the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services, an overworked and underfunded agency he had overseen for close to eight years, with investigating the families of transgender children for child abuse.
The more widespread crisis concerned books. The panic was conjured by parents and elected officials in equal measure. The first target was books with “divisive” material about race. Then, elected officials began to panicabout “pornography” in schools, a category that mostly included literature featuring queer characters and sexuality. Lawmakers proposed lists of books to be banned. In November, Abbott ordered the Texas Education Agency to investigate cases of “obscene material” in public schools and prosecute those responsible “to the fullest extent of the law,” because, as he wrote, it had to be a top priority to “protect” Texas students.
Public school teachers and children’s librarians—two professions that offer a strongly beneficial service to society for little pay—became villains for parents and candidates alike. They were called “groomers” and pedophiles on social media. In a press release, Abbott called for criminal charges to be brought if librarians were found to have put “pornography” in front of children. In Granbury, southwest of Fort Worth, half a year later, one woman lodged a criminal complaint against the librarians of Hood County ISD, prompting a police investigation. At a subsequent school board meeting, she condemned the fact that a committee brought together to review troublesome books had “too many” librarians instead of “people with good moral standards.”
The deterioration spread. A record number of public school teachers, already weary from the pandemic and now faced with a sort of siege, started quitting en masse—and forfeiting their licenses, indicating they probably wouldn’t come back. “I’m tired of getting punched. It shouldn’t be like this,” ninth grade math teacher Gloria Ogboaloh told Texas Monthly. As more teachers left, the quality of life for remaining educators got worse. Then, just four months after ordering that libraries be investigated, Abbott ordered the TEA to create a task force to investigate why so many teachers were quitting.
Hooks goes on to describe politicians who are liars, braggarts, cruel, indifferent to the safety of children, callous. How long can they continue to fool people with their charade and their fake concern? They don’t care about thechildren
The same organization that produced the Glen Beck video in the previous post also produced videos attacking the Disney Corporation and Pearson for their alleged role in “grooming” children to change their gender identity.
With the recent rash of horrific school shootings, you would think that these zealots could think of better uses for their time and resources.
How about making videos about the need for gun control? Reduced class sizes? Health clinics in school for families?
No, these people are obsessed with sex. That’s all they think about.
The good news is that parents are on to them. They don’t love Pearson, but they love their teachers. They are not fooled by nutty propaganda.
The Destroy Public Education crowd is in league with some seriously whacky people.
Vouchers are a big issue in Texas. Governor Greg Abbott recently announced he would promote them. Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick—the Rush Limbaugh of Texas—is a voucher fanatic. Senator Ted Cruz said that school choice is the most important issue of our time.
But vouchers have died every time they are introduced in the legislature. Legislators from rural communities stand firm against vouchers. Jay Leeson explained why in the Dallas Morning News.
He wrote:
Vouchers are unpopular in places where public schools are the lifeblood of community.
With Gov. Greg Abbott’s announcement that he’ll pursue “school choice” in the upcoming Legislature, there’s political math to be done.
The governor’s proposal is pencil whipping his previously reliable rural voting base, presuming that rural communities will stick with him as he looks past the November match-up against Beto O’Rourke, and moves to the next problem of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a probable 2024 presidential foe. But in rushing to check off another box on the national GOP purity exam, questionable work has been submitted.
Out where rural public schools constellate expansive Lone Star landscape, out where the real Texas economic miracle of food, fuel, and fiber is produced, there’s pencil scratching being done.
Rural folks know school choice will come at their expense. Almost like the same-old bait (moral convictions) and switch (economic interests) over and over. It’s been that way for more than 30 years, since the GOP came to power promising term limits and local control — and how has that gone?
We’ve voted for plenty of slippery-as-slop-jar scenarios, like numerous federal officials who vote against subsidies for the state’s $25 billion annual agriculture industry. In 2018, cotton had fallen out of a federal funding program to help producers break even, and it was Abbott who single-handedly stalled restoration from Austin. We’ve closed 26 hospitals since 2010. Now just 163 hospitals provide care for 85% of the state’s geography, many with limited services. We’ve incrementally upped local property taxes to fill state budget holes over three decades. And Abbott’s routing of state infrastructure, including pivotal rural telecommunications by his commissioned appointees, could make Santa Anna blush.
But the missing variable in the slippery school choice proposal is the importance of public schools to respective rural communities — and the pillars of community within those schools. I know because I attended them.
Gid Adkisson, a gargantuan man, long in kindness as he was physique, was a retired school superintendent in Abernathy (population 2,904, about 25 miles north of Lubbock) with a bad lifelong cotton farming habit. He’d head out from his homestead to the high school for Gid Night Lights to voluntarily tutor us in algebra on Mondays and Thursdays, so we could play under the Friday Night Lights.
Children, even deviant teenagers like I was, know goodness when they see it. When I first think of Gid, I don’t picture him physically; I think of his heart. The physical trait I most remember is the big dent on his forehead that shone in the lights of Ms. Hardin’s classroom.
Bettie Hardin was a petite, put-together woman — pristine white perm, horn-rimmed glasses, mock turtleneck. She played the Methodist piano every Sunday morning with the same precision she expected from our math during the week.
Sports were our world. And Ms. Hardin could end that world with the swipe of a red pen.
But Gid came to the rescue, helping us understand it all. The first time I figured out ratio and proportion equations, Gid was right there, two huge knuckles on the desk behind me, affirming and encouraging me as my mind translated through pencil what Hardin and he had worked so hard to cultivate. When the problem was solved, the huge knuckles rose above the suspenders past the dent and to the lights, “Good, golly. You got it.”
I don’t today use an acquired high school skill — from on or off the field — more frequently than that equation.
Sitting in Wayne Riley’s 6th Grade Sunday School with half a dozen others was the first time I ever first-hand witnessed a grown man weep; we’d know him later as Coach Riley, our varsity basketball coach.
When my grandmother passed, I was destroyed and my band teacher Harold Bufe took a knee and consoled me about the loss of my world and his longtime friend.
When Gid died, many of us learned what we didn’t know all along: he’d been rescuing people for a long time. He led the 317th Regiment, 80th Infantry Division up Utah Beach where dented-head man earned, but later refused, a Purple Heart. Too many missing human variables under his command for him to accept such an award.
Public education gave us a tutor who defeated Hitler, coaches who earned our respect, and band teachers who helped us outside the notes. And Ms. Hardin who played Amazing Grace as the soundtrack.
My story isn’t uncommon, which is the point.
We’ll vote against ourselves on a myriad of issues, but not our schools.
Add to it all, rural folks know a little grammar as well.
“Choice” is a political synonym for “consolidation” and “consolidation” is another way of saying “closing” our communities — and our organists, Purple Hearts, and Sunday school teachers.
The political math for Abbott and statewide Republicans is they desperately need rural Texas votes to overcome deficits in the likes of Dallas, Tarrant, Travis, and Harris Counties. Their campaign commercials running longer loops every four years are evidence.
And while Oltons, Borgers, Ballingers, Floydadas, Abernathys, and the 85% of Texas geography won’t become Beto O’Rourke Country anytime soon, if ever, these places might just not vote.
Pull the lever, do your duty, get the sticker, but leave the gubernatorial box left open.
The collective rural Republican state representative silence on the governor’s initiative is already telling. Silence from electeds who backed Abbott’s $118 million for pre-K public education funding in 2015, only to have Abbott abdicate in subsequent far-right primary challenges.
Mr. O’Rourke may well come for some of our guns, but that’s highly unlikely with a legislative and judicial GOP stronghold.
But Abbott’s open threat is against the lifeblood of our communities: our schools. And he’s making it with a three-branch majority.
That’s Abbott’s math now. And Gid’s currently unavailable to tutor.
Jay Leeson is a freelance writer and artist in Lubbock. He wrote and illustrated this for The Dallas Morning News.
Steve Hinnefeld blogs about education in Indiana. Indiana is a state that has been a target for privatizers for more than a decade due to Republican governors like Mitch Daniels and Mike Pence.
Hinnefeld reviews a very provocative article by two scholars at the University of Connecticut.
Hinnefeld writes:
Are charter schools like polluting industries? That’s a provocative analogy, but two University of Connecticut researchers explore it in a recent paper. They contend that, while some charter schools may help students, the sector needs stronger regulation to prevent harm to students and school districts.
“I would argue that, even if there are benefits, that does not give you carte blanche to not regulate or mitigate the harms that occur,” Preston C. Green III, the paper’s lead author, told me.
The paper, “Beware of Educational Blackmail: How Can We Apply Lessons from Environmental Justice to Urban Charter School Growth?,” is pending publication in South Carolina Law Review and is online at the Social Science Research Network. Authors are Green, the university’s John and Maria Neag professor of urban education, and doctoral student Chelsea Connery.
Pursuing the connection between schools and polluters, the authors argue that environmental justice principles can be used to mitigate risks from unchecked expansion of charter schools.
The concept of environmental justice arose from concern that factories and waste facilities targeted low-income, Black or Hispanic neighborhoods where they would face less effective opposition. Often, the projects promised benefits that didn’t materialize: Jobs were few or went to workers from other communities. But the harms — pollution and health risks — were real. The take-it-or-leave-it nature of the transaction gave rise to the term environmental blackmail, hence the title of the paper.
The paper notes that charter schools often locate in economically marginalized communities where families are dissatisfied with the local public school district. (It cites polling that finds charter schools are much more popular with Black and Hispanic Democrats than with white Democrats). Research is mixed on whether charter schools produce the benefits they promise, the authors write.
The paper identifies three types of harm that can be caused by the growth of charter schools:
When students leave district schools for charter schools, state operating funds typically follow, sometimes leaving the districts strapped. Over time, districts can cut costs by reducing staff and closing schools. But Green and Connery say districts often have fixed costs – for example, pensions, retiree health care and debt – that can’t be easily reduced when they lose students.
In Indiana, the biggest growth in charter schools has been in Gary and Indianapolis. District enrollment has declined by 57% in Gary Community Schools and 31% in Indianapolis Public Schools since the state began expanding charters a decade ago. The state took over Gary schools in 2017 because of money problems. (IPS recouped some of its lost enrollment via “innovation” agreementswith charter schools).
Predatory real estate deals often involve charter schools paying inflated prices, sometimes to businesses that have a relationship with the schools. The paper cites an Ohio auditor’s report that found some charter schools were paying twice the normal rent for buildings and a New Jersey newspaper investigation that found charter operators charged exorbitant rents and loan rates.
Indiana has seen some of that, but the state’s major charter school scandal involved two online schools, Indiana Virtual School and Indiana Virtual Pathways Academy. A state audit found the schools received $68.7 million in state funds by inflating their enrollment figures and improperly paid $85.7 million to vendors with ties to officials and employees of the schools.
Loss of student rights often involves matters of discipline, including high rates of suspension and expulsion at “no-excuses” charter schools. Another issue is the use of dress codes to prohibit Black girls from wearing Afrocentric hair styles. State Rep. Vanessa Summers, D-Indianapolis, filed a bill in 2022 to ban “race discrimination based on hair,” but it didn’t get a hearing.
Green and Connery conclude that it will take stronger laws to limit the harm that can result from charter school expansion, just as it took stricter laws and regulations to make gains in environmental justice.
Diane Ravitch's blog 