Its finances had been shaky for a long time, and its enrollment had declined. Yet no one anticipated its sudden closure.
As it happens, the Network for Public Education reported only days ago on the frequency of charter school closures. Its report is called Doomed to Fail. It’s sad but true that charter schools have an unusually high record of transience. Parents can’t be sure that the charter school they chose will keep its doors open for more than a year, or three, or five.
The Washington Post reported:
On the day Eagle Academy abruptly closed, teachers at theD.C. charter school had been unpacking supplies, moving furniture and hanging bright posters covered with the names of students who were supposed to fill classrooms.
There had been rumblings of financial troubles, but the school’sleaders told families over the summer they had a plan: Another charter school had agreed to take over Eagle’s two campusesin Congress Heights and Capitol Riverfront.
But the D.C. Public Charter School Board, an independent city oversight body, blocked that plan. Eagle Academy unexpectedly was shuttered in August, less than a week before the new school year, leaving roughly 350 prekindergarten through third-grade students, plus their teachers, scrambling….
Eagle Academy had shown signs of financial shakiness as enrollment declined over several years, relying at times on credit cards to stay open and missing reporting deadlines, according to a staff report from D.C.’s charter school board.
While pandemic emergency funding gave the academy a temporary boost, Eagle made errors in budgeting, including overshooting student enrollment estimates and grant allocations, a Washington Post review shows. A promise to make significant cuts in spending and an effort to attract more students did not fully materialize.
Public records and more than a dozen interviews with Eagle families, school leaders and D.C. officials show that the city and Eagle’s own board lacked a clear picture of the school’s increasingly dire financial situation — leading to questions over whether more could have been done to stave off closure or allow for an easier transition for families. The city’s charter school board also said it would examine its oversight practices…
Eagle Academy opened its first campus in 2003. It was the dream of Cassandra S. Pinkney, who set out to build a school where Black children from underserved communities would learn to swim and kids like her son — who had special-education needs — could thrive. Pinkney founded the school with [Joe] Smith, a friend and charter-school advocate.
It was vaunted at the time as the District’s first “exclusively early childhood public charter school,” according to Eagle’s 2023 annual report. Two years after opening, the school had a special-education department with speech-language therapy, mental health services and other supports. It would later expand to enroll children through the third grade…
The enrollment problems caused financial ones. Schools are funded by the city largely based on the number of students who attend.
Eagle was spending close to $50,000 per student — higher than the citywide average of about $28,000 — according to data from the 2022-2023 school year, the most recent available. Most of Eagle’s student body came from lower-income homes, and the school had a higher-than-average share of children with disabilities, according to data published by the city, which are factors that bring in more funding.
The combination of declining enrollment and financial stress doomed the school.
I have learned so much about what’s happening in Oklahoma from John Thompson, retired teacher and historian. Recently I asked John if he could explain the question that is the title of this post. John responded with the following post. Thank you, John!
When Kevin Stitt was elected governor in 2018, Oklahomans knew he was an extreme conservative and a true believer in the “Free Market,” as THE solution to our problems. Stitt had been the CEO of Gateway Mortgage, which had a questionable reputation. And he knew little or nothing about how government operated; The Tulsa World reported that Stitt apparently hadn’t even voted for governor before he was elected. Even so, the World explained, “Stitt wants the Legislature and the voters of Oklahoma to give him authority no previous governor has ever had — the power to hire and fire all state agency heads and boards.”
The first bill Gov. Stitt signed into law allowed individuals to carry firearms without a permit or training and then he “expanded the number of public spaces where guns could be carried.”
On the other hand, in 2019, I was active in the Justice for Julius campaign, which was fighting for the life of my former student who had been sentenced to death for murder, despite the lack of evidence against him, and the evidence that Julius Jones had been framed. We were told that Stitt’s religious beliefs were sincere. Stitt saved Julius from execution, but denied and banned any future efforts for parole or clemency.
Stitt also began his administration by listening to bipartisan efforts to curtail Oklahoma’s mass incarceration; our state had one of the world’s largest incarceration rates. But, a rightwing dark money group invested $160,000 on ads that said Stitt was soft on crime. Afterwards, the Oklahomanexplained, Stitt rejected Pardon and Parole Board recommendations, and replaced several board members. Moreover, “Oklahoma has executed 14 men during Stitt’s administration, second most among U.S. states. All but one were people of color or poor, or a combination thereof.”
Also, as Oklahoma Watch explains, Stitt’s belief that healthcare was a personal responsibility “became his tagline throughout the (COVID) pandemic.” As the Washington Post reported, in the first few days of the pandemic, Stitt was maskless when “he attracted national attention for tweeting a photo with his family at a ‘packed’ Oklahoma City restaurant,” and saying “he would continue to dine out ‘without living in fear, and encourages Oklahomans to do the same.’”
Stitt soon caught COVID, and he also attended, without a mask, “Trump’s rally in Tulsa — the president’s first since the pandemic set in … Local health officials warned the indoor event at a 19,000-person arena could cause a dangerous spread of the virus in a county that was already seeing a spike.” That week, Oklahoma’s weekly COVID deaths increased by more than 40%. Republican Herman Cain caught COVID after attending the rally maskless and died afterwards.
The Washington Post also reported how Stitt resisted the federal vaccination mandate for the Oklahoma National Guard, and fired the Guard’s adjutant general for supporting vaccinations.
The Frontier also reported that Stitt ordered $2 million of hydroxychloroquine, which President Trump touted. And as NPR reported, in 2020, Stitt refused to publish Oklahoma infection and death rates.
So, it’s hard to estimate how many thousands of deaths were attributable to Stitt, but in 2022, Oklahoma’s death rate was 5th highest in the U.S. In 2023, it was 2nd highest in the nation.
And Stitt continued to undermine governmental and legal institutions. After he ramped up attacks on established legal compacts with Oklahoma’s tribes, and invested $600,000 in state money in compacts which the Oklahoma Supreme Court ruled were illegal, the conservative Republican Attorney General, Gentner Drummond, said he was compelled to take “extraordinary action to put an end to the governor’s betrayal of his duty … [and] ‘cause the laws of the state to be faithfully executed.’”
As the New York Times reported, Stitt also advocated for and signed a bill that “bans nearly all abortions starting at fertilization. The new law … is the most restrictive abortion ban in the country.”
And Stitt took the lead in campaigning against Critical Race Theory which was falsely said to be undermining public education. The Oklahoman reported:
Stitt signed House Bill 1775 that would prohibit public schoolteachers from teaching that “one race or sex is inherently superior to another,” and that “an individual, by virtue of his or her race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist or oppressive.”
Gov. Kevin Stitt signed a bill prohibiting nonbinary gender markers on birth certificates for people who don’t identify as male or female — the first law of its kind in the United States, according to legal experts.
… Republican backers describe the new rules as reflecting their religious beliefs, arguing that gender is binary and immutable. “I believe that people are created by God to be male or female,” Stitt said when he issued the executive order. “There is no such thing as nonbinary sex.”
I am taking decisive executive action to ensure the true definition of the word woman, meaning a biological woman, is what guides the state as we reaffirm our commitment to ensuring the safety, dignity, and sanctity of women across Oklahoma. As long as I’m governor, we will continue to protect women and ensure women-only spaces are reserved solely for biological women.
By the way, my House Representative, Mauree Turner, was the nation’s first Black, Muslim, nonbinary state legislator; As the Washington Post explained, Rep. Turner suffered through terrible abuse by Republican politicos. Their behavior was illustrative of a new norm where MAGAs seemed to compete over the ability to be cruel, and push out their colleagues who showed respect for their opponents.
Eventually, the extremism of Stitt et. al sowed division among Republicans. OpenSecrets.org was unable to locate the source of the money used by Stitt to fund primary candidates who opposed Republican incumbents who weren’t reactionary and confrontational enough, but it did “match up” expenditure from 46 Forward Inc. that funded 46 Action and Stitt’s “endorsements in the Republican state Senate primaries.”
During Stitt’s second term, his ideology-driven policies continued to get weirder. For instance, the Oklahoma Voice reports, “Gov. Kevin Stitt has approved a controversial set of rules from the Oklahoma State Department of Education, as expected after the Legislature declined to take action on the regulations.” This gives Walters’ rules that expand test-driven accountability. The regulations also add “new ‘foundational values’ for the state Education Department that make multiple references to ‘the Creator.’”
Other rules include potential punishment for schools that continue to employ educators under investigation for wrongdoing (as defined by the ideology-driven board), and permission to fire teachers who engage in acts that “promote sexuality” within view of a minor.
For the second year in a row, Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt has rejected a federal program that would have provided additional funding for families to feed their children next summer.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Summer EBT program … would earmark about $40 per child per month on a card that families could then use at local grocery stores.
Oklahoma ranks fifth in the nation for child food insecurity.
A new food program would have kicked in this summer, had Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt not turned down $48 million from a $2.5 billion initiative that the Biden administration calls “a giant step forward” in ending childhood hunger in the country. Though Oklahoma is one of the most food-insecure states, with surveys finding that more than 200,000 children are hungry at some point during a year, Stitt suggested the administration was “trying to push certain agenda items on kids.”
And as the Oklahoman reports, a new consent decree seeks to provide mental health services for “scores of presumed-innocent Oklahomans who experience severe mental illness [and] are languishing in county jails awaiting competency restoration treatment for prolonged periods that far exceed constitutional limits.” But “Gov. Kevin Stitt, House Speaker Charles McCall and a top state mental health official are pushing back on a proposal.”
Stitt sounds like he is resisting the funding that would be required, but I wonder if he’s also opposing the agreement because it is supported by his opponent, A.G. Gentner Drummond, who doesn’t want this injustice, which has “plagued” the criminal justice system to continue to “drag on for months or years.”
By the way, A.G. Drummond was not at that meeting; he was arguing before the U.S. Supreme Court against the execution of Richard Glossip arguing that prosecutorial misconduct prevented him from receiving a fair trial.
And that brings us back to Stitt’s original intention to hire and fire all state agency heads and boards. During his second term, Stitt, rightwingers’, and their dark money donors have doubled down on a campaign to politicize the Oklahoma Supreme Court. I doubt Stitt knew much about the Court’s history, but it used to be the most corrupt Supreme Court in America. But a bipartisan team created the Judicial Nomination Commission which was often seen as the institution that started the process of making Oklahoma a real democracy.
A rightwing dark money group is funding an effort to remove three justices who voted for abortion and voting rights, tribal contracts, and against the creation of a Catholic charter school. So, whether he knows what he is doing or not, Stitt is helping to lead an effort to dismantle the Nominating Commission, take control over the nomination process, and likely turn back the clock to the corruption of the 1950’s and before.
And that leads to the question as to whether Stitt is primarily motivated by a simplistic “Survival of the Fittest” ideology, and merely follows the lead of Big Money? Or are his policies simply born out of his ignorance and their propaganda? Or has he fully embraced the most disgusting components of Trumpism, and thus devoted himself to brutality? Fundamentally, is he now seeking a reputation for embracing the cruelty that the MAGAs admire?
The state’s so-called Education Savings Accounts (or Empowerment Scholarship Accounts) were enacted by the Legislature in 2011. Whatever they are called, they are vouchers, which violate Arizona’s Constitutional ban on public funds for religious schools. They initially contained restrictions as to which students qualified to receive a voucher. The usual claim for vouchers was that they would “save poor kids from failing public schools.” However, that never happened.
From the start, the Republicans in control wanted vouchers for all students, not just those from low-income families. Even though there was a state referendum in which voters overwhelmingly rejected voucher expansion in 2018, the Legislature ignored the vote and passed universal vouchers in 2022. Any student, whatever their family income, is entitled to use public money for tuition in a private or religious school or for home schooling.
The result: few students from low-income families use vouchers.
The article in ProPublica explains why.
Vouchers don’t cover the cost of most private schools.
Most private schools are not located in low-income neighborhoods.
Low-income families can’t afford the cost of transportation to and from private schools.
In Arizona, as in other states, most students who take vouchers were already enrolled in no public schools. Their parents can afford to pay the tuition. Now the state subsidizes them. And in many cases, the schools raise their tuition in response to the state subsidy.
Several months ago, Texas journalists reported that millions of dollars were transferred from charter school accounts in Texas to charter school accounts in Colorado. Their stories said that Houston superintendent Mike Miles was bolstering the finances of one of his Colorado charter schools.
Miles was appointed as superintendent of the Houston Independent School District as part of a hostile state takeover of HISD. State Commissioner of Education Mike Morath was installed by Governor Greg Abbott, and Morath imposed Miles on HISD.
When Miles came under fire for financial irregularities, the state investigated. Who is the state? Mike Morath, the same guy who appointed Miles.
The Texas Education Agency has cleared acting Houston school district Superintendent Mike Miles of wrongdoing after he was accused of improperly diverting millions of dollars in state funds to his Colorado charter school system.
After reporting from Spectrum News and The Texas Observer prompted calls for an investigation earlier this year, the education agency concluded on Tuesday that neither Miles — who the agency picked to lead the state’s largest school district last year — nor his charter school network, Third Future Schools, “violated any applicable Texas laws,” according to the 29-page investigation report.
The investigation found, in part, that checks directed from a partnering Texas school district to Third Future Schools’ Colorado address went there because the Colorado location handles accounting services for the network’s Texas branch, which is run independently. But, the checks were eventually deposited in the Texas branch’s bank account.
“Based on the evidence obtained and analyzed during the investigation, there is no merit to the allegations contained in the media reports that state funds were being inappropriately diverted from public school students in Texas,” the report notes.
The agency is closing the investigation, and “no further action will be taken” at this time, the report says.
In an email sent to the Houston school district community on Tuesday, Miles called the earlier reporting “a baseless distraction and an attempt to undermine and discredit the good work happening” in the schools.
“Now we can do what we always do and move forward on behalf of our students,” Miles said.
Earlier this year, Spectrum News reported that the Texas branch of Third Future Schools — which receives funding from multiple Texas school districts to run campuses in the state — was potentially using public funds from its school in Odessa to offset financial losses at a sister school in Colorado.
The Texas Observer later reported that it had identified “additional irregularities” related to the disclosure of expenses by the charter network.
Miles denied wrongdoing and accused the previous reporting of mischaracterizing “common place financial arrangements between charter schools and the charter management organizations that support them” and welcomed an investigation into the network’s activities.
The state’s investigators agreed with Miles, saying they found no evidence that Texas school districts deposited funds into the bank account of Third Future Schools in Colorado. Third Future Schools-Texas reimburses the Colorado location for administrative services it provides to all of the charter network, the report says.
Colorado voters, beware! On the November 5 ballot: an amendment to the State Constitution to protect school choice.
If you want to support public schools and a raid on the state’s treasury by privatizers, defeat it!
This proposed amendment is weird. Ever since the founding of this nation, states have had explicit pledges in their constitution to protect public schools, open to all. Colorado’s state Constitution includes such language as well as language explicitly rejecting public funding for religious schools.
Article 9, Section 2 of the Constitution says:
Section 2. Establishment and maintenance of public schools. The general assembly shall, as soon as practicable, provide for the establishment and maintenance of a thorough and uniform system of free public schools throughout the state, wherein all residents of the state, between the ages of six and twenty-one years, may be educated gratuitously.
Article 8, Section 7 of the Constitution says:
Section 7. Aid to private schools, churches, sectarian purpose, forbidden. Neither the general assembly, nor any county, city, town, township, school district or other public corporation, shall ever make any appropriation, or pay from any public fund or moneys whatever, anything in aid of any church or sectarian society, or for any sectarian purpose, or to help support or sustain any school, academy, seminary, college, university or other literary or scientific institution, controlled by any church or sectarian denomination whatsoever; nor shall any grant or donation of land, money or other personal property, ever be made by the state, or any such public corporation to any church, or for any sectarian purpose.
Now, the privatizers want to cancel that language and replace it with language chartering what was previously forbidden.
On November 5, 2024, Colorado voters will weigh in on a hot topic in education today: school choice. Amendment 80 would make the concept of “school choice” a guaranteed right in the Colorado constitution. The text of the amendment reads as follows:
(1) PURPOSE AND FINDINGS. THE PEOPLE OF THE STATE OF COLORADO HEREBY FIND AND DECLARE THAT ALL CHILDREN HAVE THE RIGHT TO EQUAL OPPORTUNITY TO ACCESS A QUALITY EDUCATION; THAT PARENTS HAVE THE RIGHT TO DIRECT THE EDUCATION OF THEIR CHILDREN; AND THAT SCHOOL CHOICE INCLUDES NEIGHBORHOOD, CHARTER, PRIVATE, AND HOME SCHOOLS, OPEN ENROLLMENT OPTIONS, AND FUTURE INNOVATIONS IN EDUCATION. (2) EACH K-12 CHILD HAS THE RIGHT TO SCHOOL CHOICE.
According to University of Southern California Professor Guilbert Hentschke, “school choice has become a catch-all label describing many different programs that offer students and their families alternatives to publicly provided schools.” Since school choice covers many options, it can be confusing, and it is often the “subject of fierce debate in various state legislatures across the United States.” The critical distinction to make regarding school choice is often whether it affects public or private schools.
School choice has been the mantra for voucher-systems currently enacted in at least twenty states. School choice with voucher-type legislation entails using taxpayer dollars for education savings accounts, opportunity scholarships, tax credits, or actual vouchers so families can choose any type of schooling for their child — private, public or home schooling. This idea represents an emphasis on “funding students instead of funding school systems.”
The focus on school choice has resulted in increased enrollment in charter schools, private schools, and home schooling. At the same time, the school choice movement has also created instability, competition, ideological curricula, resource inequities, increased segregation, loss of community, and reduced funding for public neighborhood schools. In Colorado, of all eligible school-age children, about 76% attend public schools, 15% attend charter schools, 8 percent are in private schools, and 1% are homeschooled.
Advance Colorado is the conservative think tank organization that developed the language for Amendment 80, and they coordinated the expensive signature gathering to secure approval for the measure, originally titled Initiative 138. The backers acknowledge that parents already have the right in state statute to “send their kids to a neighborhood school, charter school, private school, home school, or across district lines.”
Advance Colorado’s solution to the “problem” of legislators promoting charter accountability is to put “the right to school choice in the Colorado Constitution” which they assert will give school choice “legal advantages a normal statute does not have.” Over fifty highly paid lobbyists were assigned to kill the charter accountability bill which was publicly opposed by Governor Polis, and was defeated in the House committee.
Even though Advance Colorado states its goal is to protect the charter schools from future legislative interference, Amendment 80 encompasses “private and home schooling” options. Including “private schools as a guaranteed right” is a plan promulgated by Americans for Prosperity and other conservative think tanks in several red states where voucher bills have been passed or expanded. Fields said he thinks “parents should be in charge of education,” adding “I think it’s easier when they have resources to send their kid to the school that they want to.”
Colorado State board of education members Lisa Escárcega and Kathy Plomer wrote in a September 11 op-ed that Amendment 80 is “not just about school choice.” They cautioned that “Amendment 80, brought by wealthy, in and out-of-state organizations, is part of a nationally coordinated master plan to go around voters in states where voucher proponents have been unsuccessful in passing state voucher laws.” They pointed out that in Colorado, “voters turned down three education voucher ballot initiatives in the 1990s.Voucher and private school proponents then tried the legislative route. The Colorado legislature has turned down any type of voucher or education savings account 18 times just since 2016.” While the amendment doesn’t mention vouchers, the state board members expressed their concern that “If parents have a right to send their children to private schools, then shouldn’t the state pay for it?”
Using public taxpayer dollars for children to attend private schools or for home schooling is not legal in Colorado, nor is it currently popular. (They can get some indirect support.) Kevin Welner of the National Education Policy Center stated that “it would be hard to persuade voters or politicians that Colorado should join the ranks of states that provide taxpayer subsidies for private schools or homeschooling.”
Even though Fields insists this amendment “is not paving the way for a voucher program in Colorado,” the far-right conservative groups providing the money to promote Amendment 80 have tried to enact vouchers in Colorado for years.
Vouchers are not necessarily an effective system to improve student learning and according to recent research, they can hinder state budgets significantly. Josh Cowen, senior fellow at the Education Law Center, pointed to decades of evidence showing private school vouchers have led to some of the steepest declines in student achievement on record. He added that measures similar to Amendment 80 passed in Arizona, Florida and Ohio have led to serious budget cuts.
Who is funding this effort to enshrine “school choice” in the state constitution?
In an op-ed about Advance Colorado last year, Colorado Newsline editor Quentin Young wrote that “Coloradans don’t know who’s supplying its money or their true motivations, because nonprofits don’t have to disclose their donors.” Advance Colorado is the same “dark money group” that gathered signatures for Initiative 108, which would have forced over $3 billion in cuts to services to citizens.
Advance Colorado started as “Unite for Colorado” in 2019, which bankrolled almost every major Republican effort in Colorado in 2020. Unite for Colorado spent over $17 million in 2020 on Republican candidates, and they have “become the most important fundraising entity for conservatives and for Republicans,” said Dick Wadhams, a former chairman of the Colorado GOP. Unite for Colorado changed its name to Advance Colorado Action in 2021 due to questionable conflicts over its spending practices, which are still in litigation.
As a “dark money group,” Advance Colorado receives grants from many sources, most of which are unknown, yet there is evidence that connects Advance Colorado to several conservative organizations. There are also reports that tie the group to Phillip Anschutz, Colorado’s richest billionaire. According to Cause IQ, between 2020-2023, over $28 million was funneled to Unite Colorado/Advance Colorado from the Colorado Stronger Alliance.
Colorado Dawn was formed in 2021 to “support organizations who further the efforts to educate the public about western values and economics,” and it has received over $3 million from Unite Colorado (Advance Colorado). Tax records from the Colorado Dawn’s 2022 990’s list state Board of Education member Steve Durham as chairman, Senator Paul Lundeen as Vice-chairman, and Michael Fields as Treasurer. Lundeen announced in 2022 his hopes that Colorado would enact a voucher program after the Supreme Court “cleared the way for public dollars in a Maine tuition assistance program to flow to private religious schools.” The Colorado Secretary of State’s office indicates that Colorado Dawn spent over $1.3 million to collect signatures for Amendment 80.
On Sept 13, 2024, the CEA announced its opposition to Amendment 80 at a press conference in Denver. A coalition of various representatives from across the state, the National Education Association, and the ACLU described their main reasons for opposing Amendment 80.
The speakers at the press conference emphasized that the amendment is unnecessary because school choice is already protected in law and has been for 30 years. In addition, they stated that the amendment opens the door to taking money from public schools to fund private schools. Speakers stressed that funding private schools would drain money away from rural public schools, private schools pose significant civil rights concerns, and they don’t belong in the Constitution.
In interviews with Chalkbeat, several education experts weighed in on the wording in Amendment 80, indicating it could create years of “litigation” order to interpret the amendment’s misleading language, which Kristi Burton Brown also acknowledged in her interview with KOA radio.
Currently, the following groups are opposing the measure: ACLU of Colorado, AFT Colorado, Colorado Fiscal Institute, CEA, The Colorado Association of School Executives (CASE), AFSCME, Advocates for Public Education Policy, Business and Professional Women of Colorado, Colorado Immigrant Rights Coalition, League of Women Voters Colorado, Soul 2 Soul Sisters, Bell Policy Center, Colorado PTA, One Colorado, United for a New Economy, Colorado Democratic Party, American Association of University Women, Colorado WINS, Colorado AFL-CIO, Stand for Children, and New Era Colorado Action Fund.
Colorado voters will need to decide which rationale they support regarding this school choice amendment. Will they agree with Advance Colorado that a constitutional amendment is necessary to ensure that the legislature will not update current charter school laws? Or will they believe that Colorado does not need to go the route of other states and create a pathway to use public funding for private and home schools?
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Mike DeGuire, Ph.D., has been a teacher, district level reading coordinator, and a principal in the Denver metro area for most of his education career.
The charter lobby has created a mythology that charter schools are more successful than public schools. As the study shows, the mythology is not true. What parent would choose a school that is likely to close in a few years?
Parents want to know if they can depend on a school being there not only when their children start but also when they finish. Based on a marketplace model with fewer regulations, the charter school sector is far more unstable than local public schools.
While the fate of each school cannot be predicted, we can show trends.
Doomed to Fail: An analysis of charter school closures from 1998-2022 uses data from the Common Core of Data, the primary database on non-private elementary and secondary education in the United States, to determine charter school closure rates and the number of students affected when closures occur. The report analyzes charter school closures from 2022 to 2024 to determine the reasons why schools close and how much notice families receive.
Charter schools come with no guarantees. And, as this report shows, in far too many cases, these schools were doomed to fail from the very start.
Here are some of the key findings of the report:
-By year five, 26% of charter schools have closed
-By year ten, nearly four in ten charters fail, rising to 55% by year twenty.
-More than one million students have now been stranded by charter closures
-Eight states have closure rates that exceed 45%.
-The inability to attract and retain students is the primary reason for failures.
-The second most frequent reason is fraud and gross mismanagement.
-Forty percent of closures are abrupt, giving insufficient warning.
-School operators, not authorizers, initiate the majority of closures (blowing a hole in the “accountability” myth..
The report includes some pretty startling examples of charter shutdowns during the last two years, exposing corruption, mismanagment, and operators who did not bother to tell parents the school would be closing until just before it happened. There is also a section written by Gary Rubenstein on the failure of the Tennessee Achievement District. The report can be found here and the Executive Summary here.
Jennifer McCormick was the last elected state superintendent of schools. She switched parties because of the Republicans’ hostility to public schools.
She is running for Governor of Indiana against Senator Mike Braun, who is a far-right Republican. Braun and his running mate, an evangelical extremist, want to get rid of public schools.
The 74 reports:
U.S. Sen. Mike Braun, a conservative Republican, is still ahead in the state’s gubernatorial race but his lead among Indiana voters over Democrat Jennifer McCormick has shrunk in recent weeks.
Polling released this week by the Democratic Governors Association shows Braun just three points in front of McCormick, 44% to 41%. That’s a dropoff from the Sept. 17 results of an Emerson College Polling/The Hill voter survey that had Braun with roughly 45% of the vote and McCormick with 34. Libertarian candidate Donald Rainwater also picked up more support but less dramatically so, going from 5.8% to 8%.
Indiana has not elected a Democratic governor since 2000 and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump holds a comfortable 14 percentage point lead, 57% to 43%, over Democrat Kamala Harris, according to an ActiVote poll released Tuesday.
If elected to succeed Republican Gov. Eric Holcomb, Braun and his running mate, pastor, podcaster and far-right Christian nationalistMicah Beckwith, have pledged universal school choice for every Indiana family while focusing on parental rights and school safety.
McCormick, a career educator, was the last person elected to the superintendent of public instruction’s office before it became an appointed position in 2021. She seeks to expand affordable child care, fight what she believes is excessive state-mandated testing and call for an equitable school funding formula.
She also wants to place limits on the state’s private school voucher initiative: The program grew to encompass more than 70,000 children in 2023-24, a 31% increase from the year before. The state allocated $439 million in tuition grants to private parochial or non-religious schools last year — up from nearly $312 million the year before.
McCormick said the program, which might have been intended for lower-income children, is often utilized by white suburban families and is too expensive.
“We can’t afford it,” she told The 74, “and it is sucking the resources out of our traditional schools.”
Braun, 70, wants to expand school choice by removing the $220,000 annual family income cap from the voucher program, known as the Choice Scholarship Program, and doubling the $10 millionallocated to the state’s Education Scholarship Account Program. The program, which has also seen tremendous growth in participation, gives special education students and their siblings funds for tuition and support services.
Braun did not make himself available for an interview and attempts to reach various supporters were not successful.
“School choice programs put parents in the driver’s seat, allowing them to choose schools that prioritize their children’s needs,” he states in his education plan. “Providing universal school choice will ensure every Hoosier family has the same freedom to choose their best-fit education.”
A former school board member, Braun also wants to create an Indiana Office of School Safety to streamline the efforts of several departments, including the state police — and implement age-appropriate cyber training for students regarding online safety. He said, too, that the state should limit cellphone use on campus.
Braun wants to increase Indiana’s public teacher base salary — and financially reward educators whose students perform well.
Keith Gambill, president of the Indiana State Teachers Association, said his group endorsed McCormick, 54, because of her commitment to funding traditional public schools.
He noted she did not have the group’s endorsement when she initially ran for the state superintendent’s office as a Republican. But, Gambill said, after filling the role and understanding the state’s educational needs, she switched parties and her values more closely aligned with the union’s.
“She really stood up to members of — at that time — her own party in working toward what was best for our schools,” he said, speaking of her time in office. “And, of course, as soon as they were challenged, they didn’t like that. She realized that if she was going to make a difference in public education, she would have to move in a different direction.”
McCormick aims to secure a minimum base salary of $60,000 for pre-K-12 educators, and adjust veteran teacher salaries to reflect their non-educator peers. She wants to increase academic freedom, safeguard university tenure and protect the ability of teachers unions to collectively bargain for wages and benefits.
Her running mate, Terry Goodin, a former state representative, was a teacher, assistant principal and public school superintendent at Crothersville Community Schools.
Braun, in his education plan, said he wants schools to notify parents about their child’s request to change their name or use different pronouns on campus. He has denounced gender-affirming surgery for minors and opposes transgender students playing on girls’ sports teams. Braun has the backing of Americans for Prosperity and CPAC — and maintains high ratings from the NRA.
Braun was endorsed by Trump in 2023 and won his party’s nomination for governor in May after beating out a crowded field of GOP contenders. He acknowledged last month, according to Axios, that Harris’s presence at the top of the presidential ticket has complicated down-ballot races, including his own.
“I think that’s had an impact,” he said, “but I’m going to plow through that because this is a lot about kitchen table issues once you’re starting to run for governor.”
Media Matters has done a thorough review of the contents of Project 2025, which was written as a playbook for the next Trump administration. It was released and posted on the web in 2023, without fanfare. As more people read it and expressed their indignation, Trump claimed he knew nothing about it. Ever heard of it. Didn’t know who wrote it.
But the authors of the plan included 140 people who had worked in the Trump administration. The plan was developed by the rightwing Heriage Foundation, whose president is Kevin Roberts, a friend of Trump’s.
He knew.
It’s the roadmap for the second Trump term in office.
For education, the main feature of Project 2025 is its strong support for school choice, especially vouchers. It is a formula for directing federal funds to public funding of private and religious schools, as well as home schooling. It’s the Betsy DeVos model. Its purpose is to end public schools.
Rick Hess is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank in D.C. that is underwritten in part by the billionaire DeVos family. I have always had very pleasant and rewarding exchanges with Rick, who is a very amiable guy. He often tries to stake out a middle ground on controversial issues, as he does here. He argues that he doesn’t know what Trump will do on education, if re-elected, and neither does anyone else. But he concludes that Trump is unikely to do anything radical in the way of defunding education programs or dismantling the Department. So, don’t believe what he says and disregard Project 2025.
Somehow I’m not assuaged.
Hess writes in Education Next:
This summer, musing on the Republican National Convention, I noted that the GOP has been fundamentally remade since 2016—a point deemed self-evident by right-leaning pundits (MAGA and Never-Trump alike) but that seems insufficiently appreciated by a whole lot of other observers.
This has yielded a lot of certainty in education circles as to what would happen under a Trump 2.0, much of which I find pretty dubious. I’ve done interviews with reporters who seem to take it as given that Trump would slash Title I, IDEA, and Pell Grants. One write-up after another has emphatically declared that the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 playbook is the blueprint for Trump 2.0. There’s a remarkable confidence that Trump’s administration would embrace budget-cutting, small-government, Mike Pence–Betsy DeVos conservatism, only far more aggressively than the last go-round.
Now, might they be right? Sure. But it’s not the way to bet. I want to take a moment to explain why.
For starters, keep in mind that Trump has never been a conservative in any traditional sense. He’s a showman, reality TV star, and longtime Democrat who stumbled into the presidency. In 2016, as the newbie in a party dominated by Tea Party and Reaganite conservatives, he was obligated to name Mike Pence VP and issue a list of Federalist Society–vetted Supreme Court nominees. Today, Trump is no longer so constrained: he is the Republican Party. Traditional conservatives—from Dick Cheney to Mitt Romney to Paul Ryan—have been purged. Trump’s VP pick is now J.D. Vance, a former Never-Trumper who subsequently bent the knee. Trump has thrown the pro-life wing of the GOP coalition under the bus, torn up a half-century of Republican foreign policy, and dumped those who advised him on judges last time.
The shift is only partly about Trump being unfettered. It’s also about the remaking of the Republican coalition. Republicans have bled socially moderate, fiscally conservative college grads while gaining working-class voters who kind of like New Deal/Great Society-type spending. Pence was a Reaganite, a small-government conservative who wanted to cut programs and reduce spending. Vance is a NatCon, an economic populist who greeted the news that Liz Cheney would be voting for Harris by denouncing the former member of the House Republican leadership as someone who gets “rich when America’s sons and daughters go off to die.” Where Reaganite conservatives talked about the need to reform Social Security and Medicare, Trump has promised he won’t touch them. This is decidedly not the Romney-Ryan Republican Party.
So, while it seems to elude much of the education commentariat, it should be regarded as an open question as to whether Trump 2.0 would actually commit to much budget-cutting or shrinking of the bureaucracy when it comes to education. Indeed, when asked about child care, Trump recently offered a word salad suggesting that his proposed tariffs would help fund a major expansion of federal programs. Last year, he pitched a federally-funded “American Academy,” which would open new vistas for Washington’s role in providing higher education. Trump has obviously promised aggressive action on key cultural hot points—from defunding anti-Semitic colleges to busting the higher-ed accreditation cartel—and such moves, while obviously right-leaning, imply a need for a robust federal presence.
As National Review’s Andy McCarthy observed in his debate postmortem last week, “Because he’s an opportunist with some conservative leanings, rather than a conservative in search of opportunities to advance the cause, Trump often can’t decide whether to deride Harris’s cynical policy shifts or try to get to her left.” Even in Trump’s first term, when he had an experienced team of small-government true believers, there was little cutting and a whole lot of deficit spending. Recall that it was Trump who supported the first big tranche of unconditional pandemic aid for schools, initiated the hugely expensive student loan pause, and spent his first term watching spending climb on programs he’d promised to cut.
Now, some readers may protest: “Yeah, but Trump told Elon Musk we should abolish the Department of Education, and Heritage’s Project 2025 calls for cutting education spending!” Fair points. Trump has made a slew of contradictory promises, and neither the GOP platform nor his track record offer much clarity as to what should be believed. After all, even as Trump was saying he’d like to abolish the Department, he was emphatically denouncing Project 2025 (written by first-term staff who may not be welcome back in a Trump 2.0) and insisting he hasn’t read it.
What’s the bottom line? The truth is that no one really knows how a Trump 2.0 would go. I’ll keep this simple: anyone who claims to know . . . doesn’t. It’s not clear who is advising Trump on education, who (other than his kids) would inhabit his inner circle, how much sway Vance will have, or who would make key calls on staffing. That said, it seems to me that there are three scenarios for a Trump 2.0 when it comes to education. Here they are, from least likely to most likely.
Trump Drains the Swamp. Trump governs as a Beltway-draining, government-cutting conservative, even after aggressively disavowing Heritage’s Project 2025, promising not to touch entitlements, and failing to downsize the federal education footprint in his first term. He goes after Title I, IDEA, and Pell, and he leans on Congress to dismantle the Department of Education. It’s doubtful he could convince centrist GOP senators like Susan Collins or Lisa Murkowski to go along with it, though, meaning Republicans would need a stunningly good election night in the Senate contests to put any of this in play.
Trump Seeks Retribution. Trump devotes his energy to waging his war of “retribution” on his “enemies”—going after the press, Democrats, and any RINOs who’ve earned his ire. His White House spends its time seeking to pull the U.S. out of our international commitments and launching a federally organized deportation effort as part of an aggressive immigration strategy. Amidst the maelstrom, education gets left to the White House’s domestic policy team and whoever winds up staffing the Department of Education—but little happens because of the energy consumed by the tumult and its aftermath.
Trump Puts Trump First. Trump approaches education through the same Trump-first lens as most issues. Because Trump likes things that are popular, he’ll slam colleges, gesture towards school choice, and bark at wokeness but won’t put any meaningful effort into cutting education spending or downsizing the Department. In fact, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he emulates Biden-Harris by treating education as a pandering piñata. Rather than tough-minded budget cuts, I think he’s more likely to endorse universalizing free school lunch, tripling federal spending on IDEA (for “our very beautiful children with special needs”), or making college loans interest-free à la Sen. Rubio’s new bill.
Look, I’ll be the first to concede I could well be wrong. Trump’s an impulsive creature and, should he win, it’s a guessing game who’d wind up calling the shots on education in Trump 2.0. But if I had to bet, given what we know today, I strongly suspect the feverish talk of defunding and dismantling federal education will prove little more than a fever dream.
When Donald Trump appeared recently in Milwaukee, he described his plan for the future of the Department of Education. It’s not quite the same as the scenario in Project 2025, which envisions the total elimination of the U.S. Department of Education. Trump imagines it as a “department” with only two employees: A Cabinet Secretary and a secretary.
The severely shrunken Department would focus solely on the three Rs and would somehow mysteriously have the power and personnel to prevent public schools across the nation from teaching anything connected to “woke.” That is, anything related to race, gender, or social justice. How this fictional Department would impose bans on curriculum when federal law prohibits any federal interference in curriculum is not explained. Actually, it’s nonsense.
Donald Trump has fleshed out his Project 2025–inspired Department of Education plan, and it involves handing the reins and lofty responsibilities of public school administration over to a group of people with all the time in the world: parents.
“I figure we’ll have like one person plus a secretary,” the Republican presidential nominee told a crowd in Milwaukee Tuesday night. “You’ll have a secretary to a secretary. We’ll have one person plus a secretary, and all the person has to do is, ‘Are you teaching English? Are you teaching arithmetic? What are you doing? Reading, writing, and arithmetic. And are you not teaching woke?’
“Not teaching woke is a big factor,” Trump continued. “We’ll have a very small staff. We can occupy that staff right in this room, actually I think this room is too large. And all they’re going to do is they’re going to see that the basics are taken care of. You know, we don’t want someone to get crazy and start teaching a language that we don’t want them to teach.”
Not only do parents already have enough on their plates without trying to run the public school system, it’s likely that Trump has a specific group of parents in mind to direct education policy.
The goals he lays out are startlingly akin to the policy points of the far-right “parents’ rights” group Moms for Liberty, who hosted Trump as the keynote speaker at their annual conference in September. Moms for Liberty has recently ingratiated itself significantly into national politics and was listed as a member of Project 2025’s advisory board.
In the same speech, Trump also drew attention to the amount of real estate occupied in D.C. by Department of Education buildings, plotting that the dissolution of the federal agency would allow “somebody else to move in.”
“They’re run by the state, and run by the parents, because in Washington—you know half of the buildings, such a large number, every building you pass in Washington says Department of Education,” Trump said. “You’re gonna have a lot of vacant space. Now we can have maybe somebody else move in.”
Trump’s proposal to dismantle the Department of Education wholesale is nearly identical to Project 2025, despite his campaign spending months trying to distance itself from the 920-page Christian nationalist manifesto.
Fact check: Trump exaggerated the size and physical space occupied by ED. The U.S. Department of Education is smaller than any other Cabinet department; it has 4,400 employees. It occupies a building at 400 Maryland Avenue, SW, Washington, DC. It rents space at 555 New Jersey Avenue, NW. it does not occupy all or most or many buildings in DC.
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