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Voters Defeated the Dark Money Behind Vouchers

By dianeravitch
December 9, 2024 //
3

David Armiak of the Center for Media and Democracy reviewed the recent defeat of vouchers in three states: Colorado, Kentucky, and Nebraska. He points out that vouchers have never won a state referendum. Voters have always said “No” to sending public money to private and religious schools.

Who pays for the state campaigns on behalf of vouchers?

Billionaires.

The two most reliable funders of voucher proposals are billionaires Betsy DeVos and Charles Koch.

The billionaires keep pushing vouchers even though we now know that they are subsidies for families whose children are already enrolled in private schools. And we now know that vouchers don’t help public school students who use them. And we now know that vouchers are a huge drain on state budgets and always cost more than predicted.

DeVos and Koch like to fund failure. Their goal is not to improve education but to destroy public schools.

Armiak writes:

The dark money group Advance Colorado Action (ACA, formerly Unite for Colorado) qualified the ballot measure, but most of the identifiable money spent pushing its passage came from a related advocacy group, Colorado Dawn.

Unite for Colorado was founded in 2019 by Dustin Zvonek, the former vice president for strategy and innovation and state director for Charles Koch’s astroturf operation Americans for Prosperity. As of 2022, Unite for Colorado provided Colorado Dawn with almost half of its revenue ($2.7 million out of $5.9 million).

Both groups have been hit with multiple campaign finance complaints in recent years, including one last month against Colorado Dawn for sending misleading text messages and spending money to influence a ballot measure without registering as an issue committee.

Colorado Dawn reported spending nearly $1.9 million as of October 23 to back Amendment 80, The Colorado Sun reported.

In Kentucky, voters in every county rejected Amendment 2 by a margin of almost two to one (65%).

If it had passed, the state constitution would have been amended to allow public funding to go to private schools.

A record-breaking $14 million was spent by groups in favor and against the amendment, Kentucky Public Radio reported. The Protect Freedom PAC pulled in $5 million from school privatization billionaire Jeff Yassand spent $4 million on ads supporting the measure.

Other groups spending in favor of the amendment included Kentucky Students First ($2.5 million); Empower Kentucky Parents ($1.25 million); Empower Kentucky Parents PAC ($800,000); and the state chapter of Koch’s Americans for Prosperity ($328,000).

Empower Kentucky Parents received $1 million from American Federation for Children, a group organized and funded by the billionaire DeVos family. Betsy DeVos served as secretary of education during Trump’s first term in office and now supports his plans to eliminate the department.

In Nebraska, 57% of voters supported a ballot measure (Referendum 435) to repeal a new state law that would have provided parents with $10 million in public funds per year in the form of vouchers for their children to attend private K–12 schools.

The Nebraska Examiner reported that Keep Kids First spent just $111,000 as of November 4 to prevent the repeal of the referendum in the Cornhusker state. The American Federation for Children is also the largest known donor so far to Keep Kids First, giving $561,500 in 2023–24.

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Billionaires, Democracy, Education Industry, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Funding, Koch Brothers, Religion, School Choice, Separation of church and state, Vouchers

Josh Cowen Reviews Pete Hegseth’s Book About Saving American Education

By dianeravitch
December 9, 2024 //
22

Josh Cowen kindly agreed to write a review of Pete Hegseth’s book about American education, which appears on this blog exclusively!

Hegseth has a simple answer to the problems of education: give all students a voucher and expect that most will choose a classical Christian education.

Josh Cowen is Professor of Education Policy at Michigan State. His latest book is The Privateers: How Billionaires Created a Culture War and Sold School Vouchers (Harvard Education Press).

As you know, Pete Hegseth was a FOX News host who was nominated by President-Elect Trump to be Secretary of Defense. However, his appointment appears to be in jeopardy at this moment, due to allegations about his sexual exploits and drunken behavior.

Josh Cowen wrote:

Pete Hegseth’s Education Book: American Culture on the Decline, and Only Taxpayer-Funded Classical Christian Schools Can Save Us

I read Pete Hegseth’s book on education, Battle for the American Mind, so you don’t have to. Hegseth is Donald Trump’s nominee for U.S. Defense Secretary [at this writing], and a Fox News contributor, which means his various views on the military and his trove of televised commentary are going to get more scrutiny. But as someone who understands just how important education is to right-wing plans to remake America, I was neither surprised to learn that the would-be defense secretary had thoughts about schooling, nor hesitant to look at what Hegseth had to say.

So here are a few quick thoughts. Technically, Battle is a co-authored volume with a man named David Goodwin, an activist in the classical Christian education movement. The book is presented as a joint effort that melds Goodwin’s “research about Christianity, America’s founding, history, and education” with Hegseth’s apparently probing questions about those topics. It is, however, largely written in Hegseth’s own voice (being the relative celebrity between the two). 

When the book was first published in 2022, it became a bestseller. 

The first half of Battle is something of an indictment of American culture, politics, and education. Or more specifically, of the damage that progressives have done to all three. The second half of the book poses classical Christian education as the panacea. 

Hegseth (and Goodwin) try to establish early on the notion of “paideia,” which Goodwin apparently read about through the scholars Lawrence Cremin and Werner Jaeger, and in which Hegseth seems to have been taken interest. What is “paideia?” If you’re not terribly concerned with the various buzzwords in classical Christian education circles, it’s not especially important. But in those circles it’s something between an article of faith and what passes for an intellectual framework for their goals.

Basically, paideia is what creates culture: “Paideia is contained in that human part of the soul that makes us who we are…is common to a community…made up of ideas, presumptions, beliefs, affections, and ways of understanding that defines us (p. 52).”

Crucially, “paideia is shaped during childhood” and can be cultivated. And the “Western Christian Paideia (WCP) is a unique form of paideia in that it was intentionally developed and cultivated beginning with the Greeks” who proved “that education was a powerful influencer of paideia (p. 53).” Which makes education attractive to all belief systems. What gives American paideia so much appeal is its potential to meld the Greek tradition with a right-wing version of Christian virtue for future generations.

In typical right-wing fashion, Hegseth accuses Progressives from a century ago, and “the Left” today of what his own sect is doing. It’s the Left’s “indoctrination” of children that makes it so dangerous. Except, most of Battle is a half-screed, half-baked plan to focus on children generally and on their education specifically in a cultural (and, if needed, political) uprising against the Left. As Hegseth says: “the real battlefield isn’t colleges, it’s kindergartens.”

Along the way we meet the familiar bugaboos of right-wing American ideology today’s GOP party politics: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the teachers’ unions, critical race theory, DEI, Black Lives Matter, Howard Zinn, “cultural Marxism,” the Warren Court and—in a turn of a phrase that seems to have evoked any number of self-satisfied high-fives in right-wing media green rooms—the scourge of the “Covid-(16)19 Virus” in American schools. Get the idea?

Meanwhile, approved pop culture touchstones that serve almost as sources for the book’s counter-material include the movie Gladiator, Indiana Jones, Star Wars, the heroes in both the C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkein series, (said to be a favorite of J.D. Vance as well), and more spot-quotes of dead philosophers than I care to count for this blog post. 

Honestly, Battle reads like a couple of 10th Grade AP History students crammed with a video series from Hillsdale College before knocking out their final term papers and hitting “send” before hitting the gym. It’s that profound. 

It would also be silly, if it weren’t also entirely an artifact of very real, very potent, and very present intentions on the American Right for education and for child-related policy. It’s easy to make fun of a couple of bros taken in by a smart-sounding Greek word like “paideia.” But when a possible future defense secretary draws from his experience in Afghanistan as evidence that paideia exists, and while malleable, cannot be imposed on other cultures, only grown from within—the “Afghan paideia” was too strong for Americans to impose our own on it, but now “we are losing it at home” (p. 57)—it’s worth paying attention. 

In this telling, American “democracy” is simply progressive “gospel” (p. 89) and is secondary to restoring the promise of American…paideia. 

It’s that kind of mindset—more than trust in the market, more than purported concerns for COVID-era learning loss, more than a genuine desire for all kids to have the education that best fits their needs—that truly gives the Right’s push for educational privatization its energy. 

Enter school vouchers—a “key element” of their goal. Hegseth and Goodwin close Battle with a call for voucher tax credits—not the direct appropriation kind coming from state budgets at the moment. The reason for that detail is mostly due to a desire to avoid government as a middle man (though make no mistake, the impact on public funding is the same). The goal here is to rebuild the American paideia through classical Christian education:

“Our hope (and plan),” Hegseth and Goodwin write, “is that most parents are clamoring to get their kids into the best local classical Christian school,” with “Jesus Christ at the center of all of it.” (p. 237). That hope and plan requires the “battle” in the book’s title—an insurgency protected by “the full Armor of God,” as they put it.

That phrase comes from the book of Ephesians in the Bible:

Put on the full armor of God, so that you can take your stand against the devil’s schemes.  For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms. 

Understand that this “full armor” phrase comes specifically as the authors are discussing their “hope (and plan)” for publicly funded classical Christian schools.

As a Christian man myself—one who grew up in the same network of Catholic covenant communities as Justice Amy Coney Barrett—I know how prevalent this kind of thinking is among some members of my faith tradition. I would even call it fringe, and not widely held or fairly representative of a modest Christian.

Except that fringe is at the center of right-wing politics today, of right-wing education policymaking, and—quite possibly—at the highest levels of government, up to and including a Hegseth Pentagon and the Trump White House.

Editor’s note: We should be grateful that Hegseth was not chosen to be Secretary of Education.

Categories Education Industry, Extremism, Religion, Separation of church and state

Jeff Bryant: The Podcast That Was Killed–about State Takeover of Houston Schools

By dianeravitch
December 8, 2024 //
5

Jeff Bryant is a veteran journalist who covers education issues. He is the chief correspondent for Our Schools, a project of the Independent Media Institute. He shared the following article with this blog.

What a Podcast Killed by Houston Public Media Reveals About the State Takeover of the City’s Schools

A podcast about the state takeover of the Houston Independent School District (HISD), which Houston Public Media (HPM) produced, promoted, and then quietly killed before it debuted, has been shared with Our Schools. “The Takeover,” hosted by Dominic Walsh, an award-winning public education journalist, examines the takeover, the state’s installation of a new board and a controversial superintendent Mike Miles, and the subsequent series of reforms Miles rolled out that have frustrated and angered teachers, parents, and students.

Our Schools has thoroughly examined the recordings to ensure their authenticity and is reporting on the contents of each episode so that readers are better informed about the consequences of the state takeover of Texas’s largest school district—the eighth-largest district in the nation. We have decided not to make the podcast public for legal reasons.

In four episodes of what was meant to be Season One of the podcast, Walsh covers events that took place in the school year 2023-2024, beginning with the secret ceremony in which Miles was sworn in to serve as superintendent in June 2023. Episode four culminates in March 2024 when public outrage forced Miles to back down on an evaluation plan that could have potentially resulted in half of the district’s principals losing their jobs, including some who lead the district’s top-rated schools.

Walsh ended the Season by questioning whether widespread public anger at policies implemented by Miles could endanger a school bond referendum that voters eventually decided on during the November 2024 election. That bond referendum was defeated, and the Houston Landing reported that Texas voters had never before rejected a proposed school bond measure “totaling $1 billion or more.” HPM called the defeat “an unofficial referendum of state takeover.”

Much of the airtime in “The Takeover” is taken up by interviews that are critical of what Miles has implemented, including those with parents, teachers, librarians, and students, many of whom bitterly complain about the new reforms. Walsh points out that state takeovers of local school districts almost never produce positive results, as numerous studies have shown.

Walsh has given ample time to takeover supporters on the podcast as well, including Miles; Texas Commissioner of Education Mike Morath, who appointed Miles; state-appointed Houston School Board President Audrey Momanaee; and Texas lawmakers, both Democratic and Republican, who support the takeover. He also speaks about positive developments since the takeover began, including improved test scores in math and science.

Yet, while Walsh’s reporting can be described as balanced, he largely frames the takeover and the new reforms Miles has imposed as the latest iteration of the decades-long education reform movement that Walsh negatively characterizes as being “top-down.” He further points out that the reforms are overly reliant on standardized testing with punitive accountability measures that often lead to schools being closed, teachers and school principals being fired, and parents feeling alienated.

A request for comment was sent to HPM station manager Joshua Adams, but Our Schools is yet to receive a response.

Episode one of “The Takeover” is titled “School Reform, the Musical,” a reference to a musical skit Miles staged, and played the leading role in, to ease the district about his massive disruption efforts and to counter any criticisms. But the episode could easily have been called “Winners and Losers,” which is the theme Walsh keeps returning to while describing who gains in Miles’s new education system and who loses out.

The winners tend to be those school staff members who benefit from a tiered salary system Miles implemented and teachers who are comfortable with a centrally created and scripted curriculum. The losers? Parents who see their children’s favorite teachers being fired or leaving in frustration. Students who find the scripted curriculum less engaging. Librarians whose libraries are shuttered. Teachers who lament about losing their freedom to tailor instruction to students and miss the curriculum they felt most passionate about, like teaching the entire book in English Language Arts class.

A contrast Walsh repeatedly draws throughout the episode is Miles’s claims of knowing “the best way” to improve schools versus what Walsh observes as the “painful reality” on the ground when the reforms were rolled out.

Episode one, “School Reform, the Musical” states:“State installed superintendent Mike Miles says his plan will make schools better, raise test scores, and career readiness, especially in high poverty neighborhoods that need it the most. And who could argue with those goals. Everyone wants that. Right? But it’s complicated.”
—Dominic Walsh

In episode two, “The Law,” Walsh begins by examining the law that made the state takeover possible and delves into the “conflicting philosophies” over public education and the rampant inequity in the education system. His reporting reveals that the law, House Bill 1842, was mostly based on the low academic performance of just one school, which had started to improve just before the announcement of the takeover. Walsh questions whether the low performance in Houston schools might be due to a lack of resources and the rigid system Texas uses to assess its schools.

Another state law the episode considers—passed in 2017—was an attempt to incentivize school districts to partner with charter school management groups to operate their lowest-performing schools. This law kept the HISD and other districts with low-performing schools under constant pressure of being privatized. Walsh explains that Houston’s reform movement is based on strict accountability measures of schools, which were exported to the entire nation later on.

Episode two, “The Law” states:“This is a story about conflicting philosophies—deep-seated disagreements over the possibilities, potentials, and purpose of public education in a deeply unequal society.”
—Dominic Walsh

Episode three, “The Texas Miracle,” goes back to the 1990s to explore the origin of top-down education reform in Texas under then-Governor George W. Bush and the so-called Texas miracle that became the inspiration for the No Child Left Behind Act, enacted in 2002 by then-President George W Bush. These policies were furthered under the Barack Obama presidential administration, and, in Houston, under the leadership of former superintendent Terry Grier from 2009 to 2016. He was rewarded with school improvement grant money by Obama, which he used to force changes in some of the very same schools Miles is focused on today.

However, Walsh speaks with education researcher Julian Vasquez Heilig, who was an employee of HISD’s Office of Research and Accountability from 1999-2001. He explains that the acclaimed progress resulting from the Texas miracle was a “mirage.” In another interview, education historian Jack Schneider says that the positive results, of what he calls the “bipartisan, neoliberal” policy of NCLB and similar laws, have never really been achieved.

Nevertheless, Walsh explains that the reform agenda spawned a host of reforms, to which Miles is devoted. In fact, as Walsh reports, the charter school network that Miles created and led, called the Third Future Schools, uses an education approach almost identical to what Miles is trying to implement for Houston’s public schools system. Walsh notes that Third Future Schools struggled to meet all the progress measures in another Texas school district when the company was contracted to transform a school. Walsh concludes, “If Miles can pull this off in Houston, it will be a first.”

Episode three, “The Texas Miracle” states:

“In the eyes of some researchers, if we have learned anything from the past two decades of education policy, it’s that this type of top-down, test-based school reform does not work, largely because of what it misses. But others think Mike Miles may have finally cracked the code.”

—Dominic Walsh 

The Takeover’s final episode, “Reconciliation,” largely focuses on the behind-the-scenes players that will determine the fate of Houston schools. These include the state-appointed board that Miles answers to—it mostly functions as a rubber stamp for Miles’s reform agenda, according to critics—the Texas Education Agency that initiated the takeover, and Texas state lawmakers, including the legislature and Governor Gregg Abbott, who determine state education policy. In reporting on each of these entities, Walsh finds various “contradictions” that are hard to reconcile.

Walsh interviews Audrey Momanaee about the takeover board and questions how the effort can align with the “visions and values of community,” as she claims while delivering  “results,” like higher test scores and a narrowed curriculum, which don’t seem to be in line with the values of the local community. Walsh returns to this same contradiction in his interview with Morath in which Walsh notices how Morath’s emphasis on raising test scores clashes with his goal to raise “educated citizens.” Texas state lawmakers present an even starker contradiction, Walsh notes, as they pass laws that hold public schools to increasingly harsher accountability measures while attempting to pass a new voucher system that would redirect more education funding to private schools, which have no public accountability at all.

In the face of these contradictions, Walsh accuses leaders of the Houston takeover of “kind of operating as if they have blinders on” as they choose to ignore what education should be, instead, going for scripted curriculum, command and control managerial practices, and ever higher test scores. Walsh notes that Miles seems to waver from his agenda only when wealthier parents and representatives of the business community voice their dissatisfaction.

Episode four, “Reconciliation” states:

“How the state measures success, how it decides when to intervene, and when this takeover will end, is actually up in the air. In fact, the whole public education system in Texas is in flux.”

—Dominic Walsh

Why HPM decided to kill “The Takeover” before it had a chance to air is not immediately clear based on the content of the podcast.

According to a September 2024 article in the Texas Monthly, which called the decision to kill the podcast “head-scratching,” executives at the news organization pulled “The Takeover” the day before it was scheduled to debut when they learned that Walsh’s “long-term romantic relationship with an HISD teacher” presented, what they believed, was a “conflict of interest.” Through a series of public records requests, Texas Monthly reporters Michael Hardy and Forrest Wilder obtained copies of the podcast episodes and internal communications related to its cancellation.

In their investigation, Hardy and Wilder found “no evidence that HPM canceled the podcast because of external pressure, as some community members have speculated. No inaccuracies in Walsh’s reporting are identified in the internal communications we reviewed, and HPM executives did not respond to a question about whether they had identified any.”

Hardy and Wilder also note that “What constitutes a conflict of interest is a disputed subject among journalists.” They have interviewed experts on ethics in journalism who question HPM executives’ decision to cancel the podcast.

HPM still archives Walsh’s education reporting on its website, with no disclaimer. Walsh, however, no longer covers education and seems to be reporting on other beats for HPM.

But it’s hard not to sense the irony as Walsh signs off his reporting in “The Takeover” saying, “Whatever happens we will be here. Stay tuned.”

Categories Disruption, Education Industry, Education Reform, Houston, Parents, State Takeover, Texas

Arkansas: Yes! You Can Use Your Voucher to Pay for Horseback Riding Lessons!

By dianeravitch
December 7, 2024 //
9

At the behest of Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the legislature enacted a voucher program. As in every other state with vouchers, most are used by students already enrolled in private or religious schools. The voucher is a subsidy for families who could already pay but are happy to take the extra money.

The Arkansas Times revealed that vouchers could be spent on horseback riding lessons. Taxpayers are paying for those lessons.

The story says:

The Arkansas LEARNS Act, signed into law in 2023 by Gov. Sarah Sanders, created a voucher program that sends public money to private school families to use for tuition, fees and other expenses. This school year, the program is open to many homeschoolers as well. Homeschool families don’t have tuition bills to pay, but they’re able to use voucher funds for a variety of other education-related expenses, such as books and supplies, curricula, computers and other technology, and private tutoring.

Extracurricular activities are fair game as well. A list of 569 “education service providers” approved for participation in the LEARNS voucher program as of Nov. 18includes climbing gyms, dance studios, jiu-jitsu instructors — and at least seven equestrian-related vendors, according to a cursory review by the Arkansas Times….

Some of those vendors appear to focus in whole or in part on “equine-assisted therapy” services for people with disabilities or trauma. Others appear to simply offer kids the opportunity to ride, interact with and care for horses. But all of them have been given the go-ahead by the Arkansas Department of Education to receive taxpayer dollars at a time when the state has cut inflation-adjusted spending in other areas.

Relatively speaking, equestrian centers are unlikely to eat up too much of the overall voucher pie. Each LEARNS voucher costs the public about $6,856 in the current 2024-25 school year, and there are about 14,000 students in the program this year, most of whom attend private schools. (About 3,000 are homeschooled.) The majority of the roughly $96 million that Arkansas spends on vouchers is flowing to private schools, such as Little Rock Christian Academy or Shiloh Christian School in Springdale.

The idea of publicly subsidizing horseback riding seems to be striking a nerve in a way that paying private school tuition does not. But one could argue there’s not a lot of difference between the two. 

There are no income-eligibility requirements for either homeschool or private school households to receive a voucher. Well-off homeschool families who already paid out of pocket for riding lessons before Arkansas LEARNS can now get them comped by the state. In the same vein, families who paid private school tuition before LEARNS are now getting a taxpayer-funded boost to their bank accounts, freeing them to spend that money on whatever else they please (including horseback riding, if they wish).

Categories Arkansas, Curriculum, Education Industry, Ethics, Funding, Vouchers

My Thoughts on the Trump Education Agenda

By dianeravitch
December 3, 2024 //
4

I was interviewed by Josephine Lee of The Texas Observer. She asked about growing up in Houston and my thoughts about Trump’s education agenda. It’s a conversation, not an article. I will write more on this subject in the future.

Categories Budget Cuts, Education Industry, Elections, Extremism, Funding, Texas, Trump, U.S. Department of Education

Wisconsin: Dane County Judge Overturns Notorious Act 10!

By dianeravitch
December 2, 2024 //
5

Thirteen years ago, Republican Governor Scott Walker and the legislature of Wisconsin enacted Act 10, which banned collective bargaining for public employees, except for public safety employees. Teachers, social workers, and other public employees were outraged. They encircled the State Capitol for days. Walker became a star, and his sponsors, the Koch brothers, were happy.

But today, Act 10 was declared unconstitutional. Time will tell whether the decision is upheld.

A Dane County judge on Monday sent ripples through Wisconsin’s political landscape, overturning a 13-year-old law that banned most collective bargaining among public employees, consequently decimating the size and power of employee unions and turning then-Republican Gov. Scott Walker into a nationally known political figure.

But there’s been a revival of hope in Wisconsin:

The effort to overturn Act 10 began in November 2023 when several unions representing public employees filed the lawsuit, citing a “dire situation” in workplaces with issues including low pay, staffing shortages and poor working conditions. 

In July,  Dane County Circuit Judge Jacob Frost ruled provisions of Act 10 unconstitutional and denied a motion filed by the Republican-controlled Legislature to dismiss the case.

The lawsuit argued the 2011 law violated equal protection guarantees in the Wisconsin Constitution by dividing public employees into two classes: “general” and “public safety” employees. Public safety employees are exempt from the collective bargaining limitations imposed on “general” public employees.

Categories Billionaires, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Koch Brothers, Unions, Vouchers, Walker, Scott, Wisconsin

Jan Resseger: What Would Linda McMahon’s Agenda Be at ED?

By dianeravitch
December 2, 2024 //
4

Jan Resseger read the proposals of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 and the America First Policy Institute to divine the likely shape of Linda McMahon’s plans if she is confirmed as Secretary of Education. McMahon was chair of the board of the America First Policy Institute so its goals are inportant.

It’s not as if these two groups are far apart: they are both closely aligned with Trump and his determination to expand public funding of private schools and sow chaos.

Please open the link, as I am posting only the first half of Jan’s post.

She writes:

Linda McMahon formerly served as an executive of World Wrestling Entertainment; led the Small Business Administration during Trump’s first term; and took a job in 2919 leading the America First Action PAC to support Trump’s candidacy for President. Beginning in 2009, McMahon served part of a term on Connecticut’s state board of education, and once upon a time, after majoring in French in college, the now 76-year-old McMahon secured a teaching certificate in her home state of North Carolina. Currently she chairs the board of the America First Policy Institute, a think tank competitor to the Heritage Foundation and its Project 2025. Both think tanks have been drawing up a policy agenda to drive Trump’s second term.

There is some agreement that McMahon is not as likely to shut down the U.S. Department of Education as many feared Trump’s appointment would be charged to do. The National Education Policy Center’s Kevin Welner believes the complexity of the history and needs served by that federal department would make its closure unlikely: “By the time Congress established the department in 1979, the federal government was already an established player in education policy and funding. For instance, the Higher Education Act of 1965 began the federal student loan program. In 1972, Congress created the basic Educational Opportunity Grant, the predecessor program to today’s Pell Grants. The G.I Bill of 1944, which, among other things, funded higher education for World War II veterans, preceded them both. At the K-12 level, federal involvement in vocational education began with the Smith-Hughes Act of 1917. Federal attention to math, science and foreign language education began in 1958 with the National Defense Education Act. Two laws passed during the Lyndon Johnson administration then gave the federal government its modern foothold in education: the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. The 1964 law provided antidiscrimination protections enforced by the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights. The 1965 law… includes Title I, which sends extra funding to schools with high populations of low-income students. In 1975, Congress added the law currently known as the Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act, or IDEA… To dissolve the Education department, both houses of Congress would have to agree, which is unlikely.”

Assuming the U.S. Department of Education will survive a second Trump administration, it is worth comparing the policy agendas both think tanks—the Heritage Foundation with its Project 2025, and the America First Policy Institute (AFPI) where Linda McMahon has been chair of the board—have prepared for the incoming Trump administration’s Department of Education.

The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 suggests systematically dismantling or relocating to other departments the institutions that were originally pulled together in 1979 to be managed by one federal agency. According to a concise report in August from the Brookings Brown Center on Education Policy, the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 prescribes tearing apart the Department’s structure and functions: “dismantle the U.S. Department of Education; eliminate the Head Start program for young children in poverty; discontinue the Title I program that provides federal funding to schools serving low-income children; rescind federal civil rights protections for LGBTQ+ students; undercut federal capacity to enforce civil rights law; reduce federal funding for students with disabilities and remove guardrails designed to ensure these children are adequately served by schools; promote universal private school choice; and privatize the federal student loan portfolio.”  Project 2025 would, first, end or reduce specific federal funding streams enacted by Congress to serve vulnerable groups of students, and second, disrupt or undermine the specific agency prepared to enforce laws and regulations that protect the civil rights of groups which have experienced discrimination and unequal access to opportunity in the past.

The America First Policy Institute’s agenda is far more focused on what have been called culture war issues, while both think tanks do make universal school choice—the diversion of public dollars for school privatization—a priority.  The agenda of the America First Policy Institute (AFPI) features four pillars, each one described in a two page brief:

First — “Give Parents Control by Allowing Them to Select the School Their Child Attends.” AFPI’s brief on school privatization is piece of classic pro-privatization ideology. Ignoring the fact that two weeks ago in three states, voters rejected ballot measures which would have expanded tuition vouchers for private schools and further, that every single time voters have been presented with voucher initiatives in previous years, voters have flatly rejected school vouchers, the America First Policy Institute (AFPI) tells a lie: “Just 18% of Americans are opposed to school choice. Support for school choice in America has increased from 64% to 72% since April 2020.” And despite Josh Cowen’s research that demonstrates lower academic achievement when students use vouchers at private schools, AFPI declares: “Standardized test scores significantly improve for students who exercised school choice.”  AFPI endorses charter schools and criticizes the Biden administration’s efforts to strengthen regulation of the federal Charter Schools Program, which the Network for Public Education has repeatedly shown suffers from poor oversight.  AFPI writes: “(R)egulations would severely limit the types of schools that could apply for funding and would restrict any potential expansion of charter school programs.”  AFPI concludes mistakenly: “Educational freedom is a tool that has a proven record of putting students and families first, and parents need to be given the power to choose the best educational opportunities for their children.”

Education Week‘s Brooke Shultz directly quotes Linda McMahon in 2016 strongly supporting charter schools : “One of the issues most important to me is the question of school choice.” Shultz also quotes McMahon in 2015: “I don’t believe charter schools take anything away from traditional public schools; rather I think they can be centers for innovation and models for best practices.”

Second —“Give Every Parent the Right to See All Curriculum Materials in Every Class their Child Attends.”  AFPI endorses parents’ individualist right to insulate and shield their children from programs and ideas that the parents consider offensive. However dangerous it may be for a school district to privilege individual parents with the power to set the curriculum according to the biases of the most powerful parents, and however impractical it may be for parents to review and debate each classroom’s lessons in advance, that is the policy AFPI endorses: “The formal authority to approve curriculum for public schools rests with states and local school boards. However, the authority for educating children rests with parents. As such, they should be involved early in the approval process in determining what qualifies as appropriate content for curriculum and lesson plans.”  The bias here is clear: “Many children are being taught to see white supremacy everywhere, indoctrinated to believe America’s foundation was built on racism, talked to about sex and gender identity in developmentally inappropriate ways, and presented with other questionable curriculum…  Officials that have the authority to make and approve curriculum do so as stewards of the public’s trust. The taxpayers and parents who schools ultimately answer to deserve to know what schools are teaching and how tax dollars are being spent.”

Again, please open the link to read this excellent post in full.

Categories Bigotry, Disruption, Education Industry, Elections, Extremism, For-Profit, Trump, U.S. Department of Education, Vouchers

Perry Bacon: Education Is Not a Partisan Issue–Or Is it?

By dianeravitch
December 1, 2024 //
10

Perry Bacon, a regular columnist for The Washington Post, paints a sunny view of the politics of education. He thinks that the public is so strongly united behind their public schools that Trump might back off his plan to turn federal funding into vouchers. Higher education, however, is a different story, he says, with a bipartisan coalition arrayed against student protests and debt relief.

I do not share his view that Republicans will relinquish their fealty to vouchers and privatization. No matter how determined the public is to defend their public schools, the billionaires who want vouchers are unrelenting. Bacon doesn’t see that the monied people don’t give a damn what the public wants. Betsy DeVos, the Koch machine, Jeff Yass, and Texas billionaires Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks don’t care what the public wants. Perry Bacon would have written a different article if he had read Josh Cowen’s new book The Privateers: How Billionaires Started a Culture War …

Bacon writes:

The Biden years have featured some surprising bipartisan and cross-ideological coalitions on education issues, including school vouchers and protests on college campuses, that might extend into Donald Trump’s presidency. It’s the rare policy area where the divides aren’t simply along party lines.


On K-12 education, Republican and Democratic voters have unified — against the desires of powerful conservative groups and Republican politicians. The political right has long been frustrated with American education and is pushing a number of major changes, most notably voucher programs that would put more kids in private schools and either shrink or, perhaps eventually, dismantle the public school system.


But a clear majority (57 percent) in Nebraska earlier this month voted to repeal a voucher initiative, nearly matching Trump’s support there (60 percent). In Kentucky, all 120 counties (and 62 percent of voters) rejected a proposal to start a voucher program.


The results from those two states aren’t outliers. States with huge Republican majorities in their legislatures have struggled to get voucher programs passed because lawmakers are hearing from wary constituents, including Republicans. Even when they are enacted, voucher programs so far have not resulted in a huge number of students flooding to private schools.

In another rejection of conservative education policy, Moms for Liberty, the group that backs right-wing candidates running in local school board races, has struggled electorally. Only about one-third of the candidates it backed won their races last year, according to a Brookings Institution analysis. (There hasn’t yet been a detailed analysis of the group’s election results in 2024.) There has been a strong backlash against Moms for Liberty and other conservative groups seeking to ban books on racial and LGBTQ+ issues from public schools.


Meanwhile, counties throughout Florida, where Trump won easily, voted to increase local property and sales taxes to boost public school funding.


What’s behind this strong support of public schools? Only 45 percent of all Americans and 31 percent of Republicans say they are satisfied with public schools nationally, according to Gallup polling. But 70 percent of all Americans and 62 percent of Republicans are satisfied with the schools their kids are attending. Education policy tends to reflect local dynamics, so schools in very conservative areas are probably cautious in speaking about racism or LGBTQ+ issues. But what I suspect is actually driving that strong support for public schools is that for Republicans, particularly in rural areas, public schools are a central, positive part of their lives, where their friends and relatives work and their kids play sports.


But on higher-education policy, the bipartisan coalition is against the left. Like their Republican counterparts, many Democratic politicians and prominent left-of-center leaders and activists think both that the United States became overly invested in recent decades in having people attend college and that campuses are too left-wing. (I disagree with both claims.)

So in the spring, Democratic politicians, including President Joe Biden, joined Republicans in portraying on-campus protests against Israel’s military actions in Gaza as antisemitic. Schools in both red and blue states, pushed by their centrist or conservative governing boards, have now created new limits on protests, particularly barring the kind of encampments that pro-Palestinian students created.


Biden himself was under fire from centrist Democrats and Republicans alike for trying to cancel student-loan debt, a policy strongly backed by many progressives. Many in either party argue that mass college attendance, unlike K-12 education, is not a necessity for the country and people who accrued debt during college knew the costs and should pay it back in full. The recent progressive pushes for both universal free college and mass debt cancellation seem stalled for now.


Prominent liberals have joined conservatives in questioning the value of humanities classes and departments and want colleges to focus more on graduating students ready to work in science, technology and other fields where jobs are growing. Nearly every day a Democratic politician says something along the lines of, “Our party is too influenced by the views and perspectives of professors and students on campuses and college graduates,” mirroring the rhetoric of conservatives such as Vice President-elect JD Vance.


How did we end up with Republican voters defending public schools and Democratic politicians criticizing colleges? Part of the explanation for why education policy hasn’t split on predictable partisan lines is that Biden hasn’t made the issue one of his major priorities. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona has been more low-profile than Betsy DeVos and Arne Duncan. Biden didn’t have a major education initiative such as No Child Left Behind (President George W. Bush) or Race to the Top (President Barack Obama).

Trump and his incoming administration could make this issue super-partisan. The activist right is unified around the idea that both K-12 schools and colleges are using taxpayer dollars to force liberal ideas on young people, particularly on issues of race, gender and sexual orientation. So, the Trump administration could push hard to get more K-12 students enrolled in private schools, stop K-12 schools and colleges from offering classes out of line with conservative ideology, and limit on-campus protests for left-wing causes.


Trump, in his post on Truth Social announcing that Linda McMahon would be education secretary, emphasized his support for vouchers.
But in that statement, Trump also said that education policy should be left largely to states. (It’s not clear that Trump can or would fully eliminate the federal Education Department, as he suggested during the campaign.) So perhaps his administration will take a more hands-off approach, aware that many Republican voters like how their schools are run locally.


Looking forward, it’s possible that Republican voters fall in love with voucher programs if the Trump administration pushes them hard. Or perhaps Democratic politicians will feel more compelled to defend colleges if they become a target of Trump.

But if I had to guess, I would predict that education policy continues to be an issue that doesn’t break down simply along party lines. After all, it’s personal for so many Americans, who vividly remember their time in grade school or college. And it’s complicated — exactly how should colleges have handled the Gaza protests? The happy middle for America might be a robust public school system, more of a Democratic goal, along with less liberal colleges that fewer people attend, more in line with Republican preferences.

Categories Betsy DeVos, Billionaires, Democracy, Education Industry, Extremism, Privatization, Vouchers

Politico Reporter Falls in Love with Voucher Pusher

By dianeravitch
November 27, 2024 //
12

Yeah, yeah, I know it’s a strange headline, but it’s true.

Here is the story: Politico reporter goes to Arizona to cover the voucher story. Discovers that the chief advocate for vouchers is a beautiful, charming mom who uses state money to home-school her five children.

Writer is wowed by this mom. Writer notes that mom is funded by DeVos and Koch machine. It doesn’t matter. She’s so charming and pretty, who cares that vouchers are busting the state budget?

Writer pays more attention to the adorable mom than to those fighting to stop the damage she is doing to kids, public schools, and communities. Somehow she becomes the hero of the story.

Who cares that vouchers are used mostly by families whose kids never went to public schools? Who cares that vouchers are harming the state’s public schools?

Who cares that Arizona voters overwhelmingly rejected voucher expansion? Who cares that the legislature ignored their vote?

Who cares that less than 5% of the state’s students are undermining the state budget and the schools that educate the other students?

Families, mostly from high-income zip codes, have applied the taxpayer funds for everything from ski lift passes to visits to trampoline parks, a $4,000 grand piano, more than a million dollars in Legos, online ballet lessons, horse therapy and cookie-baking kits. Proponents justify expenditures like these in the name of parents’ prerogative to shape their children’s education or by pointing to wasteful spending by public schools. As a result, ESA costs have ballooned from the legislature’s original estimated price tag of $100 million over two years, to more than $400 million a year — a figure, critics have noted, that would explain more than half of Arizona’s projected budget deficit in 2024 and 2025.

Ain’t it grand?

Love is love, even when it is underwritten by billionaires!

Categories Arizona, Budget Cuts, Disruption, Education Industry, Home Schooling, Love, Privatization, Vouchers

Please Sign the NPE Petition Opposing Trump’s Appointment of Linda McMahon

By dianeravitch
November 25, 2024 //
12

The Network for Public Education urges you to sign a petition opposing the appointment of Linda McMahon as Secretary of Education. McMahon is committed to privatization of our neighborhood schools. Her background in the wrestling industry does not qualify her to lead the federal role in education.

https://actionnetwork.org/letters/tell-your-senators-to-vote-no-for-linda-mcmahon-for-secretary-of-education/

Open the link. It will send your petition to your Senators on your behalf.

Categories Education Industry, Privatization, Trump, U.S. Department of Education, Vouchers
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