Think how much worse it could be. It could have been a Mom for Liberty. Or Chris Rufo.
Archives for category: Education Industry
John Thompson describes Ryan Walters’ frenzied campaign to be chosen as Trump’s Secretary of Education. In Oklahoma, where he is State Superintendent, Walters has been pushing the Trump agenda long before the election. He wants religion in the schools, he wants to dismantle the Department of Education, he wants to destroy public schools, he wants to purge the curriculum. He’s practically screaming, “Take me!”
Thompson writes:
We Oklahomans need to apologize to the nation for what some of us have been thinking since the election. But, how can we not hope that State Superintendent Ryan Walters gets a job in the Trump administration? As Oklahoma Watch has reported, Ryan Walters seems to be campaigning for an appointment to be Trump’s U.S. Secretary of Education. Walters has been “rumored to be angling for the post; he’s been on a taxpayer-funded national media blitz for months.” And after all, maybe Walters’s incompetence would make it harder to destroy the U.S. Department of Education than to realize his goal of destroying Oklahoma’s public schools.
Of course, I’m kidding, mostly. But at times like this, education supporters have no choice but to seek comfort in humor, no matter how absurd such jokes may be.
During the last week, as the Oklahoman reports, Walters has promised on social media that “President Trump’s agenda will be enacted in Oklahoma.” Moreover, as the Tulsa World explained, “’Freedom to pray’ is among the education policy tenets listed by Trump’s re-election campaign.” And Walters issued a memorandum to parents and school superintendents advocating for the elimination of the U.S. Department of Education and replacing its functions with block grants.”
The Oklahoman further explains that Walters has “sent a five-point memo to public school superintendents and parents, detailing what he has described as Oklahoma’s plan to implement Trump’s agenda in schools. The memo covered topics such as ‘ending social indoctrination in classrooms’ and ‘stopping illegal immigration’s impact on our schools.’” And he also complained that “‘well-funded, out of state groups’ had ‘bullied’ an Oklahoma teacher into removing quotes from the Bible from a classroom.”
Walters now promises a “new office would help protect teachers in similar situations in the future.” So, “Walters said the Office of Religious Liberty and Patriotism would promote its namesake principles and make sure students and teachers can freely practice their religion.” While doing so, he blamed teachers unions for undermining faith and family.
The Oklahoma Voice adds, “Walters said public schools have been “ground ‘zero’ for erosion of religious liberty. While calling church-state separation a ‘myth,’ he ordered Oklahoma districts to teach from the Bible, sought to buy Bibles with taxpayer funds and advocated for opening a Catholic charter school in the state.”
Walters falsely argued:
It is no coincidence that the dismantling of faith and family values in public schools directly correlates with declining academic outcomes in our public schools. … In Oklahoma, we are reversing this negative trend and, working with the incoming Trump Administration, we are going to aggressively pursue education policies that will improve academic outcomes and give our children a better future.
The Oklahoma Watch also explains, contrary to Walters’ promises:
Due to the courts and lawmakers’ interpretation of the 10th Amendment, the federal government and Department of Education are not involved in determining curricula or educational standards or establishing schools or colleges.
Mostly, the department gives out money, some of which has strings attached, ensuring that schools adhere to federal non-discrimination laws.
Even so, we are likely to see Walters ramping up his attacks on Oklahoma schools in order to impress Trump. After all, “Trump proposes having parents elect school principals, abolishing teacher tenure and adopting merit pay. He vows to encourage prayer in schools and expel more disruptive students from classrooms.”
Real world, I’ve been asking whether Walters could impose more actual damage on his home state than on the country as a whole. Could we hope that his record of incompetence would be more likely to bring his MAGA agenda down if he tackles the more complicated battles with the U.S. Department of Education (or any other national institutions targeted by the new President)? And, wouldn’t his irrational zealotry be more politically damaging to Trump if he attacks government on the federal level?
Or, are Oklahomans just worn down by the stress Walters inflicted on us, which is what he wants to dump on the nation?
It remains a fact that vouchers have never won a state referendum. Typically, voters reject vouchers by large margins. Yet Republicans continue to push them. This election, three states that voted for Trump defeated vouchers.
ProPublica reported on the public’s rejection of vouchers:
In 2018, Arizona voters overwhelmingly rejected school vouchers. On the ballot that year was a measure that would have allowed all parents — even the wealthiest ones — to receive taxpayer money to send their kids to private, typically religious schools.
Arizonans voted no, and it wasn’t close. Even in a right-leaning state, with powerful Republican leaders supporting the initiative, the vote against it was 65% to 35%.
Coming into this week’s election, Donald Trump and Republicans had hoped to reverse that sort of popular opposition to “school choice” with new voucher ballot measures in several states.
But despite Trump’s big win in the presidential race, vouchers were again soundly rejected by significant majorities of Americans. In Kentucky, a ballot initiative that would have allowed public money to go toward private schooling was defeated roughly 65% to 35% — the same margin as in Arizona in 2018 and the inverse of the margin by which Trump won Kentucky. In Nebraska, nearly all 93 counties voted to repeal an existing voucher program; even its reddest county, where 95% of voters supported Trump, said no to vouchers. And in Colorado, voters defeated an effort to add a “right to school choice” to the state constitution, language that might have allowed parents to send their kids to private schools on the public dime.
Expansions of school vouchers, despite backing from wealthy conservatives, have never won when put to voters. Instead, they lose by margins not often seen in such a polarized country.
Candidates of both parties would be wise “to make strong public education a big part of their political platforms, because vouchers just aren’t popular,” said Tim Royers, president of the Nebraska State Education Association, a teachers union. Royers pointed to an emerging coalition in his state and others, including both progressive Democrats and rural Republicans, that opposes these sweeping “school choice” efforts. (Small-town Trump voters oppose such measures because their local public school is often an important community institution, and also because there aren’t that many or any private schools around.)
Yet voucher efforts have been more successful when they aren’t put to a public vote. In recent years, nearly a dozen stateshave enacted or expanded major voucher or “education savings account” programs, which provide taxpayer money even to affluent families who were already able to afford private school.
That includes Arizona, where in 2022 the conservative Goldwater Institute teamed up with Republican Gov. Doug Ducey and the GOP majority in the Legislature to enact the very same “universal” education savings account initiative that had been so soundly repudiated by voters just a few years before.
Another way that Republican governors and interest groups have circumvented the popular will on this issue is by identifying anti-voucher members of their own party and supporting pro-voucher candidates who challenge those members in primary elections. This way, they can build legislative majorities to enact voucher laws no matter what conservative voters want.
In Iowa, several Republicans were standing in the way of a major new voucher program as of 2022. Gov. Kim Reynolds helped push them out of office — despite their being incumbents in her own party — for the purposes of securing a majority to pass the measure.
A similar dynamic has developed in Tennessee and in a dramatic way in Texas, the ultimate prize for voucher advocates. There, pro-voucher candidates for the state Legislature won enough seats this Tuesday to pass a voucher program during the legislative session that starts in January, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott has said.
The day after the election, Abbott, who has made vouchers his top legislative priority, framed the result as a resounding signal that Texans have now shown a “tidal wave of support” for pro-voucher lawmakers. But in reality, the issue was conspicuously missing from the campaigns of many of the new Republicans whom he helped win, amid polling numbers that showed Texans hold complicated views on school choice. (A University of Houston poll taken this summer found that two-thirds of Texans supported voucher legislation, but that an equal number also believe that vouchers funnel money away from “already struggling public schools.”)
In the half dozen competitive Texas legislative races targeted in this election by Abbott and the pro-voucher American Federation for Children, backed by former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, Republican candidates did not make vouchers a central plank of their platforms. Most left the issue off of their campaign websites, instead listing stances like “Standing with Public Schools” and “Increased Funding for Local Schools.”
Corpus Christi-area Republican Denise Villalobos pledged on her website that if elected she would “fight for increased funding for our teachers and local schools”; she did not emphasize her pro-voucher views. At least one ad paid for by the American Federation for Children’s affiliated PAC attacked her opponent, Democrat Solomon Ortiz Jr., not for his opposition to vouchers but for what it claimed were his “progressive open-border policies that flood our communities with violent crime and fentanyl.” (Villalobos defeated Ortiz by 10 points.)
Matthew Wilson, a professor of political science at Southern Methodist University, said that this strategy reflects a belief among voucher advocates that compared to the border and culture wars, vouchers are not in fact a “slam-dunk winning issue.”
In the wake of Tuesday’s results in the presidential election, NBC News chief political analyst Chuck Todd said thatDemocrats had overlooked school choice as a policy that might be popular among working-class people, including Latinos, in places like Texas. But the concrete results of ballot initiatives around the nation show that it is in fact Trump, DeVos and other voucher proponents who are out of step with the American people on this particular issue.
They continue to advocate for vouchers, though, for multiple reasons: a sense that public schools are places where children develop liberal values, an ideological belief that the free market and private institutions can do things better and more efficiently than public ones, and a long-term goal of more religious education in this country.
And they know that popular sentiment can be and has been overridden by the efforts of powerful governors and moneyed interest groups, said Josh Cowen, a senior fellow at the Education Law Center who recently published a history of billionaire-led voucher efforts nationwide.
The Supreme Court could also aid the voucher movement in coming years, he said.
“They’re not going to stop,” Cowen said, “just because voters have rejected this.”
CBS News in Detroit reported on the latest study by the Network for Public Education, which showed that more than one-third of charter schools close within the first five years. The NPE study is based on federal data. Most charter schools in Michigan operate for-profit. Please open the link to see the video.
(CBS DETROIT) — A new national report finds that more than one in four charter schools fail in their first five years. And by year 15, nearly half have closed. The numbers are even more stark in Michigan charter schools.
The report, “Doomed to Fail: An Analysis of Charter Closures from 1998-2022,” was done by the Network for Public Education. It found that 36% of Michigan charter schools closed within their first five years.
The state’s population is dropping, and traditional public schools are closing as well, but at about half the rate of Michigan’s charter schools.
“I’ve kind of looked at Michigan as the wild Midwest of the charter sector,” said Mitchell Robinson, an associate professor at Michigan State University and a member of the Michigan State Board of Education.
He said he wasn’t surprised by the report’s findings.
“When we treat education like banks and dollar stores and dry cleaners and McDonald’s franchises, that’s the kind of results we’re going to get.”
Robinson said charter schools popping up and closing soon after hurt students, teachers, and other schools, sometimes creating public school deserts.
“There are parts of Detroit where kids have to travel up to two hours a day to get to a school because charter schools have come in, public schools have closed, then the charter school closes, then there’s no school at all,” he said.
The report by the Network for Public Education analyzed charter school closures across the country from 1998 to 2022. They found Michigan faces its particular challenges as charter schools here have less oversight and can be big money makers.
“Seventy percent of the charter schools in Michigan are run by for-profit entities. That is the highest percentage in the nation,” said Carol Burris, the Executive Director of the Network for Public Education.
She said every charter school in Michigan must have an authorizer that oversees it, and that authorizer receives up to three percent of the state money that goes to the school.
“Now 3% doesn’t sound like a lot, but it really is,” said Burris. “One case in point, Walker Charter Academy; it’s a National Heritage Charter Academy school. It received about $7.8 million last year in state funding, so 3% of that is $234,000. Now Grand Valley is its authorizer; they have 62 charter schools. You start doing the math; you’re talking about between $10 million and $14 million a year. That’s a lot of money.”
The President of the Michigan Charter School Association was not impressed:
“I’m not sure I understand their assumptions or their basic premises because their conclusions don’t align,” said Dan Quisenberry, the President of Michigan’s Charter School Association.
If Trump follows through with his education proposals, if the Republican-controlled Congress lets him do it, America’s students and teachers are in for a world of hurt.
Mercedes Schneider writes here about what’s at stake. I did not copy and paste the article in full. It is excellent. I urge you to open the link.
I do not believe American education is a top concern for Donald Trump. I do believe that he could well turn it over to the likes of the Heritage Foundation and their Project 2025, so long as nobody outshines him in the press and puts anything (Constitution included) ahead of loyalty to him above all else.
So, when ABC News reports that Trump’s Agenda 47 as though the Heritage Foundation has not already done most of Trump’s homework for him, well, that fashions Trump’s interest in a number of issues as though it is something more than just letting those extreme-right-leaners who really care about that stuff have at.
Now that the election is over, Trump allies are openly admitting that Project 2025 was the Trump plan all along.
One featured Project 2025-Trump issue is the proposed dismantling of the US Department of Education (USDOE), which was created during the Carter administration. Talk of getting rid of USDOE began with the Reagan administration(in other words, soon after it was created). It should come as no surprise that in 1980, the “fledgling” Heritage Foundation was in Reagan’s ear and is proud to declare as much in the opening pages of its Project 2025:
Several decades later, USDOE still exists, and several decades later, the Heritage Foundation is still trying to kill it.
Heritage et al. has taken great pains to outline its 900+-page wish list of ultra conservatism, including nixing USDOE. However, it would take a lot to achieve the kind of legislative unity required to dissolve a federal department that supports numerous Americans in desired and positive ways, not the least of which is via the Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP).
Brookings offers a concise discussion of the Project 2025 plan for education, including this “sample list” of negative consequences:
No surprise that Heritage wants school vouchers for all, a notably unpopular concept at the 2024 ballot box:
Of course, the key is to have legislatures jump onto the choice bandwagon and force choice onto voters whether they want it or not. But some voters do benefit from having access to publicly-subsidized private schools: Those with money. Heritage alludes to Arizona’s “expanded program… available to all families. However, in Arizona, those accessing school voucher cash tend not to be the working class but more affluent families.
Speaking of the affluent and private school vouchers: Billionaire former US Ed secretary Betsy DeVos, who in 2023 could not get private school vouchers over the line in her home state of Michigan, apparently smells opportunity.
On January 07, 2024, DeVos resigned as Trump’s US ed sec. In her resignation letter, DeVos placed the fault of January 06, 2024, chaos squarely on Trump:
In a November 07. 2024, interview with EdWeek about advice for Trump’s next Ed sec, , DeVos is fact checked as she tries to put lack of a school choice “big moment” at the feet of the Democrats. Not so, Betsy:
During Trump’s first term, DeVos’ inability to push private school choice to her liking has to be attributed in part to some Republican resistance to the idea. Heritage and any Heritage-sympathetic ed sec could well face similar issues in Trump’s second term.
I did not copy the entire article. Open the link to finish reading it.
Perhaps you remember “Waiting for ‘Superman,'” the overhyped documentary from 2010 that made the audacious claim that public schools were failing due to “bad teachers”and that the only sane alternative was charter schools. The documentary was funded by the Gates Foundation, with the obvious purpose of smearing public schools and promoting charter schools. I reviewed the film in the New York review of Books, in a review called “The Myth of Charter Schools.” Among other flaws in the film, I pointed out that it misused and distorted NAEP data to paint a horrifying picture of public schools. I concluded it was dishonest propaganda on behalf of the privatizers.
One of the amazing, miraculous charter schools featured in the film was a residential boarding school in D.C. called SEED.
Peter Greene writes that SEED is in deep trouble and may be shuttered.
The SEED School of Washington, D.C. was in the Washington Post yesterday, accused of inaccurate records and wholesale breezing past laws that are supposed to protect students with disabilities.
If the name of this unusual charter boarding school seems vaguely familiar, that may be because back in 2010, they were one of the charter schools lovingly lionized by the documentary hit piece, “Waiting for Superman.”
“Waiting for Superman” was a big hit, popularizing the neo-liberal narrative that public schools were failing because public school teachers were lazy incompetents. Every damn newspaper in the country jumped on the narrative. Roger Ebert jumped on. Oprah jumped on. NPR wondered why it didn’t get an Oscar (maybe, they posit, it was because one big emotional scene was made up). It helped sustain the celebrity brand of Michelle Rhee (the Kim Kardashian of education, famous despite having not accomplished anything). It was a slanted hatchet job that helped bolster the neoliberal case for Common Core and charter schools and test-centric education and heavy-handed “evaluation” of teachers.
And it boosted the profile of SEED, the DC charter whose secret sauce for student achievement is that it “takes them away from their home environments for five days a week and gives them a host of supporting services.”
Except it turns out that maybe it doesn’t do that after all.
According to the WaPo piece, reported by Lauren Lumpkin, audits of the school suggest a variety of mistreatment of students with special needs.
SEED underreported the number of students it expelled last year. It couldn’t produce records of services it was supposed to have provided for some students with disabilities (most likely explanation–those services were never provided). Federal law says that before you expel a student with an IEP, you have meetings to decide if the misbehavior is a feature of their disability, or if their misbehavior stems from requirements of the IEP that are not being provided.
These have the fancy name of “manifestation determination” which just means the school needs to ask– is the student acting out because that’s what her special situation makes her do, or because the Individualized Education Program that’s supposed to help deal with that special situation is not being actually done. For absurd example– is the student repeatedly late to her class on the second floor because she’s in a wheelchair? Does her IEP call for elevator transport to the second floor, and there’s no elevator in the building? Then maybe don’t suspend her for chronic lateness.
Founded in 1998, SEED enrolls about 250 students, which seems to preclude any sort of “just lost the details in the crowd” defense. But as Lumpkin reports, questions arose.
But after receiving complaints about discipline, understaffing and compliance with federal law, the city’s charter oversight agency started an audit of the school in July. One complaint claimed school officials had manipulated attendance data and were not recording suspensions.
The audit’s findings sparked scathing commentary from charter board members and questions about SEED D.C.’s practices.
“I’m the parent of a special-needs child, and I’ve got to tell you, reading what was happening in these pages, it’s like a parent’s worst nightmare,” charter board member Nick Rodriguez told SEED D.C. leaders. “I sincerely hope that you will take that seriously as you think about what needs to happen going forward.”
Lumpkin reports that this is not their first round of problems. A 2023 audit found a high number of expulsions and suspensions compared to other charters– five times higher. A cynical person might conclude that SEED addressed the problem by just not reporting the full numbers. Inaccurate data, missed deadlines, skipping legal requirements–that’s a multi-year pattern for the school.
The school is now on a “notice of concern,” a step on the road to losing its charter and being closed down (or I suppose they could just switch over to a private voucher-accepting school).
The whole sad story of the many students who have been ill-served by SEED is one more reminder that there are no miracles in education, and no miracle schools, either.
Glenn Kessler is the fact checker for The Washington Post. He describes what it is like to check the nation’s most notorious prevaricator.
Kessler writes:
In my 14 years as The Washington Post Fact Checker, nine have been devoted to dissecting and debunking claims made by Donald Trump. Indeed, no person has been fact-checked more often than Trump, as he has bested or outlasted foes — Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris — who drew their share of fact checks. And no other person has consistently earned Four Pinocchios — the badge of a committed liar — day after day, week after week.
I first covered Trump as a business reporter in the 1980s, so I was very familiar with his long history of exaggeration and bravado when he burst onto the political stage in 2015 (not counting his brief flirtation with the Reform Party in 2000). “Businessman Donald Trump is a fact checker’s dream … and nightmare,” I wrote in the fact check of his speech announcing that he would seek the presidency.
Now, he has convincingly won a second term via the electoral college and is even on track for the first time in three tries to win the popular vote. After his first two races, I wrote analyses that, in retrospect, misjudged the Trump phenomenon.
In 2016, I noted that “based only on anecdotal evidence — emails from readers — one reason that Trump’s false statements may have mattered little to his supporters is because he echoed things they already believed.” But I expressed hope that “now that Trump will assume the presidency, he may find that it is not in his interest to keep making factually unsupported questions.”
As an example, I noted that during the campaign he had claimed that the unemployment rate was 42 percent, rather than the 5 percent in official statistics. I suggested that he might find himself embarrassed to be contradicted by the official data once he took office.
I was wrong. He embraced the numbers as his own — and then bragged that he had created the greatest economy in American history, even though he had inherited it from Barack Obama.
When Trump was defeated in 2020, my analysis carried a headline that is embarrassing in retrospect: “Fact-checking in a post-Trump era.” I wrote that “his defeat by Democrat Joe Biden suggests that adherence to the facts does matter.”
The Fact Checker documented more than 30,000 false or misleading claims that Trump made during his presidency. Indeed, through that term, Trump was the first president since World War II to fail to ever win majority support in public opinion polls. A key reason was that relatively few Americans believed he was honest and trustworthy, an important metric in Gallup polls. Gallup has described this as “among his weakest personal characteristics.”
As evidence that Trump was hurt by falsehoods, I pointed to Biden’s narrow victories in Arizona and Georgia: “It’s quite possible that at least 9,000 people in Arizona and 5,000 in Georgia were upset enough at Trump’s continued false attacks on native sons Sen. John McCain (R) and Rep. John Lewis (D), even after they died, that they decided to support Biden over Trump.”
The essay appeared before Trump embarked on a months-long campaign to claim that Biden won only through election fraud — a lie debunked in court ruling after court ruling. The Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, inspired by his rhetoric, appeared to be an indelible stain. Yet from 2020 on, Trump used his false claim to maintain his Republican support and build a base for his comeback.
In this election campaign, Trump once again resorted to false claims and sometimes outrageous lies, especially on immigration and the economy. He rode a wave of discontent about inflation — a problem in every industrialized country after the pandemic — to falsely claim that the economy was a disaster, despite relatively low unemployment, falling inflation and strong growth.
Last month, the Economist magazine published a cover story declaring that the U.S. economy was “the envy of the world.” Yet exit polls show that two-thirds of voters said the economy was in bad shape.
I do not write fact checks to influence the behavior of politicians; I write fact checks to inform voters. What voters — or politicians — do with the information in the fact checks is up to them.
Trump certainly benefits from an increasingly siloed information system — a world in which people can set their social media feeds or their television channel so they receive only information that confirms what they already believe. It’s perhaps not an accident that Trump’s rise in politics coincides with the rise of social media, which he adeptly used to first attract attention by elevating (false) questions about Obama’s birth certificate.
In this campaign, Trump made many promises that will be difficult to achieve, such as reducing the national debt and cutting energy prices in half. He also said he would reduce inflation, though that’s already been mostly achieved, and many economists say his plan to impose large tariffs on imported goods might spark inflation again.
No matter what happens, or how many fact checks are written, this time I won’t doubt his ability to convince his supporters that it’s all good news — or that the problem is the fault of someone else, facts notwithstanding.
Colorado voters rejected a proposal that was likely to protect school vouchers.
Colorado Public Radio reported:
It’s looking like Coloradans have rejected an effort to enshrine school choice in the state Constitution.
As of 9:45 p.m., Amendment 80 was losing, with 52 percent opposed to 48 percent in support. This measure, which would have been the first of its kind in the nation, needs 55 percent of the vote to go into the state constitution.
It would have added language stating each “K-12 child has the right to school choice” and that “parents have the right to direct the education of their children.” It explicitly named charters, private schools, home schools and “future innovations in education” as options guaranteed by the state constitution.
Opponents celebrated the amendment’s apparent defeat.
“We find it really encouraging that people understand what this ballot measure was really trying to do, which was to create a pathway for a private school voucher system,” said Kevin Vick, president of the Colorado Education Association. “And we’re also really encouraged that Colorado voters really value public schools and don’t want to see that happen.”
A legislative analysis concluded that the measure would have no immediate impact on education in Colorado but could have opened the door to future changes to laws and funding for education.
Vick said the vagueness of the measure would have created a “legal quagmire,” which he said, in a worst-case scenario could have meant millions of dollars taken out of the public education system.
The battle over the measure drew millions of dollars from both sides and complaints against proponents alleging deceptive campaign practices. Amendment 80 was a nuanced ballot issue and difficult for many to understand.
When Denver voter Kyle Slusher first read Amendment 80, he thought giving children options would be a good thing.
“But if it is actually just creating a lane for private schools to take from public school funding, that’s not obviously something that needs to be occurring,” he said.
After doing more research he changed his mind and voted “no.”
Advance Colorado, a conservative action committee that doesn’t disclose its donors, proposed the amendment. They argued Amendment 80 would protect families’ right to choose the school — public, private or home school — that they deem is the best fit for their child. It was also backed by Ready Colorado, the Colorado Catholic Conference and the Colorado Association of Private Schools.
The measure was opposed by a coalition that included the Colorado Education Association, the Colorado PTA, the Christian Home Educators of Colorado, Colorado Democrats, Stand for Children, the ACLU Colorado and others.
School choice is popular in Colorado, with nearly 40 percent of public school students choosing a school outside their assigned neighborhood school. The 30-year-old school choice law has bipartisan support. Critics of the measure argued that the constitutional amendment wasn’t needed because laws giving Coloradans the right to attend the school of their choice for free already exist.
But proponents worried about what they said were increasing attempts to erode choice by local school boards, the state legislature and the State Board of Education. Proponents said Amendment 80 would be a backstop to any legislative attempt to reverse decades of bipartisan work to expand choice for students.
Voters in Nebraska voted against using public funds to pay for private schools.
LINCOLN — Voters on Tuesday resoundingly rejected Nebraska’s new school voucher or scholarship program, steering public dollars spent to public schools.
Supporters of using state tax dollars to offset the costs of a private K-12 education have argued that families unhappy with their public schools need more options.
But rural and urban supporters of public schools, the Nebraska State Education Association and private foundations supporting public schools won the day.
Tim Royers, president of the Nebraska State Education Association, said he was proud to see right- and left-leaning counties agree that vouchers were the wrong choice.
“It confirms what we knew, the majority of Nebraskans don’t want public dollars going to private schools,” Royers said. “What really stood out to me is the consistency.”
Royers hopes state senators move on
Royers said he is hopeful that state senators will follow the will of the voters and move onto other more pressing issues in education that teachers and parents can work on together.
Support Our Schools argued that diverting even small amounts of public money toward private K-12 schools with a scholarship program or vouchers risked long-term support for public education.
They pointed to the experiences in other states with voucher programs, including neighboring Iowa, which has seen the national rankings of its public schools slide since that program began.
They argued that school choice programs typically end up largely benefiting the people already making the choice to send their children to private schools.
And they said such programs risked creating greater concentrations of poverty in some schools by draining them of students who often act as stabilizing force
It’s hard to notice something that is invisible, but it is indeed obvious that there has been no discussion of education in the Presidential campaign.
It’s not as if education is unimportant: education is a path to a better life and to a better society. It is the road to progress.
The differences between the two candidates are like night and day. Trump supports dismantling public education and giving out vouchers. Harris is committed to funding schools and universities.
Project 2025 displays Trump’s goals: to eliminate the Department of Education, to turn the programs it funds (Title 1, IDEA for students with disabilities) and turn them into unrestricted block grants to states, which allows states to siphon off their funding for other purposes. At the same time that the Trump apparat wants to kill the Ed Department, it wants (contradictorily) to impose mandates on schools to stop the teaching of so-called critical race theory, to censor books, and to impose rightwing ideology on the nation’s schools.
It’s too bad that the future of education never came up in either of the high-profile debates. The American people should know that Kamala Harris wants to strengthen America’s schools, colleges, and universities, and that Donald Trump wants to destroy them.
Randi Weingarten wrote an excellent article in Newsweek about the plans of each candidate.
If you can’t open it, try this link.
Diane Ravitch's blog 