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Senator Sanders Releases Report Assailing Billionaire-Funded Voucher Movement

By dianeravitch
July 6, 2024 //
24

Senator Bernie Sanders issued a report lambasting the billionaires who are funding the voucher movement. It’s good that someone in Washington, D.C., is paying attention to this mean spirited effort to shift public money to private and religious schools. As scholar Josh. Owen has repeatedly demonstrated, voucher schools have been a disaster for low-performing kids. The main beneficiaries are students from wealthy families whose children are already enrolled in no public schools. Texas is not mentioned in the Sanders release, but billionaires DeVos, Yass, and native Texan billionaires used their wealth to oust anti-voucher Republicans.

Common Dreams reports:

Sen. Bernie Sanders released a report Tuesday detailing how right-wing billionaires are bankrolling coordinated efforts to privatize U.S. public education by promoting voucher programs that siphon critical funding away from already-underresourced public schools.

The report notes that last year, the American Federation for Children (AFC)—an organization funded by former Trump Education Secretary Betsy DeVos—”ousted state lawmakers in Iowa and Arkansas who resisted proposals to subsidize private education in states and passed expansive private school vouchers.”

Aided by millions of dollars in funding from DeVos and her husband, “AFC’s political affiliates and allies spent $9 million to win 277 out of 368 races to remove at least 40 incumbent lawmakers,” the report adds.

The DeVos family is hardly alone in using its wealth to undercut U.S. public education. The Bradley Foundation, which has been knee-deep in efforts to privatize education in Wisconsin and across the country, spent $7.5 million in 2022 “to fund 34 state affiliates of the State Policy Network to push conservative policy agendas, including privatizing education, and $8.3 million to building a youth movement to ‘win the American Culture War.'”

“The Koch-sponsored group, American Encore, has funneled substantial amounts into state governor races and ballot initiatives around the country, including more than $1.4 million to elect Arizona’s former governor Doug Ducey in 2014 (who led the efforts to create the nation’s first universal private school voucher),” the report adds.

“For too long, there’s been a coordinated effort to sabotage our public schools and privatize our education system. Unacceptable.”

The analysis also names billionaires Jess Yass of Susquehanna International Group, Richard Uihlein of Uline, and Bernard Marcus of Home Depot, all of whom have recently donated to the School Freedom Fund—a PAC that supports voucher programs and shuttering the U.S. Education Department.

School voucher programs disproportionately benefit wealthy families, analyses have shown, while undercutting the goal of serving all students within a community.

Categories Betsy DeVos, Billionaires, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Vouchers

Will Arkansas Citizens Demand Accountability for Voucher Schools?

By dianeravitch
July 5, 2024 //
5

Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders and the Arkansas, which has a Republican supermajority, passed a voucher plan that allows the state’s voucher schools to evade the accountability required of public schools.

Outraged citizens have been gathering signatures for a referendum that would subject voucher schools to the same accountability as public schools. Today is the deadline to submit signatures. We will know soon if the rebellion against voucher schools’ freedom from accountability succeeded.

The Arkansas Times reported.

Organizers are racing to try to meet the signature threshold for an ambitious ballot initiative that would dramatically reorient the state’s K-12 education priorities and hold private schools receiving public funds to the same standards as those for public schools.

They still need thousands of signatures and face an uphill climb to meet the threshold by the July 5 deadline. We won’t know until the bitter end whether or not the group manages to get over the hump (more than a thousand volunteers are working at events across the state over the next 24 hours).

But I think it’s worth taking a moment to examine the stakes. The Arkansas Educational Rights Amendment would force the legislature to make real commitments to areas of educational need with a proven track record of improving learning outcomes. And it would force accountability on the governor’s voucher scheme, which is funneling tens of millions of dollars in taxpayer money into the pockets of private school families via a program with a long history of catastrophic failure in improving learning outcomes when states actually take the trouble to fairly measure and transparently report results at the private schools.

At a time when Republicans have total control of state government and Gov. Sarah Huckabee haughtily rules as if she has an infallible and possibly divine mandate, the education amendment would be the most comprehensive and far-reaching progressive policy victory in Arkansas since Medicaid expansion passed more than a decade ago.

Legislating by direct democracy

The education amendment is somewhat unusual for a ballot initiative, which usually present relatively straightforward “up-or-down” questions on issues like the minimum wage, casinos, weed, etc. The ballot initiative currently collecting signatures to reverse the state’s abortion ban is like that. Yes, there are details — abortions are allowed up to 18 weeks and for certain exceptions such as rape, incest and saving the life of the mother — but the fundamental issue is a yes-or-no question about whether or not abortion should be legal.

If someone wants to quibble with the headline above and say that the abortion initiative would be the biggest win in terms of liberal priorities in the state, I wouldn’t argue much. But it’s different in kind. The education amendment lays out a very broad-reaching slate of priorities and then would force the Legislature to act. It doesn’t articulate just how lawmakers should go about implementing it. It just establishes certain areas that are an absolute priority — required by law — tying lawmakers hands. The ripple effects through every aspect of the budget would be massive. It would steer the state toward a massive policy project that state leaders don’t want to do. The Legislature has prioritized vouchers and tax cuts skewed toward the wealthy and ignored issues like access to pre-k. If the public votes for this constitutional amendment, it would mandate that the Legislature make new tradeoffs.

This is why Arkansas Republican lawmakers are not fans of direct democracy. The overwhelming majority of voters in the state are going to back the candidate with an “R” by their name. But that doesn’t mean they share their narrow ideological obsessions. They will happily vote for minimum wage increases by huge majorities even if their elected officials hate it. With the advent of one-party rule, the state’s government is not responsive to issues that voters care about that don’t align with doctrinaire right-wing dogma. That’s why you’re seeing more expansive efforts to legislate from the bottom up via ballot initiative. Pre-k is popular; vouchers are not.

Equal standards and transparency for public and private schools getting vouchers

The push to put the education amendment before voters comes in the first year of Arkansas LEARNS, the education overhaul backed by Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders and passed by the Republican supermajority in the Legislature last year. Among the law’s most controversial provisions was the creation of a voucher program to help families cover the tuition and other costs of private schools. The program began this year and will be phased in until all K-12 students in the state are eligible to apply starting with the 2025-26 school year.

One curious feature of LEARNS is that the accountability measures it establishes for private schools accepting vouchers are not the same as those for public schools. The amendment would seek to reverse that, insisting on the same accreditation and testing for all schools receiving public funds, as well as public reporting by school of the results. This would allow citizens to see how well the voucher program is working as compared to public schools and help guide parents.

In the early days of voucher programs, advocates wanted to arrange apples-to-apples comparisons of student performance because they thought the voucher students would perform better. But once voucher programs scaled up to statewide efforts, the results were awful: Students who switched from public school to private school via voucher saw their test scores plummet to an unheard of degree — akin to the learning loss associated with a natural disaster like Hurricane Katrina or the COVID pandemic.

You might think such empirical results would give voucher advocates pause, but instead they shifted gears to trying to keep the test results secret or making comparisons impossible. Like many other new voucher programs in red states sweeping the country, Arkansas allowed private schools receiving boatloads of public money to arrange their own standards and tests, with none of the results made public. What could go wrong?

The irony here is that voucher advocates were often the ones screaming loudly about the need for accountability via testing in public schools, and pointing to those very results to disparage the quality of education in public schools. So you wind up with this very strange two-step: Voucher advocates will say something like, “these public school standards have led to lots of kids being below grade level in reading, let’s try something new.” But the measurement of how many kids are at grade level in reading is itself something we know via the standards, assessment and reporting! If voucher advocates claim to want to improve on these metrics, why wouldn’t we measure and report them at private schools, too?

I’ll let you know what happens. Republicans are terrified of voucher referenda: They always lose. To the extent that the public learns that voucher schools are actually worse than public schools and that the primary beneficiaries of vouchers are private school families whose children never attended public schools, the more likely that the public will oppose vouchers. Sending public money to private schools has never won a state referendum.

Categories Accountability, Arkansas, Education Industry, Privatization, Religion, Separation of church and state, Vouchers

Peter Greene: Religious Zealots in Oklahoma React to Court Decision Barring Religious Charter School

By dianeravitch
June 29, 2024 //
12

Peter Greene was not surprised to learn that Oklahoma’s State Superintendent Ryan Walters was angry at the state Supreme Court, which overturned a state-funded religious charter school. Even the Satanic Temple got into the act, proposing to open its own charter school to teach Satanism. And a Hindu leader insisted that the Bhagavad Gita should be posted in Louisiana classrooms right up there with the Ten Commandments.

Greene concludes:

Attempts to inject Christianity into the public school classroom can only end one of three ways–

1) All religions must be allowed to get their pitch into public school classrooms

2) The state will start requiring religions to receive official government recognition in order to be considered legitimate

3) The courts will rightly decide that no religions belong in public school classrooms

1 and 2 almost certainly go together. The correct choice is 3, a religion-neutral public school system that keeps religions from messing with schools and government from regulating religion. That is, in fact, the very best way to protect “Oklahomans’ constitutional, God-given right to express their religious belief.”

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

Ohio: Charter Schools Ripping Off Taxpayers

By dianeravitch
June 28, 2024 //
2

Steve Dyer, former legislator and perennial budget hawk, tracks wasteful spending on charter schools in Ohio in this post. Ohio is throwing away billions on charters and vouchers, at the expense of its public schools, which typically outperform its privatized schools. A pro-charter analyst concluded that Ohio’s charter schools were among the worst in the nation.

Dyer writes on his blog Tenth Period:

It’s difficult to say that a $1.3 billion state program can go under the radar, but lately it seems that Ohio’s charter school industry has done just that, thanks in large part to the absolute explosion of taxpayer funded subsidies given to wealthy private school parents.

And while the state’s largest taxpayer ripoff ever — in excess of $200 million plus — happened as the result of the infamous ECOT scandal (the state is only going after about $100 million of the $200 million plus that I calculated because they just didn’t do the forensic audit of years prior to the couple prior to the school shutting down), the per pupil funding explosion in Ohio’s charter schools has been equally remarkable.

The amount of money the state sends, on average, to Ohio’s charter schools is now more than what 129 Ohio School Districts SPEND per equivalent pupil, including all locally raised property and/or income taxes. 

That’s right. 

Ohio now provides Ohio’s Charter Schools (all but 5 of which rated in the bottom 25% of all schools nationally) more money on average than 1 in 5 Ohio school districts spend per equivalent pupil, including all their local property tax money. 

I’ve included a list of all the school districts that spend less per equivalent pupil than Charter Schools receive on average in state aid.

That’s quite a list, don’t you think?

This explains how Ohio’s charter schools now get nearly $1.3 billion in state aid while having fewer students than they had in the 2013-2014 school year, I suppose. That year — the record for number of charter school students — had about $300 million less going to charters despite having about 1,000 more students than today.

This is why it’s critical to keep our eyes on all the privatization efforts, not just the shiniest one in front of us. 

It is. Inevitable.

Organize and vote accordingly.

Because if there’s one thing I’ve learned in about 25 years of following, analyzing and writing Ohio education policy, it’s that there is nothing more certain than Ohio Republican elected officials taking tax dollars out of the hands of our 1.4 million public school students and instead stuffing the bank accounts of political contributing profiteers and wealthy private school parents. 

Categories Budget Cuts, Charter Schools, Disruption, Education Industry, Elections, Failure, For-Profit, Funding, Ohio, Politics, Privatization, Scandals

Kathy Gebhardt Wins State Board Race in Colorado, Despite Dark Money

By dianeravitch
June 26, 2024 //
3

Kathy Gebhardt was elected to the Colorado State Board of Education, despite nearly $1 million behind a charter school candidate. Kathy says she is not opposed to charters, but she did stop a Hillsdale College Barney charter school from opening in her district. Governor Jared Polis, a charter enthusiast, backed her opponent; Polis opened two charters himself, years ago. Kathy’s experience was far more extensive that that of her opponent. The voters paid attention. Kathy won. Her election assures that the charter lobby will not control the state board of education.

For the background, read Peter Greene’s summary of the race and Carol Burris’s endorsement of Kathy, whom she has worked with.

Carol Burris wrote:

No one is more qualified to serve. Kathy is an education attorney with expertise in school finance, a long-time school board member, and has served on both state and national school board organizations. All five of her children attended public schools.

The Denver Post reported:

Former Boulder school board president Kathy Gebhardt won the Democratic primary for a seat on the Colorado State Board of Education on Tuesday, despite a group supporting charter schools having spent nearly $1 million to oppose her campaign and back political newcomer Marisol Lynda Rodriguez.

The preliminary results for the 2nd Congressional District seat on the state education board almost certainly ensure Gebhardt will win the seat in November as there is no Republican candidate in the race. She will replace board member Angelika Schroeder, whose six-year term ends in January.

“It shows that money can’t buy an election,” said Gebhardt, adding that the results so far showed that “people were stepping up for public education.”

As of 10:15 p.m., Gebhardt led with 43,156 votes, or 56% of the total. Rodriguez had 33,911 votes, or 44%.

Rodriguez told The Denver Post that she called Gebhardt to concede shortly before 9 p.m.

Categories Charter Schools, Colorado, Dark Money, Education Industry, Elections

CNN Report Blasts Vouchers in Arizona

By dianeravitch
June 26, 2024 //
13

As you might have noticed, the mainstream media has not paid much attention to the reckless privatization of America’s public schools. This “movement” is a response to billionaire dollars, not to public demand. The beneficiaries are students who were already enrolled in private schools, whose parents can afford the tuition, not poor students.

It’s rare when a major TV show or newspaper features a story on the billionaire funded effort to destroy our nation’s public schools.

CNN recently aired a segment showing how Arizona was sending millions of dollars to voucher schools that discriminate against certain groups of students, while underfunding the public schools that most children attend and that accept everyone.

The feature story aired on Anderson Cooper’s CNN program. Even Ja’han Jones, who writes the blog for Joy Reid’s show, noticed the story.

CNN pointed out that rightwing evangelical churches are expanding as nearby public schools are drained of resources.

CNN reported:

Near the edge of the Phoenix metro’s urban sprawl, surrounded by a wide expanse of saguaro-studded scrubland, Dream City Christian School is in the midst of a major expansion.

The private school, which is affiliated with a local megachurch where former President Donald Trump held a campaign rally this month, recently broke ground on a new wing that will feature modern, airy classrooms and a pickleball court. It’s a sign of growth at a school that has partnered with a Trump-aligned advocacy group, and advertises to parents by vowing to fight “liberal ideology” such as “evolutionism” and “gender identification.”

Just a few miles away, the public Paradise Valley Unified School District is shrinking, not expanding. The district shuttered three of its schools last month amid falling enrollment, a cost-saving measure that has disrupted life for hundreds of families.

One of the factors behind Dream City’s success and Paradise Valley’s struggles: In Arizona, taxpayer dollars that previously went to public schools like the ones that closed are increasingly flowing to private schools – including those that adopt a right-wing philosophy.

Arizona was the first state in the country to enact a universal “education savings account” program – a form of voucher that allows any family to take tax dollars that would have gone to their child’s public education and spend the money instead on private schooling.

A CNN investigation found that the program has cost hundreds of millions of dollars more than anticipated, disproportionately benefited richer areas, and funneled taxpayer funds to unregulated private schools that don’t face the same educational standards and antidiscrimination protections that public schools do. Since Arizona’s expanded program took effect in 2022, according to state data, it has sent nearly $2 million to Dream City and likely sapped millions of dollars from Paradise Valley’s budget.

And Arizona is hardly alone: universal voucher programs are sweeping Republican-led states, making it one of the right’s most successful efforts to rewrite state policy after decades of setbacks.

This expansion of vouchers in red states was facilitated by millions of dollars spent to fund far-right legislators in state races by Betsy DeVos’s American Federation for Children and other billionaires, like Jeff Yass, a Trump supporter and the richest man in Pennsylvania. Yass said to CNN: “School choice is the civil rights issue of our time,” an oft-cited but phony claim.

In fact, school choice benefits the haves, not the have-nots, and it encourages segregation. Schools choose, not students or families.

In an internal presentation obtained by the progressive watchdog group Documented and provided to CNN, AFC boasted that it had “deployed” $250 million “to advance school choice over the last 13 years,” and that that spending had led to “$25+ billion in government funding directed towards student choice.” 

In 2018, nearly 2/3 of Arizonavoters rejected universal vouchers. Koch-funded Governor Doug Ducey kept pushing them, ignoring the will of the voters, and they were adopted in 2022. Now every student in the state can get a voucher, and most who take them come from families that can afford to pay their own tuition bills.

But unlike some other states that have adopted voucher programs, Arizona has no standardsrequiring private schools to be accredited or licensed by the state, or follow all but the most basic curriculum standards. That means there is no way to compare test scores in public schools to students in the ESA program.

“There’s zero accreditation, there’s zero accountability, and there’s zero transparency,” said Beth Lewis, a former teacher who leads an Arizona nonprofit that advocates against school privatization.

Arizona’s voucher program is busting the state’s budget. The state is facing a $1 billion deficit, caused largely by funding private schools that are discriminatory and whose academic progress is unknown.

On the other side of the Phoenix metro area, the private Valley Christian Schools received nearly $1.1 million in ESA funding last year despite facing allegations of LGBTQ discrimination in federal court. Valley Christian fired high school English teacher Adam McDorman after he voiced support for a student who came out as pansexual, McDorman alleged in a 2022 lawsuit. In an email that McDorman provided to CNN, the school’s then-principal argued that the idea that it was possible to be both “homosexual or otherwise sexually deviant and also a Christian” was a “hideous lie.”

Public schools are barred from discriminating against students because of characteristics like their religion or sexuality, but no such rules cover private schools. In court documents, Valley Christian lawyers have argued that the school had the religious liberty to fire McDorman. The school declined to comment because the case is pending.

In an interview, McDorman said his former school taught creationism as a scientific fact, and “whitewashed” American history to downplay the harms of slavery. He was surprised to learn about the level of public funding it was receiving.

Will the defunding of public schools be an issue in the Presidential election? Trump will surely boast about the progress of.school choice. Will Biden speak up against this nefarious effort to destroy public schools?

Categories Arizona, Education Industry, Media, Privatization, Vouchers

Breaking News! Oklahoma Supreme Court Rejects Religious Charter School!

By dianeravitch
June 25, 2024 //
25

Good news! The Oklahoma Supreme Court ruled against public funding for a religious charter school. Many were watching closely to see how the court ruled. A decision that went the other way would have rebuffed the tradition of separation of church and state and erased the distinction between charters and vouchers. The fact that Oklahoma’s ultra-conservative Governor Kevin Stitt and its State Commissioner of Education Ryan Walters strongly supported the religious charter school idea makes the decision even more startling.

CNN reports:

An effort to establish the first publicly funded religious charter school in the country has been blocked by the Oklahoma Supreme Court.

The court Tuesday ordered the state to rescind its contract with St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School in a 6-2 decision with one recusal.

“Under Oklahoma law, a charter school is a public school,” wrote Justice James R. Winchester for the court. “As such, a charter school must be nonsectarian. However, St. Isidore will evangelize the Catholic faith as part of its school curriculum while sponsored by the State.”

A charter contract for St. Isidore was approved by a state board last year.

Charter schools in Oklahoma are privately owned but receive state funding under the same guidelines as government-operated public schools.

The fight over the school exposed a fault line between two of the state’s top Republican politicians. Gov. Kevin Stitt strongly advocated for the school, saying when the contract was approved that it was “a win for religious liberty and education freedom in our state.”

But the school’s charter status was strongly opposed by Attorney General Gentner Drummond, who filed the lawsuit against it and predicted the state could be forced to fund other types of religious education if St. Isidore succeeded.

“The framers of the US Constitution and those who drafted Oklahoma’s Constitution clearly understood how best to protect religious freedom: by preventing the State from sponsoring any religion at all,” Drummond said in a statement Tuesday. “Now Oklahomans can be assured that our tax dollars will not fund the teachings of Sharia Law or even Satanism.”

PLEASE OPEN THE LINK TO FINISH THE STORY.

[Thanks to reader FLERP for alerting us to this story.]

Categories Charter Schools, Curriculum, Democracy, Education Industry, Oklahoma, Religion, Separation of church and state

New Hampshire: Why the GOP Is Determined to Destroy Public Schools

By dianeravitch
June 25, 2024 //
10

Every time I see New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu interviewed on CNN, he plays the role of the GOP “moderate.” Don’t be fooled. When it comes to education, he’s a clone of Betsy DeVos.

Veteran New Hampshire Garry Rayno pulls away the mask of “moderate” that Sununu wears in this article in InDepthNH.

This is an important article for everyone to read, no matter where you live. It explains succinctly the true goals of the privatization movement.

He writes:

Public education has been since its inception with the work of Horace Mann, the great equalizer.

Students from poor families have been able to compete with students from the other side of the tracks, maybe not in reality, but close enough to at least have an opportunity to excel.

Many of the founding fathers understood the need for an educated public if democracy was going to survive and thrive.

A responsible citizen is an informed citizen, and that appears to be the problem today. Too many people interested in power instead of governing don’t want a truly informed public. Instead, they want enough of the public spoon fed “alternative facts,” conspiracy theories, and outright lies to ensure they retain power although they have views that are both harmful to the majority of citizens and allow the tyranny of the minority to overturn the will of the majority.

At the heart of the minority’s transformation plan is the destruction of the public school system.

New Hampshire has had a front row seat to the war on education since Chris Sununu was elected governor and named his rival for the Republican nomination in 2016, Frank Edelblut, to be Education Commissioner, a man without any experience in public education, which was the first for someone holding that position in our lifetime.

If Sununu did not know what would happen when he put Edelblut in charge of this critical state department, shame on him, because Edelblut’s one term in the House was a roadmap for his actions during his two terms as commissioner, his second ending in March 2025.

Sununu has also packed the State Board of Education with school choice advocates instead of supporters of public education, so you have the two entities in the executive branch responsible for the state’s public education systems, maybe not anti-public schools, but certainly not advocates for the state’s public education system.

According to the statutes, the education commissioner “is responsible for the organizational goals of the department and represents the public interest in the administration of improving the effectiveness and efficiency of administrative and instructional services to all public schools in New Hampshire.”

Notice it says public schools, not private schools or religious schools, or homeschooling, or learning pods, or any of the other non-public entities that are approved vendors under the state’s Education Freedom Account program, some with questionable philosophies or intent.

An attempt by lawmakers this year to better define the education commissioner’s qualifications and responsibilities to the public school system was defeated this term by the same element that pushed to establish the EFA program and then to expand it, although this year’s attempt to increase the income threshold to participate in the program failed on the last day of the session to act on bills.

The outright attacks on public education began in New Hampshire about a decade ago but gained more warriors as FreeStaters/Libertarians swelled the ranks of the House and Senate Republican members.

The attack on public education here has been much the same as it has been in other states, mostly in the south and the west, with claims of the indoctrination of students by leftwing faculty members.

They have also attacked educators directly and have tried to pack school boards — without much success — to undermine curriculum, educators and slash budgets as happened in Croydon several years ago when the annual school meeting was poorly attended due to a snowstorm.

The Republican majority in the 2021-2022 legislature passed the state’s divisive concepts law forbidding teaching controversial subjects such as institutional racism.

The law was recently found unconstitutional by a US District Court judge.

That was the same term the EFA program was approved after earlier unsuccessful attempts.

Both the EFA program and the divisive concepts law were included in the state’s biennial budget package because they were not likely to pass on their own.

The same folks also tied education into the trumped out recent outrage over the LGBTQ community and sold it as an attack on parental rights.

The intent was to start a war between parents and educators, although parents already have many of the rights touted by the anti-public school advocates.

The theory touted was that educators were keeping information from parents about their students and their sexual identification and that educators were urging students to explore different sexual identities.

Then came the book banning other areas of the country experienced like Florida where some school libraries were stripped of books.

The red herring advocates touted here came from a national app that contains almost every book published that students could access both in schools and at home, and not on school library shelves.

Some tried to enlist town and city libraries in the surveillance of children and what they read and accessed, but that did not go very far.

All of this goes to create the appearance that schools are hotbeds of leftist politics and anti-parental values, some fueled by Edelblut in an op-ed he sent to media outlets.

And despite all this ginned up controversy, local public schools that educate about 90 percent of the school age children in the state remain very popular with parents and the public at large.

If that is true, you have to ask what is behind the push to demonize public schools like political candidates demonize opponents.

Keep in mind this attack on public education occurs at the same time when the superior court’s latest education funding decision says the state does not provide enough money to cover the cost of an adequate education for every student and the way it raises its biggest contribution to public education — the Statewide Education Property Tax — is unconstitutional.

Education is governments’ —not just state government’s — single biggest expense, costing about $3.5 billion a year.

If you are a Libertarian or Free Stater who believes “taxation is theft,” destroying public schools will shift the cost directly to parents, and you could keep a lot more of your money to spend as you see fit and not for the good of society.

And if you espouse the philosophy of the Koch Foundation or former US Education Commissioner, Betsy DeVos, you not only keep more of your money, one of the largest union-backed workforces in the country will be dismantled when certified teachers are no longer needed.

Without a public education system, a child would receive the education his or her parents could afford and for many, particularly minorities, and the historically poor, that may not be much beyond the time they turn 16 and have to go to work to keep the family treading the economic waters.

And then maybe they will work for a lot less than if they had a high school, or even a college education.

And without even an adequate education, how informed will the general public be or how capable of the critical thinking needed to realize all those folks touting their parental rights really do not have their best interests at heart.

Garry Rayno may be reached at garry.rayno@yahoo.com.

Distant Dome by veteran journalist Garry Rayno explores a broader perspective on the State House and state happenings for InDepthNH.org. Over his three-decade career, Rayno covered the NH State House for the New Hampshire Union Leader and Foster’s Daily Democrat. During his career, his coverage spanned the news spectrum, from local planning, school and select boards, to national issues such as electric industry deregulation and Presidential primaries. Rayno lives with his wife Carolyn in New London.

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Budget Cuts, Charter Schools, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Elections, Extremism, New Hampshire, Privatization, Vouchers

Ohio: The Corrupt GOP Politicians Defunding Public Schools and Their Students

By dianeravitch
June 24, 2024 //
6

Marilou Johanek is a veteran journalist in Ohio. She writes here about the Republican politicians who used their power to impose universal vouchers on the state. The main beneficiaries are children of the affluent who are already enrolled in private and religious schools and who can already afford the tuition. The losers are the vast majority of public school students, whose schools are underfunded.

What does the future hold for states that skimp on the education of the next generation while lavishing billion-dollar subsidies on the families of the well-off?

Johanek writes:

My way or the highway may be your boss’s motto and your cross to bear. But if that is the mantra of publicly elected officials in a representative government — as it sure seems to be in Ohio — all of us have a problem. A big one. 

The political bosses in Ohio conduct the people’s business with take-it-or-leave-it ultimatums. They’re not running a democracy; they’re dictating decisions made. They do not entertain questions about their extremist agenda to ban invented threats, ignore real ones, claw back rights, reduce women to breeders, welcome polluters to state parks, or defund public education to pay for private schools. 

When challenged over their arguably lawless mandates, Ohio Republican leaders mount a full court press to dismiss, disparage, intimidate, and circumvent countervailing forces that dare confront absolute power. Consider the all-out effort of GOP chieftains to scuttle a statewide lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the Republican fetish to fund private schools with hundreds of millions of apparently unlimited public tax dollars.

The partisans sprang into action to protect the $1-billion-dollar-and-counting boondoggle they created last year with universal vouchers that pay private school tuition for the affluent few at the expense of the many — a majority of Ohio students who attend traditional public-school districts. Ever since GOP lawmakers — led by Ohio Senate President and go-to financier of diocesan schools Matt Huffman — opened the government dole to any private school student with their voucher change slipped into the state budget, unaccountable public spending on private schools has exploded.

The amount of tax dollars going to students already attending private, mostly religious schools tripled the first school year uncapped voucher money was there for the taking. Many of the private school families sweeping up the easy cash earn north of $250,000 annually. The initial Republican rationale for diverting state educational funding from public to parochial schools was that the public handouts offered low-income families in failing school districts access to better school options. 

But that excuse was a ruse to subsidize religious education with taxpayer money and gradually starve public education of critical financial support. The flood of public funds to prop up Catholic schools came from the same general revenue pool that was supposed to keep public school districts afloat not be shortchanged by private education giveaways.  

The fallback for fiscally depleted districts is school levies that fail more often than not. Which, as every public school parent knows, means likely cuts to staff, extracurricular programs, student support services, and capital improvements, decades overdue, shelved again.

Little wonder that more than 200 school districts across Ohio have joined a growing coalition contesting the unprecedented release of public funds to every private school family — regardless of income or quality of home district — in a lawsuit bound for trial. 

They argue the private school “EdChoice” voucher expansion breaking the public education budget violates the state constitution by creating a separate, unequal and segregated school system of privatized education bankrolled with money the state is constitutionally obligated to spend on public education alone. Meanwhile public school students go to class in crappy buildings erected in the 1950s (because there’s no money to build a new ones) and enjoy fewer, if any, electives in music and art, or reading tutors, or enough counselors, AP course offerings, gifted services, or small class sizes, etc. 

The billion-dollar windfall to offset private school tuition many families can afford would be a godsend to public schools making do with less. God bless those who choose to send their students to expensive parochial institutions. But none of us agreed to collectively finance your private school choice that, frankly, serves a private interest, not a public one.

We agreed instead to fund what serves the greater good, not what satisfies individual preference. We do the same with other public services (besides free public education) when our taxes support local law enforcement, fire protection, mental health resources, metro park amenities and other community systems that benefit everybody. The lawsuit to strike down Ohio’s harmful universal vouchers recently added the Upper Arlington school district, in a suburb of Columbus, to its ballooning list of participants.

Ohio’s Republican Lt. Gov. Jon Husted personally pressured the district to pass on the legal fight before the school board voted to join it. Ohio’s Republican Attorney General Dave Yost tried and failed to get a Franklin County court to dismiss the voucher lawsuit altogether. Huffman, the architect of the school privatization scheme in the legislature, refused to sit for a lawsuit deposition. 

He even balked at submitting written answers. Finally, the Lima Republican appealed to the Republican-majority state supreme court (he engineered) to judge him above accountability per the litigation. The GOP my-way-or-the-highway bosses aren’t finished trying to out-maneuver public school advocates fighting for fair and equitable public funding. But their secret is out. 

In the school year that just ended, taxpayers forked over a billion dollars’ worth of tuition payments for a slice of well-off students enrolled in pricey private schools. That’s not okay with public school families eying another school levy or their kids will do without. The state’s autocrats bosses should be on notice; their take-it-or-leave-it dictate on universal vouchers went too far. 

It provoked a public education crusade willing to see you in court, Messrs. Huffman, Yost and Husted. So save the trial date. It’s Nov. 4. 

Categories Budget Cuts, Disruption, Education Industry, Fake, Funding, Ohio, Privatization, Religion, Separation of church and state, Shame, Vouchers

North Carolina: GOP Plans to Approve Politically Connected Charter School Without Usual State Review

By dianeravitch
June 21, 2024 //
8

The Republicans in North Carolina have submitted legislation in the General Assembly to authorize a charter school with powerful political connections.

Ann Doss Helms of WFAE reported:

Buried deep in the 271-page House budget bill introduced Monday night, there’s a provision that would allow an unnamed charter school to bypass state review and open in August.

The description is very specific: The “expedited opening” would apply only to applications filed in 2024, for schools in the state’s largest statistical metropolitan area, in a fast-growing county and a school district serving fewer than 25,000 students.

Also, “the proposed charter school will be located in a fully furnished school facility purchased from a local board of education.”

That description applies to Trinitas Academy, which bought the old Mt. Mourne School in Mooresville from Iredell-Statesville Schools in 2022.

Trinitas hasn’t even begun the state review process that ensures its board is ready to educate students and responsibly handle millions of dollars of public money.

But it does have a website describing it as a K-8 classical academy. It lists a board that includes:

  • Susan Tillis, wife of Republican U.S. Senator Thom Tillis and founder of the Susan M. Tillis Foundation. She’s described as having  “an extensive background in state and national politics.” (Her name was removed from the site Wednesday, after this story aired.)
  • Will Bowen, communications director for Republican Rep. Patrick McHenry.
  • Marcus Long of Mooresville, described as a retired chief circuit judge from Virginia.
  • Board Chair Mark Lockman, described as having been “part of the district leadership at Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools and Iredell-Statesville Schools. Additionally, Mark was instrumental in building the State of North Carolina’s first data-based instructional growth model for public K-12.”

They couldn’t immediately be reached. Trinitas board member Mikail O. Clark, a Charlotte lawyer, confirmed that Trinitas plans to open in August, but said he didn’t know enough about the House Bill to discuss it. “We’ve obviously engaged counsel to assist us with this matter,” he said, and hung up before answering a question about the status of the Trinitas application…

State Charter Schools Director Ashley Baquero said Tuesday that she knew nothing about the plan to bypass the approval process.

Open the link to finish the story of cronyism.

Categories Charter Schools, Disruption, Education Industry, Ethics, North Carolina
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