The Capital Prep Charter chain was created by Dr. Steve Perry. Dr. Perry hates teachers’ unions. He boasts that all the students in his charters graduate and go to college. His chain won the Yass Prize as a semi-finalist for its accomplishments. Jeff Yass is a billionaire in Pennsylvania who supports Trump, opposes abortion, and funds charter schools and vouchers. You may recall that Yass gave Texas Governor Greg Abbott $6 million to pass voucher legislation.
Students and families affiliated with Capital Prep, co-founded by Diddy, claim the entertainment mogul’s charter school did a disservice to children who attended.
Diddy co-launched the East Harlem school with Dr. Steve Perry in 2016, and in 2018 pledged $1 million for its expansion into the Bronx. However, last November Capital Prep cut ties with him amid his ongoing sexual assault lawsuits.
Now adding to the mounting controversy around the Bad Boy Records founder, a new report fromThe Cut reveals many issues with Capital Prep, including the accusation that Diddy had no involvement with the school beyond photo ops, guest appearances, and the school’s grand opening in 2016.
Fourteen sources told The Cut about alleged frequent violence at Capital Prep, along with “unstable” leadership, and frequent teacher resignation. These issues were most apparent at the height of the pandemic during both virtual learning and when students, including those who were unhoused, returned for in-person classes in 2021. According to The Cut, teachers began to not show up for virtual classes, and by the end of 2020, 80 percent of teachers had left Capital Prep altogether.
When students did return to school after quarantine, some were enrolled in courses they had previously taken, or were “sitting in the cafeteria receiving no instruction for hours.” Dysfunction among teachers reflected on the student body, especially upperclassmen who were unable to transfer their credits or enroll in college due to ineligible transcripts.
“Darnell’s transcripts had classes he’d never taken, passing classes that he never took, failing classes that he was never in,” one parent, Shirley Payne, said about inaccuracies found on her son’s transcripts.
“I thought if Diddy is funding and attaching his name to something, it would be run very tightly, that he was going to give our kids what he didn’t have at that age,” parent Shakemia Harris said. Harris’ daughter Madison was enrolled at Capital Prep as an 11-year-old in 2017.
In addition to the many academic issues, violence during the school day was reportedly ongoing. Fights were rampant when the school nearly doubled in size, expanding to include a tenth grade, and again when Capital Prep relocated to 129th and Madison. Not only was the area more violent than its previous East 104th Street address, but Capital Prep began locking out students who were late, ultimately causing families to protest the disorderly conditions. In addition it violence between students, cops were called on students for things like uniform violations.
Bob Shepherd, author, editor, assessment developer, story-teller, and teacher, read a book that he loved. He hopes—and I hope—that you will love it too.
He writes:
Like much of Europe between 1939 and 1945, education in the United States, at every level, is now under occupation. The occupation is led by Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation and abetted by countless collaborators like those paid by Gates to create the puerile and failed Common Core (which was not core—that is, central, key, or foundational—and was common only in the sense of being vulgar. The bean counting under the occupation via its demonstrably invalid, pseudoscientific testing regime has made of schooling in the U.S. a diminished thing, with debased and devolved test preppy curricula (teaching materials) and pedagogy (teaching methods).
In the midst of this, Gayle Greene, a renowned Shakespeare scholar and Professor Emerita at Scripps University, has engaged in some delightful bomb throwing for the Resistance. Her weapon? A new book called Immeasurable Outcomes: Teaching Shakespeare in the Age of the Algorithm.
OK. Maybe I’ve pushed the occupation/resistance metaphor to the edge of its usefulness. Let’s try another. If Gates’s test-and-punish movement, ludicrously called “Education Reform,” is a metastasizing cancer on our educational system, and it is, then Professor Greene’s book is a prescription for how to reverse course and then practice prevention to end the stultification of education and keep it from coming back. The book is a full-throated defense of the Liberal Arts and of traditional, humane, in-person, discussion-based education in a time when Liberal Arts schools and programs are being more than decimated, are being damned-near destroyed by bean counters and champions of ed tech. Here’s the beauty and value of this book: contra the “Reformers,” Greene details the extraordinary benefits of the broad, liberal educations that built in the United States people capable of creating the most powerful, vibrant, and diverse economy in history. She makes the case (I know. It’s bizarre that one would have to) for not taking a wrecking ball to what has worked. And best of all, she does so not at some high level of abstraction, but backs up any generalizations with concrete, vivid, fascinating, moving, delightful examples from her classrooms. How do you build a world-class human? Well, you give him or her the benefits of a broad, humane, liberal arts education that confers judgment, wisdom, vision, and generosity. Greene shows us, from her own classes over three decades, exactly how that happens.
And she shows us how, under the “standards”-and-testing occupation, all that is being lost.
Years ago, I knew a fellow who retired after a lucrative, successful career. But a couple months later, he was back at his old job. I asked him why he had decided not simply to enjoy his retirement. He certainly had the money to do so.
“Well, Bob,” he said, “there’s only so much playing solitaire one can do.”
I found this answer depressing. I wondered if it were the case that over the years, the fellow had given so much time to work that when he no longer had that to occupy him, he was bored to tears. Had he not built up the internal resources he needed to keep himself happy and engaged ON HIS OWN? Greene quotes, in her book, Judith Shapiro, former president of Barnard College, saying, “You want the inside of your head to be an interesting place to spend the rest of your life.” The French novelist Honoré de Balzac put it this way: “The cultured man is never bored.” Humane learning leads to engagement with ideas and with the world, to fulfillment, to flourishing over a lifetime, to what the ancient Greeks calledeudaimonia—wellness of spirit. Kinda important, that.
In a time when Gates and his minions, including his impressive collection of political and bureaucratic action figures and bobble-head dolls, are arguing that colleges should become worker factories and do away with programs and requirements not directly related to particular jobs, it turns out that the people happiest in their jobs are ones with well-rounded liberal arts educations, and are the ones who are best at what they do. And it turns out that people taught how to read and think and communicate and be creative and flexible, people who gain a broad base of knowledge of sciences, history, mathematics, arts, literature, and philosophy, are self-directed learners who can figure out what they need to know in a particular situation and acquire that knowledge. Philosophy students turn out to be great lawyers, doctors, politicians, and political operatives. Traditional liberal arts instruction creates intrinsically motivated people.
All this and more about the value of liberal arts education Professor Greene makes abundantly clear, and she does so in prose that is sometimes witty, sometimes hilarious, sometimes annoyed, sometimes incredulous (as in, “I can’t believe I even have to protest this shit”); always engaging, human and humane, compassionate, wise, authentic/real; and often profound. As much memoir as polemic, the book is a delight to read in addition to being important politically and culturally.
Gates and his ilk, little men with big money to throw around, look at the liberal arts and don’t see any immediate application to, say, writing code in Python or figuring out how many pallets per hour a warehouse can move. What could possibly be the value of reading Gilgamesh and Lear? Well, what one encounters in these is the familiar in the unfamiliar. As I have said numerous times elsewhere, all real learning is unlearning. You have to step through the wardrobe or fall down the rabbit hole or pass through the portal in the space/time continuum to a place beyond your interpellations, beyond the collective fantasies that go by the name of common sense. Real learning requires a period of estrangement from the familiar. You return to find the ordinary transmuted and wondrous and replete with possibility. You become a flexible, creative thinker. You see the world anew, as on the first day of creation, as though for the first time. Vietnam Veterans would often say, “You wouldn’t know because you weren’t there, man.” Well, people who haven’t had those experiences via liberal arts educations don’t know this because they haven’t been there, man.
Gayle Greene has spent a lifetime, Maria Sabina-like, guiding young people through such experiences. Her classroom trip reports alone are worth your time and the modest price of this book. At one point, Professor Greene rifs on the meaning of the word bounty. This is a book by a bounteous mind/spirit about the bountifulness of her beloved liberal arts. Go ahead. Buy it. Treat yourself.
One of the top-rated shows on Netflix is The Program: Cons, Cults, and Kidnapping.
It’s a three-part docuseries that tells the story of the abuse suffered by young people sent to a facility for troubled teens in upstate New York called the Academy at Ivy Ridge. It was produced by a young woman who spent time there, accompanied by other of the program’s unwilling participants.
The facility, now closed, is part of a national chain of similar ones. The brochure advertises a camp-like atmosphere, but once there, the teens are not allowed to speak to one another or to go outside. They are incarcerated in a brutal prison where they experience brainwashing and physical and mental abuse.
When they try to tell their parents the truth, they are labeled manipulative liars.
The producer was taken from her home at 3 am in handcuffs, with her parents’ permission.
When boys break a rule—of which there are many—they are beaten by staff members.
If some of this sounds vaguely familiar, it may be because it sounds like a “no-excuses” school.
It turns out that Ivy Ridge is staffed by untrained, uncertified locals working for minimum wage. The school is part of a Utah-based organization called the World Wide Association of Specialty Programs (WWASP). It’s a very profitable business.
As the “troubled teen” industry has grown, it’s become politically powerful and fights efforts at regulation.
The editorial board of Cleveland.com and the Plain-Dealer were taken aback by the facts reported about vouchers by their reporter Laura Hancock (posted in previous time slot). The Ohio legislature expanded vouchers so almost every family is eligible, even if they never sent their child to public school. The editorial board believed that vouchers were supposed to help poor kids escape low-performing schools, and they urge the legislature to return to the original purpose.
What is disappointing about this editorial is that it fails to recognize that the original purpose of vouchers has already proven to be a disaster. In the only statewide evaluation of vouchers, sponsored by the choice-friendly Thomas B. Fordham Institute, poor children who took vouchers fell even farther behind their peers in the public schools they left. (See summary, on p. 7, concluding that students who left public schools for voucher schools performed worse than if they had remained in their public school).
This finding—that voucher students who leave public schools perform worse—has been replicated in every voucher program. Voucher students don’t go to elite private schools. Typically they go to voucher schools that do not have certified teachers and that are allowed to discriminate on any grounds.
Voucher scholar Josh Cowen of Michigan State University has assembled the powerful negative effects of vouchers on kids who transfer from public schools. The results in Ohio are the worst.
I wish the editorial board of Cleveland.com and the Plain-Dealer had seen these data before they wrote the following editorial. The facts are in: Vouchers don’t help poor kids who leave struggling public schools.
Last June, when the Ohio House passed Amended Substitute House Bill 33, the two-year state budget, sending it to Gov. Mike DeWine’s desk for his signature, House Majority leadership celebrated the “landmark” expansion of EdChoice school vouchers, loosening income caps to make voucher benefits available to all Ohio families.
“Along with funding public education, the budget makes a landmark investment in school choice with a universal voucher program,” the statement from House Republican leadership said. “This program is designed to safeguard lower-income families and offers options beyond traditional public schools. By expanding access to vouchers, Ohio ensures parents can make the best decisions for their children’s education.”
Instead, parents in affluent communities like Rocky River, Westlake and Bay Village with kids already in private and parochial schools appear to have taken immediate advantage of the new eligibility rules. Families of four up to 450% of poverty levels (that is, earning up to $135,000 a year) now qualify for full taxpayer-funded vouchers, and those making more money qualify for partial vouchers.
Ohio’s legislature, to be true to its stated school-choice motive, should rewrite the rules to guarantee that this money goes to children in underperforming schools, possibly relying on state report cards to set the standard.
Cleveland.com’s Laura Hancock looked at before-and-after numbers and found that students on EdChoice vouchers shot up from 16 to 309 in the Rocky River school district; 41 to 581 in Westlake; and 13 to 229 in Bay Village.
Hancock then compared public-school enrollment trends to judge if this was primarily a move out of public schools, or a subsidy for kids already in private and parochial schools.
The evidence points strongly to the latter. Rocky River public school enrollment dropped by only 22 students, not 309. Bay Village enrollment dropped by 30 students, not 229. Westlake schools recorded 19 fewer students this year compared with last academic year — not 581. Similar patterns were seen in other affluent school districts, from Strongsville and North Royalton to Brecksville-Broadview Heights.
By contrast, in the Cleveland public schools, where more than 8,000 students now get school vouchers through the much-older Cleveland school voucher program, which dates to 1996, those on EdChoice vouchers increased only slightly, from 9 to 28.
In even more impoverished East Cleveland, EdChoice recipients dropped from 12 last academic year to less than 10 this year.
And the money is now almost gone.
“The legislature budgeted $397.8 million for EdChoice-Expansion this year,” Hancock reports. “As of Feb. 26, the state had spent $387.5 million.”
Advocates of the universal voucher program suggested to Hancock that, as word gets out, more people will use the vouchers as intended next school year, to switch from low-performing public schools to a private or parochial option.
But it seems unlikely those now on the EdChoice expansion vouchers would be displaced to make room for lower-income students.
In other words, lacking conscious, targeted efforts to make sure low-income Ohioans in poor-performing schools primarily benefited, Ohio’s EdChoice expansion as implemented was not the school-choice program Statehouse leaders promised.
The data suggest instead it became just a big taxpayer subsidy for those students already in private schools.
That should outrage every Ohio taxpayer — and every parent of students in struggling districts who were supposed to benefit.
Also raising red flags were the absence of reciprocal obligations on the part of private and parochial schools taking these taxpayer-funded vouchers to show they are a higher-quality alternative to public schools.
The lack of transparency and data-reporting guardrails forces parents making “school choice” for academic reasons, rather than out of religious or other motivations, to blindly assume that a private or parochial school is the best choice, without actual data on educational performance.
This is particularly troubling given Ohio’s history of funding for-profit charter schools without such guardrails. That’s how the now-shuttered Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow managed to make off with $117 million in wrongly paid taxpayer funds, based on a 2022 state audit — mostly for falsely reporting students ECOT never had.
The General Assembly needs to revisit its universal vouchers program to ensure that this nearly $400 million in Ohio taxpayer money is buying true school choice as promised for students mired in poor-performing public schools who most need quality alternatives.
COLUMBUS, Ohio – The number of Cuyahoga County students receiving state-funded scholarships to attend private schools has skyrocketed this year after state lawmakers expanded a voucher program, but state data suggests that doesn’t necessarily mean more kids have opted out of public schools.
Across the county’s 31 districts, the number of students receiving tuition payments in the EdChoice-Expansion scholarship — one of five school voucher programs run by the state, and the one lawmakers expanded over the summer to give at least partial tuition payments to families of all income levels— has increased nearly four-fold, from about 2,500 students last year to nearly 9,200 this year.
Those districts, however, have not seen a corresponding loss in student population, indicating that most of the families newly benefitting from the vouchers were already enrolled in private schools, rather than fleeing a school district besieged by violence or bullying, mediocre test scores or other problems.
The data cut against arguments lawmakers and advocates have made over the years that vouchers are necessary to give families a chance to choose private schools over the public school district where they live.
In Rocky River, EdChoice-Expansion scholarships were nearly 20 times higher on Feb. 1 than last year. In Bay Village, they increased 17 times. Westlake’s increase is 14 times higher, according to an analysis of state data by The Plain Dealer / cleveland.com.
The number of students across Ohio who are attending private schools on state-funded scholarships spiked this year because the legislature — in the two-year budget bill signed by Gov. Mike DeWine — removed income eligibility caps for EdChoice-Expansion. Last year, the cap was 250% of the federal poverty level for a scholarship, or $75,000 for a family of four. Now, there are no income caps, although families only get partial scholarships when they earn above 450% of the poverty level, or above $135,000 for a family of four.
Full scholarship amounts are $6,167 for grades K-8 and $8,407 for grades K-12.
Enrollment losses in Cuyahoga County district classrooms, however, are more modest than the jump in private school vouchers. State data shows that families that live in the boundaries of suburban district schools— some of which are among the best performing in the state — but may have never set foot in a public school now are receiving vouchers.
Enrollment in Rocky River City School District fell by just 22 students between last year and this year, even though the number of kids receiving vouchers shot up from 16 to 309. In Bay Village City School District, there are 30 fewer students, despite a voucher jump from 13 to 229. Westlake City School District has 19 fewer students; vouchers in the district spiked from 41 to 581.
In the Cleveland Metropolitan School District, the number of kids receiving EdChoice Expansion vouchers increased from nine to 28 this year, a miniscule number compared against its student population of more than 32,000. But students in Cleveland also are eligible for the Cleveland Scholarship, which has no income caps, and is the oldest in the state, having been established in 1995. As of Feb. 26, there were 8,218 students in the Cleveland Scholarship program.
Garry Rayno writes about state politics for InDepthNH, a subject he has covered for the past three decades. Here he explains how the old adage that “all politics is local” has been reversed. Now, with the advent of big money, all local politics is influenced by national agendas. Read what he has to say about vouchers. As in every other state, most vouchers are claimed by students already enrolled in private and religious schools. There has been no mass exodus from public schools. In fact, there has been almost no decline in public school enrollment. Taxpayers are now subsidizing families who can afford private schools on their own.
Rayno writes:
CONCORD – You can expect partisan politics to play a larger role in the legislature during the second year of a two-year term.
It is an election year and both parties are hard at work appealing to their bases and defining the other party as the bad guy.
However, the ill-will appears to be growing over the last decade and there is a reason or two for what is occurring.
More and more state legislatures are put in the middle of national issues that once were the purview of the political professionals.
One of the major reasons for the national attention is the US Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision swinging open the doors of the Brinks Trucks to let millions of dollars of outside money pour into a small state like New Hampshire to sway the outcome of elections.
The $1.3 million of campaign funds spent in 2022 on the New Hampshire Legislature by groups affiliated with the Koch Foundation would have been unimaginable before the court’s decision giving corporations first amendment rights as if they were individuals.
The national parties are also reaping the rewards of the decision and in turn spend rigorously to elect their candidates.
All that money investment does not come free as the people contributing expect a hefty return on investment.
Consequently many national wedge issues find their way into the legislative agendas of both parties.
The last few sessions of the House this month reflect some of what there was little of in years past.
For example House Bill 1156, which targets the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control over their guidance during the pandemic and its future guidance coming in a couple of months on pandemics to come.
The contention is that the two organizations put the state’s sovereignty at risk while revisiting the shutdown and masking debates from the pandemic’s greatest impact.
On its own, given the political philosophy of the majority of the Republican House members, it does not appear to be unusual.
But if you Google state sovereignty and WHO and CDC you will see that many other state legislatures have similar if not identical bills before them this year.
The national battle over electronic vote counting machines made it all the way down to town meeting votes this year, although the ban was not very successful, the push has been ongoing since the “Big Lie” over voter fraud in the 2020 election.
The National Republican Party had touted “voter integrity” which really means disenfranchising as many voters as possible before the 2024 election.
House Bill 1569 would do away with the affidavit exemption allowing a person to vote if a registered voter forgot a photo Id or the proper paperwork for same-day registration. That in itself will disenfranchise thousands of voters, and essentially does away with same-day registration, which New Hampshire adopted so it would not have to have motor-voter registration under the Help America Vote Act.
This change is likely going to court if it passes the Senate and the governor signs it.
The bill also expands the challenged voter provision, which puts the onus on the challenged voter to go to superior court to prove otherwise which means thousands more will be disenfranchised.
Other bills approved by the House last week would shorten the time period for voter purges from the checklist.
On the other side, the House killed House Bill 1364 which would have resulted in criminal charges if someone intimidated an election official, exerted improper influence over the election process or tampered with electronic ballot counting devices.
While that has not been an issue in New Hampshire as it has in some other states, mostly in the south and southwest, you have to wonder why the House killed the bill unless some of what would be illegal is planned for the next election.
Democrats also pushed a bill to have the state join the Election Registration Information Center, which has not interested the state in the past, and was killed last week.
Democrats proposed a series of House resolutions, which indicate the wishes of the legislature, but do not have the weight of law that included universal health insurance, and differentiating between individual and corporate rights (sound familiar).
Perhaps the most costly example of New Hampshire following a national agenda is the Education Freedom Account program, which began three years ago following other nearly identical programs in places like Arizona, Florida, Wisconsin and Louisiana.
A recent study by the Cleveland Plain Dealer of the program in Ohio which greatly expanded its program last year, noted that despite the number of new students in the program, the enrollment in the public schools did not decline, meaning most of the students benefiting from the expansion were already in private schools meaning it’s ultimately a subsidy for parents who already could afford to pay the tuition.
The study found that about 65 percent of the total grants were private school grants and most were to religious schools.
Those numbers also reflect what the New Hampshire program has seen, that most of the students enrolling in the program were already in private or religious schools, or homeschooling when the program began with 1,635 students in the 21-22 school year and growing to about 4,500 students for the 23-24 school year.
The year before the program began there were 164,918 students in public schools, according to data on the Department of Education’s website, and the first year of the program there were 164,950 students in public schools, the second year, 163,681 and this school year 165,082. [Emphasis added]
That too would indicate that most of the students receiving EFA grants are not leaving public schools to join the program.
The program’s income cap is expected to increase to 500 percent of the federal poverty level, next school year — the House has passed the bill, it is expected to pass the Senate and the governor has said he would sign it.
Parental rights are another issue that has been targeted nationwide by Republicans while Democrats continue to push for raising the minimum wage, which is a national issue since the state did away with its own minimum wage in the 2011-2012 term and moved to the federal rate.
And transgender issues have been before the legislature, particularly for minors, as they have been in many other states.
All the same issues surfacing at the same time would certainly indicate that some groups or organizations are behind the efforts.
And the political parties are also using state legislatures to continue what they hope will be the dividing lines in the upcoming election.
Oh for the days of clashes over education funding and shoreline protection.
But we are still fighting over education funding, but it’s at least our own fight.
The Grand Canyon Institute is a nonpartisan nonprofit research organization in Arizona. Its latest report concludes that charter schools are more accountable than vouchers. Vouchers suck up nearly $1 billion a year in public money and are completely unaccountable. Oucher schools are subject to no financial audits, do not have to comply with the state curriculum, and are not audited for academic performance.
Step right up and get your free money, grifters! Courtesy of Arizona taxpayers and GOP legislators!
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Charters are Accountable, Independent Private Schools are Not Yet nearly a billion public dollars flow to unaccountable private schools
Phoenix —On Monday, the State Board for Charter Schools, a public body, voted unanimously to issue a notice of intent to revoke the charter contract for ARCHES Academy, currently located in Apache Junction.
The school appears to have both academic and financial problems and recently addressed an issue with a fire marshal. This action represents the kind of responsible oversight of charter schools that serves to protect the interests of students, parents and taxpayers.
In sharp contrast, independent private schools are required to have no such oversight, even though they currently receive nearly $1 billion in state public funding. That nearly matches the state general fund support for the state university system. Public funds that support private schools come from redirected general fund dollars through tax credit donations to Student Tuition Organizations and by funds from Empowerment Scholarship Accounts (ESA)/vouchers directly from the General Fund. Last year GCI estimates private school tax credits cost $285 million (the formal report is due by March 31) and ESA/vouchers cost $592 million, so, collectively, nearly $900 million in public support for unaccountable private schools (note: this figure includes an amount for ESA homeschooling).
The table below uses the case of ARCHES Academy to contrast charter schools (which are privately owned public schools) with private schools that operate independently with the level of oversight and accountability required.
Please open the link to see the table comparing Arches charter school and private schools receiving vouchers.
A new report ranks US states in terms of how well their legislatures are protecting public schools and the students who attend them. From expanding charters to launching illiberal attacks on kids and families, a worrying number of states failed the test.
State legislatures play an enormous role in making public school systems functional and safe. (SDI Productions / Getty Images)
On February 8, sixteen-year-old nonbinary sophomore Nex Benedict died of causes that have yet to be explained to the public. The day before, Nex had told a police officer they were beaten by three schoolmates in a bathroom at their Oklahoma high school. Sue Benedict, Nex’s grandmother and adoptive parent, told the Independent that Nex suffered from identity-based bullying, beginning shortly after Oklahoma governor Kevin Stitt signed a lawforcing trans students to use bathrooms that match the sex listed on their birth certificates.
In addition to the bathroom ban, Stitt has signed severalotherlaws targeting trans youth. There are currently fifty-four other anti-LGBTQ bills before the Oklahoma legislature. While the exact cause of Nex’s death remains unverified, it’s clear that the violence preceding it occurred in an increasingly hostile environment for LGBTQ youth in the state of Oklahoma.
According to the American Medical Association and the National Institutes of Health, bathroom bans put vulnerable kids at risk for serious harm. And even when anti-LGBTQ laws don’t pass, researchindicates that young people are adversely affected by proposed legislation that puts their safety and humanity up for debate, fueling a climate of tension and suspicion which can exacerbate bullying behavior and mental health issues. Per 2019 data, majorities of LGBTQ kids have experienced harassment or bullying in school, leading to increased absences and potentially dire long-term consequences. But LGBTQ students in schools with LGBTQ-inclusive curriculum and policies are more likely to feel safe and report that their peers accept them.
In other words, adults — from educators to social media personalities to lawmakers — set a tone that appears to be highly determinative of whether school is a place where kids like Nex can safely be themselves.
This pattern is hardly restricted to LGBTQ issues. State-level legislation shapes the societies in which kids live and schools operate. For this reason “Public Schooling in America,” the latest data-packed national report card from the Network for Public Education (NPE), focuses on the extent to which each state legislature protects young people, both in and out of public school systems.
While the previous two NPE report cards have focused primarily on school privatization, this one goes further, connecting the dots between seemingly distinct attacks on public schooling that are advancing as part of the push for Christian nationalism: charter and voucher expansion, publicly funded homeschooling, defunding of public schools, and illiberal restrictions on kids and educators.
Using a points system based on how statehouses treat the above topics, NPE awarded “A” grades to five states, both red and blue, that demonstrate a strong commitment to students and democratically governed public schools: 1) North Dakota, 2) Connecticut, 3) Vermont, 4) Illinois, and 5) Nebraska. Seventeen states — all but two of which are governed by a Republican trifecta— earned “F” grades. The poorest scoring of these “F” states will come as no surprise to anyone paying attention to school privatization or the anti-LGBTQ laws curtailing kids’ and educators’ rights: 47) Arkansas, 48) North Carolina, 49) Utah, 50) Arizona, and 51) Florida.
Ultimately the report underscores a critical point: while schools are directly tasked with prioritizing child well-being and student safety, they don’t perform these duties in a vacuum. State legislatures play an enormous role in making public school systems functional and safe — or, in many cases, severely undermining them.
Privatization: Vouchers and Charters
Vouchers, which subtract taxpayer dollars from public education and turn them over to privately operated schools and service providers (including for-profit and religious schools), have notched considerable statehouse wins in recent years. In 2023 alone, seven states launched new voucher plans, while others made existing programs available to wealthy families who have never sent their kids to public schools.
Significantly, while voucher programs’ costs to taxpayers have mushroomed since 2000, bathing state budgets in red ink, overall private school enrollment actually decreased from 11.38 percent in 1999 to 9.97 percent in 2021. That’s because vouchers aremostpopular among privileged parents whose kids were already attending private schools. These privatization schemes may be propping up academically impoverished religious schools, but they are not incentivizing an exodus from public education.
Vouchers take various forms, including traditional vouchers or tuition grants, tuition tax-credit scholarship programs (TTCs), and education savings accounts (ESAs), which turn large sums of public money over to parents with virtually no strings attached. With all vouchers, and ESAs in particular, there are few or no safeguards to prevent fraud or ensure that kids are actually learning core subjects.
Vouchers are a preferred tool of religious extremists seeking state-funded Christian education, but most state constitutions have clauses prohibiting public funding of religious institutions. ESAs and TTCs are designed to evade these restrictions by funding families rather than schools (ESAs), or allowing people to donate to private school scholarships instead of paying their taxes (TTCs). Generally speaking, voucher-funded private schooling is rife with discrimination that would be illegal in public school systems. A 2023 report by the Education Voters of Pennsylvania, for example, found that 100 percent of surveyed voucher schools have policies that overtly discriminate against kids based on LGBTQ identity, disability status, academic ability, religion, pregnancy or abortion history, or other factors.
Vouchers have made splashier headlines than charter schools of late, as Republicans abandon the decades-old bipartisan education reform truce. But Christian nationalists have also been using charter schools to press their agenda, with a significant increase in right-wing “faith-friendly,” “classical,” or “back-to-basics” charter schools (and at least one officially religious church-run charter school on track to open in Oklahoma). Another in-depth report from NPE documents this rise, noting that these charter schools, which market themselves to conservative white families, are nearly twice as likely to be run by for-profit corporations as the charter sector at large.
The growth of online charter schools, which have terrible academic track records, and charter schools run for a profit has continued apace. Thirty-five states allow for-profit corporations to manage nonprofit charter schools, and in six states (Arizona, Florida, Michigan, Nevada, Ohio, and West Virginia), for-profits manage over 30 percentof all charter schools. Fraud and mismanagement result in the frequent shuttering of publicly funded charter schools, sometimes leaving families in the lurch mid–school year. Since 2019, NPE has been collecting news stories of charter school malfeasance and abrupt closures (charter churn). Thirteen states have racked up at least fifty such reports: California takes the prize for one hundred and eighty charter scandal stories, and Pennsylvania comes in second.
Though often cleverly referred to as “public,” charter schools are not equally accessible by all kids. In School’s Choice, researchers Wagma Mommandi and Kevin Welner show how charter schools use branding and promotional strategies to sway enrollment toward students with more resources and fewer needs than the general population.
In an even more blatant example of the nonpublic nature of charter schools, NPE points to the phenomenon of workplace charters. Under Florida law, such schools are permitted to restrict enrollment to the children of a specific firm’s employees — functioning as a form of labor discipline reminiscent of the last century’s coal “company towns.” At the Villages Charter School (VCS)’s six campuses, parental employment is verified monthly. If a VCS parent hates working at the Villages (a large, highly profitable retirement community) and wants to quit, they had better be prepared to upend their kids’ educational and social lives.
Homeschooling
The number of homeschooling families spiked during the COVID-19 pandemic and has continued to rise. Journalists at the Washington Post found a 51 percent increase over the past six years in states where it’s possible to track homeschooling trends. Once a practice found mainly among fundamentalist Christians in rural areas, it is now the fastest growing education sector.
Thirteen states directly subsidize homeschooling through vouchers or tax credits. A flourishing tech-based industry (including charter schools for homeschooling families) has emerged to cash in on these state subsidies, with parents putting taxpayer dollars to questionable uses. In Arizona, a proliferation of news stories has documented homeschooling families spending ESA money on things like LEGO sets, snowboarding trips, ninja training, and aeroponic indoor gardens. Very few states have regulations in place to ensure that homeschooled children are receiving basic academic instruction. In fact, most states allow parents to issue a diploma with no verification of student learning.
Culture warriors like Chaya Raichik have used the slippery concept of “grooming” to gin up fears about adults hurting kids in public schools. In reality, because public schools are governed by strict child safety laws including background checks and mandated reporting, they are much more likely to detect and prevent abuse than minimally regulated private schools and totally unregulated homes. Eleven states don’t even require parents to report that they’re homeschooling their kids, while fourteen more just require a onetime notice with no follow-up. Only Pennsylvania and Arkansas conduct any form of background check on homeschooling parents.
The Coalition for Responsible Home Education has cataloged about one hundred and eighty horrific stories of homeschooled children suffering and even dying from neglect, abuse, and torture in their educational settings. Nicole and Jasmine Snyder, for example, experienced things like having their heads bashed against a wall, being forced to stand in a dark hallway for long stretches, and having urine and feces smeared on their faces as punishment for potty accidents. They starved to death in 2016 and 2017, weighing five and ten pounds respectively. Because they were homeschooled, no one outside the family had any idea the abuse was happening. Their murders were not revealed until 2021.
Public School Financing
Researchers have clearly established the relationship between school funding and student learning outcomes. And because school funding enables everything from adequate staff-to-student ratios to heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems to essential structural repairs, it’s undeniably a student safety issue.
To rank school funding, NPE looked at the following metrics from the Education Law Center, which issues an annual school funding report: funding levels (cost-adjusted, per-pupil revenue from state and local sources), funding distribution (how states allocate funds to high-needs schools serving economically disadvantaged students), and funding effort (the relationship between a state’s GDP and its investment in schools). They also looked at average teacher salaries, adjusted for each state’s cost of living.
The states that earned the most points for funding public education and narrowing resource discrepancies were New York, New Jersey, and Wyoming. Florida lost every single available point for school funding, while Arizona, Idaho, and Nevada lost all but one. Washington, DC, Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont all stand out for having exceptionally low teacher pay despite relatively high per-pupil spending.
It’s important to recognize that numerous GOP-controlled states are in the process of defunding their public schools — through spending cuts and policies that drain public coffers by enabling skyrocketing voucher costs coupled with generous tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy. If this experiment is allowed to continue, it will ultimately disfigure the landscape of community life and civic participation.
Freedom to Teach and Learn
Because the right-wing attacks on students and educators have ramped up in conjunction with efforts to defund public schools and boost private alternatives, this NPE report card includes a new category, Freedom to Teach and Learn, which encompasses a range of factors pertaining to student safety and well-being: laws protecting LGBTQ students in public schools, corporal punishment bans, censorship and curriculum bans, collective bargaining for teachers, and teacher quality…..
[Please open the link to read the rest of this important article.]
If the biggest charter chain in Texas is under investigation for financial finagling, is it the right time to let that charter chain expand? Well, it’s Texas, so of course!
The Network for Public Education thinks that’s a rotten idea. It’s wrong. It’s unethical. so we issued this press release.
Texas Ed Department Approves Scandal-ridden Charter Chain’s Expansion
For immediate release:
Within days of appointing conservators to manage the IDEA charter chain, the Texas Education Agency gives it the green light to expand.
There is a major financial and ethical charter scandal in Texas, and the Network for Public Education is outraged. The same day that the Texas Education Agency (TEA) announced the appointment of a management team for IDEA charter schools following years of inappropriate spending, the charter chain submitted a request for a massive expansion that would add ten new charter campuses in Texas.
On March 6, the TEA announced it appointed two conservators to oversee IDEA charter schools following its investigation into multiple allegations of financial mishandling. Two days later, the TEA approved that expansion without public comment or meaningful notice.
The charter chain obtained nearly $300,000,000 from the U.S. Department of Education to expand to 123 schools. Following an audit, the Department is now demanding that IDEA return $28 million to be paid using Texas taxpayer dollars.
NPE President Diane Ravitch has been following the charter chain’s scandals for years. “The IDEA charter chain has a long-established reputation for spending millions on luxury items for its leaders while paying executives private-sector salaries. The grifting at public expense must stop. When one Houston school received failing grades, TEA took over the entire district. In this case, TEA appointed a conservator from another charter chain and then approved IDEA’s expansion in a shady insider deal.”
According to Network for Public Education Executive Director Carol Burris, “The scandals involving this federal Charter School Program (CSP) recipient are breathtaking. As shocking as seems, it is possible this new expansion of the corrupt IDEA charter chain will be financed through CSP grant money. We all foot the bill.”
The Network for Public Education is a national advocacy group whose mission is to preserve, promote, improve, and strengthen public schools for current and future generations of students.
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Mailing Address:
Network for Public Education PO Box 227 New York City, NY 10156
State Senator Tina Bojanowski, teacher and legislator (@TinaforKentucky), tweeted:
KY House passes HB2, a bill to change our Constitution to allow vouchers and charters by creating an amendment that allows future legislation to disregard SEVEN sections of our Constitution. @kyhousedems
Diane Ravitch's blog 