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Peter Greene on Chris Rufo’s Plans to Destroy Public Education

By dianeravitch
September 24, 2023 //
22

After I first listened to Chris Rufo’s infamous speech at Hillsdale College, something clicked. I saw the plan for the demolition of public education. Rufo spelled it out. He is a proponent of universal school choice, and he says the way to reach that goal is to create universal distrust of public schools. This is why we hear blarney about public school teachers “grooming” their students and indoctrinating them. It’s all part of the plan to create “universal distrust.” It’s a plan to privatize public education by disseminating lies and defaming teachers.

Peter Greene listened to Rufo’s speech and analyzes it closely. Please read to see the master plan, the hoax about “critical race theory,” and the rightwing plot to privatize public funding for education.

And though Peter says he summarized the speech to save you time, I urge you to listen to it. It’s scary.

Categories Education Industry, Hoax, Lies, Privatization, Propaganda, School Choice, Vouchers

Carol Burris: Charter Schools Can No Longer Claim to Be “Public Schools”

By dianeravitch
September 24, 2023 //
4

Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education, wrote an article in The Progressive about a new law in North Carolina that makes clear that charter schools are NOT public schools.

She writes:

When an Oklahoma state school board approved what would become the nation’s first taxpayer-funded religious charter school, opponents of the proposal called it “deeply un-American” and “a flagrant violation of long-standing constitutional law.” An Oklahoma parents group and a handful of state and national civil organizations filed a pair of lawsuits to block the new school. Creating a taxpayer-funded religious school “turns on its head the concept that charter schools were supposed to be public schools,” American Federation of Teacher president Randi Weingarten argued.

Indeed, they were supposed to be public schools. But anyone who has been watching the devolution of charter schools could see this coming from a mile away.

The magical transformation of what should be a public school to a taxpayer-funded private school is not a trick confined to Oklahoma.

Charter schools, which were originally proposed to be district-run, innovative public schools, have since morphed into national charter school chains, Christian nationalist schools, and facades for for-profit corporations.

From charter schools in churches with websites displaying crosses to “faith-friendly” charters, the charter industry has been flirting with religiosity for years. Under former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, the federal Charter School Programs were given the green light to award grants to religious organizations that own or operate charter schools.

During the 2021-2022 school year, 20 percent of all charter school students were enrolled in a school run by a for-profit company. This allowed these companies to evade laws and regulations by using a nonprofit school as a facade. And it is but a small hop over a line drawn in the sand to move from the federal government funding a religious organization to run charters, to funding charters that provide religious instruction in classrooms. It only takes a strong breeze, and the sand lines disappear altogether.

The magical transformation of what should be a public school to a taxpayer-funded private school is not a trick confined to Oklahoma, nor does the hocus-pocus turn solely on the question of religion.

Even as quasi-religious and perhaps overtly religious charter schools are on the rise, there is another effort intent on blurring the line between public and private.

A recent bill passed in North Carolina, a state in which a large proportion of charters run by for-profits, dismisses other features that determine whether or not charter schools, in fact, deserve the title “public.”

Charter schools are supposed to be “free and open to all” without discrimination or favor. But HB 219, passed by a Republican supermajority legislature over the veto of Democrat Governor Roy Cooper, allows charter schools to charge tuition and grant enrollment privileges to certain students. With the bill’s passage, North Carolina’s under-enrolled charter schools can now enlist both foreign and out-of-state students on a tuition basis. How will under-enrollment be defined?

Since the bill also allows nearly uncontrolled expansion of existing charter schools, finding space for tuition-paying students will not be difficult. Who will pay the tuition bill—the state, the foreign nation, or the family? North Carolina left that question unaddressed, but the likely outcome will be families, which favors the wealthy.

Not only does North Carolina challenge the definition of a charter school as a free school, but it also flaunts the idea that charters are open to all. The new law erodes equal access to charter schools in the state by giving enrollment privileges to special groups, allowing charter schools to shape their student bodies.

Please open the link and continue reading this important story.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Equity, Extremism, North Carolina

Free! A Journal About Education and Democracy

By dianeravitch
September 23, 2023 //
12

Take advantage of an offer of a free publication about education.

A special issue of Education Policy Analysis Archive (EPAA) just came out, featuring articles by members of the International Academy of Education (IAE). EPAA is a free, on-line journal, published simultaneously in English, Spanish, and Portuguese. Access is at https://epaa.asu.edu/index.php/epaa

This special issue was edited by Fernando Reimers of Harvard and features the following articles: Critical thinking and the conditions of democracy by Nicholas C. Burbules; Education and the challenges for democracy by Fernando Reimers; Race, class, and the democratic project in contemporary South African education: Working and reworking the law by Craig Soudien;Speculations on experiences in public education and the health of the nation’s democracy by David C. Berliner; Challenges in fostering democratic participation in Japanese educationby Yuko Nonoyama-Tarumi; Civic education, citizenship, and democracy by Lorin W. Anderson; and Education in a democratic and meritocratic society: Moving beyond thriving to flourishing by Ee-Ling Low.

Categories Democracy, Education Industry, Education Reform, Equity, Global Education Reform Movement (GERM), International

Josh Cowen: The Truth About Vouchers in Milwaukee

By dianeravitch
September 22, 2023 //
9

Joshua Cowen, Professor of Education Policy at Michigan State University, has been researching and writing about vouchers for yearly 20 years. As you will read, school choice advocates were very angry about his criticisms of vouchers. They told him he was wrong. George Mitchell, a founder of School Choice Wisconsin wrote a comment on this blog, highly critical of negative judgments about vouchers. Here is Josh Cowen’s response.

Author: Josh Cowen

Affiliation: Professor of Education Policy, Michigan State University

Topic: Wisconsin Voucher Results

Recently, I made comments to the Wisconsin Examiner that were highly critical of Wisconsin’s system of school vouchers. The columnist for that piece had asked me as a researcher with 18 years of experience on the topic for my professional opinion about a new School Choice Wisconsin report purporting to show that Wisconsin vouchers are more cost-effective than the state’s public schools.

In response to my comments, the director of School Choice Wisconsin issued his second op-ed in one week, slamming both me and the Examiner columnist; a researcher from the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, which like School Choice Wisconsin is heavily subsidized by the voucher-advocating Bradley Foundation in Milwaukee, issued a similar social media thread; and George Mitchell himself, the co-founder of SCW, sent me not one but two angry and unsolicited emails trying to rebut me.

Among other things, I said to the Examiner: “If you took the report at its word, it’s possible to achieve exactly what they’re describing simply by exiting the children who are the most expensive to educate.”

I make similar assessments in other states, based on the large volume of data showing that voucher programs like Wisconsin’s have huge exit rates among the lowest scoring and lowest income students. I’m used to objections from conservative activists who are for ideological reasons supportive of vouchers, but the sheer volume in this case is frankly odd and warrants extra attention.

Wisconsin is also a bit different because that’s where I got much of my start on voucher research—and that’s where some of the more troubling patterns of student exits from voucher schools first emerged. As an early career analyst on the last official evaluation of vouchers—at the time, limited to the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program between 2005 and 2010—I helped study those data.

Here’s the thing: the Bradley Foundation financially supported that larger evaluation, and School Choice Wisconsin played an integral role in participant recruitment for the study.

What we found in not one but two papers published in the top education research journals in the country was that students left Milwaukee vouchers at high rates, roughly 15% of kids per year (in other states it’s above 20%), and did so in very systematic ways: the lowest scoring kids, lowest income children (even in a program targeted to lower income families to begin with) and students of color were far more likely to experience turnover out of the voucher program.

And crucially, those students did better once turning or returning to Milwaukee Public Schools. That last finding was important because kids who gave up their voucher did not enroll at the highest rated MPS schools, but they still appeared to have been better served there than when they had used a voucher.

That pattern alone can inflate the numerator in the fraction SCW used to claim voucher cost-effectiveness. By dividing the state’s accountability score by a simplistic calculation of the revenue schools receive per kid, SCW was able to claim more voucher bang for the buck. It’s simple algebra: “cost effective” can mean either a high score for a given dollar spent, or a smaller dollar spent for a given accountability score.

And if, as in our MPCP evaluation, students who leave voucher programs are especially low scoring on state exams, that would artificially push SCW’s voucher numerator high. Again, simple algebra.

That is not a particularly controversial statement among serious program evaluators who specialize in such data without an agenda. And while I’m not surprised that as the state’s chief voucher advocacy group, SCW took issue with my data-backed comments, I am surprised they’ve spent as much time as they have issuing new columns and sending me angry emails.

Of course, one way to settle lingering questions about Wisconsin’s voucher program would be to hold another multi-year evaluation, in which groups like School Choice Wisconsin, the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, and teacher stakeholder groups came together to agree on a third-party review of these programs.

That happened in 2005 Wisconsin Act 125, which helped create the data in our team’s reports that I cite above. But it has not happened since vouchers expanded statewide. If School Choice Wisconsin is as confident in their numbers as they claim, they should welcome such a new evaluation—just like they did back in the program’s early years.

If that happened, Wisconsin taxpayers wouldn’t have to take voucher advocates’ word for it—or mine for that matter. One of the findings from the last evaluation was that once DPI started reporting voucher results by school name (like public schools have to do), their performance improved. Voucher advocates should want new evaluations—if they don’t, what are they worried those new reviews will find?

Absent a new evaluation, what we know for certain based on what’s available to the research community is that voucher programs have extremely high rates of student turnover, and these rates are driven by particularly high rates among at-risk children. In that, the data are quite consistent with the startling report issued by journalists at Wisconsin Watch in May, documenting strategies that Wisconsin voucher schools use to select children out after admitting them originally.

In Wisconsin, as in other states, there is far more state oversight on entry into choice programs than on exits—and yet we know for a fact that exits are where modern voucher programs truly choose their students.

Either way, and based on the independent data we do have, when it comes to using vouchers it’s the school’s choice, not parental choice.

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Failure, Fake News, Milwaukee, Vouchers, Wisconsin

Republicans Hold Congressional Hearings on Chinese Influence in American Schools

By dianeravitch
September 20, 2023 //
25

The Republican leadership of the House Education Committee held hearings on the threat posed by Communist China to American public and private schools. Read the summary and ask yourself the following questions: Would red states grant the Confucius Classrooms a charter to run their own schools? Would they let a school organized by the Confucius Classrooms accept voucher students? Are they equally concerned about the scores of Gulen schools that receive public funds and operate as charter schools? Gulen is a Turkish imam who lives in seclusion in Pennsylvania; the board of trustees of his schools are led by Turkish men; the Gulen schools have a large number of Turkish teachers on staff. When will the House Committee on Education investigate the Gulen schools?

The release from the committee begins:

Hearing Recap: Confucius Classrooms Edition

Today’s Early Childhood, Elementary, and Secondary Education (ECESE) Subcommittee hearing, led by Chairman Aaron Bean (R-FL), investigated the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) efforts to infiltrate America’s K-12 schools.

In postsecondary education, the CCP exerts soft power on the American education system through cultural exchange outposts known as Confucius Institutes. The K-12 arms of this propaganda machine, called Confucius Classrooms, were under the microscope today for their potential malignant influence.

Chairman Bean opened the hearing by pointing out, “The risk posed by the proliferation of Confucius Classrooms is threefold, threatening America’s national, geopolitical, and academic interests.”

Expert witnesses testifying today included Mike Gonzalez, Senior Fellow at the Heritage Foundation; Nicole Neily, President of Parents Defending Education (PDE); and Ryan Walters, State Superintendent of Public Instruction at the Oklahoma State Department of Education.

The seminal report on Confucius Classrooms, and therefore the spark for congressional investigation, was led by Nicole Neily and PDE. In her opening testimony, Ms. Neily laid out the key findings of her organization’s report: “Our research found that over the past decade, over $17 million has been given to 143 school districts and private K-12 schools across 34 states (plus DC) – impacting over 170,000 students in 182 schools.” Furthermore, these classrooms were identified near 20 U.S. military bases, posing a potential national security threat.

As a state education officer, Mr. Walters offered a perspective on the impact of these donations in Oklahoma schools. After one of his school districts was named in the PDE report, Mr. Walters ordered a further investigation, which uncovered that, “Through a series of non-profits, that school district maintains an active connection with the CCP through a program called Confucius Classrooms, even after the federal government cracked down on similar programs in 2020.”

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Gulen Charter Schools, International, Republicans, Vouchers

“Democracy”: AP Courses Are Worthless

By dianeravitch
September 20, 2023 //
91

A reader who identifies as “Democracy” left a comment here about DeSantis’ war against the College Board’s Advanced Placement (AP) courses. DeSantis manufactured a culture war issue, a familiar tactic for him, but don’t defend the AP exams: They are worthless, says he or she.

Democracy wrote:

While I certainly do not agree with — and am appalled by — the Florida dictate, I hate to see the College Board’s Advanced Placement (AP) program in the bannerhead of this issue because it makes it appear that the AP program is somehow being victimized, and it helps to propagate the AP brand.

It’s important to separate the wheat from the chaff here. The Florida requirement – state law – is part of a larger effort by conservatives (Republicans) across the country to, as USA Today put it, “restrict learning and materials about controversial topics.” Or, in other words, topics that conservatives hate to talk about: racism, misogyny, equality, sedition, tolerance, democracy, reproductive rights, climate change, sex…..

The original law required a cataloging of all books in “a school library media center.” The DeSantis-controlled Florida DOE interpreted that broadly to include classrooms. The Republican legislature amended the law to say that a school library media center is

“any collection of books, ebooks, periodicals, or videos maintained and accessible on the site of a school, including in classrooms.”

As The Sarasota Herald Tribune reported in April of this year,

“The law, governing instructional materials for classes from kindergarten to 12th grade, passed last year and holds school districts responsible for the content of all materials used in a classroom, made available in a school library or included on a reading list. It requires each book in a school library to be certified by a media specialist and for a list of these materials to be available on school websites. The law took effect in January.”

This is incredibly cumbersome, especially for elementary school teachers who have large troves of books for their students. And if it reeks of conservative religious state-imposed censorship, that’s probably because it is. As ABC News (and other media) reported, “Books targeted by conservative groups were overwhelmingly written by or about people of color and LGBTQ people, according to anti-censorship researchers.”

All of this is worrisome. It’s dangerous territory.

But that does not mean that AP is the victim. Nor should it imply that AP is actually educationally beneficial for most students. As I’ve noted here previously, more colleges and universities are either refusing to accept AP test scores for credit, or they are limiting credit awarded only for a score of 5 on an AP test. The reason is that they find most students awarded credit for AP courses are just generally not well-prepared.

Dartmouth no longer gives credit for AP test scores. It found that 90 percent of those who scored a 5 on the AP psychology test failed a Dartmouth Intro to Psych exam. A 2006 MIT faculty report noted “there is ‘a growing body of research’ that students who earn top AP scores and place out of institute introductory courses end up having ‘difficulty’ when taking the next course.” Two years prior, Harvard “conducted a study that found students who are allowed to skip introductory courses because they have passed a supposedly equivalent AP course do worse in subsequent courses than students who took the introductory courses at Harvard.”

In The ToolBox Revisited (2006) Clifford Adelman scolded those who had misrepresented his original ToolBox research by citing the importance of AP “in explaining bachelor’s degree completion. Adelman said, “To put it gently, this is a misreading.” Moreover, in statistically analyzing the factors contributing to the earning of a bachelor’s degree, Adelman found that Advanced Placement did not reach the “threshold level of significance.”

College Board executives often say that if high schools implement AP courses and encourage more students to take them, then (1) more students will be motivated to go to college and (2) high school graduation rates will increase. There are educators who parrot the College Board line. Researchers Kristin Klopfenstein and Kathleen Thomas “conclude that there is no evidence to back up these claims.”

Why do students take AP? Because they’ve been told to. Because they’re “trying to look good” to colleges in the “increasingly high-stakes college admission process,” and because, increasingly, “high schools give extra weight to AP courses when calculating grade-point averages, so it can boost a student’s class rank.” It’s a depraved stupid circle that has swept up parents, guidance counselors, administrators and school boards, teachers, and the general public – not to mention public education reporters – into the misbelief that “AP is better.” It isn’t.

One student who got caught up in the AP hype cycle –– taking 3 AP courses as a junior and 5 as a senior –– and only got credit for one AP course in college, reflected on his AP experience. He said nothing about “rigor” or “trying to be educated” or the quality of instruction, but remarked “if i didn’t take AP classes, it’s likely I wouldn’t have gotten accepted into the college I’m attending next year…If your high school offers them, you pretty much need to take them if you want to get into a competitive school.”

What do students actually learn from taking these “rigorous” AP courses and tests? For many, not much. One student remarked, after taking the World History AP test, “dear jesus… I had hoped to never see ‘DBQ’ ever again, after AP world history… so much hate… so much hate.”

And another added, “I was pretty fond of the DBQ’s, actually, because you didn’t really have to know anything about the subject, you could just make it all up after reading the documents.”

Another AP student related how the “high achievers” in his school approached AP tests: “The majority of high-achieving kids in my buddies' and my AP classes couldn’t have given less of a crap. They showed up for most of the classes, sure, and they did their best to keep up with the grades because they didn’t want their GPAs to drop, but when it came time to take the tests, they drew pictures on the AP Calc, answered just ‘C’ on the AP World History, and would finish sections of the AP Chem in, like, 5 minutes. I had one buddy who took an hour-and-a-half bathroom break during World History. The cops were almost called. They thought he was missing.”

And an AP reader (grader), related this about the types of essays he saw:

“I read AP exams in the past. Most memorable was an exam book with $5 taped to the page inside and the essay just said ‘please, have mercy.’ But I also got an angry breakup letter, a drawing of some astronauts, all kinds of random stuff. I can’t really remember it all… I read so many essays in such compressed time periods that it all blurs together when I try to remember.”

The Florida law is clearly not in the interests of kids and learning. But AP ain’t necessarily all that either.

Categories Accountability, Curriculum, DeSantis, Education Industry, Failure, Florida, For-Profit, Fraud

Houston: Teachers Told to Comply with Miles’ Orders or Get Out

By dianeravitch
September 18, 2023 //
32

Mike Miles, the state-imposed superintendent of the Houston Independent School District, has never been a teacher, but he thinks he knows exactly what teachers should do. He has dubbed his behaviorist program the “New Education System.” Those teaching in certain designated schools are required to do it his way or get out. Clearly he has never read the research on motivation (Edward Deci, Dan Ariely, Daniel Pink), or he would know that forced compliance depresses motivation.

The Houston Press reported:

Teachers called to a last-minute after school meeting at Chrysalis Middle School Friday afternoon were told to get with the New Education System program instituted by Houston ISD Superintendent Mike Miles or get gone. And that they had until 6 p.m. Sunday to let the district know whether they’d be staying or wanted to be moved to another school.

Dr. Luz Martinez, the Central Division superintendent (previously at Midland in 2021 and Round Rock in January 2023 before moving to HISD this June), minced no words in making it clear that there wasn’t to be any more questioning of the new policies at the NES-Aligned schools, part of the Miles plan after the state takeover of HISD.

By Saturday, two teachers who tried to ask questions — one of whom was thrown out of the meeting — received letters that the district was beginning the process of terminating their employment and they were barred from campus. “Insubordination” was cited as the precipitating factor in Carr’s case.

“We are not going back. We are not compromising,” Martinez had told the teachers at the meeting while Principal Mary Lou Walter stood by, “All this noise that is going on, that’s in the past. We are moving forward. We are NES-Aligned.” She went on to insist that the NES program was “never intended to be rigid, never intended to be mechanical.”

At the same time, Martinez told teachers she’d be bringing more outsiders into the schools who would be in the teachers’ classrooms “all the time” to ensure they are “implementing the model with fidelity.”

Science teacher Teresa Carr said she attempted to ask in what way the teachers at Chrysalis were supposedly falling short. “[Martinez] said we were not implementing with fidelity,” said Carr but when the district superintendent was pressed, the only example she came up with was three elementary students she’d spotted on their way to the office because they’d had bathroom accidents. Pointing out that involved Cage and not the middle school or its teachers, Carr said she was unable to get Martinez to give any specific examples involving Chrysalis.

After Carr left the meeting, another teacher attempted to continue with follow up questions, Carr said. That teacher also received a letter of reprimand and notice that termination proceedings were beginning against her, Carr said.

The holder of a BA in science education and a master’s in English education, Carr said she had never been in trouble with the district before and clearly by Sunday was still very unsettled by what had happened. One bright spot was that she had joined the Houston Federation of Teachers union for the first time before the start of school this year and had already talked with her union rep.

A group of parents at Cage Elementary and Chrysalis — they share the campus and principal with Chrysalis — have planned a protest at 7:30 a.m. Monday about what happened Friday and the NESA program in general. Parent Mayra Lemus echoed the bewilderment of many when she pointed out that Cage has been an A level Blue Ribbon School, so why were the more rigid educational approaches that are part of NES instituted there.

Naturally enough, given the times in which we live, someone recorded part of Martinez’s speech.

Carr said when she asked again for an answer to her questions, Martinez walked toward her saying “You can leave. You can leave. You can leave.”

In her written reprimand to Carr, Martinez wrote that the science teacher had “acted in a highly unprofessional manner” in the meeting and was “insubordinate.” According to Martinez, Carr yelled during the exchange and talked over her. Carr insists that it was Martinez who did the yelling.

“As a result, I will move forward with an immediate recommendation to terminate your contract effective 9/16/2023,” Martinez wrote. She also notified Carr that she was not allowed on the Cage/Chrysalis campus for any reason and that she would have to make arrangements to have her personal items picked up after 5:30 p.m.

“If you’re one of those teachers who don’t want to do the model, that is fine. But you will not be here,” Martinez had told teachers assembled Friday. She gave them the weekend to think it over, but later that was shortened to 6 p.m. Sunday.

Categories Corporate Reform, Discipline, Disruption, Education Industry, Houston, State Takeover, Teachers and Teaching, Texas

Gary Rubinstein: How Success Academy Gamed the US News Ranking System for “Best High Schools”

By dianeravitch
September 18, 2023 //
9

Gary RubInstein explains how Success Academy figured out how to game the high school ranking system of US News so that it’s high school would land on the list as one of the best high schools in New York City.

Gary begins:

In the latest U.S. News & World Report Best High School Ranking 2023-2024, the Success Academy High School was ranked the 102nd best high school in the country and the 12th best high school in New York State.

This is strange, he notes, because its graduation rate is one of the lowest in the state and the nation.

For all the schools in the top 80 in New York state, the second lowest graduation rate was 92%. The first lowest was Success Academy with a 75% graduation rate.

On this graduation rate statistic, Success Academy is actually in the bottom 10% in the state and also in the bottom 10% in the country. Nationally it is number 16,468 out of 17,680.

How is it possible that a high school with such a low graduation rate is ranked as 12th best in the state?

Open the link, and read Gary’s explanation.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Data, Education Industry, Fake News, Harlem Success Academy, New York City

Politico Advises Democrats to Act Like GOP on School Choice

By dianeravitch
September 18, 2023 //
26

In what has to be the worst, most unbalanced article about education in all of 2023, Politico urged Democrats to act like Republicans and promote school choice.

Politico’s education writer, Juan Perez Jr., interviewed Democrats who are well known as advocates for charter schools as proof that Democrats must support choice policies.

He begins:

MINNEAPOLIS — President Joe Biden’s education chief believes public schools are facing a “make or break moment.” The rescue plan coming from some Democrats, however, rings of policies that have already landed wins for conservatives.

Political skirmishes over classrooms have left Democrats underwater, or dead even, with Republicans among voters in a clutch of battleground states. And as they worried their party has not honed a strategy to reverse declining test scores, enrollment and trust in public schools, liberals watched Republican governors sign historic private school choice laws this year.

The GOP wins and a generational crisis in schooling has convinced some Democrats that the Biden administration needs to promote a liberal version of public school choice in the 2024 campaign, or risk losing votes.

“We’ve lost our advantage on education because I think that we’ve failed to fully acknowledge that choice resonates deeply with families and with voters,” said Jorge Elorza, the CEO of Democrats for Education Reform and its affiliate Education Reform Now think tank.

Please open the link. It doesn’t get any better. Not only does he quote DFER, the hedge managers group that does not support public schools, he also quotes Kerri Rodrigues of the “National Parents Union,” funded by the billionaire Waltons as a leader of the 2016 failed campaign to increase charters in Massachusetts.

Not exactly typical Democrats. More like charter advocates.

I sent Mr. Perez the following email:

Dear Mr. Perez,

I am writing to express my strong disagreement with your article today about Democrats and schools. Democrats will not improve their popularity by acting more like Republicans.

Republicans are on a mission to transfer public funds to nonpublic schools. Whenever vouchers have been put to a state referendum, they are defeated by large margins, as they were in Florida, Arizona, and Utah. The Republicans leaders of those states ignored the will of the voters and authorized vouchers.

In every state with vouchers, 70-80% are claimed by students who never attended public schools. Vouchers are a giveaway to families who already put their kids in private and religious schools.

Nearly 90% of the parents in this country send their children to public schools.

The most recent Gallup Poll showed that the overwhelming majority of parents are happy with their public schools.

For decades, Republicans have promoted school choice by attacking public schools.

The way forward for the Democratic Party is not to embrace GOP policies but to support the adequate and equitable funding of public schools and to stand against the privatization of public schools.

Volumes of research show that charter schools on average do no better than public schools, even though they admit whom they want and oust whoever has low scores or is disruptive. The Network for Public Education, in which I am involved, reports frequently on the high rates of closings by charter schools, as well as the scandals that occur almost daily due to embezzlement and other financial misdeeds.

Voucher students do not take state tests. Their schools are not accountable. Their teachers need not be certified. They may discriminate against students and families on grounds of religion, LGBT, or any other reason. They are not required to accept students with disabilities. Students who leave public schools for voucher schools typically fall behind their public school peers, and many drop out and return to public school.

Why in the world should Democrats support schools that are free to discriminate, free to hire uncertified and unqualified staff, managed by for-profit entities, and are not as successful as public schools?

That is bad political advice, which you got by interviewing people whose organizations advocate for charter schools (DFER and the so-called “National Parents Union”). The only pro-public school voices in your article were Randi Weingarten and Miguel Cardona, a union leader and the Secretary of Education.

Why didn’t you interview parents engaged in the fight to keep public education public? They are in every state, fighting billionaire-funded organizations like DFER and Moms for Liberty.

Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education, could introduce you to them. Why don’t you come to our 10th annual national conference, which will be held at the Capitol Hilton in DC on October 28-29. You would meet parents from every state who are working to preserve their public schools and keep them safe from entrepreneurs, grifters, corporate chains, and religious interests.

Diane Ravitch

You too can write him at jperez@politico.com.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Democracy, Democrats for Education Reform, Deregulation, Disruption, Education Industry, Elections, Republicans

New Hampshire: Republicans Increase Vouchers Despite Public Opposition

By dianeravitch
September 18, 2023 //
7

Gary Rayno of InsideNH writes about the expansion of the state voucher plan by Republicans in New Hampshire, who control both houses of the legislature and the governorship. Income requirements were raised. Enrollment increased. 75% of last year’s students never attended a public school. The biggest beneficiary is religious schools. When the voucher program was first proposed, public opposition was overwhelming. Governor Sununu and the legislators didn’t care.

Open the link to read it all.

Rayno writes:

The war over public education was on full display last week in the battle over PragerU’s financial literacy course and the State Board of Education’s 5-0 decision to approve it.

Despite opposition from the vast majority of speakers and letter writers, the board — stacked with school choice advocates by Gov. Chris Sununu — voted 5-0, with board chair Drew Cline abstaining.

While the controversial organization’s foot in the door was lamented by many after the vote, the on-line financial literacy course will not “cost” the state anything, which cannot be said about the biggest battleground in the education war, the Education Freedom Accounts program.

Last week, Kate Baker Demers, the executive director of the Children’s Scholarship Fund NH, which administers the program, told the freedom account oversight committee about 1,600 new students joined the program for this school year bringing the total number of students to around 4,200, but noted those were rough figures and the Department of Education should be posting the exact figures soon.

While the program is growing, only one major change was made the last legislative session, which increased the financial threshold from 300 percent of poverty to 350 percent.

That increases the threshold for the current school year from $59,160 for a family of two, to $69,020, and for a family of four from $90,000 to $105,000 annually.

Once a family qualifies for the program there are no future financial limits on earnings.

Demers told the oversight committee 200 plus students’ families qualified under the higher income threshold than would have under the former limit.

Last school year, the Department of Education data indicates 3,196 students participated in the program with the average grant per student $4,860 with a total cost of more than $15.5 million without administrative expenses.

The program for the first two years was about $24 million over budget as the department’s estimates of student participation was much lower than reality.

For this school year, there are about 1,000 more total students participating, Baker Demers said about 600 students left the program to either return to public schools, who graduated (111), moved away or for some other reason.

Along with the 1,000 increase in students, lawmakers increased the state’s basic adequacy grant from $3,787 per student to $4,100, and also increased the amount of additional aid for students in low-income families, and with special education needs.

That is likely to make the new average per pupil cost go over $5,200 per student.

That would increase the total costs not counting administrative costs from the scholarship fund organization — to about $22 million this year, an increase of about $7 million.

The state budget contains $30 million in each year of the biennium for the program, so total costs are likely to bump against the $60 million if there is much growth in the program next year.

Most programs with increases like this would be curtailed and limited with talk about halting runaway growth, but that does not appear to be a big concern of the majority party, which has pushed the program along with Education Commissioner Frank Edelblut and Sununu.

Democrats are the ones seeking to put guardrails around the program that draws its money from the Education Trust Fund, the source of all state education aid that is not the Statewide Education Property Tax….

The program was sold as an opportunity for low-income families to send their child to a program more appropriate for their learning skills than a public school.

But that has not been the biggest driver and represents a small percentage of the students enrolled.

About 75 percent of the participants in the past were enrolled in private schools — either religious or secular — and in home school programs.

Whether that figure remains in similar proportion is not something anyone will know until the Department of Education shares its data on its website.

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Extremism, Funding, New Hampshire, Religion, Vouchers
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