Joshua Cowen of Michigan State University tweeted the following information from official sources in Florida:
Oh would you look at that—70% of expanded Florida #schoolvouchers users were already in private school.
Another 18% entering kindergartners.
Only 13% came from public school.
@FLBaloney @FloridaPolicy @DianeRavitch
drive.google.com/file/d/1yyl80J…
NBCT high school teacher Justin Parmenter frequently tweets (X’s) about politics and schools in North Carolina. He has been reviewing the religious schools that take vouchers. Here is the latest.
Fayetteville Christian got $1.3m NC taxpayer dollars this year. They deny admissions to non-Christians and LGBTQ (whom they refer to as “deviate and perverted”).
I don’t want my public dollars going to institutions that can discriminate this way. #nced #ncga #ncpol
His Twitter handle is his name.
Peter Green learned that New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu awarded $6 million to a for-profit organization called Prenda, to establish microschools in the Granite State. It’s not as if Prenda has a track record of success.
He writes:
New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu just gave Prenda a whopping $6 million cut of the granite state’s pandemic school relief. It’s a relatively small slice (the full pile of money is $156 million), but it’s notably a larger per-pupil amount than the state gives in normal “adequate aid.” So who is Prenda, and what is the money for, exactly?
Prenda is a company riding the new microschools wave. Microschools are the next evolutionary strep in homeschooling. Says the Micro Schools Network website, “Imagine the old one-room schoolhouse. Now bring it into the modern era.” Or imagine you’re homeschooling, and a couple of neighbors ask if you’d take on their children as well. Or to look at it another way, imagine back to the beginning of a public system, only this time, your system would only include the students and families you wanted to include.
Microschools like to emphasize their modern awesomeness. From the Micro Schools Network site: While no two micro schools are identical, most share several common traits: a small student population, an innovative curriculum, place-based and experiential learning, the use of cutting-edge technology, and an emphasis on mastering or understanding material. The education that micro schools provide is highly personalized.”
The microschools movement seems marked by a lot of educational amateur columbussing–the breathless announcement of “discoveries” plenty of people already knew. Again, from the network’s website:
Teachers typically guide students’ curiosity rather than lecture at them. Instead of utilizing a fixed curriculum, they integrate subjects that students are passionate about into daily lesson plans and account for each student’s unique strengths, learning style, and existing knowledge.
Because nobody who works professionally in education ever thought of any of those things. Or you can check out a video from Prenda founder/CEO Kelly Smith in which he may tell you ecitedly about how cool it was running his own microschool and seeing students become lively and excited about something they had learned. The microschool movement seems to be very much excited about its discovery of the wheel….
Needless to say, Prenda CEO Kelly Smith is not an educator.
Prenda has said it wants to be the Uber of education, but that really only makes sense if Uber were a service where the state paid the company and then you drove (or “guided”) yourself to your destination. Prenda does exist in a grey area that allows it to escape virtually all oversight. In Arizona, they don’t need a charter, don’t have to get their curriculum approved, and are not subject to any kind of oversight or audits.
There’s no explanation out there of why Sununu decided to spend $6 million on Prenda of all things. Their administration claimed that the microschools “are particularly helpful to students who have experienced learning loss and will thrive with more individualized attention,” but when the individual attention comes from a guide with no educational training (but lots of caring) and a computer program, it’s unclear how helpful it will be. Last fall they had 400 pods of roughly ten each in action; there’s virtually no information about how well these things actually work.
And yet, New Hampshire is handing over a sweet $6 mill in federal dollars. Said Rep Mel Myler (D), member of the House Committee on Education:
Chris Sununu’s decision to use federal funds to advance his anti-public school agenda and help a shady for-profit organization, rather than providing public schools the resources they need to prepare for the next phase of the pandemic, could have serious consequences for our teachers and students.
Good luck to the children of New Hampshire.
And good luck to New Hampshire’s taxpayers, who usually expect recipients of public dollars to have some accountability.
Open the link to see who’s funding this latest “innnovation.”
Justin Parmenter, an NBCT-certified teacher in North Carolina, has been posting interesting facts on Twitter (X) about religious schools in North Carolina that accept voucher students. That is, the public is paying most or all of their tuition.
Here is the latest:
NC requires public school teachers to hold a license.
Durham, NC’s Mt. Zion Christian Acad receives public $ for vouchers. They require their teachers to demonstrate their relationship w/the Holy Spirit by speaking in tongues.
A license is optional. #nced #ncpol #ncga
@justinparmenter
Nancy Bailey criticizes the ongoing campaign to raise academic expectations and academic pressure on children in kindergarten. She traces the origins of this misguided effort on the Reagan-era publication “A Nation at Risk” in 1983.
Although the gloomy claims of that influential document have been repeatedly challenged, even debunked*, it continues to control educational discourse with its assertion that American schools are failing. “A Nation at Risk” led to increased testing, to the passage of George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind in 2002, to the creation of Barack Obama’s Race to the Top in 2009, to the release of the Common Core standards in 2010.
Despite nearly a quarter century of focus on standards and testing, policymakers refuse to admit that these policies have failed.
And nowhere have they been more destructive than in the early grades, where testing has replaced play. Kindergarten became the new first grade.
But says Bailey, the current Secretary of Education wants to ratchet up the pressure on little kids.
She writes:
In What Happened to Recess and Why are our Children Struggling in Kindergarten, Susan Ohanian writes about a kindergartner in a New York Times article who tells the reporter they would like to sit on the grass and look for ladybugs. Ohanian writes, the child’s school was built very deliberately without a playground. Lollygagging over ladybugs is not permitted for children being trained for the global economy (2002, p.2).
America recently marked forty years since the Reagan administration’s A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform which blamed schools as being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people.
Berliner and Biddle dispute this in The Manufactured Crisis: Myths, Fraud, and the Attack on America’s Public Schools. They state that most of these claims were said to reflect “evidence,” although the “evidence” in question either was not presented or appeared in the form of simplistic, misleading generalizations (1995, p. 3).
Still, the report’s premise, that public schools failed, leading us down the workforce path of doom, continues to be perpetuated. When students fail tests, teachers and public schools are blamed, yet few care to examine the obscene expectations placed on the backs of children since A Nation at Risk.
Education Secretary Cardona recently went on a bus tour with the message to Raise the Bar in schools. Raising the bar is defined as setting a high standard, to raise expectations, to set higher goals.
He announced a new U.S. Department of Education program, Kindergarten Sturdy Bridge Learning Community.
This is through New America, whose funders include the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Waltons, and others who want to privatize public education. Here’s the video, Kindergarten as a “Sturdy Bridge”: Place-Based Investments, describing the plan focusing on PreK to 3rd grade. This involves Reading by 3rd and the Campaign for Grade Level Reading.
Cardona says in the announcement:
Getting kindergarten right has to be top of mind for all of us, because what happens there sets the stage for how a child learns and develops well into their elementary years and beyond.
Ensuring that kindergarten is a sturdy bridge between the early years and early grades is central to our efforts both to Raise the Bar for academic excellence and to provide all students with a more equitable foundation for educational success. The kindergarten year presents an opportunity to meet the strengths and needs of young learners so they can continue to flourish in the years to come.
Raise the bar? Kindergarten is already the new first grade. What will it be now? Second? Third? Fourth? What’s the rush? How is this developmentally sound? One thing is for sure: there will still be no idle time for children to search for ladybugs.
Few bear the brunt of A Nation at Risk,as do early learners whose schools have been invaded by corporate schemes to force reading and advanced learning earlier than ever expected in the past.
If kindergartners aren’t doing well after all these years of toughness, higher expectations, and an excruciating number of assessments, wouldn’t it seem time to back off, instead of raising the bar higher?
Editor’s note:
*James Harvey and I will discuss the distortions contained in the “Nation at Risk” report at the Network for Public Education conference on Oct. 28-29 in Washington, D.C. James Harvey was a high-level member of the staff that wrote the report. He has written about how the Reagan-era Commissuon in Excellence in Education “cooked the books” to paint a bleak—but false—picture of American public schools. Please register and join us!
While looking over my site, I came across this post written in 2014.
It is as timely now as it was then. Reformers worked with communications specialists to develop language that conceals its true meaning.
For example, reformers today don’t want to improve public schools. They want to defund them. Some want to destroy them. They think that public money should go to anyone, any organization that claims they are educating young people. They are fine with funding religious schools. No doubt, they would have no objection to funding Satanic schools, for fairness sake.
These reformers believe in tight accountability for public schools, their principal, their teachers, their students.
They believe in zero accountability for anyone taking public money for nonpublic schools. In most states with vouchers, voucher schools do not require students to take state tests. Students can’t be judged by test scores as public school students are; their teachers can’t be evaluated by test scores. Their schools can’t be closed because of test scores. There are no test scores.
Teachers in public schools must be college graduates who have studied education and who are certified. Teachers in voucher schools do not need to be college graduates or have certification.
Hundreds of millions, maybe billions, now fund homeschooling. With well-educated parents, home schooling may be okay, although the children do miss the positive aspects of meeting children from different backgrounds, working in teams, and learning how to get along with others. But let’s face it: not all home schoolers are well-educated. Poorly educated parents will teach their children misinformation and limit them to what they know, and no more.
Then there is the blessing that the US Supreme Court gave to public funding for religious schools. The purpose of most religious schools is to teach their religion. The long word for that is indoctrination. We have a long history of not funding religious schools. But now all of us are expected to foot the bill for children to learn the prayers and rituals of every religion. I don’t want to pay taxes for someone else’s religion to be inculcated. I also don’t want to pay taxes to inculcate my own religion.
But the Supreme Court has step by step moved us to a point where the government’s refusal to pay for Catholic schools, Muslim schools, Jewish schools, and evangelical schools—with no regulation, no accountability, and no oversight—violates freedom of religion. That’s where we are going.
Ninety percent of the people in this country graduated from public schols. Those who sent their children to private or religious school paid their own tuition. That arrangement worked. Over time, we became the leading nation on earth in many fields of endeavor. Our education system surely had something to do with our national success.
I believe that people should have choices. Most public schools offer more curricular choices than charter schools, private schools, or religious schools. Anyone may choose to leave the public school to attend a nonpublic school, but they should not ask the taxpayers to underwrite their private choice.
The public pays for a police force, but it does not pay for private security guards. The public pays for firefighters, highways, beaches, parks, and many other public services. Why should the public pay for your decision to choose a private service?
Saddest of all, the current trend toward school choice will lower the overall quality of education. The children of the affluent who attend elite private schools will get a great education, although they will not get exposed to real life on their $60,000 a year campus. None of those campuses will get poor voucher kids because all they bring is a pittance.
We are now learning that most public schools are superior to most of the voucher schools. Many charter schools are low-performing.
On average, school choice will dumb down our rising generation. It will deepen social and religious divisions. It will not produce better education or a better-educated society. It will widen pre-existing inequalities.
Books have been and will be written about this fateful time, when we abandoned one of our most important, most democratic institutions. Libertarians and religious zealots have worked for years, decades, on this project. By convincing leaders of both parties to follow them, they have betrayed the rest of us. They have lost sight of the common good.
Those two words are key. The “common good.” With them, we as a society can conquer any goal, realize any ideal. Without them, we are reduced to squabbling tribes, cliques, factions. We are becoming what the Founding Fathers warned about.
If it’s not too late, that is the banner behind which we should rally: the common good. An understanding that we are all in the same boat, and we must take care of others.
Peter Greene wrote in Forbes about the results of the latest Gallup poll about schools. Bottom line: The extremist plot to dismantle public education has bamboozled the public, but not parents. The absurd conspiracy to portray teachers as groomers and pedophiles is undermining public trust in one of our most democratic institutions, the one that teaches us to live with others who are not just like us. As the extremist Chris Rufo said in his infamous speech at Hillsdale College, the road to universal school choice requires sowing distrust of the public schools.
Peter Greene writes:
Parental satisfaction with their local school is at an all-time high, while Americans’ satisfaction with K-12 quality is at a record-tying low, according to newly-released poll results from Gallup.
Starting 1999, the pollsters have asked Americans every August about their views of K-12 quality. There has always been a gap in the results: parents think their own schools are better than the national system as a whole, and non-parents think the national system is even worse. But this year the gap is especially huge.
Of parents of K-12 students, 76% consider themselves completely or somewhat satisfied with their oldest child’s education quality. But when it comes to the U.S. system as a whole, those parents are only 41% completely or somewhat satisfied (14% for completely). Americans as a whole are only 36% satisfied with K-12 education (8% for completely).
Only 9% of K-12 parents are completely dissatisfied with their children’s education. For the system as a whole, both the parents and the full group report 25% completely dissatisfied.
Educators have long suggested that this disparity is the result of negative coverage. That theory makes sense; you know your own child’s school first hand, but beyond that, you only know what you’re told second hand.
Nor have opponents of public education been shy about explaining their intent. In an April, 2022 speech at Hillsdale College entitled Laying Siege to the Institutions, school choice advocate Chris Rufolaid out the strategy succinctly:
To get universal school choice, you really need to operate from a place of universal school distrust.
This caps forty years of pressing home the message that U.S. public schools are failing. There was a time when supporting public schools was as politically innocuous as babies and apple pie. Now criticism of public education is the political norm, with accusations that teachers are pedophiles and groomers and porn peddlers are not unusual. And groups like Moms For liberty push the narrative that the majority of parents are themselves up in arms about the many failings of their districts.
As the poll shows, that’s not true.
If your child is in school, you see first hand the efforts of the district and the results for your child. But if you have no children at all, or your children’s school days were long ago, all you know about school is what you hear second hand, and that second hand space is dominated by voices declaring that U.S. education is failing.
The poll findings reflect that long repetitive negative messaging, and little else. After all, what would be a better way to gauge the quality of a particular restaurant: talk to people who just ate there, or the people who do PR for a rival eatery?
Reader Raymond F. Tirana posted a comment in which he described the end goal of the libertarian overhaul of school funding. In Kansas, Florida, and other red states, he says, they are trying to shift responsibility for funding and providing schools from the state to parents. This will not only exacerbate segregate but increase inequity. Of course, they will do this under false pretenses, claiming to “widen opportunities” and to “save poor children from failing schools.” Don’t believe them.
He wrote in a comment:
What will really happen once the state offloads all responsibility for educating children: Inevitably, the budget will be slashed each year (Kansas is already enacting a flat tax that will decimate the State’s ability to raise revenue – people remember Koch Industries is based in Kansas, right?) until the public schools are forced to fold and Kansas parents will be lucky to get any crumbs from their masters to be used toward the education of their kids. This was Milton Freidman’s fantasy, and we are close to seeing it realized in Kansas, Florida and other states, as parents sit by and let their children’s future be stolen from them.
During the last gubernatorial campaign, the Network for Public Education decided not to endorse Tony Evers. A friend in Wisconsin warned us that he would not be an ally. We endorsed a different candidate, our Wisconsin allies were disappointed in us, and Evers won. Now we know: Evers is not a reliable friend of public schools. He just agreed to a stunning hike in voucher spending.
Ruth Conniff, editor-in-chief of The Wisconsin Examiner, reviews the money and politics behind the campaign to fund private schools and defund public schools in Wisconsin. Despite the failure of school choice, the rightwing money keeps flowing to destroy public schools as the center of community life.
She writes:
Now that the new school year has started, I’ve been volunteering on the Madison East High School cross-country team, trying to keep up with 80 or so kids as they run through Madison’s east side neighborhoods and around the fields behind the school.
A former East runner myself, I’ve always been a Purgolder partisan. All three of my kids have been shaped by the down-to-earth culture of East High School, with its hallmark quirkiness, warmth and inclusive ethic that, to me, captures the social value of public school.
To be sure, there are glaring inequities among public schools in Wisconsin. These are on display to East kids whenever they travel for meets away from their school, with its aging facilities and World War II-era cinder track, to the groomed fields and gleaming stadiums of some of their competitors.
Still, the inequities among public schools in richer and poorer property tax districts are nothing compared to the existential threat to public education from a parallel system of publicly funded private schools that has been nurtured and promoted by a national network of right-wing think tanks, well funded lobbyists and anti-government ideologues.
For decades, Wisconsin has been at the epicenter of the movement to privatize education, pushed by the Milwaukee-based Bradley Foundation, a mega-wealthy conservative foundation and early backer of Milwaukee’s first-in-the-nation school voucher program. That program has expanded from fewer than 350 students when it launched in 1990 to 52,000 Wisconsin students using school vouchers today.
This year school privatization advocates scored a huge victory when Democratic Gov. Tony Evers, a longtime ally of public schools, agreed to a budget bargain that includes a historic bump in the amount of tax money per pupil Wisconsinites spend on private school vouchers. The rate went up from $8,399 to $9,874 for K-8 students and from $9,405 to $12,368 for high schoolers.
Not only is the amount of money taxpayers spend on private education increasing, in just a couple of years all enrollment caps come off the school choice program. We are on our way to becoming an all-voucher system.
This makes no sense, especially since, over the last 33 years, the school voucher experiment has failed to produce better outcomes in reading and math than regular public schools.
So why are we undermining our public school system to continue the voucher expansion?
School Choice Wisconsin would have you believe that vouchers for private school are an improvement on public schools. In a recent report the group claims that publicly funded private schools are more “cost effective” when you compare their academic results to the cost of educating each student. (Behind the scenes, meanwhile, the same group is pushing to prevent the state from publicly disclosing how much taxpayer money we’re spending on publicly funded private schools.)
There’s something fishy going on with the scientific-sounding document School Choice Wisconsin is promoting.
Using the word “report” to describe the document is “the kind of thing that drives school finance experts nuts,” Joshua Cowen, a professor of education policy at Michigan State University who has studied school vouchers for nearly two decades. told me on the phone after he read it.
“A serious version of this would give a range and talk about what would happen if you changed your assumptions,” Cowen said. For example, there are big differences in per-pupil spending across Wisconsin school districts, but the school choice lobby group came up with a “back of the envelope” ratio that doesn’t separate different areas with different costs. Nor does it make an apples-to-apples comparison between particular voucher schools and nearby public schools in the same district.
There’s a much bigger problem, though, says Cowen.
“If you took the report at its word,” he says, “it’s possible to achieve exactly what they’re describing simply by exiting the children who are the most expensive to educate.”
That’s significant, because Wisconsin voucher schools have a long record of expelling and counseling out expensive-to-educate students. The ACLU of Wisconsin called on the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate Wisconsin’s school voucher program for discriminating against children with disabilities in 2011, pointing to the very low number of special needs students in Milwaukee voucher schools.
Last May, Wisconsin Watch reported on how voucher schools continue to discriminate against LGBTQ students and kids with disabilities by expelling them or counseling them to drop out.
“Forget cost-effective,” says Cowen. “they’re just able to reject kids that are more costly to them.”
Meanwhile, touting their dubious record of success in Wisconsin, pro-voucher groups are using Wisconsin kids to push forward vouchers nationally, Cowen says.
“The foot in the door created by the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program in 1990 with 350 kids — that’s what created vouchers everywhere,” says Cowen. He notes a that the School Choice Wisconsin report credits a study by Corey DeAngelis, Ph.D. — a researcher to whom the report attributes a long list of obscure academic journal publications. What the report doesn’t note is that DeAngelis is a fellow at right-wing billionaire Betsy DeVos’ American Federation for Children, a Michigan-based pro-voucher group that has dumped money into Wisconsin elections. His American Federation for Children bio adds his ties to a bunch of other right-wing foundations: executive director at Educational Freedom Institute, an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, a senior fellow at Reason Foundation, and a board member at Liberty Justice Center — as well as a contributor to National Review and Fox News.
The idea that public schools have failed and the free market is the solution has been the drum beat from these groups for decades.
The results have not been good.
“The roughly zero difference between voucher students and non voucher students in Wisconsin — that is about as good as it gets nationally,” Cowen says. As unimpressive as the school voucher experiment has been in Wisconsin, things are better here than in other states that followed Wisconsin’s lead, where Cowen describes the outcomes as “catastrophic.”
“We don’t often see programs that reduce student achievement the way vouchers have in Ohio, Indiana, Louisiana, and DC,” he says.
The learning loss caused by what Cowen calls “subprime” voucher schools in church basements and strip malls, where “academics is not their priority,” has had “roughly twice the effect of COVID,” in reducing academic performance, he says.
Please open the link to finish reading this excellent article. As Conniff points out, it’s absurd for a rightwing advocacy group to describe its advertising as a “report.”
The Chicago media and choice supporters are whooping it up because Stacy Davis Gates, the head of the Chicago Teachers Union, sends her child to Catholic school. Big deal. It doesn’t matter where you choose to send your child. What matters is whether you demand that taxpayers pay for your private choice.
I was anxiously waiting for the six o’clock start of the U.S. Open semi final match between Coco Gauf and Carolina Muchova last night.
It was no disappointment.
But I had to wait for the end of the local news.
I thought local political reporter Mary Ann Ahern was going to have a stroke reporting that local Chicago Teachers Union President Stacey Davis Gates sends her kid to Catholic school.
Apparently Ahern has been on this story for days.
This morning the Chicago Sun-Times runs the story front page.
It’s a phony controversy.
Former CPS schools chief and perpetual losing candidate in every office he runs for penned an op-ed piece for the Tribune attacking Gates for her position against taxpayer funding of private and parochial schools.
That’s what this is all about.
It is no coincidence that this phony controversy over where Stacy Gates sends her son to school just happens to take place when the Illinois General Assembly is considering ending public money on private school vouchers.
Former mayor Lightfoot, Rahm Emanuel, the Obamas, and former secretary of education Arne Duncan all sent their kids to private schools.
Paul Vallas sent his kids to parochial school, as did ex-Mayor Richard M. Daley.
As do thousands of Chicagoans who are willing or able to afford it.
Me? I’m a public school grad as are my own kids and grandkids.
And I’m a retired public school teacher.
But my decision to send my children to public school and to teach in a public school was a personal one as is Stacy Gates’ decision to send her son to Catholic school.
The real issue is one of public policy: Should public money go to fund private and parochial schools?
Illinois and Chicago public schools are notoriously underfunded.
The legislature is now debating school funding.
So, suddenly CTU President Stacy Davis Gates sending her kid to a Catholic school is a headline and Mary Ann Ahern is spending days investigating this non-story.
That’s why I say it is a phony distraction.
Diane Ravitch's blog 