The National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado invited scholar Chris Lubienski of Indiana University to review a recent publication of EdChoice (the new name of the Milton and Rose Friedman Foundation), which summarizes what voucher advocates believe about the efficacy of vouchers. The publication is titled “The 123s of School Choice: What the Research Says About Private School Choice Programs, 2023 Edition.”
Not surprisingly, EdChoice concludes that vouchers are effective. Lubienski, however, is critical of the studies they include and those they exclude. In short, EdChoice engages in cherry-picking to bolster its cause.
While the report confidently asserts that school choice works, Lubienski says that the authors ignore recent studies that show the opposite to be true. For many students, vouchers are harmful.
If your district or state is under pressure to endorse vouchers, be sure to read this review.
In this post, Jan Resseger discusses Marilyn Robinson’s essay about the new cruel politics in Iowa, which appeared in the New York Review of Books. Iowans are “free” to work for less. Their children are “free”to attend religious schools at public expense and “free” to work at dangerous jobs. This new definition of freedom risks a future of harm to children and general ignorance.
Resseger encourages everyone to learn about the Iowa regression:
In Dismantling Iowa, in the November 2, 2023 New York Review of Books, Marilynne Robinson examines Governor Kim Reynolds’ Iowa as the microcosm of the conservative Republican attack on the rights of children and on the promise of K-12 and university education. Robinson is a novelist and retired professor of creative writing at the University of Iowa; she has been an artist-in-residence at a number of other colleges. Her style contrasts with the writing of policy wonks, but she comes to the same conclusions. Her comments are about today’s politics in Iowa but at the same time reflect on the politics of other states like Florida and Wisconsin and Ohio.
Robinson begins with a bit of history—the sudden rightward turn of states once known for their progressivism. She defines a “liberal” education, the foundational principle of progressive colleges established in the nineteenth century by abolitionists across the Midwest: “American higher education is of the kind historically called liberal, that is, suited to free people, intended to make them independent thinkers and capable citizens. ‘Liberal’ comes from the Latin word liber, meaning ‘free.’ Aristotle, a theorist on this subject of incalculable influence until recently, considered education a natural human pleasure, essential to the perfecting of the self, which he says it is in our nature to desire. Obviously when he taught there was no thought of economic utility that would subordinate learning to the purposes of others, to the detriment of individual pleasure or self-perfection. Training in athletics, music, then philosophy were to be valued because they are liberating.” “(W)e are in a period when the value of education is disputed. Regrettably, it has become expensive enough to be regarded by some as a dubious investment of time and money. Its traditional form and substance do not produce workers suited to the present or the future economy—as these are understood and confidently imagined by its critics.”
At the K-12 level, Robinson prefers free public education to school privatization exemplified by Iowa’s new publicly funded private school tuition vouchers. She examines the provision of education through the lens of equality, one of the principles our society has historically endorsed, but which Robinson believes Governor Reynolds and her legislature have sacrificed: “The governor has been very intent on achieving equality as she understands it for Iowa students. She and her legislature have provided a grant of public money for every child who is approved by the state to attend a private school, the money to be released when the child is accepted there… It should be noted that ‘private’ in this context can mean religious in some—or any—sense of the word. The constitutional issues that might arise from this use of public money seem to be of no concern. As for the character of these schools… the implicit promise seems to be that contact with ideas and people some find problematic can be avoided, that they can be and will be excluded on what are called religious grounds. So public money will be used to deprive some children of the kind of education the governor deems beneficial while other children are deprived of the education that comes with encountering a world not yet structured around polarization.”
Will the state protect the rights of students receiving state support for private school? “State governments can intervene in public schools, hector, threaten, and substantially control them. Private schools are too disparate to be the objects of sweeping denunciation…Now that state money will come into such private schools as there are in Iowa—forty-one of the ninety-nine counties don’t have even one—it will be interesting to see if the governor and her like have a comparable interest in interfering with them. These schools can be selective, which is a positive word now, though the honor and glory of public education is that it does not select… An element in all this is the fact that we have let the word ‘public’ seem to mean something like ‘second-rate.’ This is very inimical to the open and generous impulses that make a society democratic.”
Robinson explores some other legislative actions Iowa has undertaken supposedly to provide freedom from regulation for Iowa’s parents and children: “Consistent with this current ‘conservative’ passion for dismantling things, including gun laws… the governor and the legislature of Iowa are stripping away legal limits on child labor… All this is being done in the name of freedom. It is always fair to ask when rights are being claimed whether they impinge on others’ rights. The question certainly arises here. We know that the employment of children does not reliably bring out the best in employers… Migrant children, unprotected or worse, work under sometimes intolerable conditions… (I)t is jarring that Iowa children will… do work previously prohibited as dangerous, at hours previously prohibited as incompatible with their schooling. They are making the most of a new opportunity, according to the governor, to ‘develop their skills in the workforce.’ Not incidentally, they will also be easing the labor shortage from which the state suffers. The minimum wage in Iowa is $7.25. In Illinois it is $13.00, in Missouri $12.00, in South Dakota $10.80. Surely these figures suggest another possible solution to the shortage of workers, a better way to compete with surrounding states than to expose children to the possibility of injury, or to the costly lack of a high school diploma. There is much talk about choice in Iowa, but many children will find that, for them, important possibilities have been precluded.”
What about the culture wars in public schools? “(T)he Iowa governor and her legislature have launched a campaign to embarrass the public grade schools. Of course there is now great perturbation about what can or cannot be included in their libraries. This intrusion of the state government on traditionally more or less autonomous communities has the tenor of a moral crackdown. New laws have been enacted to bring unruly librarians to heel. Educational standards for new librarians have been lowered. The governor says, of course, that the legislation ‘sets boundaries to protect Iowa’s children from woke indoctrination.’ It is as if parents zipping up their five-year-old’s jacket feel a qualm of fear because of potential classroom exposure to sinister ideas, not because their state now allows permitless concealed and open carry.”
Oklahoma has a major charter scandal on its hands, which has not dampened the enthusiasm of the Republican Governor, legislators, and state superintendent for charters and vouchers.
EPIC Charter Schools opened in Oklahoma in 2011. It was the state’s first online school and was hailed for its innovative delivery of education. As early as 2013, authorities suspected financial irregularities. Not until 2019 did the public learned that EPIC was under state investigation for embezzling money and inflating its enrollment. The founders tried to block the investigation by insisting that they were a private business and could not be audited. The company collected tuition from the state and retained 10% of its revenues. The state auditor estimated that EPIC’s founders inappropriately diverted $22 million.
Founders of Epic Charter Schools are facing new charges of money laundering and presenting false claims to the state, bringing the total number of charges to 15.
Epic co-founders David Chaney and Ben Harris and Chief Financial Officer Josh Brock, were arrested and charged with a list of felonies in June 2022. Charges included racketeering, embezzlement of state funds, and obtaining money by false pretense.
The amount of diverted money so far totals $30 million. Republicans complain about public schools, but no district superintendent or principal has ever been accused of massive crimes like those of EPIC. Let it be noted that virtual charter schools have been the source of the biggest financial crimes.
Sean McManus of Australia, along with Jason Schrock of Long Beach, led a statewide charter school scheme from 2016 to 2019 in which they used a network of mostly online charter schools to defraud the state of approximately $400 million and used $50 million of that amount for personal use. They did so by falsely enrolling students and manipulating enrollment and attendance reporting across their schools to get more money per student than schools are supposed to, prosecutors said.
E.J. Dionne is a thoughtful columnist for the Washington Post. He writes here about the extremists on the left who defend the terrorism and butchery by Hamas. I repost his article because his views are similar to my own. I deplore the callousness and undemocratic policies of the Netanyahu regime. I support a two-state solution. I hope for the day that Israel and its neighbors are willing and able to collaborate to improve the standard of living for everyone in the region. And I deplore the horrific terrorism that Hamas inflicted on Israeli civilians of all ages on October 7. Hamas knew that their attack would provoke a ferocious response by Israel, and that the world would react with fury towards Israel. Hamas uses the Gazans as human shields.
I hope that Netanyahu is permanently disgraced by his failure to seek reconciliation and by the security lapses that allowed Hamas to slaughter civilians. I hope that everyone involved in the attack on Israel is captured and punished. I am deeply concerned about the humanitarian crisis in Gaza and pray for the safety of innocent Palestinians and for a swift end to the Army’s incursion. Above all, I pray for peace among the Israelis and their neighbors.
He writes:
A conversation I had last week with a progressive Jewish friend is, I think, representative of many discussions happening on the left. Most liberals are horrified and outraged over Hamas’s killings and kidnappings in southern Israel but also strongly support a Palestinian state and are deeply critical of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government.
My friend anguished over parts of the left — yes, they are very vocal online but a tiny minority of a broader movement — that not only failed to condemn Hamas’s atrocities but in some cases justified terrorist acts against innocents, many of them left-wing Israelis in kibbutzim who long for peace based on justice for Palestinians and Israelis alike. For my friend, this moral failure signaled that antisemitism had embedded itself in the wing of politics with which she has long identified.
To comment on this intra-left controversy risks distorting the political stakes, since there is a rare consensus in mainstream politics that Hamas’s terrorism was “an act of sheer evil,” as President Bidensaid in his powerful speechon Tuesday. Little pockets of sympathy for Hamas will have no effect on U.S. politics going forward. The important contrast is between the moral and strategic seriousness of Biden’s response and the petty, unhinged and self-involved rantings of Donald Trump. Maybe, just maybe, Americans pondering a vote for the former president will see more clearly that returning him to the White House would be an act of democratic suicide.
But liberals and supporters of the democratic left like to pride ourselves on being sensitive to injustice, decent in our instincts and capable of making distinctions. To rationalize the sadistic crimes of Hamas meets none of these standards. Doing so also undercuts the arguments that the vast majority on left wants to make about the future of Israel and Palestine.
It’s true that years of right-wing governance in Israel, the spread of settlements on the West Bank and the assault on democracy by the Netanyahu government have altered the balance of forces on the left. Older liberals such as Biden (and, yes, I’m in that camp) have an unshakable and ingrained sympathy for the survival of a Jewish homeland in Israel, while also empathizing with the injustices and suffering that Palestinians confront. We continue to support an increasingly distant two-state solution precisely because we want the Jewish homeland to be democratic and we want Palestinians to have a democratic government of their own.
But the destruction of Israel would be a moral catastrophe, and Hamas longs for that outcome.
Unlike the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Palestinian citizens of Israel, Hamas is explicitly antisemitic and will accept nothing short of the end of Israel. Netanyahu thought he could keep Hamas in check and ignore Palestinians, who, like so many of the Israelis slaughtered in the south, were willing to take risks for peace. The strategy of containing Hamas and privileging settlements on the West Bank has failed in an abysmal and tragic way.
The sharp turn to the right in Israel that Netanyahu engineered has undercut support for the country among younger Americans in the United States. Most of these increasingly vocal critics have resisted supporting Hamas, but the gut liberal sympathy for Israel has largely disappeared among those born after Biden’s generation and mine. If Hamas’s shameful attack has mostly restored consensus in the Democratic Party around the need to defend Israel against mass terrorism, the underlying opposition to Israel’s settlement policies and its refusal to engage with Palestinian demands for self-determination remains.
The shock of these traumatic events should shake everyone into a reassessment rooted in moral realism. As my Post colleague Max Bootargued last week, the imperative of accountability should lead eventually to Netanyahu’s ouster. Even as supporters of Israel stand up for its right to self-defense, analysts with long experience in the Middle East, including Thomas L. Friedman of the New York Times and The Post’s David Ignatius, warn of the dangers of overreach in Gaza. Having reported alongside them and learned from them during the war in Lebanon in the 1980s, I share their skepticism of grand military plans that promise to settle a conflict for good. We have seen too many such promises fail in the Middle East. And Biden was right in his speech to call attention to moral obligations that apply even in legitimate wars of self-preservation.
The left should not stop advocating on behalf of justice for Palestinians. And Israel’s center and left should not stop demanding that Netanyahu’s plans to undercut the country’s judiciary be shelved permanently. But terrorism will not create a more democratic Israel or lead to self-determination for Palestinians. The Israeli-Palestinian dispute is rife with ambiguities and conflicting moral claims. This cannot be said of what Hamas did. Its actions are, exactly as Biden said, unambiguously evil.
The New Republic convened a meeting to discuss Trump, book banning and the culture wars. Randi Weingarten described the attack on schools as a coordinated strategy to destroy public schools and promote vouchers. Edith Olmsted of The New Republic interviewed her. None of this is new to readers of this blog, but the American public needs to hear this message. Again and again.
Book Bans Are a Conservative Plot to Destroy Public Schools, Says Randi Weingarten, The teachers union head denounced the “extremist strategy,” which also includes voucher campaigns and manufactured outrage over critical race theory.
DANIEL BOCZARSKI/GETTY IMAGES FOR MOVEON
Teachers union head Randi Weingarten says that the campaign by conservatives to ban books isn’t about the books at all, but part of a broader strategy to destroy public schools—one that was supercharged by the pandemic.
“You take the agita and the anxiety that people had at Covid, that fear, and you combine it with a right wing who has wanted to kill public schools for years and take that money for vouchers, and you have the scenario we have,” Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, said Wednesday at The New Republic’s Stop Trump Summit.
Vouchers, which use public education dollars to fund private and religious school attendance, are just one pillar of the conservative campaign to “undermine, destroy, and defund” public schools, she said. The other two are book banning and manufactured outrage over critical race theory.
Weingarten pointed to conservative activist Chris Rufo and a comment he made at Hillsdale College, a Christian nationalist school, in which he admitted that focusing on these issues was all part of a master plan to promote universal vouchers: “To get to universal school choice, you really need to operate from a premise of universal public school distrust.”
In an interview with TNR after the event, Weingarten explained the “extremist strategy” Rufo and other conservatives have used to defund public schools. “The hook was trust. If you really create as much distrust as possible in public schooling, then parents will look at privatization as an option,” she said.
That’s where critical race theory comes in.
“[Rufo] tried to make a term that nobody knows so toxic, so that you can weaponize it and make fear,” she said. “Conversations about hard subjects became weaponized as indoctrination. Which is patently ridiculous, and dangerous.”
Race, as well as gender, is the subject conservatives have focused on in their campaigns to ban books in public schools and libraries.
“What [Republican Governor Ron] DeSantis is doing in the so-called ‘war on woke,’ is exactly part of their playbook—to make people afraid of books, and afraid of what we do in school,” Weingarten said. According to Pen America, Florida passed 15 “educational intimidation” bills in the last two and a half years.
The “parents’ rights” movement is made up of a loud minority, Weingarten said, and actively undermines what most parents want. “What we see in Florida is that 60 percent of the book banning has been done by 11 people,” she said.
The AFT has partnered with The New Republic in fighting back against such bans. TNR’s Banned Books Tour has been delivering thousands of banned books across the country this month, most recently in Florida.
The Texas Tribune reports on the blatant hypocrisy of State Commissioner of Educatuon Mike Morath. He used a sledgehammer on the Houston Independent School District because of one low-rated school (whose rating improved before Morath acted). But he allows failing charter schools to expand with no corrective action. His heart belongs to Governor Greg Abbott and the charter industry. His hostility to public schools, attended by 90% of Texas students, is obvious. The takeover of HISD was vengeful and partisan, motivated by politics, not the well-being of students.
The story was written by Kiah Collier and Dan Keenahill on behalf of THE TEXAS TRIBUNE AND PROPUBLICA.
In June, Texas Commissioner of Education Mike embarked on the largest school takeover in recent history, firing the governing board and the superintendent of the Houston Independent School District after one of its more than 270 schools failed to meet state educational standards for seven consecutive years.
Though the state gave Houston’s Wheatley High School a passing score the last time it assigned ratings, Morath charged ahead, saying he had an obligation under the law to either close the campus or replace the board. He chose the latter.
Drastic intervention was required at Houston ISD not just because of chronic low performance, he said, but because of the state’s continued appointment of a conservator, a person who acts as a manager for troubled districts, to ensure academic improvements.
When it comes to charter school networks that don’t meet academic standards, however, Morath has been more generous.
Since taking office more than seven years ago, Morath has repeatedly given charters permission to expand, allowing them to serve thousands more students, even when they haven’t met academic performance requirements. On at least 17 occasions, Morath has waived expansion requirements for charter networks that had too many failing campuses to qualify, according to a ProPublica and Texas Tribune analysis of state records. The state’s top education official also has approved five other waivers in cases where the charter had a combination of failing schools and campuses that were not rated because they either only served high-risk populations or had students too young to be tested.
Only three such performance waivers had been granted prior to Morath, who declined numerous requests for comment. They had all come from his immediate predecessor, according to the Texas Education Agency.
One campus that opened because of a waiver from Morath is Eastex-Jensen Neighborhood School, which is just 6 miles north of Wheatley High School. Opened in 2019, Eastex didn’t receive grades for its first two years because the state paused all school ratings due to the adverse impacts of the pandemic. In 2022, the last time the state scored schools, Eastex received a 48 out of 100, which is considered failing under the state’s accountability system. The state, however, spared campuses that received low grades from being penalized for poor performance that year.
“The hypocrisy here seems overwhelming,” said Kevin Welner, an education policy professor at the University of Colorado Boulder. “This is the same education commissioner who justified taking over the entire Houston school district based largely on one school’s old academic ratings.”
Open the link to read more about Mike Morath’s hypocrisy. Texas Republicans are determined to turn the state into a playground for edupreneurs. If only the parents of public school students voted against them, they would all be out of office. Governor Abbott and his appointees take instructions from the evangelical billionaires, Farris Wilks and Tim Dunn.
For several years, vendors of Education technology have promoted the bizarre idea that learning on a computer is “personalized,” as compared to human interaction with a teacher. Tech leaders like Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates believed that technology would make it possible to accelerate learning and raise test scores by standardizing teaching.
Matt Barnum reports in Chalkbeat that Zuckerberg’s efforts failed. He and his wife Priscilla Chan via their CZI Initiative realize that their support of Summit Learning failed. However they are now betting on artificial intelligence.
What’s clear is that they do not trust teachers.
Barnum begins:
Several years ago, Mark Zuckerberg had grand designs for American schools.
The Facebook founder and his wife, pediatrician Priscilla Chan, poured well over $100 million into an online platform known as Summit Learning that initially aspired to be in half of the nation’s schools. In 2017, Zuckerberg suggested that technology-based “personalized learning” could vault the average student to the 98th percentile of performance.
Fast forward to this summer: The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the couple’s philanthropic arm, laid offdozens of staff on its education team and announced a shift in strategy. “Our understanding of what’s possible in the world of education — and in our world more generally — has changed,” Sandra Liu Huang, CZI’s head of education, wrote in an August blog post. “And so, at CZI, our education efforts must change too. Navigating these changes is humbling and challenging, but ultimately, necessary.”
It was an acknowledgement that the company’s prior education strategy had fallen short of its hopes. Through a spokesperson, Huang declined an interview request, but noted in her blog post that the company is continuing its work in education, albeit with a different strategy. “This moment demands not just investment but innovation — and that’s why we are building a team of experts and partners to identify opportunities where technology and grantmaking can drive coherence,” she wrote.
CZI’s shift in approach marks something of a coda to an era when various advocates and funders believed that computer-based “personalized learning” could dramatically improve education. Summit, CZI’s pet project, has not spread as far as once hoped, and there’s little evidence that it or similar efforts have led to the large learning gains that Zuckerberg envisioned. This gap between ambitions and results underscores the difficulty of using technology to dramatically improve America’s vast system of decentralized schools.
“People keep hoping that our technologies are the Swiss Army knives or steamrollers that they can do everything,” said Justin Reich, a professor at MIT and author of a book on the limits of technology in education. “Instead, our best technologies are very particularly shaped ratchet heads and the landscape of education is millions of bolts.”
Please open the link and read the rest of this fascinating article. CZI has not given up on technology. Imagine if they had spent those millions on health clinics in schools. Or anything else human-based.
Charter school executives in Philadelphia are very well compensated indeed, write the leaders of the Alliance for Philadelphia Public Schools, Lisa Haver, Deborah Grill, and Lynda Rubin.
They write:
Three of the six most highly paid administrators identified in String Theory’s most recent tax information are members of the Corosanite family: Chief Executive Officer Angela Corosanite, Chief Information Officer Jason Corosanite, and Director of Facilities Thomas Corosanite. Their total salary and compensation, as listed in the charter management organization’s 2021 IRS 990, comes to almost $900,000. String Theory manages only two schools in the city, but the company has six administrators making over $100,000 in salary and compensation. In addition, each school has its own CEO. Why does a network of only two schools need so many highly-paid administrators?
There are no guidelines for charter compensation, that is, no schedule of salary steps as there is for district principals and administrators. Ad Prima charter, a small charter school with 600 students, has a CEO, a principal and a “site director” on staff, all paid over $100,000.00 in salary and compensation. Community Academy charter has a CEO, deputy CEO, a Chief Academic Officer and deputy CAO. Pan American, an elementary school with 750 students, lists eight administrators. Folk Arts Cultural Treasures (FACTS), on the other hand, has one administrator making over $100,000. Global Leadership Academy is a two-school network. Each school has its own CEO–one making more than the district’s superintendent, the other making slightly less. GLA’s principal made over $11,000 more than a district principal with seven years or more of principal experience.
The question is: What does a charter CEO do? In charter schools with a principal, school leader, several assistant principals and a cultural director, what duties are left for a CEO? One superintendent oversees the 217 public schools in the School District of Philadelphia, at a salary of $335,000. Based on most recent federal tax information, the total salary and compensation paid to the city’s charter CEOs is over $10 million. The individual boards of each charter school, or the board of a charter chain, decides on the salary of the CEO and other administrators. There is no uniform system that takes into account years of experience. Charter schools are publicly funded; all charter administrators are paid with tax dollars.
How can charter schools afford so many highly-paid administrators? A 2016 report by City Controller Alan Butkovitz showed that the district spends more of its per-pupil funding on classroom instruction than charters, who spend a higher percentage on administration.
Please open the link and read the rest of the report, which lists the compensation at every charter school in Philadelphia.
In what way is it efficient to pay so many executives?
After years of attacking public schools and their teachers, after years of demanding public funds for private choices, the discontented right found another approach to getting the kind of schools they want by adopting the curriculum provided by Hillsdale College, a small Christian college in Michigan. No more focus on racism and the other dark chapters in American history, past and present. Grievance is gone; what remains is an updated version of the American story taught in the 1950s. It relies, in large part, on the so-called 1776 curriculum commissioned by Trump in the last days of his term, which relied on Hillsdale advisors. Kathryn Joyce wrote in Salon about this development. She is one of the few journalists who has devoted time to understanding the rightwing effort to undermine or control public schools.
Recently the Network for Public Education and the Education Law Center sponsored a zoom conversation with Nick Surgey. Nick is an experienced investigative journalist who works with an organization called Documented, which digs into the Dark Money groups undermining Public schools and other democratic institutions. Nick has done the legwork that identified the money and people behind the home schooling movement, as well as the rightwing Alliance for Defending Freedom. He has worked with the Center for Media and Democracy and other pro-democracy organizations.
This is a discussion you should definitely tune into.
