Archives for category: Education Industry

ProPublica has been working with The Texas Tribune to cover politics–but especially education–in the Lone Star State. In their latest report, they discovered that three charter districts had some of the highest paid superintendents in the state, despite the poor performance of their schools. In some of them, teachers were low-paid and teacher turnover was unusually high.

Three charter school superintendents who are among the highest paid in Texas are overseeing some of the lowest-performing districts in the state, newly released records show. One of them is at risk of closure by school year’s end.

An investigation by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune previously revealed that board members at Valere Public Schools had paid Superintendent Salvador Cavazos up to $870,000 annually in recent years, roughly triple what it reported publicly to the state and on its website. Two other districts the newsrooms covered, Faith Family Academy and Gateway Charter Academy, also substantially underreported the compensation paid to their top leaders.

The state determined that all three of those districts have had failing or near-failing levels of performance in recent years. The ratings, released last month by the Texas Education Agency, also show that charter schools make up the majority of the districts that have repeatedly had “unacceptable” performance, though they account for a small portion of public schools across Texas. The agency published two years’ worth of accountability ratings for the state’s public and charter schools that were previously undisclosed due to litigation.

Faith Family Academy, a Dallas-area district with two campuses, was one of eight charter school districts that are now on track to be shut down at the end of the school year after receiving a third consecutive “F” rating. Board members paid superintendent Mollie Purcell Mozley a peak annual compensation of $560,000 in recent years to run the district, which has about 3,000 students.

Education experts said they were troubled that the underperforming charter networks the newsrooms identified would invest so heavily in superintendent compensation instead of areas with a more direct impact on student achievement.

“I don’t know what metrics the board’s reviewing to say that this is performance that would warrant this amount of pay,” said Toni Templeton, a research scientist at the University of Houston. “What we know from academic literature is when you put resources closest to the students, the students benefit the most. And the superintendent’s position is important, but it’s pretty far from the kids.”

The state’s “three strikes” law mandates that the state education agency automatically shut down a charter school district that has repeatedly failed to meet performance standards.

School leaders have a 30-day window to contest the ratings with the state education agency if they believe there were errors. The state will then release final scores in December that will determine whether failing campuses will be forced to close.

Keri Bickerstaff has sent four of her five children to school at Faith Family Academy but pulled most of them out after prekindergarten. She said she was shocked and saddened when she learned about the district’s payments to Purcell Mozley from ProPublica and the Tribune. At her children’s school in Waxahachie, south of Dallas, Bickerstaff observed crowded classrooms and felt that the teachers lacked experience and left the school at high rates. She was surprised that the superintendent had been paid so highly.

“I was under the impression that funding was an issue,” Bickerstaff said in an interview.

Purcell Mozley and Faith Family Academy did not respond to repeated requests for comment, but in an Aug. 14 letter to parents and staff posted on the school’s website, she stated that the district planned to appeal the state’s rating. “While this rating is disappointing on its face,” Purcell Mozley wrote, “we want our community to know that we have conducted a thorough review of our performance data — and we strongly believe that our true score for 2025 reflects a solid C rating.”

Another small charter district in Dallas, Gateway Charter Academy, has two strikes against it after receiving a combination of “F” and “D” ratings over the last three school years. If the district receives another low score next year, it too will be forced to shutter its two campuses that serve around 600 students.

State education records show Gateway has been plagued by teacher turnover, with as many as 62% of its instructors leaving the district in recent years. The district has paid teachers about $10,000 less than the statewide average while paying superintendent Robbie Moore more than $426,000 in 2023, according to tax records— nearly double his base salary of $215,000.

Gateway and Moore did not respond to requests for comment. After it was originally contacted by the newsrooms about the previously undisclosed compensation, the district posted a new document on its website that lists an undated $75,000 bonus for Moore.

While there are no state regulations limiting how much school districts can pay their superintendents, state lawmakers have tried to change that for years. Lawmakers filed at least eight proposals during the most recent regular legislative session that would have constrained administrators’ pay and severance packages at public and charter schools, but none passed. That included a bill authored by Sen. Adam Hinojosa, a Republican from Corpus Christi, that would have capped a superintendent’s income to twice that of the highest-paid teacher in the district.

Hinojosa filed another bill during a special session that began in July that would have allowed superintendents to earn up to three times as much as the top-paid teachers when their district scored an “A” rating. But if a district earned a “D” or “F” rating, a superintendent’s income could not exceed that of the top-paid instructors. The measure failed to reach a committee for discussion.

“If teachers are held accountable for student performance, administrators should be too,” Hinojosa said in a statement.

Although Valere received a “D” rating for the past two years, its board has compensated Cavazos hundreds of thousands of dollars annually on top of his base salary, making him among the highest-paid public school leaders in the country, the ProPublica and Tribune investigation found…

Holding Charter Schools Accountable

Texas’ A-F rating system was established in 2017 and uses metrics such as standardized test scores to grade each district and campus on student achievement, school progress and success with closing socioeconomic achievement gaps.

The new ratings come after a lengthy legal battle between Texas public school districts and the TEA over changes to the education agency’s ratings system. Districts twice sued Mike Morath, the TEA commissioner, to stop the release of the scores after the agency announced plans to revamp the system in 2023. The lawsuits successfully kept the scores from public view until this spring, when a state appeals court overturned a ruling in favor of the districts, setting the stage for the release of performance ratings for the 2022-23 school year in April, and ratings for the two most recent school years in August after a separate decision by the same appeals court.

The ratings affect charter schools and traditional public schools in different ways. A traditional public school district can potentially face state intervention after one of its campuses receives five years of failing ratings. The new TEA records show that there are five such districts at risk. By comparison, the state is required to automatically shut down an entire charter district that receives three years of failing scores.

Supporters often point to the “three strikes” law as evidence that charter schools are held to a higher level of performance standards than public schools.

The regulation, which was introduced in 2013, is one of many guardrails that has been put in place since charter schools were authorized in the 1990s with far less state oversight than public schools. Charter schools, for example, were originally shielded from the state’s nepotism and conflict-of-interest laws until reports of leaders engaging in self-dealing and profiteering gradually prompted lawmakers to act.

Brian Whitley, a spokesperson for the Texas Public Charter Schools Association, said that Texas holds charter schools “more accountable, more quickly” when they don’t meet performance expectations, including through automatic closures.

Private schools are set to receive a similar level of protection from the laws that govern how traditional public schools spend their money: Under a landmark school voucher bill the Legislature passed this spring, the state plans to direct at least $1 billion public dollars to private education in the coming years. Earlier this month, an investigation by ProPublica and the Tribune revealed more than 60 instances of nepotism, self-dealing and conflicts of interest at Texas private schools that likely would have violated state laws had the schools been public.

These sorts of conflicts of interest and familial business entanglements have been common among at least two of the three charter districts that have made outsize payments to their leaders.

Records show that Gateway Charter Academy has hired employees related to administrators, including Moore. According to Gateway’s 2017 financial audit, Moore also married an “instructional coach” in the district that year. Records show that the coach’s compensation increased from $75,000 to $221,000 during the 2022-23 school year, after she was promoted to director of curriculum development. She did not respond to requests for comment.

At Faith Family Academy, Gene Lewis, one of the founding board members who hired Purcell Mozley and reviews her performance, is also her uncle, according to bond documents. Lewis’ wife also sits on the board of a separate entity that oversees the district, according to Faith Family Academy’s tax filings.

Lewis and his wife did not respond to requests for comment.

Categories Administrators, superintendents, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Ethics, Funding, Texas

Wyoming: The Fight Against Vouchers Continues

By dianeravitch

September 12, 2025 //

Bill Phillis of the Ohio Coalition for Equity and Adequacy in Funding reported on the continuing fight to stop universal vouchers in Wyoming. Every student in the state is eligible for a voucher, regardless of family income. Parents are concerned that their child may be excluded by private schools, such as those with special needs. Parents and teachers sued to block the program, based on the state Constitution. A judge just approved their request to sue.

Phillis writes:

School vouchers have never been supported by a majority of the people of any state in a statewide ballot. Neither are school vouchers currently being approved by the courts. Wyoming judge denies state’s motion to dismiss. In June, EdChoice vouchers in Ohio were declared unconstitutional by Franklin County Court of Common Pleas Judge Jaiza Page.

All states have constitutional provisions for public education. (After the Civil War no state could be admitted into the Union without a constitutional provision for public education.) The plain language of state constitutions require public education available for all, but not private education as a state funding responsibility. Private schools should not expect to be supported by public funds.

Judge denies Wyoming’s motion to dismiss school voucher lawsuit

Laramie District Court judge finds plaintiffs do have standing to claim harm in lawsuit against the state’s new school-choice program, which remains in limbo.

by Katie Klingsporn

In the latest blow to Wyoming’s controversial universal school voucher program, a judge has denied the state’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit challenging it.

The Steamboat Legacy Scholarship Act program has been dogged by constitutionality concerns since well before it was enacted into law in March. Educators and parents filed suit in June, and Wyoming’s attempts to advance the voucher payments in the face of the lawsuit have repeatedly failed.

The program is designed to offer Wyoming families $7,000 per child annually for K-12 non-public-school costs like tuition or tutoring. The scholarship would also offer money for pre-K costs, but only to income-qualified families at or below 250% of the federal poverty level. It was passed amid a wave of school-choice laws, particularly in Republican-led states like Wyoming.

However, Wyoming’s constitution makes public education a paramount state commitment. Critics of the universal voucher program say spending public funds on private education violates several of the state’s constitutional obligations and have long warned the matter would end up in the courts.

So far, state gambits to circumvent legal challenges have been unsuccessful. Laramie County District Court Judge Peter Froelicher granted a temporary injunction pausing the voucher program in June, then extended that injunction in July. More recently, he denied a request by Wyoming Superintendent of Public Instruction Megan

Degenfelder and others to let the law take effect while they challenge the injunction.

In the newest decision, issued Aug. 28, Froelicher denied the state’s motion to dismiss, determining that plaintiffs do have standing to sue. In the order, Froelicher also determined that Wyoming’s State Treasurer Curt Meier, who the lawsuit names, is a valid defendant. The state asked that Meier be dropped from the suit.

Degenfelder, who championed the voucher program as a major school-choice win, has expressed dismay over the lawsuit’s impacts on families who had already applied and were awaiting funds to pay for costs like textbooks, tutoring or private school uniforms for the 2025-26 school year.

Rocky road

The universal voucher program represents a major expansion of the state’s 2024 education savings accounts, which offered money to income-qualified students for private school tuition or homeschool costs.

The 2025 bill transformed that program by stripping income qualifications so that the $7,000 would be available to everyone.

The bill ignited one of the hottest debates of the recent session. It sparked a deluge of feedback, both from school-choice proponents and critics who called it unconstitutional.

Lawmakers transformed it before it passed out of the Legislature; they brought 26 amendments, including 11 that passed. They also repeatedly questioned the constitutionality of the expanded program. Many urged colleagues to hold off and allow the existing education savings account program to roll out before changing it so drastically. Those requests did not sway the body.

The new program’s application opened on May 15, attracting nearly 4,000 student applications. But in June, nine parents of school-aged children and the Wyoming Education Association, which represents more than 6,000 of the state’s public school employees, sued Degenfelder, Meier and the state of Wyoming.

A previous Wyoming Supreme Court ruling on education funding “found that ‘education is a fundamental right’ in Wyoming, that ‘all aspects of the school finance system are subject to strict scrutiny,’ and that ‘any state action interfering with [the right to equal educational opportunity] must be closely examined before it can be said to pass constitutional muster,’” the lawsuit reads.

This voucher program, plaintiffs assert, does not pass that muster. That’s because “the state cannot circumvent those requirements by funding private education that is not uniform and that meets none of the required state constitutional standards for education.”

In addition, the program is unconstitutional because it violates constitutional language that allows the state to give public funds only for the necessary support of the poor, the lawsuit argues. Instead, it’s an example of “gratuitously funneling public funds to private individuals and entities, regardless of whether they are poor and regardless of whether that support is necessary.”

Parents who signed onto the case oppose the voucher plan due to the harmful impact it will have on their children, according to the lawsuit, “because private schools receiving voucher funding can refuse admission to children with disabilities … and are not required to provide special education services or comply with [individualized education programs].” They are also concerned that private schools can refuse to admit and educate children who identify as queer, transgender or non-binary.

The voucher program will also negatively impact funding at public schools that the parents’ children attend, the lawsuit says.

By rejecting the state’s motion to dismiss, Froelicher accepts “the individual harms alleged in the complaint as true,” according to his order.

What’s next

The Wyoming Attorney General’s office in July appealed Froelicher’s preliminary injunction preventing the Wyoming Department of Education from transferring or paying out funds to participants of the program.

In a July update on the Wyoming Department of Education’s site, Degenfelder said she is grateful the attorney general appealed to the Wyoming Supreme Court, but informed the public that “the appeals process is still extensive, and, unless the injunction is stayed while the appeal proceeds, may cause the program funds to be unavailable for most of the 2025-26 school year.”

Katie Klingsporn

Katie Klingsporn reports on outdoor recreation, public lands, education and general news for WyoFile. She’s been a journalist and editor covering the American West for 20 years. Her freelance work has… More by Katie Klingsporn

Categories Education Industry, Resistance, Vouchers, Wyoming

Pastors for Texas Children Speak Out Against the Harm of Standardized Testing

By dianeravitch

September 3, 2025 //

Our allies at Pastors for Texas Chuldren fought courageously against the passage of voucher legislation but were ultimately defeated by Governor Abbott’s plan to oust moderate Republicans from the legislature.

Funded by Pennsylvania billionaire Jeff Yass and Texas billionaires Farris Wilks and Tim Dunn, both of whom are Christian pastors and nationalists, Abbott managed to defeat the moderate Republicans who worked with Democrats to beat vouchers.

Now the Pastors have set their sights on minimizing the damage done to children by standardized testing. For many years, Texas legislators have been obsessed with test scores. They never consider the harms done by the tests to students, teachers, and the love of learning.

The Pastors did, and they issued this statement:

At Pastors for Texas Children, we believe every child is a precious gift of God, created with unique abilities and potential. Yet for decades, our public schools have been forced to rely on standardized testing as the primary measure of learning and progress. These tests were designed with good intentions, but in practice, they have done real harm to our children, our teachers, and our schools.

Standardized testing narrows the curriculum, reducing education to what can be measured on a multiple-choice exam. It discourages creativity, critical thinking, and the joy of learning. Instead of nurturing a child’s individual talents, testing forces them into a one-size-fits-all mold. For many students, especially those from vulnerable communities, these tests add unnecessary stress and stigma, often labeling children by a single score rather than recognizing their God-given worth.

Teachers, too, are burdened. Their ability to teach with passion and flexibility is restricted when their professional value is tied to test results. Entire classrooms are transformed into test-prep factories, rather than places of discovery, curiosity, and growth. Public schools—the foundation of our democracy—are weakened when accountability is reduced to a number on a page.

HB 8 purports to mitigate the damages of standardized testing and fails. The version advancing out of the Senate is even worse. There is still time to fix this bill, but the clock is ticking. Call your State Representative now and tell them to remove high stakes from these assessments and strip TEA of its authority to administer them.

Our faith calls us to see children as whole beings, not data points. We must move toward assessments that encourage true learning, affirm student progress, and honor the dedicated work of educators. Texas children deserve classrooms that inspire and equip them, not testing regimes that drain and demean them.

We urge you to join us in advocating for an end to the overreliance on standardized testing in Texas public schools. Let us stand together for education that celebrates the fullness of every child’s potential.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Education Industry, Extremism, Freedom to Learn, Real Education, Standardized Testing, Students, Texas, Vouchers

Congress Slashed Funding for Public Schools. They Lied! Protest!

By dianeravitch

September 2, 2025 //

The Network for Public Education Action sent out the following alert. Please use the form to send a letter to your members of Congress.

Dear Friend of Public Schools.

They said they wouldn’t cut Title I. They lied.

Majority House leaders just dropped their FY26 education bill, slashing $12.1 billion (15%) in K-12 funding for public education. It guts the very programs that keep our public schools running — while boosting charter start-up/expansion to $500,000,000.

What they’re cutting:

Title I: –27% slashed — funding that provides targeted education services like remedial reading to students with maximum impact in high-poverty schools in cities and rural communities.
English Language Acquisition Grants: Gone.
Title II-A (teacher training & support): Eliminated.
Full-Service Community Schools: Zeroed out.

SEND YOUR EMAIL NOW

And their justification?

“Despite outsized investment, America’s public schools continue to fail children and families.”
That’s what they think of your neighborhood school.

Why this matters

Cuts of this magnitude will crowd classrooms, strip student supports, widen inequities, and push more schools into crisis — especially in rural and high-need communities.

Do these two things now

1) Email your Representative:

Use our action link to send a pre-written message in 15 seconds: Send your email now.

2) Call your Representative:

Find your member’s phone number here.
Below is a script you can use right now:
“Hello, I’m a constituent from [Representative’s name] district. I’m calling to urge the Representative to oppose the House education funding bill that cuts Title I by 27% and reduces K12 funding by 15%. These cuts will harm students and teachers in our district. Please vote NO and support full funding for public schools — not half-a-billion in funding for charter expansion while our classrooms are being cut. Thank you.”

Now spread the word

Forward this alert to friends, family, and colleagues.
Post on social media (copy/paste):
- Congress: Hands off Title I. Oppose cuts that gut public schools while funding charter expansion. Act now:https://actionnetwork.org/letters/they-said-they-would-not-cut-title-i-they-lied-k12-ed-budget-slashed-by-the-house/
- They promised no Title I cuts. Now it’s –27%. Tell your Rep to vote NO on the House ed bill. Act now: https://actionnetwork.org/letters/they-said-they-would-not-cut-title-i-they-lied-k12-ed-budget-slashed-by-the-house/
- Public funds should support public schools—not slash classrooms while sending $500M to charter growth. Speak up:https://actionnetwork.org/letters/they-said-they-would-not-cut-title-i-they-lied-k12-ed-budget-slashed-by-the-house/
- House Budget follows Project 2025 playbook slashing Title I funding–defunding urban and rural schools. Act Now: https://actionnetwork.org/letters/they-said-they-would-not-cut-title-i-they-lied-k12-ed-budget-slashed-by-the-house/
- Do not wait. Congress is back today (September 2). Let’s flood their inboxes and phone lines. The House’s education funding bill is a betrayal of America’s children.

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Thanks for all you do! You can share this email with this link: https://npeaction.org/act-now-k12-budget-slashed-by-the-house/

Carol Burris

Network for Public Education Action Executive Director

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Evil, Extremism, Funding, Resistance

Jennifer Berkshire: Is Public Education Over?

By dianeravitch

September 2, 2025 //

Fifteen years ago, I wrote a book about the the danger that school choice and testing posed to public schools. Its title: The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education. I named a few of the billionaires funding the attacks on public schools, teachers, and unions–Bill Gates, Eli Broad, and the Walton family–calling them “The Billionaire Boys Club.” Little did I know that they were the tip of the billionaire iceberg.

My hope in 2010 was that public school supporters would block the privatization of their schools. Public schools are as American as apple pie. I wanted the public to wake up, rally around their public schools, and repel the hedge fund managers and billionaires who were funding the privatization movement.

I was too optimistic.

The attacks escalated, fueled by the political power that money buys. The major media bought the corporate reform narrative hook, line, and sinker.

Neoliberal corporate reform brought us high-stakes standardized testing, A-F ratings for schools, charter schools, school closings, and rating teachers by the test scores of their students. And cheating scandals. All to get higher test scores, which never happened.

Now, Jennifer Berkshire asks on her blog The Education Wars whether it’s all over for public schools. Jennifer appreciates the importance of public schools as community builders and civic institutions that serve the common good.

Please read her smart take on the state of public education today:

I won’t lie. If you’re a member of Team Public Education, as I am, it has been a tough summer. And if you, like me, have been sounding the alarm about the dangers of school privatization, it’s impossible to ignore the sense that the future we’ve been warning about has arrived. Five years ago, education historian Jack Schneider and I wrote a book called A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door: the Dismantling of Public Education and the Future of School that culminated in a sort of “Black Mirror” chapter called “education a la carte.” In it, we described how the ultimate vision of school privatization advocates wasn’t simply to shift the nation’s youngsters into private schools, but to ‘unbundle’ education into a vast array of products for consumers to purchase on Amazon-like exchanges. Lest you think we were exaggerating, turn your attention to Florida, where, as Sue Woltanski documents, project unbundle has arrived with a vengence.

Florida, as usual, is slightly ahead of the curve. But the accelerating collapse of public schools in the state, chronicled in this recent New York Times story, pushed along by the now universal school voucher program, will soon be coming to a state near you. The NYT piece, by the way, was just one of many ‘are public schools over?’ stories to drop in recent weeks. The Washington Post version headed to peer in the window of the GOP vision for education. Spoiler: it entails replacing public schools with “a marketplace of school options.” Then, of course, there was the annual PDK survey of attitudes towards public education, which found both sinking approval of the nation’s schools (with the usual exception for local schools) and rising warmth towards the idea of private school vouchers. As legal scholar Derek Black put it, “The deep well of faith in public education has a disastrous leak.”

To understand what’s happening, I’m going to pause here to spend some time with yet another of the ‘are public schools through?’ stories, Chandler Fritz’s eye-opening new feature for Harper’s, “The Homemade Scholar.” Fritz, a teacher and writer who pens the “Arizona Room” newsletter, took a job at a private religious microschool in order to get a close up view of Arizona’s education marketplace, what he describes as “a new frontier in American education.” I recommend paying attention to this piece because 1) Fritz is a terrific writer and 2) he provides real insights into the appeal of vouchers, or as they’re billed in AZ, education savings accounts—something my own writing rarely reckons with.

Fritz finds a grab bag of reasons that students and parents are drawn to this particular microschool, most of which will be familiar to you: a hunger for ‘customization,’ the desire for religious instruction, the appeal of a small setting, conservative backlash against public education. But there’s another reason we don’t hear as much about—the opposition to the standardized testing that shapes every aspect of what’s left of our public schools. Fritz’s piece is long (the audio version clocks in at nearly an hour), and infuriating in parts, but his observations regarding the attitudes of these ‘education consumers’ towards standardized tests get straight to the point: they hate them.

Bad math

A similar theme pops up in Dana Goldstein’s recent portrayal of the impact of vouchers on schools in Florida’s Orange County. While three quarters of the schools in the district earned an ‘A’ or a ‘B’ on the state’s school accountability report card, parents are eager to free their kids from the burden of taking the state tests, something Florida education watchdog Billy Townsend has been tartly observing for years. Now, I mention opposition to standardized testing here because, even in our deeply divided times, it is a cause that unites parents across virtually any line of division. If you don’t believe me, head down to Texas, where, in addition to re-gerrymandering the state’s electoral maps, legislators have also been pretending to address the popular revolt against the STAAR Test.

But there’s another reason to revisit the antipathy to testing. While you’ve been distracted by the relentless tide of bad and worse news, what’s left of the education reform movement has been busy reemerging, zombie style, seemingly without having learned a single thing about why it flopped in the first place. There are overt signs of the zombie’s return—like Democrats for Education Reform trying to rally the party around a vision of education ‘abundance,’ or Andrew Cuomo, flailing in the NYC mayoral race, now rebranding himself as the education reform candidate with a pledge to shut down failing schools and replace them with new ‘schools of promise.’ Then there’s the pundit-level narrative taking shape in which education reform was working just great until the teachers unions ruined everything and/or Democrats lost their nerve.

This version of events, encapsulated in this recent David Brooks column, goes like this:

School reform was an attempt to disrupt the caste system, to widen opportunity for the less privileged. Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama angered core Democratic constituencies like teachers unions in order to expand opportunity down the income scale. But now Democrats have basically given up. Joe Biden didn’t devote much energy to education reform. Kamala Harris ran for president without anything like a robust education reform agenda.

Brooks goes on to cite Michael Petrilli on the ‘Southern surge,’ the rise in test scores in Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana and Tennessee (but not Florida) that has education reformers so excited. Kelsey Piper, authoress at the brand new outlet the Argument, is excited too. In her back-and-forth with leftist policy analyst Matt Bruenig over the question of whether giving parents cash benefits poor children, Piper comes down squarely on the side of fixing the schools.

I think school reform after school reform has served every conceivable interest group except students (who do not vote) and so have failed to meaningfully increase literacy and numeracy, even though we now have a road map for how to genuinely let every child thrive.

If you guessed that the ‘road map’ referred to here is Mississippi, you would be correct. Mississippi, by the way, is a national leader in child poverty levels, an honor that the state, which just eliminated its income tax, seems determined to hold on to.

Proxy war

Such ‘if only the band would get back together’ takes somehow miss what a flop much of our recent version of education reform turned out to be. Here’s a partial list. The backlash to Common Core on the right didn’t just help to usher in Donald Trump but played a role in transforming the GOP from the party of big business (which was all in on pushing the Common Core standards) to one dominated by aggrieved populists. And the over selling of college tapped into a well of resentment so deep that the entire system of higher education is now threatened. Then there is the relentless push to narrow the purpose of school down to standardized testing and workforce prep, a bipartisan cause that, as I argue in a forthcoming essay in the Baffler, has now been abandoned by the right in favor of education that prizes ‘virtue’ over vocation, even as many Democrats continue to beat the ‘career readiness’ drum.

I’m not the only one to point this out, by the way. Teacher-turned-writer Nora De La Cour makes a compelling case that the appeal of so-called classical charter schools is due in part to the damage done to public education by neoliberal education reform. Students at these rapidly spreading classical schools encounter the ‘great books.’ Their public school peers get “decontextualized excerpts in corporate-produced test prep materials,” writes De La Cour.

Which brings me to the main point of this piece. (Finally!) Part of what’s so frustrating about our current moment is that by leaning into a deeply unpopular vision for public schools—test them, close them, make them compete—a certain brand of Democrat is essentially incentivizing parents to seek out test-free alternatives. Consider too that we’re in the midst of a fierce intraparty debate over what Democrats need to do to win. For the education reform wing of party, the answer to the question is to go hard at teachers unions and double down on school accountability, while also embracing school vouchers.

While this vision is inherently contradictory, it’s also a loser with voters. There may be no single less appealing sales pitch than ‘we’re going to close your school.’ Just ask former Chicago mayor Rahm Emmanuel, who was so unpopular in the city’s minority neighborhoods after shuttering 50 schools that he couldn’t run for reelection. As voucher programs expand rapidly, we’re about to enter a new era of school closures. If you don’t believe me, just check out this statement from a CATO Institute spox in response to that WaPo story on Arizona:

It’s tough for some families when their school—public or private—closes. Kids miss their friends, teachers worry about their jobs, parents have to adjust their transportation plans. But stories bemoaning public schools losing enrollment due to school choice policies are missing the point. Should parents who want a different option for their children be forced to stay in their assigned school in order to prop it up? Of course not. Public schools had a virtual monopoly on enrollment for decades, but no school can serve the unique needs of all the children who happen to live near it. As we continue down the path of more educational freedom, some schools will rise to the challenge and others will close. We shouldn’t sacrifice children’s futures in an effort to save schools that aren’t meeting their needs.

Close readers will note the moving goal posts—that we’ve moved from school choice as a means of escaping ‘failing schools’ to escaping any kind of school. But the bottom line is that we’re just supposed to accept that ‘education freedom’ means that lots of schools will be closing. Or take the ‘back to the future’ sales pitch for microschools, in which parents “form pods in church basements, barns, and any space they can find. Teachers are launching microschools in their garages.” This vision of what proponents like to call ‘permissionless education’ is one many parents, indeed entire communities, will find difficult to make sense of. It also seems like a gimme for Democrats who are trying to differentiate themselves from the right’s hostility to public schools.

I want to end on a hopeful note, because I’ve depressed us all enough by now, but also because there are some hopeful signs out there. While the education reform zombie may be reemerging, well funded as ever, a growing number of Democrats are showing us what it sounds like to run as an unabashed advocate for public schools. There’s Graham Platner, the challenger to Susan Collins in Maine, who calls out the endless attacks on public schools and teachers as “the tip of the assault on all things public.” Or how about Nathan Sage in Iowa, who puts the defense of public education at the center of his populist platform:

Public schools are the heart of our Democracy, and Republicans are tearing them down brick by brick, while treating our heroic public school teachers like dirt. They are underfunding our public schools and are diverting billions of taxpayer dollars to private schools and into the pockets of billionaires behind them.

To this list I could add Josh Cowen and Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, or Catelin Drey in Iowa, who, if she pulls off a win in today’s special election to fill a state senate seat in a district that Trump carried by 11 points, will end the GOP’s supermajority in that chamber. Drey, by the way, is running as a pro-public-education-candidate and an outspoken opponent of Iowa’s controversial universal school voucher program. Plenty of influential Democrats will insist that that message is a loser. That the way for Democrats to win is to run against public schools—to talk about what failures they are, why we need to get tougher on them, and how maybe we don’t actually need them after all. I think they’re wrong, and that voters agree.

Drey did win in Iowa, decisively, proving that a pro-public education stand is a winning message. Drey won 55% of the vote in a district that Trump carried. Her victory broke the Republican supermajority in the state senate.

Categories Billionaires, Budget Cuts, Charter Schools, Closing schools, Corporate Reform, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Education Reform, Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), For-Profit, Funding, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Portfolio District, School Choice, Standardized Testing, State Takeover, Vouchers, Walton Foundation

There Was No “Miracle” in New Orleans

By dianeravitch

September 2, 2025 //

This is the most important post you will read today or this week, maybe this month, if you care about the future of American public schools. It’s about the importance of honest research; it’s about debunking false narratives. It’s about the media printing inaccurate stories without the necessity of fact-checking. It’s about irresponsible journalism.

The Washington Post published an article loaded with inflated claims by a British journalist, Ian Birrell, about the “miracle” in New Orleans that followed the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

Five years later, Obama’s Secretary of Education Arne Duncan boldly said that the hurricane was “the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans.” Birrell agrees with him.

In 2018, Betsy DeVos’ Department of Education allocated $10 million to fund the National Center for Research on Education Access and Choice at Tulane University (REACH). In 2023, two of the nation’s leading advocates of choice–the Walton Foundation and the City Fund–gave REACH $1 million “to jointly support a three-year research project on the system-level effects of charter schools at the national level. The goal is to learn how charter schools improve student outcomes and better understand the role of policy in fueling these changes.”

After Katrina, the state converted New Orleans into an (almost) all-charter district. All of the district’s teachers were fired, and their union dissolved. Charter chains and TFA poured into the district as did funding by the federal government and major foundations. About one-third of the students never returned after the hurricane.

Linda Darling-Hammond and her Stanford colleagues Frank Adamson and Channa Cook-Harvey studied the charterization of New Orleans in 2015. Unlike most other studies, they looked closely at student experiences as well as data. They concluded that the district was not only highly segregated by race and class, but was “one of the lowest-performing districts in one of the lowest-performing states in the nation,” not a model to be replicated.

Rutgers’ scholar Bruce Baker examined the advocates’ claims in 2019 and concluded that they overlooked or minimized two significant factors: one, demographic changes (a reduction in concentrated poverty), and two, a huge infusion of external funding.

But Birrell is not an education journalist so he seems not to have looked for views that countered the charter enthusiasts.

Gary Rubenstein, former member of TFA and career high school mathematics teacher, did the research that Birrell failed to do. He explained why there was no “miracle” in New Orleans:

It has been 20 years since Hurricane Katrina wiped out the New Orleans schools system causing it to be replaced with all charter schools. And it has been over 15 years since former Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said, based on what he considered early evidence of the success of those charter schools that Katrina was “the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans.” And it has been also about 15 years since educational researchers have been continuously debunking the New Orleans educational miracle.

So I was quite surprised to see that The Washington Post just published an opinion piece with the headline “‘Never seen before’: How Katrina set off an education revolution — Twenty years after the hurricane, taking stock of the miracle in New Orleans Schools.”

Reading this Op Ed was a strange experience for me. Supposedly based on recent research, it basically trotted out all the old bogus claims that I hadn’t heard anyone claim in at least ten years. Since it was The Washington Post, I figured it had to be Jay Matthews who has been known to write puff pieces (and books) about KIPP and Michelle Rhee. But these talking points were so antiquated that it would have been odd even for him to use them. No, this anachronistic Op Ed was not from any of the usual suspects but from a name I had never seen before: Ian Birrell.

Reading up on the biography of Ian Birrell, things made a bit more sense. Ian Birrell is a British journalist who has mainly written about international affairs. I’m sure he is a very competent journalist but this is his first foray into education reporting. So he heard about the New Orleans ‘miracle’ for the first time, got a totally biased ‘research’ report from Doug Harris supporting the miracle and, not knowing that there has been an ongoing battle over education reform in this country where the ‘reformers’ have all kinds of tricks for misrepresenting data to advance their agenda. So, thinking he has discovered something incredible, of course he wants to write something about it. But what he writes is completely naive since he doesn’t know the right questions to explore to get to the truth. It’s kind of like if I decided to become a nature reporter and wrote a thing about Big Foot based on just photoshopped images and unreliable first hand accounts.

The New Orleans Miracle is pretty easy to debunk if you know the right questions to ask.

So the first thing to look at is the Louisiana AP scores. Even though AP tests and the way they are sometimes misused, are not the only thing that matters in looking at a state’s education quality, colleges do look at AP scores so it is a bit of a measure of ‘college readiness.’ From the College Board website, it can be seen that Louisiana has the third worst AP passing rate in the country.

In the Washington Post Op Ed, Birrell describes the interventions after Katrina as follows: “They fired all 7,000 teachers, sidelined unions, invited ambitious experts to run the schools and offered parents almost total freedom over where to send their children.”

If he knew the full history of this he would know that the “ambitious experts to run the schools” included KIPP, the famous charter chain created by two Teach For America alums. So to measure the size of the miracle twenty years later, just check to see how the KIPP Booker T. Washington High School students are doing academically. For this I went to the recent US News & World Report data.

So the gold standard charter network in the miracle city of New Orleans has an 11% Math proficiency, a 21% Reading proficiency, and a 10% Science proficiency.

As far as AP scores at the top charter chain in the miracle city of New Orleans, the exam pass rate is just 2%.

But maybe you think I am cherry picking a KIPP school that was never mentioned in the Op Ed. In it Birrell writes about a specific ambitious expert “Among those watching the horrific Katrina news footage 20 years ago was a former corporate financier with Boeing who was planning to move into education. Ben Kleban told me in a 2010 interview how, soon after the disaster, at age 26, he moved to the city from New York to set up a school, starting in a refurbished building with 120 pupils ages 11 to 15. His venture grew fast, took over a nearby failing school, improved proficiency tests and won a national medal for its successes. “For too long,” he said, “the public school system found excuses rather than being properly accountable to parents.” He explained how he relied on “basic business practices” with a daily flow of data on attendance, discipline and classroom performance.”

So I looked up Ben Kleban to see how his school was doing. It is a little confusing but it seems like the entire charter chain he created was shut down in 2018 except maybe one school which is called Walter L. Cohen High School. For them, there are no AP passing scores reported. For their test scores, they are a little better than KIPP for math and reading but lower on science.

So what evidence did Birrell see that convinced him that the New Orleans miracle was authentic? Doug Harris has some nice graphs that shows test scores in New Orleans scores now compared to test scores in New Orleans 20 years ago. But of course this is not the proper comparison to make. The way a scientific experiment works is that if you want to measure the impact of an effect, you try to take a group and split it in half and apply the impact to half of the subjects and make the rest the ‘control group.’ So in this situation, had they not made all the New Orleans schools into charter schools but instead randomly picked half the schools and made them charters and left the other half under local control, then you could compare the results of the two groups after 20 years and, as long as the groups continued to be randomly distributed, that could be a useful way to make a comparison.

But that is not what happened since unfortunately there is no control group to compare to. It is quite possible that the scores now are lower than they would have been had Katrina never happened and the New Orleans charter experiment had never happened. But even without anything to compare to, the data from that one gold standard KIPP is, in my opinion, pretty good evidence against the miracle. Just like the way you can check the temperature of a Thanksgiving turkey by putting a meat thermometer into one spot of the Turkey, looking at what is supposed to be the best charter school is a good measure of all the schools since the KIPP is surely better than the average school there.

I thought I’d never have to debunk the New Orleans miracle again, but I guess I’m going to have to every five or ten years for each milestone anniversary of “the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans.”

My view: Gary Rubenstein is a national treasure. The major editorial boards should check with him before they publish stories about a “miracle” school or “miracle” district.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Disruption, Education Industry, Louisiana, New Orleans

The GOP Death March, Led by RFK Jr.

By dianeravitch

September 1, 2025 //

Concerned about RFK Jr.’s assault on vaccines, I called my local CVS pharmacist a few days ago to schedule every vaccine for which I was eligible. I got the flu vaccine and the RSV vaccine.

I asked for the COVID-19 vaccine, but was told that the latest version would not be available until mid-October. I’m in the eligible group (over 65), but no vaccine yet. When I got home, I learned that the vaccine is not available in certain states, including New York. I worry that RFK Jr. may decide to cancel the vaccine altogether.

Wajahat Ali writes on his blog, The Left Hook, about RFK Jr.’s threat to public health:

In today’s Democracy-ish, Danielle and I spend the hour discussing the most dangerous horseman of Trump’s Apocalyptic cult: RFK Jr.

Oh, you know, the scion of the Kennedy empire who was a heroin addict, suffered from brain worms, ate exotic animals, and was described as a predator by his own cousin.

That RFK Jr., who promotes reckless and dangerous anti-vaxx conspiracies, eugenics, and has no medical background or training. That’s the wealthy, mediocre, white man that Trump has elevated as the director of America’s Health and Human Services.

I mean, what could go wrong?

Who needs vaccines during COVID or the rise of measles? Who needs Medicaid except 20% of Americans who depend on it for healthcare? Who needs the National Institute of Health or the CDC staffed by competent, qualified professionals who have spent their lives devoted to saving lives?

Not the United States, because we aren’t a bunch of woke, weak pansies who listen to so-called experts, damn it!

Welcome to Trump and MAGA’s pro-death march led, in part, by RFK Jr. and his broligarch friendswho are perfectly fine killing Americans to make a profit and advance their white supremacist agenda.

We bring all the receipts. It’s depressing, but it’s worth hearing to ensure you stay informed, safe, and protected.

Here’s Danielle’s write-up at DAM DIGEST:

In the United States, public health has long depended on institutions like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). For decades—through Republican and Democratic administrations alike—these agencies functioned under a shared goal: protecting Americans’ health through science, research, and expertise.

But in recent years, that foundation has begun to crack. The appointment of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (RFK Jr.), an outspoken anti-vaccine activist with no medical training, to lead HHS has brought that crisis into sharp focus. His presence in the nation’s top public health office signals a seismic shift—one where politics trumps science, conspiracy theories replace research, and ideology threatens lives.

The Erosion of Trust in Science

During the COVID-19 pandemic, more than one million Americans died, while public health officials faced harassment, death threats, and relentless political attacks. Former CDC Director Anthony Fauci, who spent his career working to save lives, became a target of right-wing media and extremist groups.

Instead of rallying around experts, leaders like Donald Trump and his allies downplayed the severity of the pandemic, promoted misinformation about masks and vaccines, and openly mocked scientists. This politicization of science directly fueled vaccine hesitancy, prolonging the crisis and causing unnecessary deaths.

Now, five years after the peak of the pandemic, the United States faces a resurgence of diseases once thought to be under control—measles, polio, and other preventable illnesses—precisely because vaccination rates have dropped.

RFK Jr.: Conspiracies Over Credentials

RFK Jr.’s position is especially alarming given his history of promoting anti-vaccine propagandaand debunked eugenics myths. He has falsely claimed that autism and other health conditions are caused by vaccines and even suggested that COVID-19 was “targeted to spare Jews and Black people”—a statement widely condemned as antisemitic and racist.

Despite his lack of medical training, Kennedy insists he can “diagnose” children by sight, attributing health challenges to supposed “mitochondrial issues visible in their faces.” Licensed physicians, including those trained at Harvard and Mayo Clinic, have dismissed such claims as pseudoscience.

Yet under the Trump administration, this man now wields control over Medicare, Medicaid, the CDC, NIH, and national vaccine policy—institutions responsible for the health of over 330 million Americans.

The Resignations and Walkouts

The consequences are already unfolding. After Kennedy moved to push out CDC Director Dr. Susan Monarez—a Trump appointee who nonetheless refused to abandon science—top scientists and health officials resigned in protest. Dr. Dimitri Daskalakis, a respected infectious disease expert, wrote in his resignation letter that serving under Kennedy was “untenable” because HHS leadership was no longer guided by science.

Soon after, CDC staff staged mass walkouts, warning the public that American lives are being endangered by unqualified leadership. These resignations leave critical gaps at the very moment the nation faces rising COVID variants, climate-driven disease risks, and growing vaccine hesitancy.

Cuts That Will Cost Lives

Beyond personnel, the Trump–Kennedy administration has overseen massive funding cuts:

$500 million slashed from vaccine research
$1 trillion cut to Medicaid, threatening to shutter rural hospitals and nursing homes
Reductions in NIH research funding
Cuts to foreign aid and peacekeeping operations, destabilizing global health security

These moves directly undermine America’s preparedness for the next pandemic. As climate change accelerates, experts warn that new infectious diseases are almost inevitable. Yet instead of strengthening systems, leaders are dismantling them.

The Bigger Picture: A Pro-Death Movement

This moment cannot be seen in isolation. It reflects a broader “pro-death” political movement that prizes ideology over evidence, power over public health, and partisan gain over human life. Whether it was Trump pushing “herd immunity” at the expense of vulnerable Americans, or Kennedy advancing conspiracy theories that endanger children, the pattern is clear: science is under attack.

The result? Americans are less safe, less protected, and less prepared for the crises ahead.

Why This Matters Now

The rise of unqualified, conspiracy-driven figures like RFK Jr. at the helm of America’s most critical health institutions is not just political theater—it is a direct threat to public safety. The decisions made today about vaccines, research funding, and disease response will determine whether millions live or die in the years ahead.

Public trust in science and medicine must be restored. That means demanding qualified leaders, protecting the integrity of institutions like the CDC and NIH, and pushing back against those who seek to weaponize public health for political gain.

Because as history has shown—from pandemics to polio eradication—science saves lives. Conspiracies cost them.

Categories Accountability, Disruption, Education Industry, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Health, Ignorance, Lies, Medicine, Trump

Texas: Governor Abbott Hands Out Millions to Voucher Schools with No Oversight or Accountability

By dianeravitch

August 19, 2025 //

ProPublica published an eye-popping review of the lack of financial accountability in Texas for private schools. When Abbott’s billion-dollar boondoggle is launched, hundreds and hundreds of religious schools will share in the bounty.

Free cash!! Free cash!! Open the Church of Satan K-12 Academy and watch the dollars roll in. No one cares how many students are enrolled or even if the list of students is a fake. Governor Abbott trusts you!

Governor Abbott knows that most of the vouchers will be claimed by students who are already enrolled in private schools. He doesn’t care. He knows that kids who leave public schools to attend a private school fall behind. He doesn’t care.

He wants the state to pay the tuition of all children, regardless of whether they attend a snake-charming religious school or the most elite private school in Dallas or Houston.

Governor Abbott wants YOU to step right up and claim your Free cash!!

ProPublica wrote this:

For about eight years, a Houston private school has followed a unique pattern when appointing members to its governing board: It has selected only married couples.

Over 200 miles away, two private schools in Dallas have awarded more than $7 million in combined contracts to their board members.

And at least seven private schools across Texas have issued personal loans, often reaching $100,000 or more, to their school leaders under terms that are often hidden from public view.

Such practices would typically violate laws governing public and charter schools. But private schools operate largely outside those rules because they haven’t historically received direct taxpayer dollars. Now, as the state moves to spend at least $1 billion over the next two years on private education, lawmakers have imposed almost none of the accountability measures required of the public school system.

If held to the same standards, 27 private schools identified by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune through tax filings likely would have violated state law. The news organizations found, and three education law experts confirmed, more than 60 business transactions, board appointments and hiring decisions by those schools that would have run afoul of the state rules meant to prevent self-dealing and conflicts of interest if they were public.

“It’s frankly astonishing to me that anyone would propose the massive sort of spending that we’re talking about in these school voucher programs with, at best, minimal accountability,” said Mark Weber, a public school finance lecturer at New Jersey’s Rutgers University who opposes vouchers. “If I were a taxpayer in Texas, I’d be asking, who’s going to be looking out for me?”

Texas has long stood as a holdout in the national push for voucher programs, even as other conservative states embraced them. Gov. Greg Abbott gave school voucher proponents a major win this year, signing into law one of the largest and costliest programs in the country. In doing so, Abbott’s office has argued that the state has “strict financial requirements,” saying that “Texas taxpayers expect their money to be spent efficiently and effectively on their behalf, both in private and traditional public schools.”

The law, however, imposes no restrictions to prevent the kinds of entanglements that the newsrooms found.

The contrast is sharp. Public or charter school officials who violate these rules could be subject to removal from office, fines or even state jail felony charges.

Private schools face none of those consequences.

Supporters of the voucher program argue that oversight of private schools should come not from the state, but from their boards and the marketplace.

“If you transform the private schools into public schools by applying the same rules and regulations and procedural requirements on them, then you take the private out of the private school,” said Patrick Wolf, an education policy professor at the University of Arkansas. Wolf, who supports vouchers, said that if parents are unhappy with the schools, they will hold them accountable by leaving and taking their tuition dollars with them.

Typically, neither parents nor the state’s taxpayers have access to information that shows precisely how private schools spend money. Only those that are organized as nonprofits are required to file public tax forms that offer limited information. Of the state’s more than 1,000 accredited private schools, many are exempt from submitting such filings because they are religious or for-profit institutions, leaving their business conduct opaque. It is unclear if private schools that participate in Texas’ voucher-like program will have to detail publicly how they use taxpayer dollars.

“The public system is not always perfect, but when it’s not perfect, we see it,” said Joy Baskin, associate executive director for policy and legal services at the Texas Association of School Boards, which represents public districts across the state. “That kind of transparency doesn’t exist in private schools.”

The Chinese Baptist Church in Houston, where Trinity Classical School has a campus (Danielle Villasana for ProPublica and The Texas Tribune)

“Just Isn’t Right”

Conflicts of interest in education were on the minds of legislators this spring. At an education committee hearing in March, Texas state Rep. Ryan Guillen, a Republican from Rio Grande City, along the southern border with Mexico, introduced a bill that would bar businesses with close ties to board members from applying for school district contracts. Such deals were previously permitted as long as school leaders publicly disclosed conflicts and abstained from voting.

But Guillen, who did not respond to requests for comment, argued those rules were abused, pointing to recent scandals in two districts that led to state investigationsand, in one case, resulted in federal charges.

He described his bill as a “commonsense” proposal that would ensure “no one in a position of power can exploit the system for financial benefit.” The Legislature passed the bill, which was signed into law by Abbott.

Notably, the measure excluded private schools. In public testimony, no one brought them up, and there was no debate about them even as lawmakers advanced a proposal that would direct state money to them.

The newsrooms found at least six private schools that awarded contracts to companies with ties to their board members.

Cristo Rey Dallas College Prep, a Catholic high school serving primarily low-income students of color, awarded more than $5 million to a construction firm owned by one of its board members for “interior finish” work between 2017 and 2021, tax filings show. The school did not respond to questions about the payments. Raul Estrada, who was on the school board when his firm received the payments, said he recused himself from any votes or decisions related to the contract. He added that the company’s work provided “substantial savings” to the school but did not provide specific figures.

Just 30 miles north, board members at the Shelton School, which specializes in teaching students with learning differences such as attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and dyslexia, have received hundreds of thousands of dollars in payments over the last decade. Tax records show one trustee was awarded over $465,000 for landscaping, and another collected more than $1.2 million for “printed education material.” The board members whose firms received the contracts did not respond to requests for comment. Suzanne Stell, the school’s executive director, said the board members who received contracts were not involved in the decisions. Stell also said that the contract for printed material included training for educators.

Our investigation also found dozens of instances of nepotism or relatives serving on boards together at private schools, some of which were started and are led by families.

Trinity Classical School in Houston, for example, has long maintained a family-led chain of governance on its school board exclusive to married couples, appointing a new pair each time one cycled off. The board deviated from that pattern only once, when it selected Neil Anderson, the school’s leader, according to tax filings. None of the current board members responded to interview requests, nor did Anderson or the school.

Such arrangements have been prohibited since 2012 in charter schools, which are restricted from appointing more than one family member to serve as a trustee at the same time. Anderson’s appointment would also not be allowed in traditional public schools, where employees are barred from serving on their school’s governing board.

At the elite Greenhill School in the Dallas area, where tuition can exceed $40,000 a year, the previous leader, Scott Griggs, hired his son to coach the boys’ volleyball team and teach middle school math. While allowed in private schools, state nepotism laws prevent public and charter schools from hiring close relatives of superintendents and trustees, with few exceptions. Griggs told the newsrooms that he’d already announced his retirement when he asked the board in 2017 to approve hiring his son, who did not respond to requests for comment.

The following year, the college prep academy provided a personal loan of nearly $100,000 to its current head of school, Lee Hark, for a down payment on a home. The school did not disclose the terms of the agreement in its tax filings, including whether it charged interest or what would happen should Hark default. Hark declined to comment.

Private schools are generally free to use money as they choose, but a 150-year-old provision of the Texas Constitution bars public schools from lending taxpayer dollars. The state does not require private schools to publicly disclose whether taxpayer money would be used for such arrangements under the voucher program.

In a written statement, a Greenhill spokesperson said the school operates with “sound financial principles” that meet or exceed “all standards of accountability for independent schools.” She said the school charged interest on the loan and it has since been paid off, but did not provide records.

Many of the private schools examined by the news organizations, including Greenhill, said that they are still deciding whether to participate in the voluntary voucher program.

The lack of accountability for private schools has sparked concern from public school parents like Sarah Powell, a mother of two near Dallas. She was among thousands who urged lawmakers to reject voucher legislation earlier this year.

“You’re either part of the system or you’re not,” Powell later told the newsrooms. “You can’t have the resources and not any of the regulations. It just isn’t right.”

*The Greenhill School, where tuition can surpass $40,000 per student, in Addison, just outside of Dallas (Shelby Tauber for ProPublica and The Texas Tribune)*

Repeating History

State funds flowing to public and charter schools are monitored by the Texas Education Agency, which requires annual independent audits and assigns ratings that gauge each school’s fiscal health. Districts that repeatedly underperform risk sanctions, including forced closure.

“Looking back on it today, I think it was necessary,” Bob Schulman, a longtime education attorney, said about many of the reforms.

Even as oversight of charter schools has been strengthened, gaps remain. Earlier this year, a ProPublica and Tribune investigation found that a charter network with 1,000 students was paying its superintendent nearly $900,000 annually, making him among the highest-paid public school leaders in the nation. Yet the school did not disclose the superintendent’s full compensation to the state and later rebuffed calls to lower his salary from lawmakers and the advocacy group representing charters. The school board defended Cavazos’ salary, saying it was merited because of his duties and experience.

The state, however, will not directly regulate private schools under the new voucher program, which will begin next year. Instead, supervision will largely fall to one of 20 private organizations, which schools must pay to obtain and maintain the accreditation required to receive public funds.

A review by the newsrooms of these organizations’ standards found they are generally far less rigorous than the state’s. Most do not require annual financial audits, which some accreditation organizations say can be too costly and time-consuming, and many do not mandate policies to prevent nepotism and conflicts of interest.

If a private school loses accreditation from one group, it can simply apply to another.

That total, however, is likely an undercount even within the sample of schools the newsrooms reviewed. Reporters identified dozens more conflicts listed in tax forms, for example, but the schools provided sparse information about what they were. Because of that, there is no way to determine if the conduct would have violated state laws if it had occurred at a public or charter school. The newsrooms reached out to each school about the missing information, but none answered questions.ġ

Texas lawmakers laid the groundwork for publicly funded schools with limited state oversight when they authorized charter schools in the 1990s as an alternative to traditional public education. At the time, they exempted charter schools from many regulations, betting that greater flexibility would lead to innovation and stronger academic performance.

But over the past three decades, the state has steadily increased restrictions on charter schools in response to concerns about financial mismanagement and academic performance. Charter schools, for example, were initially exempt from the state’s nepotism and conflict-of-interest laws, but lawmakers gradually changed that after reports exposed leaders enriching themselves and their families. The state implemented another round of stricter rules after newspapers uncovered lavish spending on perks such as Spurs tickets and lucrative land deals.

Schulman, who has represented Texas charter schools for decades, said that some leaders abused the limited state oversight for years, making it more concerning that lawmakers launched a voucher program with even fewer regulations.

“I’m very disturbed,” Schulman said. “But I’m hopeful that it will be a quicker turnaround than it was for the charters.”

How We Reported This Story

For this story, reporters reviewed nonprofit tax filings for 90 of the 200 highest-enrollment private schools listed in the Texas Private Schools Accreditation Commission database. Those filings were not available for the other 110 schools, as for-profit schools or those tied to houses of worship are not typically required to make tax documents public. For the schools that filed these records, reporters reviewed available annual reports dating back to at least 2015.

Reporters identified more than 60 instances involving conflicts of interest, nepotism and financial transactions with related parties at 27 schools. Three education lawyers confirmed our findings.

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Disruption, Education Industry, Ethics, Funding, Texas

School Choice Creates a Budget Disaster in Polk County, Florida

By dianeravitch

August 18, 2025 //

Polk County Public Schools expressed relief July 25 after learning that the Trump Administration would release about $20 million in funding that it had withheld for weeks.

The district issued a news release, noting that the previously frozen grants in four categories directly fund staff positions and services supporting migrant students, English-language learners, teacher recruitment and professional development, academic enrichment programs and adult education.

The relief, though, was only partial. When the district eight days earlier took the unusual action of issuing a public statement warning of “significant financial shortfalls,” it cited not only the suspended federal grants but also state policies.

Legislative allocations for vouchers — scholarships to attend private schools or support home schooling — combined with increased funding for charter schools “are diverting another $45.7 million away from Polk County’s traditional public schools,” the district’s news release said.

The statement reflected warnings made for years by advocates for public education that vouchers are eroding the financial stability of school districts.

“The state seemingly underestimated the fiscal impact that vouchers would have,” Polk County Schools Superintendent Fred Heid said in the July 17 news release. “As a result, the budget shortfall has now been passed on to school districts resulting in a loss of $2.5 million for Polk County alone. We now face having to subsidize state priorities using local resources.”

Florida began offering vouchers in the 1990s, initially limiting them to students with disabilities and those in schools deemed as failing. Under former Gov. Jeb Bush, the state expanded the program in 2001 to include students from low-income families.

The number of students receiving vouchers rose as state leaders adjusted the eligibility formula. In 2023, the Legislature adopted a measure introducing universal vouchers, available to students regardless of their financial status.

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All of Polk County’s legislators voted for the measure: Sen. Ben Albritton, R-Wauchula; Sen. Colleen Burton, R-Lakeland; Rep. Melony Bell, R-Fort Meade; Rep. Jennifer Canady, R-Lakeland; Rep. Sam Killebrew, R-Winter Haven; and Rep. Josie Tomkow, R-Polk City.

Allotment for vouchers swells

The vouchers to attend private schools are known as Florida Empowerment Scholarships. The state also provides money to families through the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship and the Personalized Education Program, which financially supports home-schooled students.

The money for vouchers comes directly from Florida’s public school funding formula, the Florida Education Finance Program.

Families of students receiving such scholarships have reportedly used the money to purchase large-screen TVs and tickets to theme parks, spending allowed by Step Up For Students, the nonprofit that administers most scholarships.

The state allotment for vouchers has swelled from $1.6 billion in the 2021-2022 school year to about $4 billion in fiscal year 2024-2025, according to an analysis from the Florida Policy Institute, a nonprofit with a progressive bent.

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In Polk County, 5,023 students claimed vouchers in the 2021-2022 school year, according to the FPI report. Those scholarships amounted to just over $41 million.

The figures rose in 2022-2023 to 6,124 students and nearly $58 million. The following year, the total was 7,854 students and nearly $72 million.

In the 2024-2025 school year, 11,297 students in Polk County received vouchers totaling more than $97 million, FPI reported.

A calculation from the Florida Education Finance Program projects that nearly $143 million of Polk County’s state allotment for education will go to Family Empowerment Scholarships in the 2025-2026 school year, a potential increase of about 47%. The total reflects 16.3% of Polk County’s state funding.

Statewide, the cost of vouchers has risen steadily and is projected to reach nearly $4 billion in the 2025-26 school year.

Florida’s State Education Estimating Conference report from April predicts that public school enrollment will decline by 66,000 students over the next five years, or about 2.5%. Over the same period, voucher use is projected to increase by 240,000.

The state projected that only about 27% of the new Family Empowerment Scholarship recipients would be former public school students.

Subsidizing wealthy families?

Since the state removed financial eligibility rules for the scholarships in 2023, voucher use has soared by 67%, the Orlando Sentinel reported in February. And the majority of scholarships have been claimed by students who were already attending private schools.

By the 2024-25 school year, more than 70% of private school students were receiving state scholarships, the Sentinel reported. The total had been less than a third a decade earlier.

The Sentinel published a list of private schools, with the number of students on state scholarships from the years before and after the law took effect.

Among Polk County schools, Lakeland Christian School saw a jump from 40 to 89, a rise of 122.5%. The increases were 102.7% for All Saints Academy in Winter Haven and 60.3% for St. Paul Lutheran School in Lakeland.

The scholarships available to Polk County students for the 2025-2026 school year are $8,209 for students in kindergarten through third grade; $7,629 for those in grades four through eight; and $7,478 for students in ninth through 12^th grades. Those figures come from Step Up for Students.

There have been news reports of private schools boosting their tuition rates in response to the universal voucher program. Lakeland Christian School’s advertised tuition for high school students has risen from $14,175 in 2022-2023 to $17,975 for the current school year, a jump of 26.8%.

Polk school district prepares to enforce state law banning most student cell phone use

Stephanie Yocum, president of the Polk Education Association, decried the trend of more state educational funding going to private schools.

“In the 2023-24 school year, 70% of Florida’s universal vouchers went to students who already were in private schools,” Yocum said. “Seventy percent of those billions and billions and billions of dollars are going to subsidize already wealthy families, and our state continues to push welfare for the wealthy, while they are siphoning off precious dollars from our students that actually attend a public school, which is still the supermajority of children in this state.”

Critics of vouchers point to Arizona, which instituted universal school vouchers in 2022. That program cost the state $738 million in fiscal year 2024, far more than Arizona had budgeted, according to a report from EdTrust, a left-leaning advocacy group.

Arizona is facing a combined $1.4 billion deficit over fiscal years 2024 and 2025, EdTrust reported. The net cost of the voucher program equals half of the 2024 deficit and two-thirds of the projected 2025 deficit, it said.

Meanwhile, there is a move toward a federal school voucher program. The “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” that Congress adopted in early July uses the federal tax code to offer vouchers that students could use for private school tuition or other qualifying education expenses.

The Senate revised the initial House plan, making it not automatic but an opt-in program for each state. The Ledger emailed the Florida Department of Education on Aug. 4 asking whether the state plans to participate. A response had not come by Aug. 6.

The federal program could cost as much as $56 billion, EdTrust reported. Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers’ union, called the program “a moral disgrace,” as NPR reported.

Canady: Let parents choose

Proponents of vouchers say that it is essential to let students and parents choose the form of education they want, either through traditional public schools, charter schools, private schools or homeschooling.

Canady, who is in line to become state House Speaker in 2028, defended the increase in scholarship funding.

“In Florida, we fund students — not systems,” Canady said by text message. “Parents have the freedom they deserve to make the decisions that are best for their own children. There are a lot of great school options — public district, public charter, private, and homeschool.”

She added: “In Florida, decisions about which school a child will attend are not made by the government — parents are in control.”

Canady has taught at Lakeland Christian for nearly 20 years and is director of the school’s RISE Institute, which encompasses research, innovation, STEM learning and entrepreneurship. She began her career teaching at a public school.

None of Polk County’s other legislators responded to requests for comment. They are Rep. Jon Albert, R-Frostproof; Rep. Jennifer Kincart Jonsson, R-Lakeland; and Albritton, Burton and Tomkow.

Canady noted that 475 fewer students were counted in Polk County Public Schools for funding purposes in the 2024-2025 than in the previous year.

“That reflects the choices that families have made,” Canady wrote. “During the same time, the Florida Legislature increased teacher pay by more than $100 million dollars and continues to spend more taxpayer money on education than ever before.”

She added: “Education today looks different than it did decades ago, and districts around the state are all adapting to the new choice model. Funding decisions should always be about what is good for students and honor the choices that families make.”

The 475 net loss of students in Polk’s public schools last year is far below the increase of 3,443 in Polk students receiving state scholarships.

Questions of accountability

Yocum said that public school districts face certain recurring costs that continue to rise, no matter the fluctuations in enrollment resulting from the use of vouchers.

“You’ll still have the same — I call them static costs, even though those are going up — for maintenance, for buildings, for air conditioning, for transportation,” Yocum said. “All of those costs still exist. But when you start to siphon off dollars that public schools should be getting to run a large-scale operation of educating children, then we are doing more and more with less and less.”

Yocum also raised the question of accountability. The Florida Department of Education carefully controls public schools, largely dictating the curricula they teach, overseeing the certification of teachers and measuring schools against a litany of requirements codified in state law.

Public schools must accept all students, including those with disabilities that make educating them more difficult and costly.

By contrast, Yocum said, private schools can choose which students to accept or reject. The schools are free from much of the scrutiny that public schools face from the Department of Education.

The alert that Polk County Public Schools issued on July 17 mentioned another factor in its financial challenges.

“PCPS is facing an immediate $2.5 million state funding shortfall due to what state officials have described as dual-enrollment errors that misallocated funding for nearly 25,000 Florida students,” the statement said.

That seemed to refer to a “cross check” that the Florida Department of Education performs twice a year, said Scott Kent of Step Up for Students. The agency compares a list of students on scholarships with those reported as attending public schools.

If a student appears on both lists, the DOE freezes the funding. Step Up for Students then contacts the students’ families and asks for documentation that they were not enrolled in a district school, Kent said.

“This is a manual process that can be time-consuming, as the state and scholarship funding organizations want to ensure accuracy and maintain the integrity of the scholarship programs,” Kent said by email. “The DOE currently is checking the lists before releasing funds to Step Up to pay eligible students.”

In the 2025 legislative session, the Florida Senate passed a bill that would have clarified which funds are dedicated to Family Empowerment Scholarships, a way of addressing problems in tracking students as they move between public and private schools. But the bill died, as the state House failed to advance it.

Yocum said the House rejected transparency.

“They want it to look like they’re funding public schools at the level that they should be funding it, where, in reality, more and more of our dollars are running through our budgets but being diverted to corporate charter, private schools and home schools that have no accountability to our tax dollars,” she said.

Effect of charter schools

The warning from the Polk County school district mentioned funding for charter schools as part of a “diversion” of $45.7 million traditional public schools.

Charter schools are publicly funded schools that operate independently. Polk County has 36 charter schools covering all grades. Those include two charter systems: Lake Wales Charter Schools with seven schools, and the Schools of McKeel Academy with three.

Some other charter schools are affiliated with national organizations, including for-profit companies.

Yocum lamented the passing of public funds through the school district to charter schools, though specified that she had no criticism of the McKeel or Lake Wales systems.

“We’re talking about the corporate-run charters that are in it to make money,” she said. “We keep seeing billions and billions of our state dollars diverted to those money-making entities that do not make decisions in the best interest of children. They make decisions in the best interest of their bottom line.”

Canady sponsored a bill in 2023 establishing the transfer of hundreds of millions of dollars from traditional public schools to charter schools’ capital budgets by 2028. It passed with the support of all Polk County lawmakers, and Gov. Ron DeSantis signed it into law.

The Florida Legislature passed a bill in the 2025 session (HB 1105), co-sponsored by Kincart Jonsson, that requires public school districts to share local surtax revenues with charter schools, based on enrollment share.

The bill, which DeSantis signed into law, also makes it easier to convert a public school into a charter school, allowing parents to initiate the change without requiring cooperation from teachers. It also authorizes cities or counties to transform public schools with consecutive D or F grades into “job engine” charter schools.

Gary White can be reached at gary.white@theledger.com or 863-802-7518. Follow on X @garywhite13.

Categories Budget Cuts, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Equity, Florida, Funding, School Choice, Vouchers

Peter Greene: A Major For-Profit Chain Implodes

By dianeravitch

August 7, 2025 //

Peter Greene writes in Forbes, where he is a columnist, about the failure of a major for-profit chain, the kind that will enjoy the benefit of voucher programs.

Ray Girn graduated from the University of Toronto in 2004 with a BS in Psychology, then went to work in LePorte Schools, a chain of Montessori schools in Southern California. By 2010 he was CEO of the chain and, in his telling, raised a “nascent family business” into “what became North America’s largest Montessori network.” He also met his wife, Rebecca.

Just three years ago, Higher Ground was calling itself “the future of education.” A promotional video touted “a mission to redesign education from the ground up” with a mixture of “rigor and individualization” across its family of 150 schools. Now most of those schools have been shuttered by foreclosure, and the company has filed a pre-arranged Chapter 11 bankruptcy plan.

In 2016, the Girns launched Higher Ground Education in Austin, Texas. The mission, said Girn, was to “mainstream and modernize Montessori education through extending its principles across infancy and into high schools.” Rebecca was the Chief Programs Officer and General Counsel.

Higher Ground grew both through acquisition and creation. It was the parent group for Guidepost Montessori, a huge network of Montessori schools located across the US and in some overseas locations. The Academy for Thought and Industry, later rebranded Guidepost Academy, that promised “a school dedicated to a union of classical and Montessori approaches to education: a classical liberal arts emphasis on history and great books, and a Montessori emphasis on independence and agency.”

Higher Ground drew the attention of venture capitalists. HGE created their own program for certifying Montessori teachers (MACTE accredited). They acquired a variety of other businesses, including Tinycare, Neighborschools, FreshGrade, and, the remains of AltSchool, the San Francisco-based tech-based microschool start-up that was drawing glowing reviews in 2015, but by 2019 was instead drawing headlines like Fortune’s “How an Education Startup Wasted Almost $200 Million.”

In 2022, Girn announced that he was launching a Montessori think tank called Montessorium. The result was a business that calls itself “Montessori all grown up.” The Montessorium initiative is headed up by two other Austin entrepreneurs. Matt Bateman also came from LePorte (Girn appears to have brought several LePorte folks with him) and was Higher Ground’s Vice President of Pedagogy; currently his LinkedIn profile lists his occupation as Philosopher (self-employed).

The other Montessorium leader in MacKenzie Price, an education entrepreneur who has been trying to expand her network of cyberschools into other states. Her signature business is 2HourLearning, which promises that students can get a full education in just two hours a day with a computerized tutor. Montessorium promises to “combine the full suite of Montessori practices and hands-on materials with a state-of-the-art personalized learning software platform.”

The HGE network of schools was also growing. In 2018 HGE operated 12 schools; by 2022, the number was 101, and by 2024, HGE had 150 schools in its stable. And yet, Higher Ground was in trouble.

The story continues if you open the link to read the article at Forbes, in full.

Categories Charter Schools, Education Industry, Failure, Innovation

Texas: Some of the Worst-Performing Charters have Some of the Highest-Paid Superintendents

Holding Charter Schools Accountable

Wyoming: The Fight Against Vouchers Continues

Pastors for Texas Children Speak Out Against the Harm of Standardized Testing

Congress Slashed Funding for Public Schools. They Lied! Protest!

Jennifer Berkshire: Is Public Education Over?

There Was No “Miracle” in New Orleans

The GOP Death March, Led by RFK Jr.

The Erosion of Trust in Science

RFK Jr.: Conspiracies Over Credentials

The Resignations and Walkouts

Cuts That Will Cost Lives

The Bigger Picture: A Pro-Death Movement

Why This Matters Now

Texas: Governor Abbott Hands Out Millions to Voucher Schools with No Oversight or Accountability

“Just Isn’t Right”

Repeating History

How We Reported This Story

School Choice Creates a Budget Disaster in Polk County, Florida

Allotment for vouchers swells

Subsidizing wealthy families?

Canady: Let parents choose

Questions of accountability

Effect of charter schools

Peter Greene: A Major For-Profit Chain Implodes

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Holding Charter Schools Accountable

The Erosion of Trust in Science

RFK Jr.: Conspiracies Over Credentials

The Resignations and Walkouts

Cuts That Will Cost Lives

The Bigger Picture: A Pro-Death Movement

Why This Matters Now

“Just Isn’t Right”

Repeating History

How We Reported This Story

Allotment for vouchers swells

Subsidizing wealthy families?

Canady: Let parents choose

Questions of accountability

Effect of charter schools

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