Charter school advocates were thrilled by a recent CREDO report celebrating the “remarkable improvement” in charter schools. Valerie Strauss of The Washington Post did some digging and found that the “remarkable improvement” was a chimera..

She wrote:

It seemed like good news for charter schools when a study released this summer declared that they get better student outcomes than do traditional public schools — at least from 2015 to 2019, the years for which researchers said they crunched the numbers. The Wall Street Journal editorial board hailed the results as showing “huge learning gains over union schools” (with “union schools” used as a pejorative reference to public schools in traditional school districts).

Education Week’s headline declared: “Charter Schools Now Outperform Traditional Public Schools, Sweeping Study Finds.”

But the study, it turned out, doesn’t show that at all. The headlines were wrong. For one thing, a close look at the results revealed only tiny improvements in charter schools. That, plus concerns critics have raised about the validity of the methodology and definitions used in the study, render moot the claims of besting traditional public schools.

The “not what they seem” theme of the study results reflect the uncertain position in which charter schools find themselves these days. The vanguard of the “school choice” movement when the first charter opened in 1992 in Minneapolis, these schools have been eclipsed in the national debate about “school choice” by programs that use public money for private and religious schools, including vouchers, tax credit programs and education savings accounts.

Robert Enlow, president and CEO of the Indianapolis-based EdChoice, a nonprofit that tracks and advocates for school choice policies, has declared 2023 the “year of universal choice” because of the proliferation of new state laws establishing or expanding programs that allow the use of public funds for private and religious education. According to EdChoice, North Carolina joined seven other states this year that have created a new “universal choice program” — meaning all families in the state have access to it — or expanded an existing one to include all students. The states are Iowa, Utah, Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, Oklahoma and Ohio. Arizona and West Virginia already had such programs.

At July’s 50th annual conference of the American Legislative Exchange Council — a network of conservative state legislators, philanthropies, donors and other groups, right-leaning advocacy groups, and private-sector businesses that drafts and disseminates “model bill” proposals for state legislation — the education talk was focused on programs that use public dollars for private and religious education, according to two Wisconsin Democratic state legislators who attended, Reps. Kristina Shelton and Francesca Hong. Both lawmakers said in interviews that charter schools were virtually not discussed.

Charter schools are publicly funded but privately operated, some of them as for-profit entities, and they educate about 7 percent of U.S. schoolchildren. The 30-year-old charter sector has been riddled with financial and other scandals over the years, though supporters say that the problems these schools face are expected growing pains and that they offer families an important option over schools in publicly funded districts.

Opponents say that charters are part of an effort to privatize public education, that there is little public accountability over many of them and that they drain resources from the traditional districts where the vast majority of children attend school.
Charters are permitted to operate in 45 states plus the District of Columbia; California has the most, with some 1,330, while other states have very few. Washington state, for example, has about a dozen.

As momentum for these programs grows, charter schools face existential questions about the “public” nature of “public charter schools.” That question was underscored most significantly with a recent, unfinished effort in Oklahoma to open what would be the nation’s first religious charter school. Publicly funded schools are not allowed to teach religious doctrine though they can teach about religion. The Catholic Archdiocese of Oklahoma City is seeking to open a virtual charter school that, according to the application, would serve “as a genuine instrument of the Church.” Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt backs the school’s application. Oklahoma’s Statewide Virtual Charter School Board voted 3-2 in June to allow the school to open, in 2024, but a lawsuit is challenging it, and state Attorney General Gentner Drummond (R) warned in February that allowing the school to open would create a dangerous precedent allowing any religious group to open a publicly funded charter school. Still, on Monday, a state board approved a contract with St. Isidore of Seville Virtual Charter School, bringing the institution one step closer to becoming the first publicly funded religious charter school in the nation.

Nina Rees, president and CEO of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, the charter sector’s major trade group, says charter schools are all public and have to follow laws, just like traditional school districts, that forbid the teaching of religious dogma. Some charter critics have questioned that “public” status for years — as have some judges — arguing that many are permitted by state laws to operate with little public accountability, that some operate as for-profit businesses, and that some charter schools claimed to be nongovernment entities when arguing against teacher unionization. Rees now acknowledges that “this notion of our public identity is going to be challenged.” The U.S. Supreme Court this year declined to accept a case that could have settled the issue.

Another bit of bad news for charter schools came recently in the form of a federal audit of the U.S. Education Department’s Charter Schools Program (CSP), which has provided more than $2.5 billion in grants to help open or expand charter schools. The audit by the department’s Office of Inspector General, released in August, was aimed at determining whether the department’s processes “provided reasonable assurance” that the program’s grantees were reporting “complete and accurate information” in their annual performance reports (APR) and spent grant money “only on allowable activities and in accordance with program requirements.”

Auditors wrote:

We concluded that the CSP office generally implemented these processes as designed. However, it did not always ensure that CSP program officers accurately and completely filled out APR review templates and notified grantees of issues or concerns identified during their reviews of APRs. As a result, the CSP office might not have had reliable information needed to make informed decisions about continuation funding. Additionally, the CSP office might not have provided timely assistance to grantees that needed assistance to meet their approved goals. Further, we determined that the Department and the CSP office also designed processes that should have provided reasonable assurance that Replication and Expansion grantees spent grant funds only on allowable activities and in accordance with program requirements. We concluded that the CSP office generally implemented these processes as designed. However, it did not always ensure that grantees implemented corrective actions to address significant compliance issues relevant to their uses of Replication and Expansion grant funds, fiscal control, and fund accounting. Lastly, the CSP office did not always retain records in official grant files. As a result, the CSP office could not find about 52 percent of the APR review forms that we concluded CSP program officers should have completed from Oct. 1, 2015, through June 30, 2021. Additionally, the CSP office could not find written correspondence with the grantees associated with about 10 percent of the APR review forms that we requested for review.

The audit included a response from the Education Department that said it was already implementing some of the recommendations made to improve processes but also said it did not concur with a few of the findings.

The federal program was the subject of several reports by the nonprofit Network for Public Education, an advocacy group that is highly critical of charter schools and advocates for legislative reform. It has published reports since 2019 on the federal program, revealing the waste of hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars on charter schools that did not open or were shut down. The reports also showed that the Education Department did not adequately monitor federal grants to these schools. You can read about two of those reports here and here. A third report details how many for-profit management companies evade state laws banning for-profit charters.

Meanwhile, the boost charter schools seemed to get from the student results wasn’t authentic. The June study was the third in a series started in 2009 by CREDO, or the Center for Research on Education Outcomes, which was founded at the University of Rochester by Margaret “Macke” Raymond and her husband, Eric Hanushek, an economist. In 2000, they moved CREDO to Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, a conservative think tank that supports charter schools and school choice, according to CREDO’s 2001 annual report, giving it more “institutional credibility.” Raymond, who directs CREDO, is a research fellow and scholar at Hoover. Raymond still directs CREDO, which is funded in large part by foundations and individuals who have spent millions of dollars supporting charter schools.

The new CREDO report identifies two nonprofits as underwriters: the City Fund and the Walton Family Foundation. The City Fund is financially supported by a number of billionaires who support charter schools, including Bill Gates, John Arnold and Reed Hastings. The Walton Family Foundation was one of the first organizations to boost charter schools and calculates that it has supported about a quarter of them, spending hundreds of millions of dollars and pledging more than $1 billion.

The report looked at standardized test scores in 31 states between 2015 and 2019. It concludes that charter schools “produce superior student gains despite enrolling a more challenging student population than their adjacent” traditional public schools. It further says: “The benefit of attending charter schools during the period of study amounts to additional days of learning equivalent to six days in math (0.011) and 16 days in reading (0.028).” And it says there are more than 1,000 “gap-busting” charter schools that “have eliminated learning disparities for their students and moved their achievement ahead of their respective state’s average performance.”

Not really.

For one thing, Raymond said in an email that CREDO used standardized test scores as the basis for its calculations. In the United States, standardized test scores have for decades been a key measure for assigning quality to a school, despite the fact that assessment experts have long said that a single metric can’t reveal the full life of a school, or that the tests themselves are often substandard, or that the algorithms used to decide what the test scores really show are misused.

As for the specific findings of the study, Matt Barnum of the education news publication Chalkbeat put it this way: “CREDO found that attending a charter school for one year would raise the average student’s math scores from the 50th percentile to the 50.4 percentile and reading scores to the 51st percentile. By conventional research standards and common sense, these impacts are small.” Trivial, actually.

The nonpartisan National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder published a critique of CREDO’s report authored by Joseph J. Ferrare, an associate professor at the University of Washington at Bothell who studies education reform movements. He wrote: “Readers should maintain a healthy skepticism toward the findings of this report given its nonexperimental design … [I]t is simply not possible to rule out the potential that unobserved factors are, at least in part, driving differences in test score growth across sectors.”

The Network for Public Education issued a lengthy critique of the CREDO study about problems with data, reporting methods, conclusions and funders. One section detailed issues with CREDO’s calculation’s for “days of learning.” The report, written by the network’s executive director, Carol Burris, a former award-winning educator, says:
CREDO reports its top-line results in Days of Learning, a construct it developed based on the 2012 assumption of Eric Hanushek, Paul Peterson, and Ludger Woessman that “[o]n most measures of student performance, student growth is typically about one full standard deviation on standardized tests between 4th and 8th grade, or about 25 percent of a standard deviation from one grade to the next.”According to CREDO, 5.78 days of learning translates to a 0.01 standard deviation difference. That means the 6.0 “days of learning” average increase in math achievement between charter school students and their virtual twins translates to a 0.011 increase in standard deviation units, which is the accepted way of presenting such differences in scholarly literature. Sixteen CREDO days of learning in reading account for only 0.028 standard deviations (SDs).To ascertain whether or not differences in the range of 0.11 to 0.028 SDs are “remarkable,” I quote CREDO itself as it described its comparative findings between charter and public school students in 2009 on page 22 of the report. Note that the relative differences were similar, although reversed.”

In reading, charter students, on average, realize a growth in learning that is .01 standard deviations less than their TPS counterparts. This small difference — less than 1 percent of a standard deviation — is significant statistically but is meaningless from a practical standpoint. Differences of the magnitude described here could arise simply from the measurement error in the state achievement tests that make up the growth score, so considerable caution is needed in the use of these results.

In math, the analysis shows that students in charter schools gain significantly less than their virtual twin. Charter students on average have learning gains that are .03 standard deviations smaller than their TPS [traditional public school] peers.Unlike reading, the observed difference in average math gains is both significant and large enough to be meaningful. In both cases, however, the absolute size of the effect is small.”

In 2013, then director of the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution, Tom Loveless, used real-world examples to show the minimal impact of findings between .01 and .03 standard deviations in the second CREDO national study. In Charter School Study: Much Ado About Tiny Differences, he made the point that regardless of whether charter schools or public schools are up or down, the differences between the sectors were so small that “the two sectors perform about the same.”He refers to the 1969 guidelines provided by Jacob Cohen, a psychologist, and statistician best known for his work on effect sizes. Cohen categorized effect sizes as small if they meet the thresholds of 0.2, medium at 0.5, and large if it reaches 0.8 standard deviations.

To give real-world context, Loveless provided the following example:“You attend a public talk given by a close friend, a guy who is about 5’ 10” tall. He stands behind a podium on 7 sheets of paper. That’s a bit larger than a 0.01 SD addition to his height. Would you go up to him afterwards and say, ‘Wow, you look taller today.’ I doubt it. What if he stood on 20 sheets of paper (about 0.03 SDs)?

Nope. You wouldn’t notice a difference.”

It is worth noting that the new report uses the term “statistically significant” 39 times, a phrase researchers use to suggest that their findings have meaning, and, presumably, impact in the real world. But “statistically significant” findings often don’t have much meaning in the real world, a point made in a 2019 editorial by statisticians and published in the American Statistician, a journal of the American Statistical Association. The editorial called for ending the use of the term for reasons including this one: “Don’t believe that an association or effect exists just because it was statistically significant.”

Please open the link and read the rest of this important article.

Thom Hartmann argues that the Republican Party has become infected with libertarianism, a philosophy based on selfishness. This explains it’s eagerness to cut social supports and hurt the weak and vulnerable. Feeding hungry children or providing medical care is “woke.” The party of mean.

Anti-vaxxer hero and Democratic primary nominee Robert Kennedy Jr. says, according to news reports:

“I’ve always been aligned with libertarians on most issues.”

Bobby, of course, isn’t the only one. It’s high fashion across the GOP to claim your Libertarian credentials; Ron (and now Rand) Paul turned it into a moneymaking scam, and most all of the Putin Caucus in the GOP love to talk up libertarianism, as do multiple rightwing billionaires. Senator Mike Lee proclaims himself a Libertarian, and has for years.

We see it writ large in the rhetoric of Republican members of Congress and conservative pundits who argue that shutting the government down is a good thing, because most government functions are “unnecessary” or “woke.”

So let’s take a look at how libertarianism would work out in America, and where it came from in the first place.

Generally speaking, Libertarians don’t believe in democracy, which, they say, should be replaced by “the magic of the marketplace” — or at least the “magic” of people made rich by the marketplace — running the country’s essential services.

Here’s the one question that always stops libertarians dead in their tracks when they come on or call into my radio/TV program to proclaim the wonders of their political ideology:

“Please name one country, anywhere in the world, any time in the last 7000 years, where libertarianism has succeeded and produced general peace and prosperity?”

There literally is none. Nowhere. Not a single one. It has never happened. Ever.

If it had, that country would be on the tip of every Libertarian’s tongue, the way Democratic Socialists talk about Norway or Denmark where the full-on Social Democracy and regulated capitalism experiment has succeeded for generations.

Doing my show from Copenhagen a few years ago, I had one of that nation’s top conservative politicians on.

“So, you’re one of the nation’s leading conservatives,” I said. “I guess that means you want to privatize Denmark’s national healthcare system?”

He blinked a few times, incredulous, and then said, bluntly, “Are you crazy?”

There are, of course, examples of governments that intentionally or unintentionally operate broadly along libertarian lines. Back in the 1980s when I was setting up international relief projects with the Salem organization based out of West Germany, I worked in several such countries.

They were places where the government’s only real function is to run the army, police, and the courts, just like libertarians say America should be run. No social safety net, no Social Security, no national healthcare, no or few state-funded public schools, no publicly funded infrastructure of any consequence.

In 2008, my friend and colleague talkshow host Joe Madison (“The Black Eagle” on SiriusXM daily) and I saw how this worked in South Sudan on the border of Darfur as the northern Sudanese government was burning people out of their homes and the group we were with was flooded by tens of thousands of refugees.

It was similar to what I saw in 1980 in Uganda when I was working there at the end of the Tanzanian war to expel Idi Amin.

In parts of Colombia later that decade, after a bomb went off just a block from where we were working, I heard stories of middle-class men in the next neighborhood over who’d an organized an urban “hunt club,” complete with logos and patches, using high-powered rifles to pursue what they described as “feral children.”

Kidnapping was also a major industry in Colombia then: a friend in Bogota was kidnapped and repeatedly raped while her husband, forced to listen to her screams on the phone, frantically tried to raise enough money to pay her ransom. I later met with them both and heard the story firsthand.

In those countries that, because of corruption, civil war, or oligarchic ideology are run along Ayn Rand/Rand Paul libertarian lines, the roads, utilities and housing are fine in wealthy neighborhoods that can provide for themselves, but the rest of the country is potholed and dark, while everyday people often have to walk miles to get firewood, food, and fresh water every day.

There are few or no taxes for the very rich in such countries, and no resources at all for the very poor except those provided by international relief agencies like the one I worked with.

We generally referred to those countries as “failed states.” Rand Paul would probably describe them as “Libertarian paradises,” as his father advocated when, during a presidential primary debate, he said people shouldn’t be let into hospital emergency rooms unless they can pay.

“That’s what freedom is all about, taking your own risks,” Ron Paul said.

No country has ever succeeded when its government has suffered the fate that multimillionaire K Street Lobbyist Grover Norquist wished on America when he famously told NPR:

“I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.”

That’s what Texas did when they split their grid away from the rest of America to avoid regulation of their power industry. The lie of libertarian policies was on vivid display when Texans died from hypothermia while Ted Cruz fled to Cancun.

And then Texas families who survived the bitter cold got $3,000 to $17,000 power bills after the freeze left, because of magical deregulated “free markets” for power in that state.

The libertarian streak in GOP politics was on vivid display when the power went down and the now-resigned Republican Mayor of Colorado City, Texas, Tim Boyd, posted to Facebook:

“No one owes you are (sic) your family anything; nor is it the local government’s responsibility to support you during trying times like this! Sink or swim it’s your choice! The City and County, along with power providers or any other service owes you NOTHING! I’m sick and tired of people looking for a damn handout!

“If you don’t have electricity you step up and come up with a game plan to keep your family warm and safe. If you have no water you deal with out and think outside of the box to survive and supply water to your family.

“If you are sitting at home in the cold because you have no power and are sitting there waiting for someone to come rescue you because your (sic) lazy is direct result of your raising! Only the strong will survive and the weak will parish (sic).”

This libertarian world-view has been foundational to and at the core of the Republican mantras of austerity and “self reliance” ever since the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s.

It’s what Trump tried to do to our public health agencies when he first came into office and shut down Obama’s pandemic response operations in both the National Security Council and the Department of Homeland Security. As a result, almost a million Americans have died of Covid and millions more are disabled for life.

When George W. Bush put a Republican-donor horse show judge in charge of FEMA’s disaster response, his libertarian attitude pretty much guaranteed thousands of people would die in Hurricane Katrina: “Heckuva job, Brownie.”

The Bush administration also defunded food safety enforcement and the predictable result was an increase in food-borne sickness and death.

At the behest of fossil-fuel billionaire libertarians, Republicans have fought any regulation of the fossil fuel industry for 40 years; the result is climate wilding that’s devastating our country from California to Texas to the Midwest to Miami Beach.

Mitch McConnell and Republicans in the US House and Senate argue that giving a $2 trillion tax cut to billionaires was an appropriate thing for government to do (even though it jacked up the national debt), but Build Back Better to help out average Americans is, they say, a crime against our republic.

Americans, increasingly, are figuring out the damage this failed 40-year-long libertarian experiment has done to our nation, which is why people are leaving the Republican Party in droves.

There is, however, one group that is still quite enamored of libertarianism: rightwing billionaires and the corporations that made them rich. And quite a few of them have spent the past decades shoveling cash into the Republican Party, with no sign of a letup to this day.

They set up think tanks and fund hundreds of college professors nationwide to preach their libertarian ideology, and often dominate internet searches because of their thousands of organizations and “news” sites.

They create phony grassroots organizations and get deluded middle-class white people to show up with signs like, “Keep Your Damn Government Hands Off My Medicare!”

They set up organizations nationwide and in every state to bring Republican legislators together with lobbyists to craft libertarian “corporate friendly“ legislation that consistently enriches the top 1% and screws average Americans.

They proclaim the wonders of “small government” and “fiscal responsibility,” code words for gutting the protective functions traditionally performed by government and replacing them with “charity” and corporate sponsorships.

And Republican politicians live in fear today of doing anything that might cause government to actually help the American people, because those same libertarian billionaires and corporations who fund their campaigns are more than happy to destroy them politically when they stray.

Despite all the obvious disasters and widespread public opposition, they’re still intent on America being their grand experiment to prove that at least one country can operate along libertarian lines.

Back in the 1950s and 1960s when Milton Friedman and Ayn Rand were first pitching this ideology (then called neoliberalism and objectivism) as a way to bring “freedom” to America, they were broadly ridiculed and ignored.

But the libertarian foundations and billionaires got into the act in the 1970s, along with the rightwing media organizations they were then building, putting Ronald Reagan into office and shaping his policies, sending America into a libertarian slide.

Forty years of the Reagan Revolution’s libertarian experiment have brought us the predictable result:

— historically low tax rates on corporations and billionaires
— an impoverished middle-class
— devastated labor unions
— the highest rate of child poverty and maternal death in the developed world
— millions without access to healthcare
— one in seven American children going to bed hungry
— our schools, roads, bridges and rail systems in shambles

Libertarianism is a poison that’s crept into our society on the backs of rightwing billionaires like Libertarian David Koch, who ran for Vice President in 1980 on a platform of shutting down every government agency except the military, courts, and police.

But where did all this “greed is good” as a political philosophy start?

Believe it or not, it began in the 1950s with a corrupt real estate lobby, a brutal child murderer, and the young, idealistic Russian immigrant who fell in love with him.

Read the rest of the story in the next post.