Samantha Steckloff, a member of the state’s House of Representatives, tweeted that the House defeated vouchers by 56-51. Steckloff represents Michigan’s 37th district.
@SamSteckloff tweeted:
Public tax dollars for private vouchers FAILED the Michigan House! Majority of us agree that public dollars should go to public schools and public institutions!
Michael Hiltzik is a brilliant columnist for The Los Angeles Times. This article is the single best analysis of gun control that I have read anywhere. In it, Hiltzik demonstrates the fallacies of those who oppose gun control. The Second Amendment does not give unlimited rights to own guns. Gun control is supported by majorities. Effective gun control saves lives. Why should the right to own a gun be more sacred than the right to life?
Hiltzik writes:
Another massacre, another outpouring of political balderdash, flat-out lies about gun control and cynical offers of “thoughts and prayers” for the victims.
I haven’t commented on the slaughter of 19 children and two adults in Uvalde, Texas, by an assault rifle-wielding 18-year-old before now, hoping that perhaps the passage of time would allow the event to become clarified, even a bit more explicable.
But in the week since the May 24 massacre, none of that has happened. The news has only gotten worse. It’s not merely the emerging timelines that point to the inexcusable cowardice of local law enforcement at the scene, but the ever-growing toll of firearm deaths across the country.
The right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited.
— Justice Antonin Scalia, District of Columbia vs Heller
There have been 17 mass shootings nationwide since Uvalde, including 12 on Memorial Day weekend alone. A mass shooting is defined by the Gun Violence Archive as one in which four people or more are killed or wounded, not including the shooter.
What is most dispiriting about this toll is the presumption that campaigning to legislate gun safety is fruitless, because gun control is unconstitutional, politically unpopular, and useless in preventing mass death.
These arguments have turned the American public into cowards about gun control. Voters seem to fear that pressing for tighter gun laws will awaken a ferocious far-right backlash, and who wants that?
Yet not a single one of these assertions is true, and repeating them, as is done after every act of mass bloodshed, doesn’t make them true. The first challenge for those of us concerned about the tide of deaths by firearms in America is to wean the public and public officials from their attitude of resignation.
We’ll skip lightly over a few of the more ludicrously stupid claims made by politicians and gun advocates about Uvalde.
For example, that the disaster could have been averted if the school had only one door, says Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas); apparently Cruz is ignorant of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory disaster, in which 146 garment workers died, many because they could not escape the factory through its locked doors.
But that happened in 1911, and who can expect a Senator to remain that au courant?
Or the admonition by Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), about second-guessing law enforcement officers engaged in “split second decisions.” By most accounts, local first responders failed to confront the Uvalde shooter for 78 minutes, which works out to 4,680 “split seconds.”
Or the assertion by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and many others that the problem leading to Uvalde isn’t the epidemic of assault weapons, but mental illness. This is nothing but an attempt to distract from the real problem.
“Little population-level evidence supports the notion that individuals diagnosed with mental illness are more likely than anyone else to commit gun crimes,” a team from Vanderbilt University reported in 2015.
Even if it were true, Abbott’s Texas has done nothing about it — the state is one of 12 that has not expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. What’s America’s largest single source of funding for mental health services? Medicaid.
Finally, there’s the argument that the aftermath of horrific killings is not the time for “politics.” In fact, it’s exactly the time for politics. Mass death by firearm is the quintessential political issue, and there’s no better time to bring it forward than when the murders of children and other innocents is still fresh in the public mind.
Let’s examine some of the other common canards about gun violence and gun laws, and start thinking about how to move the needle.
For 217 years after the drafting of the Bill of Rights, which included the 2nd Amendment, courts spent little effort parsing its proscription that “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.”
Since the federal ban on assault weapons expired in 2004, mass shootings with those weapons has climbed. An assault weapon was used in the Uvalde massacre of May 24. (Mother Jones)
That changed in 2008, with the Supreme Court’s ruling in the so-called Heller case overturning the District of Columbia’s ban on possession of handguns in the home. Since then, the impression has grown — fostered by the National Rifle Assn. and other elements of the gun lobby — that Heller rendered virtually any gun regulation unconstitutional.
But Justice Antonin Scalia’s 5-4 majority opinion said nothing of the kind. Indeed, Scalia explicitly disavowed such an interpretation. “The right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited,” he wrote. The Constitution does not confer “a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose.”
There was, and is, no constitutional prohibition against laws prohibiting the carrying of concealed weapons, he found. Nothing in his ruling, he wrote, should “cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or … the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings,” or conditions on gun sales.
The problem with the D.C. law, Scalia wrote, was that it went too far by reaching into the home and covering handguns, which were popular weapons of defense in the home. “The Constitution leaves the District of Columbia a variety of tools” for regulating handguns, as well as other firearms, he wrote.
The federal assault weapons ban, which was enacted in 1994 and expired in 2004, repeatedly came under attack in federal courts, and prevailed in every case. Not a single one of those challenges was based on the 2nd Amendment. Since the expiration of the ban, mass shooting deaths in the United States have climbed steadily.
“Heller has been misused in important policy debates about our nation’s gun laws,” wrote former Supreme Court clerks Kate Shaw and John Bash in a recent op-ed. “Most of the obstacles to gun regulations are political and policy based, not legal.” Shaw and Bash worked on the Heller decision as clerks to Scalia and John Paul Stevens, the author of the leading dissent to the ruling, respectively.
So let’s discard the myth that gun control laws are unconstitutional.
By any conventional accounting, the NRA is a shadow of its former self. Its leadership has been racked with internal dissension, its resources have been shrinking and it has faced a serious legal assault by New York state. Attendance at its annual convention last week in Houston drew only a few thousand members, even with former President Trump on hand to speak.
Yet the organization still carries major political weight. To some extent that’s an artifact of its political spending. Even in its straitened circumstances it’s a major political contributor, having handed out more than $29 million in the 2020 election cycle. Some of the politicians taking resolute pro-gun stands are beneficiaries of this largess, mouthing “thoughts and prayers” for the victims of gun massacres while pocketing millions from the NRA.
The NRA also has played a lasting role in blocking funds for research into gun violenceby federal agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an obstacle that remained in place for some two decades until Congress restored funding in 2019. But the gap in research still hampers gun policymaking. It’s long since time to curb this organization’s blood-soaked influence on our politics.
Part of the knee-jerk news coverage of the aftermath of gun massacres is the notion that the American public is deeply divided over gun regulations. This is a corollary of the traditional claim that American society is “polarized,” which I showed last year to be absolutely false. The truth is that large majorities of Americans favor abortion rights, more COVID-related restrictions and, yes, gun regulations.
More than 80% of Americans favor instituting universal background checks on gun buyers and barring people with mental illness from owning guns, according to a Pew Research Center poll. More than 60% favor banning assault weapons and high-capacity ammo magazines.
The poll was taken last September; it’s a reasonable bet that the majorities would be larger now. To put it another way, the “debate” is over — most Americans want to bring gun sales and ownership under greater control.
One claim popular among pro-gun politicians is that gun regulations don’t serve to quell gun violence. (A common version of this trope is that proposed regulations wouldn’t have stopped the latest newsworthy massacre.)
This is a lie, as statistics from the CDC show. States with stricter gun laws have much lower rates of firearm deaths than those with lax laws. The first category includes California (8.4 deaths per 100,000 population) and Massachusetts (3.7). The second group includes Louisiana (26.3) and Texas (14.2, and the highest total gun-related mortality in the country, at 4,164 in 2020).
Texas even loosened its gun regulations just months before the Uvalde massacre. When Missouri repealed its permit regulations for gun ownership in 2007, gun-related homicides jumped by 25% and gun-related suicides by more than 16.1%. When Connecticut enacted a licensing law in 1995, its firearm homicide rate declined by 40% and firearm suicides by 15.4%.
Perhaps the most inexplicable argument justifying congressional inaction over gun laws is that tough laws have no chance of passage, so it’s pointless even to try. Defeatism in the face of urgent need is inexcusable.
The resistance of Republicans to voting for gun laws is precisely the very best reason for bringing those bills to the floor. There’s no reason to give Republican obstructionists a free pass — make them stand up and take a vote.
Make them explain what it is about making Americans safer in schools and workplaces that they find objectionable, and why they think that voting against measures supported by 80% of the public is proper. Bring the fight to them, and show voters the character of the people they’ve placed in high office.
Americans have become inured to gun violence in part because our culture minimizes its horrors. We’re awash in the most visceral depictions of shootings in movies and television, but at their core those depictions are unthreatening — indeed, in most cases they’re meant for entertainment.
Even our news programs revel in gore — the classic dictum of local news broadcasting has long been “If it bleeds, it leads.”
These conditions have inoculated us against the horror of firearm injuries as they occur in real life — especially those caused by assault weapons such as the AR-15. There’s a big difference between hearing the words “gunshot wound” and learning what actually happens to the organs of victims of AR-15 assaults. They don’t look anything like what we see on TV, and we need to have a true, visceral sense of the difference.
“These weapons are often employed on the battlefield to exact the maximum amount of damage possible with the strike of each bullet,” radiologist Laveil M. Allen wrote last week for the Brookings Institution. “Witnessing their devastating impact on unsuspecting school children, grocery shoppers, and churchgoers is unfathomable. The level of destruction, disfigurement, and disregard for life that a high-powered assault rifle inflicts on the human body cannot be understated. Placed into perspective, many of the tiny Uvalde victims’ bodies were so tattered and dismembered from their ballistic injuries, DNA matching was required for identification because physical/visual identification was not possible.”
You’ll hear the argument that showing photographs of real victims or the scenes of massacres will only be more traumatizing. For some people, including the victims’ families, that may be true. But that only underscores my point — we have not been sufficiently traumatized, and the creation of a truly effective mass movement for gun laws requires that we be traumatized.
Because we experience the horror of gun massacres at a remove, they tend to drift out of public consciousness in a distressingly short time span. Even after the Sandy Hook killings, which took the lives of 20 children ages 6 and 7 less than 10 years ago, there was something distancing about reportage of the event. Photos of some of the murdered children have been made public, but they are photos from life, showing the children smiling at birthday parties or gamboling about the playground.
Let’s face it — few Americans were thinking about the Sandy Hook killings until May 24, when the Uvalde massacre brought them bubbling back to public consciousness. Would our reaction be different had we seen photographs of classrooms slathered in blood, of children’s bodies ripped to pieces by Adam Lanza’s assault rifle?
You bet it would. Those images would not easily be forgotten. Every time a GOP senator or representative stood up to declare that the right to own assault weapons trumped the right of those children to live their lives, someone should have produced one of those photographs and said, “Justify this.”
Our risk is that Uvalde will be just another Sandy Hook. Soon to move off the front burner, or soon buried under the choruses of “We can’t pass this” or “This won’t work” or “This is the path we’ve chosen.” We need to change the terms of discussion, or Uvalde will just be the latest massacre of a long line, not the last massacre of its kind.
Christopher Hooks wrote in The Texas Monthly about the boundless hypocrisy and moral vacuousness of Texas’ elected leaders.
In the run-up to the 2022 primaries and election, they made a big show of “protecting the children.”
They obsessed about the danger of transgender children, even insisting on criminalizing parents’ efforts to get medical help for their children. They obsessed about teachers allegedly “grooming” children for lives of deviant sexual behavior. They obsessed about “obscene” books that might normalize sexual behavior they—these men of high righteousness— deplored. They obsessed about “critical race theory” and demanded the banning of books that taught children about racism, whether past or present, or anything about human sexuality.
Yes, the children of Texas would be protected from any teaching about race or sexuality.
But they would not be physically protected. They would not be protected from an 18-year-old with two AR15s.
When the bad man with a powerful weapon came into their classroom, the children were left to fend for themselves while 19 police officers stood in the hallway. The bad man killed their teachers. He killed children. Little girls called 911 and begged for help. One said 8 or 9 children were still alive. But the police remained in the hallway.
The parents in the schoolyard pleaded with the police to save their children, but the police had their instructions: keep the parents away.
Almost an hour passed before the police broke into the classroom and shot the murderer.
The Governor called a press conference , where he commended the police for their courage and bravery. He commended the men who waited in the hallway for almost an hour, while the children were dying, one after another.
Hooks writes:
Texas, a friend used to say, is hard on women and little things. That would come to mind over the years when reporting seemed to bear it out. In 2015, I watched a foster mother testify in court, via telephone from her daughter’s hospital bedside, that state cuts to the Medicaid acute therapy program were having disastrous consequences for her child’s incurable, debilitating genetic disorder. In 2021, an eleven-year-old boy in Conroe suffocated from carbon monoxide poisoning after seeing snow for the first time, as his family tried to keep their home warm after the collapse of a horribly mismanaged electrical grid. And then there were the perennial horror stories from the state’s spike-pit child welfare system—a three-year-old found dead, bleeding from the ears, after his day care repeatedly warned state agents about signs of abuse by his foster parents; a teenage girl who killed herself the moment she could despite orders that she was never to be left alone; and countless others who survive through the heavy prescription of psychotropic meds before being kicked out to the streets at the age of eighteen.
Each revelation of new misery brings a new wave of revulsion, but—I hate to say this—as you learn more about how the social safety net works in Texas, the revulsion starts to fade, and it becomes a dull undercurrent to an awareness of the world instead of something sharp that pokes through. As it fades, so comes the realization that it has faded in the same way for those in power—and that nothing gets fixed because leaders have been immunized from caring to an even greater degree. The grid remains unsteady; children in foster care still get abused. Legislators make a show of passing partial, temporary fixes and resist looking at problems head-on. The Texas Legislature, with all its self-regard and jocularity and pride in itself as an institution, turns out to be suffused with a very dull and banal kind of evil.
On Tuesday, though, something poked through. For me, it wasn’t the knowledge that there had been another school shooting. Who could be surprised by that? Every detail was familiar. A once-bullied eighteen-year-old, two AR-15s, 22 dead, and 19 injured. The thing that shocked was the pictures of the dead when they lived. They were so little! Do you remember what it was like to have a body that small? A round fired by an AR-15 at close range enters the human body at three times the speed as those fired by a handgun, disintegrating and liquefying bones and organs around it. “It’s like a grenade goes off in there,” one trauma surgeon told Wired. Parents had to submit DNA samples so their kids could be accurately identified.
This spectacular violence, it sometimes feels, has not left much of us. At his initial press conference, Governor Greg Abbott wore his traditional white disaster-response shirt and offered details of the massacre as if reading a weather report. At a press conference the next day, where the governor sat alongside Texas senator Ted Cruz and Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, Abbott told Texans that the disaster “could have been worse,” and the primary flash of anger shown by elected officials came when Beto O’Rourke, who appeared in the crowd, tried to talk over them.
Appearing on Newsmax TV the day of the shooting, state attorney general Ken Paxton suggested that more armed guards at schools would help, “because it’s not going to be the last time.” Can you believe that, as a response from one of the most powerful elected officials in the state to a massacre of fourth graders? “It’s not going to be the last time.” There used to be at least a perfunctory mourning period, some hugs given in front of cameras, before those in power turned to one another other and shrugged. But in truth, leaders are only handling this the way they think about the foster care system they oversee, and every other death trap run by the state. The revulsion dulls, the novelty fades, and it becomes normal.
The shooting took place on the day of the Texas primary runoff. The composition of the Legislature and the rest of state government for the next two and a half years was set that night, barring extraordinary circumstances, by the conclusion of the Republican primary, which in Texas is more influential than the general election. Paxton, who had shrugged off the Uvalde shooting on Newsmax while wearing a campaign T-shirt, won renomination and almost certainly a third term in office.
It is a grotesque and cruel irony that the Republican primary this year, and several years of political activity before it, have been dominated by an all-consuming and comically misdirected argument about the “protection” of children and by a war on public schools. There was essentially no policy contested in the GOP primary that could affect the practical and economic circumstances of all Texans. (There rarely is.) There was, however, ceaseless argument about the well-being of children, their morals, their internal lives.
The most acute panic was over transgender children. In February, Paxton’s office issued a formal opinion holding that the prescription of puberty blockers to transgender children represented “child abuse.” Shortly after, Abbott tasked the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services, an overworked and underfunded agency he had overseen for close to eight years, with investigating the families of transgender children for child abuse.
The more widespread crisis concerned books. The panic was conjured by parents and elected officials in equal measure. The first target was books with “divisive” material about race. Then, elected officials began to panicabout “pornography” in schools, a category that mostly included literature featuring queer characters and sexuality. Lawmakers proposed lists of books to be banned. In November, Abbott ordered the Texas Education Agency to investigate cases of “obscene material” in public schools and prosecute those responsible “to the fullest extent of the law,” because, as he wrote, it had to be a top priority to “protect” Texas students.
Public school teachers and children’s librarians—two professions that offer a strongly beneficial service to society for little pay—became villains for parents and candidates alike. They were called “groomers” and pedophiles on social media. In a press release, Abbott called for criminal charges to be brought if librarians were found to have put “pornography” in front of children. In Granbury, southwest of Fort Worth, half a year later, one woman lodged a criminal complaint against the librarians of Hood County ISD, prompting a police investigation. At a subsequent school board meeting, she condemned the fact that a committee brought together to review troublesome books had “too many” librarians instead of “people with good moral standards.”
The deterioration spread. A record number of public school teachers, already weary from the pandemic and now faced with a sort of siege, started quitting en masse—and forfeiting their licenses, indicating they probably wouldn’t come back. “I’m tired of getting punched. It shouldn’t be like this,” ninth grade math teacher Gloria Ogboaloh told Texas Monthly. As more teachers left, the quality of life for remaining educators got worse. Then, just four months after ordering that libraries be investigated, Abbott ordered the TEA to create a task force to investigate why so many teachers were quitting.
Hooks goes on to describe politicians who are liars, braggarts, cruel, indifferent to the safety of children, callous. How long can they continue to fool people with their charade and their fake concern? They don’t care about thechildren
Denis Smith retired from the Ohio Department of Education, where he worked in the charter school office and saw fraud after fraud. Ohio’s charter schools (which the state calls “community schools,” which they are not) are unusually low-performing; a large number are failing schools.
Smith wrote about the scandalous selection of the new state superintendent in the Ohio Capital Journal.
Smith writes:
At its May meeting, the State Board of Education voted to employ Steve Dackin as Ohio’s new Superintendent of Public Instruction. But the hiring of the veteran school administrator has raised some concerns that require further reflection.
The state board’s decision occurred in the middle of National Charter Schools Week and prompted questions about the processes used in the appointment and the search that led up to the board’s action.
To those familiar with the behavior of some charter school boards, where the members are usually hand-picked by the school’s operating company and where tales of conflicts of interest and self-dealing are legion, the state board’s action will need to be more closely examined lest it acquire the same reputation of so many conflicted charter school boards.
In covering the search process and appointment of a new state superintendent of schools, the Cleveland Plain Dealer summarized the situation succinctly:
“Steve Dackin was vice president of the State Board of Education and led the search for a vacant superintendent position before resigning and applying for the job three days later. The deadline to apply was the following day.”
You don’t have to read that Plain Dealer paragraph again to realize there was something wrong in the practices of a state board that allowed a board member to conduct the search for a superintendent, resign so that he could apply at the deadline for the position, add his resume to those already received from other candidates, and then months later be hired for the very position he oversaw as vice president of the board and head of the search committee that was charged with filling the position.
If a public board is concerned about optics, its actions might demonstrate that in addition to suffering from myopia, it’s also tone deaf as shown by its hiring of the new state superintendent.
Catherine Turcer, who directs Common Cause Ohio, an organization which promotes “transparency and accountability in government,” also examined the process that led up to Dackin’s candidacy and had concerns.
“The thing that’s important about this is that we have as much transparency as possible so that we can understand what happened and whether he was attempting to get himself the job inappropriately,” she said. “Right now, we have a lot of questions and things look odd. It’s not enough to do the pro forma, ‘I put my resignation in before I applied.’ You dotted one ‘i’ but what about all the ‘t’s?’ she told the Plain Dealer.
The appointment of a new state superintendent during National Charter Schools Week drew praise from the state charter school lobby, including kind words from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, an organization that promotes these publicly funded, privately operated, underregulated entities and, like the schools it promotes, is conflicted in its purposes. That makes Fordham a comfortable and perfect fit in the midst of charter world.
The conflict that is Fordham was described last year in the Ohio Capital Journal. Fordham serves simultaneously as a charter school authorizer, promoter, and so-called “think tank,” crafting studies that unsurprisingly promote public school privatization, which it calls school choice. But with all of its “think tank” research, apparently Fordham hasn’t studied one of the major design flaws in charter schools.
That flaw doesn’t allow the democratic election of board members by qualified voters in a community. Instead, in many instances we have seen self-dealing by hand-picked board members, conflicts-of-interest by operators, and all of the ethical issues that surround organizations that are not fully transparent in their operations.
The most classic example of this was seen several years ago, where the chairman of a charter school board was also a part-owner of the company which owned the building where the school was located. The school made an overpayment of $478,000 to the company without any board approval. A number of individuals associated with the charter school were indicted, including the school founder, his wife and brother, the board chairman and school treasurer.
Which brings us back to the recent action of the State Board of Education in choosing a new state superintendent.
Because of a history of scandal in the state charter school industry, where more than $1 billion in public funds alone went to ECOT in the largest online charter school scandal in the country, and where the wreckage of more than 300 closed Ohio charters have further depleted the state treasury due to lax oversight caused by few controls, the State Board of Education itself should not be acting like a challenged and conflicted charter school board with few rules, policies, or any sense of institutional memory.
Moreover, the enthusiasm for Dackin’s appointment expressed by the charter school industry and the Fordham Institute should also raise even more concerns.
As someone who has experience in providing oversight of charter schools as well as service on non-profit boards, it is my view that the processes used in the Dackin appointment are troublesome. For example, some boards have policies that require at least a one-year separation by a board member before applying for employment with the organization. Such a board policy protects an organization and lessens the possibility of a conflict or self-dealing situation by any member.
And what about the State Board of Education? Why isn’t there policy which prohibits the employment of a former board member for an extended period of time after separation from the board? For that matter, are there any state boards that have a “time-out” policy before a board or advisory committee member seeks employment?
The Ohio Ethics Commission and its three-page review of the situation before the state board’s hiring of the new superintendent was, to put it mildly, inadequate for the circumstances in the Dackin situation. The appearance of a conflict of interest or any ethical question related to actions that employ past board members recently separated from a public board should be a serious issue.
There is no doubt that the State Board of Education can do better at policy formulation and practice. So too can the Ohio Ethics Commission, which should start a discussion about strengthening its guidelines to go beyond minimalist interpretations of statute and offer more robust models to boards and public agencies that promote greater transparency and accountability.
After all, a state public board by its actions should not mimic charter school boards that love to receive public money but hate regulation.
A video was posted on Facebook showing Uvalde parents pleading with police officers in the school grounds to enter the school and stop the shooting. Some wanted to charge into the building on their own. They yelled, they cursed, pleaded, to no avail. The response from the officer they encountered was to push them back. The video is posted on this article in The Washington Post. It will undoubtedly be all over the other news sites soon. (I’m not on FB.)
The police seemed to have no plan. They sat in their patrol cars, waiting for instructions.
As more and more law officers arrived—local, state, and federal—their confusion about what to do and who was in charge must have grown intense.
There was one evil guy with an AR15 and (as the saying goes among gun advocates) more than 100 good guys who had weapons, maybe even their own AR15s. Without action, their presence was not enough to save the 21 souls in the classroom the evil one entered. No one even tried to save them. The decision was made by someone to isolate the classroom instead of entering it.
This is not a time to take pride or offer congratulations on a fast response. This is a time for grief and shame. Grief for those who died at the hands of a heartless killer. Shame for the officials who failed to develop action plans to save those in danger.
Who should be held accountable?
Governor Greg Abbott.
Reader Christine Langhoff sent a warning that the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education is poised to take control of the Boston Public Schools. This would be a mistake. No state takeover has ever led to better education. The state is not wiser than the city. If anything, the state education department is far removed from daily practice, as it is simply another bureaucracy. The current board is dominated by advocates of choice. Apparently they are unaware that the root cause of low test scores is poverty. The best the board could do would be to reduce class sizes and to promote the creation of community schools, which makes the school the hub of valuable services for children and families. Such proven strategies are unfamiliar to choice advocates. They prefer a failed approach.
Christine Langhoff wrote:
It seems that MA DESE is poised to place Boston’s public schools under receivership, perhaps by a vote as soon as May 24. Doing so would fulfill the Waltons’ wet dream which has been frustrated since the defeat of ballot Question 2 in 2016, which would have eliminated the charter cap.
The board is appointed by Governor Charlie Baker, whose donors are, of course, the Waltons and the Kochs. Four members of the board have day jobs tied to the Waltons: Amanda Fernández, Latinos for Education; Martin West, Education Next; Paymon Rouhanifard, Propel America; and Jim Peyser, New Schools Venture Fund and the Pioneer Institute. Baker is a lame duck, which may explain the haste to pull this off.
No state takeover has yet been successful, and once a system enters receivership, there is no exit. BESE has pointed to low MCAS scores to say our schools are failures, but Boston’s scores, invalid as they may be during the covid pandemic, are higher that in the three districts the state runs: Lawrence, Holyoke and Southbridge.
The Boston Teachers Union has an action letter if anyone is so inclined to support public education in the city where it originated:
Lisa Pelling wrote this article, which appeared in the Swedish publication Social Europe. She directs Arena Ide, a progressive think tank in Stockholm, Sweden.
Lisa Pelling explains how ‘freedom of choice’ has wrought a vicious circle of inequality and underperformance.
Think of a caricature of a capitalist couple and you can picture the front page of the leading Swedish daily, Dagens Nyheter, earlier this year. A man with a tailormade suit and an 80s style attaché portfolio. Next to him, a woman in high heels, silk skirt and large, silver fur coat. Big confident smiles.
Sadly, the portrait of Hans and Barbara Bergström was not a cartoon but an illustration of the current Swedish school system. The photo accompanied an article on what was once a cherished social institution and a source of national pride, which has become a profitable playing field for corporate interests and the creation of immense private wealth.
Barbara Bergström, founder of one of Sweden’s largest school corporations, with 48 schools across Sweden, and her husband, former editor-in-chief of Dagens Nyheter—and a long-time lobbyist for the privatisation of schools—are two of the people who have made a fortune running publicly funded schools in Sweden. When Barbara sold shares in her school empire to American investors a few years ago, she earned 918 million krona (almost €90 million). Her remaining shares are now worth another €30 million.
This is money made entirely from public funds. Private schools in Sweden are funded not by tuition fees, but by a ‘free choice’ voucher system introduced by a conservative government in 1992.
This year, that radical reform of Sweden’s school system turns 30. Ideologically conceivedby Milton Friedman, the system is under increasing criticism. Not only because no other country in the world has chosen to copy it, but also because the downsides have become so evident. In particular, school boards across the country are increasingly aware that the owners of private schools treat them as profitable businesses—at the expense of the public schools.
A controversial social-democrat governance reform in 1991 abolished the state-run schooling system. Since then, municipalities have been in charge of public schools in Sweden and all municipalities are by law obliged to hand out school vouchers (equivalent to the cost of municipal schools) to private schools for each pupil they accept.
It sounds fair: all pupils get a voucher (‘a backpack full of cash’) and all get to choose. Yet individual pupils’ needs are different and, while the municipal school has to cater for all children’s needs, private schools can pick the most profitable pupils—and still receive the same funding.
Municipalities have a legal responsibility to provide children with access to education close to where they live, be that in a small town or remote village. For-profit schools do not have such an obligation and can establish themselves in the city centre.
Nor can municipalities turn pupils down. For-profit schools do this all the time: they put pupils on a waiting list and accept only a profitable quota. Since the largest costs in schools—teachers and classrooms—are more or less fixed, maximum profits stem from maximising the number of pupils per teacher and per classroom. Waiting lists allow pupils to be queued (while attending the default municipal school) until a full (in other words, profitable) classroom can be opened.
This creates a vicious circle. While private for-profit schools operate classrooms with 32 pupils (with the funding from 32 vouchers), municipalities have to run schools where classrooms have one, two or maybe five pupils fewer. Less money per teacher and per classroom mathematically increases the average cost per pupil.
If the cost per pupil for the municipality rises in its schools, the private schools are legally entitled to matching support—even if their costs have not risen. Public schools lose pupils, and so funding, to for-profit schools, while their consequently rising cost per pupil delivers a further funding boon to the private schools—which, with the help of this additional support, become even more attractive. All the while public schools are drained of much-needed resources and so the downward spiral continues.
Inevitably, it is mostly privileged kids who are able to exercise their right to attend private schools, so socially-disadvantaged pupils are left in the public schools. This not only favours inequality of performance between schools but also lowers the overall average—high-performing Finland, by contrast, has very low performance gaps between its schools.
Andreas Schleicher, head of the directorate for education and skills at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, used to ‘look to Sweden as the gold standard for education’. Now, he writes, ‘the Swedish school system seems to have lost its soul’. No other country has experienced such a rapid fall in performance in the OECD’s Programme for International Assessment (PISA) league table as Sweden, paired with increasing knowledge gaps between schools. And all the while school segregation is increasing, not only in big cities, but in mid-sized towns as well.
In her seminal The Death and Life of the great American School System, Diane Ravitch describes how making ‘freedom of choice’ the ‘overarching religion’ benefits few and harms many, destroying the public school system. What should be a public service is abused by parents who seek a (white, non-working class) segregated refuge for their children.
It might seem unlikely that the Swedish school system would be an inspiration to anyone anywhere. But Swedish private schools are highly profitable, their owners have huge funds to spend and they are eager to meet upper- and middle-class demands for social segregation by expanding their corporations abroad.
Academedia, the largest private education provider in Sweden, is established in Norway and has 65 preschools in Germany. It recently reported to investors that it was preparing to launch an apprenticeship programme in the United Kingdom and expand its preschools into the Netherlands. Barbara Bergström’s Internationella Engelska Skolan already owns seven schools in Spain.
The Bergströms’ foundation, meanwhile, has donated SEK60 million to establish a ‘professorship in educational organization and leadership’ at the Stockholm School of Economics. Friedman would have been impressed.
Bill Phillis, retired state education official, is campaigning relentlessly to block the expansion of the state’s voucher program. He is a staunch opponent of privatization. He frequently writes about the low academic quality of the state’s charter schools, their fiscal irresponsibility, and their drain on the state’s public schools. If you live in Ohio, you should join his organization to support public schools.
He writes:
EdChoice Voucher Scheme Does Not Align with the Intentions of the Delegates of Ohio’s 1850/1851 and 1873/1874 Constitutional Conventions Regarding the Public Common School System—Part 1*
The EdChoice voucher scheme is contrary to the intention of the Delegates’ vision of the state system of common schools. During the 1873/1874 Constitutional Convention, when a delegate proposed to alter the 1851 constitutional provision for education to fund private schools, Delegate Asher Cook stated:
Here the children of a district, and often those of an entire village, are united in one school, where all cause of strife and contention is removed, and their minds, true to the instincts with which they are endued, rich and poor, mingle together, for a loving group of little friends, who, hand in hand, march bravely up the rugged hill of science, making the ascent easy by each other’s aid, and smoothing its rugged surface by glad peals of laughter, which ring out merrily and clear over hill top, across valley and up the mountain side, until their echoes wake up a joyous community to thank God for the common schools.
The Delegates to the 1850/1851 Constitutional Convention were intentional in selecting the word “common”. Delegate Archibold expressed that the meaning of “common” at that time might change and thus, suggested the word “useful” to replace “common”. An 1828 dictionary defines “common” as “belonging equally to more than one or to many indefinitely.” Delegate Humphreville stated his belief that “common” as they intended it to function in the clause would never be misinterpreted, and thus, responded to Delegate Archibold’s concern by stating “[C]ommon schools in the future will be common schools—that is to say they will not be uncommon schools.” The inclusion of the word common was intentional.
During the 1874 debates, a discussion ensued regarding the meaning of “a system of common schools.” The discussion led to the question of whether public school funds should be provided to private religious schools. Delegate Root informed the discussion, saying, “Common schools to be successful must be the union of schools. The 1828 American Dictionary of the English Language defines “union” as, [c]oncord; agreement and conjunction of mind, with affections or interest.” Delegate Root asked:
What kind of a common school system would you have but for uniform rules and uniformity of discipline, and by whom are these prescribed? By the legislative power– the highest power in the State. They may relegate the details to certain officers, but it must come from them.
Regarding the same issue, Delegate Miner stated:
I am utterly opposed to a constitutional provision, or to any legislation, having in view the allotment of anypart of the common school fund to any schools except those established, maintained and controlled by, or under the authority of the state. The moment we consent to do so, we deal with a death blow to the system of common schools, upon which, expanded and improved by increasing experience and wisdom, more than upon anything else, it is my profoundest conviction, depends on the perpetuity and efficiency of our American institutions and government.
It is clear that those who established the Constitution language for a system of schools meant that only one system of common schools was to receive public funding for the support thereof.
*Research for this post and much of the content of it is credited to Ohio State University Moritz College of Law Juris Doctor Candidate, Kira Sharp.
Learn more about the EdChoice voucher litigation
Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/OhioEandA
VOUCHERS HURT OHIO
William L. Phillis | Ohio Coalition for Equity & Adequacy of School Funding | 614.228.6540 |ohioeanda@sbcglobal.net| http://ohiocoalition.org
Choice advocates lure new customers by making false promises, writes Peter Greene in The Progressive.
Say this for Jeb Bush: he is not dissuaded by failure. No matter how many studies show the failure of vouchers, he doesn’t care. No matter how many studies show that charter schools do not get better results than public schools, he doesn’t care. No matter how many grifters have drained millions through privatization of schools, he doesn’t care. No matter how little evidence he has for any of his proposals, he still pushes them.
His ideas are old and tired and incoherent. But count on him to package them as fresh and innovative, which they are not.
He is the male counterpart to Betsy DeVos.
He just cares about destroying public schools.
He wrote recently in The Miami Herald:
Last month marked two years since the pandemic swept across the country, causing the largest disruption to our nation’s education system in modern history. But at last, this spring brings an academic revival of sorts. Schools are remaining open, mask mandates are disappearing and plexiglass dividers between students in their classrooms are coming down.
In the rush to return to normal, we owe it to our nation’s children to emerge from this pandemic transformed, not by going backwards, but ready to forge a better future for them with all we’ve learned.
Our starting point is challenging. Prior to the pandemic, America’s public schools were struggling to serve the needs of students, and since the pandemic, a study by McKinsey found students have fallen months behind as a result of school closures and disruptions. There were severe impacts on student mental health, too. Pew Charitable Trusts found students are reporting significantly increased levels of grief, anxiety and depression.
It’s also no surprise that there’s a growing distrust in public education. A survey by Ipsos found trust in teachers declined during the pandemic, and there’s been a subsequent decrease in the number of students enrolling in public school.
Those are serious setbacks, but there are reasons for optimism. The pandemic put a spotlight on a myriad of possibilities for the future of education. Notably, it illustrated a desperate need by families for a broadened ecosystem of options for their children, with funding flexibility to create more equity in choice. And it elevated the power of parents to blaze new educational pathways for their children.
The Associated Press recently reported that homeschooling remains a popular choice for parents, despite schools reopening. And, private schools and public charter schools have witnessed increased enrollment. But choice, in and of itself, isn’t enough. Policymakers must continue to seek new ways to unbundle education systems, transforming old approaches into new and better learning options.
In Indiana, lawmakers, led by House Speaker Todd Huston, took the first step toward creating the nation’s first “parent-teacher compact” law. This innovative policy would allow parents to directly hire teachers. Educators would continue to be paid by the state and receive their health and retirement benefits, but this policy would enable parents and educators to enter into a peer-to-peer relationship to benefit individual students, without the hurdle of a district middleman. This individualized approach to education would give educators more freedom, families more flexibility and individual students the personalized experience they may need.
As we unbundle education, we need to reimagine all aspects of how education is delivered to students. One approach is enacting new part-time enrollment policies. Right now, students are defined by the school in which they’re enrolled.
Lawmakers can improve the education experience by allowing students to have more flexibility, whereby a student can enroll in their local public school and easily access a portion of their education funding to also enroll part-time in a private school, with an online provider, or engage in another learning experience that benefits the child’s education.
Another approach that complements unbundling is rethinking education transportation options. Last year, Gov. Doug Ducey awarded $18 million in grants to modernize Arizona’s K-12 transportation system, including direct-to-family grants to help close transportation gaps. In Oklahoma this year, Gov. Kevin Stitt proposed changing Oklahoma’s school transportation funding formula to expand how public school buses can serve students. And Florida’s Legislature recently passed legislation to create a new $15 million transportation grant program that encourages districts to create innovate approaches to school transportation, including carpooling and ride sharing apps, for both school-of-choice families and traditional school students.
Those are just a few examples, and we must continually look for more ways to unbundle and reimagine education. The pandemic saw an explosion of families, in all communities and from all demographics, embrace micro schools, homeschooling and customized learning pods. Rather than trying to limit these families, we should give them access to direct funds to further personalize and benefit their child’s out-of-school learning experience.
That’s what Gov. Brad Little has championed in Idaho. In response to school closures in 2020, Little used federal emergency COVID relief funds to provide direct grants to families to support students who were no longer learning in school. And this year, Little signed the Empowering Parents Grant Program into law, giving qualifying families up to $3,000 to use for tutoring, educational material, digital devices or internet connectivity….
Transforming our nation’s education system and ensuring students receive the individualized experience to unlock potential and lifelong success require continual forward momentum, especially after two years of disruptions. We have to keep moving, keep reimagining, keep transforming. This commitment to excellence is a point of pride for Florida.
Last year, Florida’s Legislature passed some of the most significant improvements and expansions to the state’s school-choice programs. And this year, lawmakers strengthened the charter school law, expanded the Florida Empowerment scholarship program, created a new financial literacy requirement for high school graduates and ensured parents are better informed of their child’s progress through online diagnostic progress monitoring and end-of-year summative tests.
This Pied Piper plays a tune meant to deceive. Ignore him.
Diane Ravitch's blog 