Archives for category: For-Profit

Carol Burris is the executive director for of the Network for Public Education. in this post, which she wrote exclusively for the blog, she reveals the details of Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ plan to defund and destroy the public schools in her state.

Burris writes:

Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the daughter of Baptist minister and former Governor Mike Huckabee, missed learning the 9th commandment that prohibits telling a lie. As press secretary to Donald Trump, her distortions of the truth resulted in the editor of Forbes warning corporations against hiring Sanders and other Trump “propagandists,” writing, “Forbes will assume that everything your company or firm talks about is a lie.”

Now she is the Governor of Arkansas. On her first day in office and in her response to Biden’s State of the Union, she parroted the old “education is the civil rights issue of our time” line that has been used to justify horrible policies from school closures to charter schools and vouchers. However, the disconnect between what she says and what she does quickly became apparent. On her first day in office, she issued an executive order prohibiting “indoctrination and critical race theory in schools” and another banning the term “Latinx” from being used in state documents. State authorities are investigating AP African American Studies at Little Rock Central High School, where the majority of students are Black.

If we need further proof that this self-proclaimed champion of Civil Rights is more aptly described as a champion of Civil Wrongs, look at her recently leaked ed reform plan.

Here are its features:

The Privatization of Public Education:

· Her voucher plan is a universal ESA—the plan now favored by the far-right. These plans have few rules and no family eligibility requirements. They have become Entitlement Spending Accounts–cash going into the pockets of private school families regardless of income. The leaked plan does not say how taxpayers will pay for it. But everyone will be eligible by 2025. It includes Voucher funding for homeschools. The only restrictions will apply to vendors, so those who enroll their children in those recently uncovered Neo-Nazi homeschools can find ways to cash in.

· Increased tax credits for contributions to an existing voucher program.

· Local School Boards can contract with an open-enrollment charter school or private company to run a school campus at risk of state takeover due to low performance—and if they do, they get a financial incentive.

· Establishment of a charter-school construction fund for new charters and expansion.

· Elimination of the cap on charters.

· Charter school applications no longer need to be reviewed and approved by the local school district board of directors.

· All students attending a public school can take courses and earn credit for classes not offered in their school. By the beginning of the 2025-2026 school year, students attending a public school that receives a letter grade of “C”, “D”, or “P” from the Arkansas School and District Accountability System may take their required courses (i.e. math, English, etc.) through the course choice program. Bet your bottom dollar that these courses will be online, with vendors like Stride K12 making a fortune.

Censoring and Controlling Curriculum

· K-3 literacy evaluation will be aligned with the “science of reading.”

· Before grade 5, teachers cannot provide classroom instruction on the following topics: sexually explicit materials, sexual reproduction, sexual intercourse, gender identity, and sexual orientation.

· School districts must implement an age-appropriate child sexual prevention program for grades K-12, allowing parents to preview materials and exempt their children from instruction. (I have no idea what a child sexual prevention program even is.)

· The Secretary of Education will review the Department of Education regulations, policies, materials, and communications to ensure they do not indoctrinate students with ideologies that conflict with the principle of equal protection under the law.

· No school employee or student must attend training on prohibited indoctrination or Critical Race Theory.

Harmful Policies for Students

· 3rd-grade retention based on deficits in reading proficiency.

· An accountability system for pre-school education that includes student data.

· Literacy testing three times a year for all students in K-3.

· Curriculum tracking in Grade 8.

· Community service requirements, which may, for some students, be challenging to meet.

· Mandated cops on campus.

· Career-ready pathways in partnership with local business and industry leaders” translate workforce training programs to track students into low-paying and middle-wage jobs.

Punitive Policies for Teachers

· Elimination of due process in dismissals.

· Base salaries will no longer increase by years of experience or for Master’s degrees.

· Bonuses based on VAM.

There are a few likable initiatives in her plan, such as paid maternity leave for teachers, but if she makes districts fund them even as she drains their funding with charter schools and voucher expansion, a good initiative will be one more financial pressure on already underfunded schools.

Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ education plan is a hodgepodge of all the awful and ineffective ideas proposed since No Child Left Behind. The fingerprints of JEB! and the Walton family are over the leaked legislation.

Despite its hodgepodge nature, one thing is clear—its ultimate intent is to destroy public education in the state by slamming a fist down on students, public schools, and their teachers while propping up a wild and largely unaccountable privatized system.

Categories Accountability, Arkansas, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Corruption, Curriculum, Democracy, Education Industry, Extremism, For-Profit, Fraud, Funding, Ignorance, Inequity, Injustice, Privatization, Segregation , Racial Isolation and Integration, Separation of church and state, Vouchers

Ohio GOP Wants to Expand Vouchers, Pooh-Poohs Online Nazi-Homeschooling Group

By dianeravitch

February 12, 2023 //

Ohio has poured taxpayer dollars into charter schools, even though public schools consistently outperform charter schools. Ohio has poured more than $1 billion into virtual charters, even though the biggest of them (ECOT, or The Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow) had the lowest graduation rate in the nation and declared bankruptcy rather than pay back $67 million to the state for large numbers of phantom students. But despite its dismal statistics, it collected $1 billion over its 20 years in business. Vouchers were evaluated by a researcher chosen by a pro-choice think tank, and the report said that voucher students were falling behind.

Given this long history of school choice failure, wouldn’t you think the state would step back and evaluate its commitment to failure?

Of course not. The GOP dominated Legislature wants to expand vouchers.

Why does the Ohio GOP invest in failure?

Morgan Trau of News5Cleveland explains:

https://www.news5cleveland.com/news/politics/ohio-politics/as-some-lawmakers-debate-nazi-home-schooling-scandal-others-propose-expansion-to-school-voucher-program?_amp=true

COLUMBUS, Ohio — A bill to expand the school voucher system and provide more money to home-schoolers has been proposed in Ohio as the Department of Education is investigating a Nazi home-schooling scandal. This is not the first Holocaust education issue the state has had in one year.

Ohio’s public schools have been pushing for consistent funding for decades.

William Philis, executive director of the Ohio Coalition for Equity & Adequacy of School Funding, has spent his career fighting against the voucher system.

“We don’t have a constitutional system and they’re exacerbating the unconstitutionality of the system by draining money out of the public school system,” Philis said.

A new bill introduced to the state Senate will continue to leave public schools behind in favor of supporting private schools, he added.

Senate Bill 11 is expected to use taxpayer money to give $5,500 to elementary and middle school students and $7,500 to high schoolers so they can attend any public, community or charted nonpublic school. Ashtabula Republican Sen. Sandra O’Brien introduced the bill because, “Ohio should act now to put parents, not government, in control of their children’s education,” she said in sponsor testimony Tuesday.

Eric Frank, president of School Choice Ohio, believes the legislation allows children to get the best education possible.

“Primarily, what those do is they target scholarships to families that either live in what we typically refer to as under-performing public school areas, not necessarily districts, but buildings within districts and also low-income families,” Frank said.

The bill would expand the current EdChoice Scholarship to give universal eligibility to all students in the state of Ohio.

There are two sections of the current program:

EdChoice Expansion, which the state reported had 17,152 students participating in fiscal year 2021, requires income verification. Eighty-five percent of these students were below the 200% poverty rate.
Standard EdChoice, which the state reported has 33,129 student in FY 2021, does not require income verification. More than 75% of the students utilizing this program were not low-income qualified.

Of the total 50,281 students, 25,180 are low-income qualified, with 25,101 that are not. This means that half of the students utilizing taxpayer money to go to a private or charter school are not designated as “needing government assistance.”

This is not to say that people who aren’t in that designation don’t struggle to have to pay the full price of the tuition — but it just means it is unknown if they do struggle to pay or not.

“Most people are really happy with their public schools,” Frank added. “But families that aren’t, they should have another option.”

Philis strongly disagreed.

“I’d say that’s pure poppycock,” Philis said. “I don’t get a voucher for a backyard swimming pool because I don’t want to go to the public pool.”

Even if a student takes a voucher, private schools choose who will be admitted, the advocate said.

“What we’re doing in Ohio right now is that we’re funding segregation,” he stated. “We are funding, with taxpayer money, White Flight.”

The Fair School Funding Plan (FSFP), was somewhat attempted to be put into place for fiscal year 2021-22. It was supposed to change how the state delegates funding for school districts.

Starting in the 2021 FY, lawmakers added hundreds of millions of state dollars in both direct funding and tax credits to subsidize families sending their children to private and charter schools. Critics, like Ohio Education Association, said this makes taxpayers pay for these for-profit schools and diverts money away from public education, which desperately needs it.

The bill would also expand the home-school tax credit from $250 to $2,000, which raises concerns.

Ohio’s Nazi Education Problem

The Ohio Dept. of Education is investigating a family in Upper Sandusky after it was revealed that their home-school program was allegedly a Nazi propaganda school, where children were taught how to love Hitler and become a “wonderful Nazi.”

Logan and Katja Lawrence were the alleged creators of the “Dissident Homeschool” group which had 2,500 members on its Telegram channel when they were exposed in a late January article from VICE News.

“We need to ensure that home-schooling is not an opportunity for parents to systemically teach their children hatred,” state Sen. Catherine D. Ingram (D-Cincinnati) said. “Senate Bill 1, which is pending in Education Committee, weakens home-schooling requirements. The legislature must protect our children from instruction fueled by racism and intolerance.”

News 5 asked Sen. President Matt Huffman (R-Lima) if there should be oversight over the home-school program, which he said “absolutely,” but there are specific rules and regulations.

“I hope we’re long past the point in our society where we take the actions of one person or a small group of people and paint the entire group as though somehow they’re participating in that,” Huffman responded.

The Department of Education should be figuring out what is going on, he added.

“I hope, frankly, that people will not try to take some political advantage or policy advantage… basically trying to decide that a couple of sociopaths somewhere in Ohio who are doing strange things that… somehow should affect the policy of the rest of the state is anathema to me,” the GOP leader said (anathema means something that a person hates).

Democrats have already been jumping at making sure a situation like this does not happen again.

There are only two Jewish members in the Ohio House — Democratic Reps. Casey Weinstein of Hudson and Dani Isaacsohn of Cincinnati.

Weinstein consistently tweets about antisemitism, including a recent post advocating for more home-schooling regulations. Republican state Rep. Riordan McClain, who represents the area in which the alleged Nazi-group resides, responded to him.

“Let’s not take freedom away from all for the terrible ideas of a few,” McClain said. “I can tell you as a home-educating parent from Upper, I’ve never heard of these people.”

In a statement to the press, McClain condemned the Nazi-based teachings and “racial hatred.” He, however, acknowledged that “differing opinions exist in a free society and our job as community members is to have robust ongoing debates.”

“Get the public system out of the way, give the parents the money — we’re going to have a school that involves the Ku Klux Klan mentality,” Philis said.

Frank argued back.

“There are 50,000 families in Ohio that are home-schooling their kids,” Frank said. “And my guess is 99.9% of them probably do a good job and they are their kids, and so it’s their right.”

News 5 continues to search to find out if the Lawrence family has received any funding from the state.

This is not the first time Ohio has dealt with a Holocaust-related scandal in the past year.

Back in March of 2022, News 5 aired an exclusive report about comments made by one of the primary sponsors of a bill to ban schools from teaching “divisive topics” — H.B. 327. The report stemmed from an interview exchange between state Rep. Sarah Fowler Arthur (R-Ashtabula) and News 5 Statehouse reporter Morgan Trau.

During the interview, Fowler Arthur was asked about the financial aspect of the bill. While attempting to talk about funding, she brought up the Holocaust, saying that students needed to hear the massacre from the perspective of the “German soldiers.”

After the exclusive story went international, the original divisive concepts bill had been renamed the “both sides bill” or the “both sides of the Holocaust bill.”

Former Speaker of the Ohio House Bob Cupp (R-Lima) responded to a question about the lawmaker’s comments on the Holocaust, saying they were “inappropriate remarks, they were uninformed remarks.”

The bill swiftly died, despite Fowler Arthur’s repeated efforts to bring it back to life, a records request by News 5 showed. Also in the records were dozens of angry emails to the lawmaker.

She was previously on the state Board of Education but has never participated in the public education system as a student or a parent. She was home-schooled and did not attend college.

In the new General Assembly, the lawmaker will have more power than she has ever had. News 5 shared in January that Fowler Arthur will be the primary and secondary Education Committee’s vice chair.

“I think that in terms of the committee makeup, is it concerning to me that that individual has been given a leadership position on an education committee? Absolutely,” Minority House Leader Allison Russo (D-Upper Arlington) told News 5 in a one-on-one interview.

Luckily, Russo said, the vice chair shouldn’t have a huge role in leading the direction of a committee.

Follow WEWS statehouse reporter Morgan Trau on Twitter and Facebook.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Disruption, Education Industry, Failure, For-Profit, Ohio, Privatization, Virtual Charter Schools, Vouchers

Carol Burris: Running a Charter School for Profit Should Be Illegal

By dianeravitch

February 9, 2023 //

Carol Burris, executive director of the Betwork for Public Education, writes in The Progressive that it should be illegal to run a charter school for profit, just as it is illegal to run a public school for profit. Since the charter school lobby claims that charter schools are “public schools,” they should insist on banning for-profit charters.

Please open the link. This is an important article.

Burris writes:

From insider deals to real estate flips, the problems with charter schools run by for-profit corporations can’t be ignored. And growth in this sector is accelerating as operators use lax regulations and complicated corporate schemes to harvest public dollars from publicly-funded charter schools.

Those are the findings of a new report, Chartered for Profit II: Pandemic Profiteering, from the Network for Public Education (NPE), the organization I lead. We determined that for-profit corporations operate nearly 17 percent of all charter schools. And because many are online schools with high enrollments, one in five charter school students attended a for-profit run charter during the 2021-2022 school year.

In some states, the percentage of students in for-profit-run schools is staggering. More than 50 percent of all Florida charter school students are in schools run by for-profit companies; in Ohio, the percentage tops 60 percent. In Michigan, a startling 72 percent of all of the state’s charter school students attend a school run by one of forty-five corporations.

And this is not in the best interest of children. Students of charters run for profit graduate at lower rates and have more adverse academic outcomes as the number of charter services managed by for-profit operators increases. That conclusion, by the way, comes from a report published by the pro-charter Thomas B. Fordham Institute, an Ohio charter school sponsor.

Students of charters run for profit graduate at lower rates and have more adverse academic outcomes.

Some of these schools are part of large national chains. Four of the five largest for-profit chains now run their schools with sweeps contracts, meaning that 90 percent or more of the public dollars coming into the school are “swept” into for-profit-controlled bank accounts. The largest, Academica, which runs a private online international school that gives out American high school diplomas, manages 205 charter schools in nine states. Thirteen for-profit chains run twenty or more schools or campuses. Nearly half of all 110 for-profit operators in the United States run only one or two schools. These micro-education management organizations exist solely to shield financial transactions and owner profits from the public.

The charter industry downplays the prevalence of charter schools being run for profit because the mission of for-profit companies is to maximize profits, which puts the focus on financial gain, not students.

Open the link, please.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Corruption, Education Industry, For-Profit

Ohio: Public Schools Are Not Failing, Ohio’s Politicians Are

By dianeravitch

February 8, 2023 //

Dave Dewitt, editor-in-chief of the Ohio Capital Journal, wrote a blistering critique of the state’s political leadership, who place the interests of the private sector above the common good of the public.

Many Ohioans pay taxes for schools but don’t have school-age children. Their taxes are meant to fund quality public schools because having educated citizens is a public good. Sending their money to unaccountable for-profit, private, and religious schools is a terrible abuse.

Compelling taxpayers to support private interests at the expense of public ones is not only unethical, but unconstitutional when those private interests intertwine with religion. American taxpayers should never be forced to fund the efforts of religious institutions of any kind. Not one red cent.

The very first clause in the First Amendment of our Bill of Rights is couched firmly in that defining principle. The entire basis for making “no law respecting an establishment of religion” the first clause was “Father of the Constitution” James Madison’s takedown of anti-Constitution Patrick Henry’s proposal to send taxpayer money to support religious institutions.

Nevertheless, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine has put forward a budget proposal to expand school voucher subsidies that would send money to private, for-profit, and religious ventures. Prominent Ohio Republican Statehouse leaders appear to be on board.

From Cleveland.com’s Laura Hancock:

“Families are eligible for EdChoice scholarships by either living in the boundaries of a low-performing school or by household income. Currently, a family of four can qualify for state money if the household income is at or below $69,375, or 250% of the Federal Poverty Guidelines. The limit would increase to 400% of the Federal Poverty Guidelines, which would be $111,000 for a family of four, under DeWine’s proposal. …”

EdChoice vouchers are distributed as checks given to private schools to help cover a student’s tuition. The scholarship amount is currently $5,500 for students in grades k-8 and $7,500 for grades 9-12. Republicans who control the legislature expanded vouchers in 2012, 2020, and 2021.

So vouchers are already available to low-income households and in low-performing districts, which means the only reason to increase the voucher threshold to 400% is for a massive sweetheart giveaway to private interests.

DeWine’s budget also would increase per-student building funding for all charter schools from $500 to $1,000 per student — a 100% bump — and provide an extra $3,000 for each economically disadvantaged student, or a student who qualifies for free or reduced lunch — up from $1,750 currently.

DeWine, Hancock notes, did not propose any extra per-student money for traditional public education.

Sadly, American public education was marked as a $500 billion a year opportunity for private profiteering some time ago, and Ohio has been leading the way.

Over the past several decades, Ohio’s seen one boondoggle after another.

Ohio taxpayers were ripped off by hundreds of millions of dollars, and nearly 12,000 Ohio schoolchildren and their families left in the lurch, when the ECOT scheme — dreamed up on a Waffle House napkin — crashed and burned in 2018.

Another for-profit charter school operator called White Hat Management drained $67 million a year away from Ohio public schools before low test scores and soaring high school dropout rates led to a lawsuit from school boards and its eventual demise.

Dayton Daily News’ Josh Sweigart has uncovered a smattering of cases the past decade, including nepotistic hiring, undocumented purchasing, and charter school board members overpaying themselves.

Meanwhile, Ohio Capital Journal’s Zurie Pope revealed in reporting this past summer that the proposed “Backpack Bill” legislation last General Assembly to send public education money to private schools by the head was written with help from religious lobbying group the Center for Christian Virtue (CCV) and a think tank that promotes charter schools.

Promotion for the so-called “Backpack Bill” law featured CCV President Aaron Baer speaking at a press conference for it, and documents obtained by OCJ also revealed behind-the-scenes advice and promotion by outside groups like Heritage Action and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).

ALEC even held a luncheon for lawmakers at the Statehouse promoted as a “Backpack Bill Briefing.”

All of this has come amid a decades-long right-wing assault on public education itself, only becoming more venomous and destructive in recent years.

But by wide margins, parents express satisfaction with their kids’ schools, and educational outcomes over the past 50 years in America have only steadily improved. From Education Next:

Contrary to what you may have heard, average student achievement has been increasing for half a century. Across 7 million tests taken by U.S. students born between 1954 and 2007, math scores have grown by 95 percent of a standard deviation, or nearly four years’ worth of learning. Reading scores have grown by 20 percent of a standard deviation during that time, nearly one year’s worth of learning.

The narrative of “failing public schools” has been manufactured by corrupt private school bloodsuckers looking to wet their beaks in the public school money pot.

Aside from its false pretenses, it undercuts funding and saps the ability of public schools to address real problems.

The biggest achievement gap in American education is directly tied to poverty. Exacerbating this situation is the fact that Ohio has had unconstitutional property tax-based school funding for 25 years. Wealthy districts do great, while low-income districts suffer mightily.

We have ample empirical evidence to prove that the way to address the poverty achievement gap is by robustly funding public schools to institute best practices: early childhood education; a well-rounded school experience including culture, sports, and the arts; extra-curricular activities that give students a sense of purpose; community-minded and community-building schools; cooperative learning.

But initiatives like these are the very things money-strapped districts are forced to cut first, alongside practical necessities like busing or the teachers themselves.

DeWine’s proposed budget does include money for things such as early childhood education, and he has already awarded significant grants for it, which is commendable.

But he seems to want to balance this politically with a massive giveaway of public dollars to private school interests and the religious zealots aligned with CCV, which is unacceptable.

Many Ohio taxpayers — even those who don’t have children or whose children are no longer school-age — are happy to help fund public schools.

We understand that quality public schools increase property values and make our communities attractive places to live, which helps them thrive.

We want our communities and our public schools to thrive.

What most Ohio taxpayers do not want is our public schools to continue to suffer as money and resources are siphoned away from them to prop up private, for-profit, and religious interests.

But when it comes to funding those interests, or fully and fairly funding Ohio’s public schools, Republican Statehouse leaders have continually legislated for the private interests.

The vultures have poll-tested their messaging, so they love to talk about “school choice,” “parents’ rights,” and “funding the students, not the system.”

This is a smooth evasion that attempts to elide the fact that the question isn’t about whether parents have a choice where to send their kids for schooling; everybody already does.

What these interests are asking for are endless direct state subsidies to their private enterprises and religious institutions.

And that’s what DeWine and these lawmakers stand prepared to keep giving them, on our dime and at the expense of our public schools.

Every Ohio public school faces a yearly audit, but no such requirement exists for private schools receiving public vouchers. Why not? If public money is continually funneled into these schools, why are they not subjected to the same auditing standards as public schools to make sure that money is actually going toward appropriate education of students?In an analysis of one proposed bill, the nonpartisan Legislative Services Commission found that two-thirds of kids getting vouchers in Ohio’s expansion program have never been in public schools.

So that means that these kids aren’t being “rescued” from public schools; they were never going to public schools in the first place. This is pure state subsidy of private school tuition. As the LSC puts it, these are “existing nonpublic school students that represent a new state responsibility.”

Do the private schools lead to greater academic success?

A Cincinnati Enquirer analysis of nearly 2.5 million test scores from schools in more than 150 Ohio cities during the 2017-18 and 2018-19 school years found that in 88% of the cities, the public district achieved better state testing results than the private schools.

Given all this, what assurances are Ohioans being given that our money will not be misused as it has been in the past? If this money is coming out of public school funding, what guarantees do we have that our public schools will be fully funded under the new Fair Funding plan?

COLUMBUS, OH — JANUARY 31: Ohio Senate President Matt Huffman (R-Lima) takes questions from the press following State of the State Address, Jan. 31, 2023, in the Warren G. Harding Briefing Room at the Statehouse in Columbus, Ohio. (Photo by Graham Stokes for Ohio Capital Journal. Republish photo only with original story.)

Ohio Senate Republicans led by President Matt Huffman have made clear they want the full “Backpack Bill” pushed by the CCV. That would be the biggest win possible for the private interests. As this DeWine proposal is brought and negotiated between the House and Senate, it looks likely to become, essentially, “Backpack Bill Light.”

I’m not holding my breath for full, fair public school funding. Legislators repeatedly steamroll DeWine and there’s no reason to think they won’t on this. There’s only one pot. It’s meant for high-quality public schools. But they always turn their backs on our public schools in favor of the private interests.

I come from a family of educators: My mom, a longtime teacher and junior high school principal; my sister, a primary school special education teacher; my grandmother, a high school teacher; my other grandmother, a school librarian; my grandfather, a school teacher and later the dean of a Kent State University branch.

I grew up surrounded by public educators, both at school and at home. I grew up generally believing that we as a society agreed about the importance and value of public education.

It came as a great shock to me when I entered adulthood that there are incredibly well-funded private interests working every day to undermine and rob our public schools.

Then I started seeing one for-profit school scam after another in Ohio, and realized that our state government was actively stoking the grift.

When I ask the public educators I know for their thoughts, many tell me there’s a definite role for traditional charters and private schools for the maybe 10% of students best off at them, but it’s unconscionable to rob the other 90% of public school students and prioritize the 10%.

That seems reasonable.

Traditional charter and private schools have a place, but they must face just as much scrutiny and accountability and auditing as our public schools if they are to receive our money.

And propping up private schools should never, ever come at the expense of our already woefully unsupported public schools.

We need to dedicate ourselves to a positive vision of the wonderful beacons our public schools can be when we invest in them, when we support them, when we encourage them to be creative, and when we give them the resources and opportunity to thrive.

Public education is not failing. Ohio politicians are failing to prioritize and invest in public education.

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Education Industry, Ethics, Failure, For-Profit, Fraud, Ohio, Privatization, Shame, Vouchers

Steven Singer: A New Ed Tech Goliath Enters Standardized Testing Field

By dianeravitch

February 3, 2023 //

Steven Singer writes about the alliance among three organizations—a private equity firm, a testing company, and an EdTech company. What could possibly go wrong?

He begins:

Prepare to watch more of your tax dollars spiral down the drain of standardized testing.

A year after being gobbled up by private equity firmVeritas Capital, ed tech company Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH) is acquiring K-12 assessment giant Northwest Evaluation Association (NWEA).

Let me put that in perspective – a scandal-ridden investment firm that made billions in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan bought one of standardized testing’s big four and then added the Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) test to its arsenal.

This almost certainly means the cost of state testing is going to increase since the providers of the tests are shrinking.

“It used to be if you put out a [Request for Proposal] RFP for state assessment, you get five, six, 10 bidders,” said Scott Marion, executive director of the Center for Assessment. “Now you’re lucky to get three. When you’re doing that, there’s maybe not as much expertise and certainly the cost will go up” (emphasis mine).

Under the proposed deal announced in January, the testing company’s assessments and the ed tech company’s test prep materials will become intimately entwined.

NWEA, best known for its MAP assessment, will operate as a division of HMH. And NWEA’s tests will be aligned with HMH’s curriculum.

You can just imagine how this will affect the marketplace.

NWEA serves about 10,000 school districts and HMH estimates it works with more than 50 million students and 4 million educators in 150 countries, according to a press release about the proposed acquisition.

So we can expect districts and even entire states which rely heavily on the MAP test to beencouraged to buy as much HMH curriculum as possible. That way they can teach directly what is on their standardized tests.

That is assuming, of course, the acquisition agreement is approved after a 90-day regulatory review period.

To be honest, I would be surprised if there are any objections.

Such cozy relationships already exist with other education companies. For example, Curriculum Associates provides the aforementioned curriculum for its own i-Ready assessment.

It’s ironic that an industry built on standardization – one size fits all – continues to take steps to create books, software and courses aligned with specific tests. It’s almost like individuating information to specific student’s needs is beneficial or something. Weird!

After all, if these sorts of assessments can be gamed by increased access to materials created by the same corporate entities that create and grade the tests, are we really assessing knowledge? Aren’t we just giving students a score based on how many books and software packages their districts bought from the parent company? Is that really education?

I remember a time when curriculum was determined by classroom teachers – you know, experts in their fields, not experts in the corporate entity’s test du jour.

But I guess no one was getting rich that way…

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

Categories Education Industry, For-Profit, Standardized Testing

College Board Revises AP African American Studies Course to Placate Conservative Critics

By dianeravitch

February 2, 2023 //

When I first had a chance to read the College Board’s AP African American Studies syllabus, I predicted that the College Board was likely to beat a hasty retreat if its bottom line was jeopardized. I have not yet seen the revised edition, but the media is reporting that certain hot topics and prominent names were deleted to make the course palatable to Ron DeSantis and other conservative governors.

The New York Times reported:

After heavy criticism from Gov. Ron DeSantis, the College Board released on Wednesday an official curriculum for its new Advanced Placement course in African American Studies — stripped of much of the subject matter that had angered the governor and other conservatives.

The College Board purged the names of many Black writers and scholars associated with critical race theory, the queer experience and Black feminism. It ushered out some politically fraught topics, like Black Lives Matter, from the formal curriculum.

And it added something new: “Black conservatism” is now offered as an idea for a research project.

This last addition was a direct concession to criticism from the conservative National Review, which assailed the AP course as Neo-marxist indoctrination that left out the voices of African American conservative writers and scholars.

The Times’ story continues:

But the study of contemporary topics — including Black Lives Matter, incarceration, queer life and the debate over reparations — is downgraded. The subjects are no longer part of the exam, and are simply offered on a list of options for a required research project.

And even that list, in a nod to local laws, “can be refined by local states and districts.”

The expunged writers and scholars include Kimberlé W. Crenshaw, a law professor at Columbia, which touts her work as “foundational in critical race theory”; Roderick Ferguson, a Yale professor who has written about queer social movements; and Ta-Nehisi Coates, the author who has made the case for reparations for slavery. Gone, too, is bell hooks, the writer who shaped discussions about race, feminism and class.

After the curriculum was released, Professor Crenshaw said that even if her name and others had been taken out of the curriculum because secondary sources — theorists or analysts — were being eliminated in favor of facts and lived experience, the decision sent a troubling message. “I would have made a different choice,” she said. “Even the appearance of bowing to political pressure in the context of new knowledge and ideas is something that should not be done.”

But she said she was also disappointed because she had believed the course would capitalize on a hunger of young students to learn “ways of thinking about things like police brutality, mass incarceration and continuing inequalities.”

Instead, she said, “the very same set of circumstances that presented the need for the course also created the backlash against the content that people don’t like.”

David Blight, a professor of American history at Yale University, said Wednesday that he had written an endorsement of the new curriculum, at the College Board’s request, and that he believed it had much to offer not just about history but also about Black poetry, art and the origins of the blues, jazz and hip-hop. But he withdrew his endorsement on Wednesday, after learning that some sections had been cut.

“I withdrew it because I want to know when and how they made these decisions to excise these people, because that’s also an attack on their academic freedom,” Dr. Blight said.

PEN America, a free speech organization, echoed that concern. While the College Board had said the changes were not political, the board “risked sending the message that political threats against the teaching of particular types of content can succeed in silencing that content,” said Jeremy C. Young, senior manager of free expression and education at PEN America…

Dr. Gates, who was a consultant to the curriculum, said he was “sorry that the College Board’s policy is not to require secondary sources in its curricula.” He teaches Harvard’s introduction to African American studies, “and academic subjects such as ‘Intersectionality’ and critical race theory, the 1619 Project, reparations for slavery, Black homophobia and antisemitism are fair game, of course, for such a class,” he said in an email. The 1619 Project is an initiative by The New York Times.

The College Board insists it made its changes in December before DeSantis denounced the syllabus.

But the conservative attack on the syllabus began last September, when Stanley Kurtz received a leaked copy and wrote a scathing critique in The National Review called “Neo-Marxing the College Board with AP African American Studies.”

He wrote in September:

A new and sweeping effort to infuse leftist radicalism into America’s K–12 curriculum has begun. The College Board — the group that runs the SAT test and the Advanced Placement (AP) program — is pilot-testing an AP African American Studies course. While the College Board has withheld the course’s curriculum framework from the public, I have obtained a copy.

Although K–12 teachers and academic consultants working with the College Board have publicly denied that AP African American Studies (APAAS) either pushes an ideological agenda or teaches critical race theory, those denials are false. APAAS clearly proselytizes for a socialist transformation of the United States, although its socialism is heavily inflected by attention to race and ethnicity. Even if there were no laws barring such content, states and local school districts would have every right to block APAAS as antithetical to their educational goals. In any case, APAAS’s course content does run afoul of the new state laws barring CRT. To approve APAAS would be to gut those laws.

Kurtz followed with additional articles in The National Review lambasting the course as radical leftist indoctrination that violated state laws prohibiting the teaching of critical race theory. He applauded DeSantis’s attack on the course.

Although the College Board insisted that it’s revisions had nothing to do with the conservative pushback and was completely nonpolitical, Kurtz laughed:

Here’s the reality. The College Board is in a panic. Its repeated attempts to keep the APAAS curriculum secret have failed. That curriculum has now been widely published, and the teacher’s guide has been exposed here at NRO as well. My sources tell me that at least one other red state is seriously considering pulling out of the course. More red states are likely doing the same. The College Board knows that if it doesn’t stop the bleeding, the red states will be lost.

The College Board knew it had a problem months before DeSantis condemned the course. Could it take the risk of offering a course that would be rejected by red states that had already banned “critical race theory?”

The Times pointed out:

Acceptance for the new curriculum is important to the College Board, a nonprofit, because A.P. courses are a major source of revenue. The board took in more than $1 billion in program service revenue in 2019, of which more than $490 million came from “AP and Instruction,” according to its tax-exempt filing.

The College Board is a nonprofit but it pays hefty salaries. According ito Forbes, its Chief Executive Officer David Coleman (the architect of the Common Core standards) was paid $1.8 million in salary in 2018 (the last year that figures were available), and its president received more than $1 million. The company holds over $1 billion in assets.

Could they risk publishing a course that might be rejected by every red state? Maybe. But would they? Clearly, it was decided that it was easier to drop the controversial names and topics than to offend powerful conservative figures who might hurt their revenues.

Categories Censorship, Curriculum, DeSantis, Education Industry, Extremism, Florida, For-Profit, Race, Racism

How to Get Rich Quick: Open a Charter School in Texas!

By dianeravitch

January 26, 2023 //

Independent researchers have demonstrated repeatedly that charter schools in Texas do not get better academic outcomes than public schools. The average charter school ranks below the average public school. Yet charter schools continue to proliferate, for two reasons: one, the governor, lieutenant governor and legislature firmly believe that the private sector is better than anything public; two, charter schools are a honey pot for entrepreneurs, who see a chance to get public money with minimal accountability or oversight.

Will Dobbie and Roland Fryer reported in 2016:

We estimate the impact of charter schools on early-life labor market outcomes using administrative data from Texas. We find that, at the mean, charter schools have no impact on test scores and a negative impact on earnings. No Excuses charter schools increase test scores and four-year college enrollment, but have a small and statistically insignificant impact on earnings, while other types of charter schools decrease test scores, four-year college enrollment, and earnings. Moving to school-level estimates, we find that charter schools that decrease test scores also tend to decrease earnings, while charter schools that increase test scores have no discernible impact on earnings.

This article appeared in the San Antonio Express-News. The business community in San Antonio has been very supportive of turning public money over to private-managed charter schools.

Just over two years ago, Universal Academy, a Texas charter school with two campuses in the Dallas area, made a surprising move.

In November 2020, a nonprofit foundation formed to support the school bought a luxury horse ranch and equestrian center from former ExxonMobil Chairman Rex Tillerson. The 12-building complex features a show barn “designed with Normandy-style cathedral ceilings,” a 120,000 square foot climate-controlled riding arena and a viewing pavilion with kitchen and bathrooms.

Last summer the Texas Education Agency granted Universal Academy permission to create a new elementary campus on the horse property’s manicured grounds. It will offer students riding lessons, according to a brochure, for $9,500.

Sales prices aren’t public in Texas, but the 100-acre property had been listed for $12 million when Tillerson, who also served as secretary of state under former President Donald Trump, bought it in 2009. Because of the foundation’s nonprofit status and its plans to offer equine therapy, the parcel has been removed from the tax rolls.

School board President Janice Blackmon said Universal hopes to use the facility to start a 4H chapter and Western-style horsemanship training, among other programs that take advantage of its rural location. “We’re trying to broaden the students and connect them to their Texas roots,” she said.

Splashy purchases like the horse arena are receiving increasing public scrutiny as charter schools continue to expand aggressively across Texas. Under state law, charter schools are public schools — just owned and managed privately, unlike traditional school districts.

An analysis by Hearst Newspapers found cases in which charter schools collected valuable real estate at great cost to taxpayers but with a tenuous connection to student learning. In others, administrators own the school facilities and have collected millions from charging rent to the same schools they run.

In Houston, the superintendent and founder of Diversity, Roots and Wings Academy, or DRAW, owns or controls four facilities used by the school, allowing him to bill millions to schools he oversees. DRAW’s most recent financial report shows signed lease agreements to pay Fernando Donatti, the superintendent, and his companies more than $6.5 million through 2031.

In an email, superintendent Donetti at DRAW said the property transactions were ethical, in the best interest of DRAW’s students and properly reported to state regulators. He said his school was “lucky” he was able to purchase the property because of challenges charters can face finding proper facilities.

Also in the Houston area, at ComQuest Academy Charter High School, the superintendent and her husband also own the company to which the school pays rent.

And Accelerated Learning Academy, a charter school based in Houston, is still trying to get a tax exemption on one of the two condominiums it bought just over a decade ago in upscale neighborhoods in Houston and Dallas. The school claims it has used the condos for storage, despite a nearby 9,600 square foot facility.

The battles between school districts and charter networks have become increasingly pitched, as they are locked in a zero-sum battle for public dollars.

Last year in Houston, about 45,000 students transferred from the ISD to charter schools, resulting in a loss to the district of a minimum of $276 million. That figure includes only the basic allotment received by the districts, excluding special education funding or other allotments.

In San Antonio, the two largest school districts are Northside ISD and North East ISD. More than 12,000 Northside students transferred to charter schools in the 2021-2022 school year, as did just under 8,000 from North East ISD. That means Northside lost at least $75 million, while North East lost $50 million, using the same basic allotment figures.

Each side cries foul about the other’s perceived advantages: charters are able to operate with less government and public scrutiny, while school districts benefit from zoning boards and can lean on a local tax base for financing.

Georgina Perez, who served on the State Board of Education from 2017 until this year, noted arrangements such as these would never be permitted at traditional school districts.

“If it can’t be done in (school districts), they probably had a good reason to disallow it,” she said. “So why can it be done with privately managed charter franchises?”

Lawmaker: ‘Sunshine’ is best cure

The largest charter network in Texas was a catalyst for the increased public scrutiny of charter school spending.

IDEA Public Schools faces state investigation for its spending habits, including purchases of luxury boxes at San Antonio Spurs games, lavish travel expenditures for executives, the acquisition of a boutique hotel in Cameron County for more than $1 million, plans to buy a $15 million private jet and other allegations of irresponsible or improper use of funds. The allegations date back to 2015 and led to the departure of top executives — including CEO and founder Tom Torkelson, who received a $900,000 severance payment.

Over the years lawmakers have steadily tightened rules for charter governance. A 2013 bill included provisions to strengthen nepotism rules; a 2021 law outlawed large severance payments. That bill was sponsored by Rep. Terry Canales, a South Texas Democrat whose district has some of the highest rates of charter school enrollment in the state.

“There’s a lot of work to be done for the people of Texas when it comes to charter schools,” Canales said. “Sunshine is the best cure for corruption. And the reality is it seems to be sanctioned corruption in charter schools.”

Considering the increased scrutiny, “It’s a myth that charter schools today are unregulated,” said Joe Hoffer, a San Antonio attorney who works on behalf of many charter schools. “Every session, more and more laws get passed.” If anything, he said, charter schools often have to jump through more regulatory hoops than local schools.

Yet acquiring property remains a gray area.

Charter schools that can’t purchase their own property typically must lease it and pay taxes. A 2021 state law authored by Rep. Barbara Gervin-Hawkins, a San Antonio Democrat who operates a charter, made such arrangements tax-free. But the Texas Supreme Court later blocked parts of the law, and it has been applied differently by counties across the state.

It’s unusual for school districts to lease their facilities; typically they are publicly owned or constructed. Local school districts are governed by nonpartisan elected boards, and when the board decides to purchase real estate, it must notify the public of the contract and voters can petition the district to block it. If a project requires bonding or new taxes, it must be put on the ballot.

At charters, by comparison, the governing board is appointed, not elected, so it does not answer to local voters. The main public scrutiny comes later, when the information about the sale must be disclosed in annual required filings with the Texas Education Agency.

The state education agency has the authority to review charter real estate transactions and sometimes does. In Dallas, Golden Rule Charter School is under state investigation for a real estate deal and possible nepotism. The school declined to release details because the investigation is pending.

But such reviews are often cursory, if they happen at all.

When charters report a real estate transaction to the education agency, Hoffer said, they typically just receive a letter back saying it has been recorded, with a clause reminding the schools that state regulators have the authority to return for an audit or demand the deal be re-done.

Critics say it isn’t enough. “The problem that a lot of us have had with charters is that they are considered public schools and they are taxpayer-funded, but they don’t have taxpayer scrutiny,” said state Rep. Donna Howard, an Austin Democrat and former trustee at Eanes ISD. “It’s a real lack of accountability.”

Some deals benefit administrators

According to its website, Horizon Montessori Public School operates four campuses in the Rio Grande Valley, one on Sugar Cane Drive in Weslaco. Until recently, records show, the property and its two commercial buildings were owned by Superintendent Alim Ansari.

Hidalgo County appraisal records show Ansari also apparently lived in a 4,800-square-foot home at the back of the 2.85-acre parcel, a portion of which was granted a homestead limitation on its taxes.

In addition to serving as Ansari’s home, records from the Texas Education Agency show that between 2015 and 2020, the superintendent leased his Weslaco property to Horizon for classroom and office space, collecting $118,000 a year in rent during the period. In 2020, Ansari-the-landlord signed a new five-year contract with his school for the property, for $168,000 annually, according to education agency records.

A home can be seen on the same piece of property as the Horizon Montessori Public School on Sugarcane Drive in Weslaco on Thursday, Jan. 19, 2023. The home belonged to the superintendent of the public charter school who leased his Weslaco property to Horizon for classroom and office space, collecting $118,000 a year in rent from 2015-2020. State and local records show Ansari sold the campus and residence last June. The buyer was a nonprofit organization called South Texas Educational Technologies, which according to its tax records conducts business as Horizon Montessori. Ansari is its chairman. State and local records show the foundation purchased the property from Ansari for $1.9 million, or more than twice the $840,000 at which Hidalgo County appraised it. Records show the foundation used a private appraiser to value the parcel.James Hord/Contributor

State and local records show Ansari sold the campus and residence last June. The buyer was a nonprofit organization called South Texas Educational Technologies, which conducts business as Horizon Montessori, according to its tax records. Ansari is its chairman.

State and local records show Ansari’s foundation purchased the property from Ansari for $1.9 million — or more than twice the $840,000 at which Hidalgo County appraised it. The foundation used a private appraiser to value the parcel.

Ansari did not respond to multiple phone and email messages. James Hayes, a CPA who sits on Horizon’s board and who also is paid $48,000 a year by the charter for accounting services, declined to comment.

Related-party arrangements are rare among modern charters, said Hoffer, the attorney who represents some of them. In some cases, he said, new schools might be forced to make such deals temporarily because they did not have the creditworthiness to borrow money to purchase facilities.

Pioneer Technology and Arts Academy, which has several campuses in the Dallas area, paid about $5 million in rent in the 2021 fiscal year to two companies, one a nonprofit and one a for-profit. Records show Superintendent Shubham Pandey has stakes in both.

Just under $3.5 million went to the nonprofit controlled by two board members of Pioneer, including Pandey. Another $1,296,418 went to Pandey’s for-profit business, PNC Partners, with more than $3 million total reported in the previous three years.

In an email, Pandey said that Pioneer’s goal all along was to transfer the school buildings from his for-profit ownership to a nonprofit. Three campuses were taken over by the nonprofit in 2019, while three others were transferred last year. Future campuses will be owned by the nonprofit, he said, and he no longer collects rent checks from the school.

But the nonprofit did not exist when Pioneer was given its charter, and its initial application did not mention future plans to transfer assets to a nonprofit.

At ComQuest Academy Charter High School, the Houston-area charter, Superintendent Tanis Stanfield and her husband, Glenn, said they don’t earn a profit from the rent it pays their company, Peachwood Station LLC

Peachwood collected $91,000 in rent in 2021. Documents also say the company provided an additional $117,000-worth of rent for free.

Tanis Stanfield said the couple followed the law and provided the needed space at a steep discount to the school she ran. “State charter funding for facilities was not available for the campus acquisition,” the superintendent wrote in an email.

School-owned condos?

In 2017, the Chronicle reported on Accelerated Learning Academy’s purchase of a 1,119-square-foot condo unit in the 22-story Cosmopolitan, a glassy high rise near Memorial Park, for $427,000. The school then bought a 1,340-square-foot condo in downtown Dallas’s Metropolitan Club the same year, appraisal records show.

The school claimed both of the residential units were needed for storage space. The Dallas Appraisal District accepted that explanation, though the school already had a 9,600-square-foot, nearly empty campus in nearby Lancaster, and granted the condo a full property tax exemption. Records show Accelerated sold the condo in 2021.

The Cosmopolitan condominium building at 1600 Post Oak Blvd where Accelerated Learning Academy purchased a 1,119-square-foot condo unit, claiming they needed the space for storage, photographed Thursday, Jan. 19, 2023, in Houston.

Harris County appraisal officials have been more skeptical about the school’s use of the unit for educational purposes: “Personally, I cannot imagine that the state of Texas would allow the use of state funds to purchase this property,” the agency’s exemptions coordinator wrote in 2013, noting the Cosmopolitan’s deed restrictions prohibited condos from being used for businesses.

Accelerated has continued to seek a tax exemption. The appraisal district’s 2018 field inspection showed some plastic totes scattered throughout the unit.

“Very nice condo with granite and hardwoods,” the inspector noted. The exemption was again denied because the property did “not meet the tests prescribed by the tax code.” Records show Accelerated paid about $9,000 in property taxes on the unit last year.

Another example is the A.W. Brown Leadership Academy, which has two campuses in the Dallas area that serve about 1,000 students. Property records show it owns eight properties, several worth millions that have sat unused — even as taxpayer money has gone to repay the loans used to buy them.

Records show A.W. Brown’s real estate holdings include nearly 50,000 of commercial office space purchased with bonds in 2017. Appraised at more than $4 million, the property has been tax-free since 2018 and is vacant. Taxpayers pay for the bonds. A.W. Brown spokesman Charles Roberts said the school is still deciding how to use it.

The charter also owns a 3,400-square-foot house with an in-ground pool on 6 acres in Duncanville, identified as an office and valued at $630,000, plus 99 acres next to it, valued at more than $4 million by the appraisal district. Those were purchased more than a decade ago from professional basketball player Larry Demetric Johnson, records show.

The school has paid no taxes on either since 2014, according to appraisal records. In the fall of 2022, the school announced its plan to turn the more-than 100 acres of land into a community garden and farm for students “to learn more about agriculture and entrepreneurship,” said Roberts, the school spokesman.

In response to questions from Hearst, Roberts said the charter would be starting “an internal audit of facility purchases.” He declined to comment further.

edward.mckinley@chron.com

eric.dexheimer@chron.com

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Corruption, Education Industry, For-Profit, Texas

Thom Hartmann: Why Is the For-Profit Healthcare Industry Like a Blood-Sucking Tick?

By dianeravitch

January 20, 2023 //

Thom Hartmann provides a brief history of the power of the for-profit healthcare industry, which has successfully blocked a national Medicare-for-All system. Please open the link and read it all. The industry’s current push is to get people transferred from Medicare to for-profit Medicare Advantage plans. Under Medicare, seniors can choose their own doctors and do not have to seek permission for costly procedures. under Medicare Advantages, patients may see only in-network doctors and may be denied permission for treatment. That’s where the profit is: denying treatment. About half of all seniors are on a Medicare Advantage plan, because they were wooed by prescription drug coverage or a free gym membership.

Hartmann begins:

Republicans have taken control of the House of Representatives, and already have their sights set on forcing major cuts to “entitlements” like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

One of the promises McCarthy made to become speaker was to force a vote on dialing back 2023/2024 spending back to 2021 levels — and there’s been a 7% inflation increase in costs/expenses since then. In other words, they want massive cuts.

His Republican colleagues have already outlined the starting point for their demands, as reportedby Yahoo News:

“The Republican Study Committee proposed a budget for fiscal 2023 that would gradually increase the eligibility ages for Social Security and Medicare, and change the Social Security benefit formula for people 54 and younger…”

In that, they’re going to have a hell of a fight on their hands, as Senator Bernie Sanders is taking over leadership of the Senate Health Committee, which oversees Medicare and Medicaid. He’s already promising “a lot of subpoenas” will be arriving at the offices of healthcare and big pharma CEOs.

Most Americans have no idea that the United States is quite literally the only country in the developed world that doesn’t define healthcare as an absolute right for all of its citizens.

That’s it. We’re the only one left. Were the only country in the developed world where somebody getting sick can leave a family bankrupt, destitute, and homeless.

A half-million American families are wiped out every year so completely that they must lose everything and declare bankruptcy just because somebody got sick. The number of health-expense-related bankruptcies in all the other developed countries in the world combined is zero.

Yet the United States spends more on “healthcare” than any other country in the world: about 17% of GDP.

Switzerland, Germany, France, Sweden and Japan all average around 11%, and Canada, Denmark, Belgium, Austria, Norway, Netherlands, United Kingdom, New Zealand and Australia all come in between 9.3% and 10.5%.

Health insurance premiums right now make up about 22% of all taxable payroll (and don’t even cover all working people), whereas Medicare For All would run an estimated 10% and would cover every man, woman, and child in America.

How and why are Americans being played for such suckers?

We are literally the only developed country in the world with an entire multi-billion-dollar for-profit industry devoted to parasitically extracting money from us to then turn over to healthcare providers on our behalf. The for-profit health insurance industry has attached itself to us like a giant, bloodsucking tick.

And it’s not like we haven’t tried to remove that parasite.

Presidents Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Jack Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson all proposed and tried to bring a national healthcare system to the United States.

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

Categories Elections, Fake, For-Profit, Health

Peter Greene: Vouchers Are a Disaster By Any Name

By dianeravitch

January 17, 2023 //

Peter Greene explains school issues better than anyone. In this post in the Bucks County Beacon in Pennsylvania, he explains why vouchers fail, why renaming them doesn’t make them better, and why anyone who cares about the quality of education should forget about vouchers/ESAs.

He writes:

School Vouchers Have Been A Disaster—Now Advocates Are Trying To Rename Them

What you need to know about education savings accounts, a kind of “super-voucher.”

Although a sizable number of Republican candidates in the 2022 midterm elections who were counting on school vouchers to be a winning issue—including Tudor Dixon in Michigan, Kari Lake in Arizona, and Tim Michels in Wisconsin—went down to defeat, school vouchers are not about to go away. Voucher advocates are instead changing the name and pushing for education savings accounts (ESAs).

ESAs are legal in around 10 states so far, but if this new idea for promoting school choice hasn’t already been proposed in your state, it may be appearing there soon. Here’s what education savings accounts are, how they work, and what policymakers and families in your state should consider before rushing headlong into adopting this idea.

What Are ESAs?

Education savings accounts are a kind of super-voucher. While traditional vouchers give parents a chunk of taxpayer money that they could use for tuition at the school of their choice, an ESA gives parents a chunk of taxpayer money that they can spend on private school tuition or a variety of other educational expenses.

Tennessee’s ESA law offers a typical list of eligible expenses that not only include private school tuition and fees but also textbooks, school uniforms, tutoring, transportation to and from school, computer software, tech devices, summer school tuition, and tuition and fees at a postsecondary school.

ESAs provide a wider range of choices—and a wider range of ways for vendors to get their hands on education tax dollars without having to open a whole school to get voucher money.

ESAs also provide political cover. Vouchers have frequently been rejected by voters, so voucher proponents, on Twitter and in legislative discussions, have opted not to use the label of “voucher” for ESAs. They may further try to sweeten the rebranding by using terms such as “education scholarship accounts” and “education freedom accounts.”

The money comes to parents by way of a company hired to handle these funds. Step Up for Students and ClassWallet are two examples of these “scholarship management” companies. These companies handle the actual disbursement of the monies, often through debit cards; they also take a cut of the funding.

Where Does ESA Money Come From?

Funding for an ESA program can come from several different paths.

One pathway is via tax credit programs that allow corporations and individuals to contribute directly to “scholarship” funding while getting a dollar-for-dollar tax credit. Former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos proposed this on a national scale with her failed Education Freedom Scholarships.

Proponents like to say that tax credit funding does not involve any government spending, which is technically correct because the money never touches government hands. But because it is a tax credit, it does cost the taxpayers. A million dollars in tax credit scholarships means $1 million of revenue the government does not get, leaving a hole that must be made up either by raising taxes or cutting other state and federal programs. Kentucky set up tax credit scholarships to fund its ESA program; the tax credit scholarship program was thrown out in December 2022 by the state’s supreme court for being “unconstitutional.”

Another pathway to ESA funding comes from new laws enacting “backpack funding,” where per-pupil funding that would have gone to the student’s home school district goes to the student’s ESA instead. This can be particularly damaging in states like Arizona, where the money is pulled from the student’s assigned district even if the student has always attended private school. In other words, the school’s operating revenue is reduced by the per-pupil funding, but its operating costs are reduced by zero dollars.

ESAs can also be funded by taking the money off the top of the state’s education budget, meaning the costs of the vouchers hit all school districts, whether they have students choosing vouchers or not.

In addition, a suggestion was made that pandemic relief funds be distributed via ESA-style programs (Oklahoma was one state that tried it).

GOP legislators have also tried to propose that federal funding intended for poor students or students with special needs, such as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), be turned into school voucher programs, a particularly ironic proposal, as students usually give up their rights under IDEA when they move out of the public education system. This repurposing of federal funding for education will no doubt become part of the rhetoric used for ESA funding.

How Are Tax Dollars in ESA Spent?

Tracking how tax dollars are spent in ESA programs is difficult if not impossible because these programs have hardly any accountability.

ESAs, like vouchers, have proven to be a way to use public tax dollars to fund private religious schools. In fact, in states where voucher programs exist, vouchers primarily fund religious schools (particularly Catholic ones). While the separation of church and state, when it comes to education, is already being increasingly whittled away, ESAs, like vouchers, allow states to circumvent that wall entirely.

Further, there are few checks in place to ensure that ESA money is spent on legitimate education expenses. In Arizona, parents spent $700,000 of their ESA money on beauty supplies, clothes, and other questionable expenses. In Oklahoma, pandemic relief funds were disbursed ESA-style, and when news broke that about half a million dollars in funds had been used to buy things like Christmas trees, gaming consoles, and outdoor grills, the state passed the buck.

Ryan Walters, who was just elected as Oklahoma’s education chief, bragged that the private sector would be a “more efficient way” to handle the funds, and he gave ClassWallet freedom to administer the state’s ESA program. But ClassWallet has admitted that it has “neither responsibility for, nor authority to exercise programmatic decision making with respect to the program or its associated federal funds and did not have responsibility for grant compliance.” In other words, nobody is checking to see how the money is really spent.

In most ESA programs, parents can select from an official list of vendors. One might assume that such a list would include vendors that have been screened to make sure that they are qualified providers of high-quality materials and instruction, but one would be wrong. In many states, a vendor is included in the list after simply meeting some very basic requirements. Tennessee’s ESA program leaves oversight of education vendors largely up to the management of its private contractor. Arizona’s ESA program doesn’t even have a list of approved schools, vendors, or providers, leaving the destination of taxpayer funding up to the “discretion” of the account holder.

The argument is that free market forces will keep vendors in line and that parents’ ability to make choices will work better than government regulations. One might also argue that the Food and Drug Administration should be shut down and the market should be allowed to regulate food manufacturing behavior. If a company gets sloppy or cheap and starts producing poisoned food, the market will correct it. All we have to do is let some consumers be poisoned in the process.

Not only are taxpayers’ interests unguarded in ESA systems, but parent and student interests are unguarded as well. Parents have to navigate an unregulated marketplace, an asymmetrical market where sellers have far more information than buyers, and where marketing materials take the place of useful information.

What Risks Do ESAs Pose to Students and Families?

Whether school choice advocates are pushing vouchers or ESAs, they frequently fail to mention the most fundamental issue for students and their families—private schools do not have to admit anyone they don’t wish to admit, either by placing various barriers in the way (not offering transportation or meals) or by simply putting restrictions in place.

That was one of the takeaways from Carson v. Makin, a Supreme Court decision that declared that Maine must allow voucher money to go to religious private schools, even if they are clearly discriminatory. Many ESA laws include a sort of non-interference clause that declares that accepting voucher money does not make the school a state actor, and the state may in no way dictate to the school how it will operate. In other words, they may teach what they want and discriminate as they like, even if they accept taxpayer dollars. Students with special needs, as well as LGBTQIA+ students, find they may have far fewer “choice” options than others.

ESA programs fail to protect students in other important ways. Should a family run out of ESA money, or find that they’ve been bilked by a bad vendor, or even be dumped by a vendor that goes out of business midyear, there are no real protections for families of students. Some school choice advocates have suggested that this risk would be minimized by providing third-party consumer reviews via a service like Yelp. But generally, it’s assumed that the invisible hand of the market, wearing its caveat emptor ring, is supposed to do the job of quality oversight.

In one striking example, an ESA bill proposed in Utah in 2022 included a requirement that parents sign a statement that they “assume full financial responsibility for the education” of their child. That means if they run out of voucher money or get left high and dry by a bad vendor or find the vendor incompetent, they are on their own. Presumably, in such a situation, a student would have no recourse but to return to a public school, though that school might get zero funding for that student.

Do ESAs Improve Education Results?

Most importantly, study after study shows that voucher programs in all their forms do not foster excellence in education. ESAs are a newer creation and so have been studied less, but given that the ESA system has even fewer guardrails than traditional vouchers, there’s no reason to think that the educational results would be any better.

In any case, under ESA, poor educational outcomes would be the parents’ problem, and the solutions we’ve seen for this problem are grim.

For instance, some voucher proponents (including DeVos) suggest a low-cost use for vouchers would be microschools, in which a handful of students gather in someone’s home around a computer with some online lessons while an adult “coach” keeps an eye on things. It’s not anyone’s first choice for a great education, but if that’s what you can afford—well, enjoy your choice.

That is the heart of voucher programs, whether you call them vouchers or education savings accounts or freedom scholarship accounts; they get the government out of the school business and turn education into a commodity that is the responsibility of parents alone. In voucher world, the state hands you your debit card and washes its hands of you. “Enjoy your freedom, and good luck.” And if an excellent education is not readily available because the ESA money is inadequate or your child has special needs, and your local public school is struggling with reduced funding, well, that’s your problem.

It’s all about the three D’s—disrupt, defund, and dismantle. Call the voucher system whatever you would like, but it is about reducing education from a public good and shared societal responsibility to a simple consumer good.

This article was produced by Our Schools, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Peter Greene

Peter Greene is a recently retired classroom secondary English teacher of 39 years. He lives and works in a small town in Northwest Pennsylvania, and blogs at Curmudgucation.

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, For-Profit, Fraud, Hoax, Pennsylvania, Vouchers

Network for Public Education: Chartered For Profit, II: Pandemic Profiteering

By dianeravitch

January 11, 2023 //

The Network for Public Education has released a new report on for-profit charters, which grew during the pandemic years. The report is titled Chartered for Profit II: Pandemic Profiteering. It builds on the findings of a report published by NPE in 2021. For-profit charters not only divert money away from the public schools, which enroll the vast majority of students in every state, but they skim off profits that should have been spent on students and teachers. The report details the nefarious deals that enrich the charter operators. Every citizen who cares about our future should be aware of the facts detailed in this report. We believe readers will be genuinely shocked by the findings in this report, which shows how scammers and grifters have gotten a stronghold in the charter industry, to the detriment of students, teachers, and taxpayers.

Here is the executive summary:

In March of 2021, the Network for Public Education published Chartered for Profit: The Hidden World of Charter Schools Operated for Financial Gain. In this follow-up report on the charter for-profit sector, we chronicle its expansion during the years of the Covid-19 pandemic by reporting growth in the number of schools, the number of for-profit corporations that run them, and student enrollment.

Acccording to our research, the for-profit sector dominated the charter school sector during the pandemic years. As the pandemic wore on – the percentage of charter schools run by for-profits jumped from 15 percent to 16.6 percent of the charter sector. This is a far greater percentage than is reported by the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, which inexplicably does not report schools run by for-profit Education Management Organizations (EMOs) that control only one or two schools. These micro-EMOS comprise nearly half of all for-profit EMOs.

However, the number of schools run for profit underestimates the true growth of for-profit schooling during Covid 19. The percentage of students attending a charter school designed to produce a profit for its management company soared. According to the Common Core of Data of the National Center for Education Statistics, the total student enrollment in charter schools during the second year of the pandemic (the 2021-2022 school year) was 3,676,635. Student enrollment in for-profit-run charter schools jumped to 731,406 that year.

That means that 20 percent of all charter school students, 1 in 5, were enrolled in a charter school managed by a for-profit management corporation by the pandemic’s end.

More disturbing is that 27 percent of the students attending for-profit-run schools were enrolled in low-quality virtual charter schools that teach students either exclusively or primarily online. That was in 2021. During the prior year (2020) the number was even higher.

Those who defend for-profit charter schooling claim it is no different from public schools using vendors for transportation services or to purchase textbooks. However, as this report explains, for-profit chartering is very different from vendors who supply discreet products and services. We detail the various ways in which the owners of EMOs extract profit via a lack of oversight and regulation that fails to protect taxpayers from sweetheart deals, sweeps contracts, and related party transactions designed to enrich EMO owners, their friends and their family members. And we explain how the acquisition of real estate and exploitative lease and purchase agreements drive the expansion of for-profit-run charter schools and, in some cases, put the school at financial risk.

Chartered For-Profit II: Pandemic Profiteering makes a case for substantive state and national reform so that the best interests of students and taxpayers trump financial gain. Like our first report, it provides insight into the most controversial sector of the charter school world—charters operated for financial gain.

chartered-for-profit-2 Download

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Corruption, Education Industry, Failure, For-Profit

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Peter Greene

Network for Public Education: Chartered For Profit, II: Pandemic Profiteering

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School Vouchers Have Been A Disaster—Now Advocates Are Trying To Rename Them

Peter Greene

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