This is a letter from Robert Weissman of Public Citizen, an organization that’s trying to fix our broken nation.
There was a time — not that long ago — when America’s gun manufacturers did not advertise assault weapons to the general public.
But for the past 20 years or so, the gun industry has been aggressively marketing military-grade munitions to the American people — with ads specifically invoking race-based fear, twisted notions of masculinity, and distorted ideas about “patriotism.”
This has fed some very bad and deadly trends:
The United States is the only country on the entire planet with more guns (at least 400 million and counting) than people (335 million). No other country has even half as many guns per capita as we do.
The number of guns manufactured in America has nearly tripled over the past two decades, from 3.9 million in 2000 to 11.3 million in 2020. (And it’s not as if guns wear out like light bulbs, refrigerators, or cars.)
We endure more mass shootings than all other developed countries combined. It’s not even close.
The frequency — and body count — of mass shootings has increased as well.
13 of the 20 deadliest mass shootings since 1982 happened in just the past decade.
There were 118 school shootings in 2018, doubling the previous record of 59. Then 119 in 2019. Then 114 in 2020. Then 249 (not a typo) in 2021. And already 137 so far in 2022 (with more than half the year still to go).
The 3 deadliest years for school shootings in the past half-century are 2018, 2021, and 2022 (which, again, isn’t quite halfway over yet).
Guns have become the leading cause of death among children in our country. Not disease. Not malnutrition. Not accidents. (Auto accidents had been the leading cause of death among children for decades until overtaken by guns in 2020.)
And all the while, gun industry profits have exploded.
Look, America’s gun manufacturers may well be beyond listening to reason. There are, after all, more people to scare — and more profits to be made — no matter the carnage.
But let’s make them hear us — our pain, our fury, our disgust — anyway.
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 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.
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.
The 2nd Amendment
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.
The NRA
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.
Debate? What debate?
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.
Gun regulations work
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%.
Make them vote
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.
Show the pictures
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.
Valerie Strauss is an outstanding journalist who writes “The Answer Sheet” blog about education for The Washington Post. She understands the great heist that is being foisted on American public education by privatizers and their powerful lobbyists. She knows better than the editorial boards of the nation’s leading newspapers that school choice exacerbates the problems of American education and that test scores are not a worthy measure of the worth of a school.
In this article, she offers valuable advice to President Biden about the absurd claims made by the charter industry about the regulations proposed by the Department of Education to reform the federal Charter Schools Program. That program doles out $440 million a year to underwrite new charter schools. Biden has not cut it (even though it is not necessary, since new charters are supported by many billionaires, including the Walton family, Charles Koch, Betsy DeVos, Bill Gates, Reed Hastings, John Arnold, Dan Loeb, and Michael Bloomberg.)
The Department offered modest regulations, like barring for-profit corporations from applying for federal funding and asking those who seek federal funding for new charters to do an impact analysis of why their charter is needed and whom it would serve. The charter industry and its allies reacted with lamentations, outrage, and hysterical denunciations of Biden (even though Biden said during the 2020 campaign that he would stop funding for-profit charter management organizations).
Strauss writes:
The Biden administration recently released proposed reforms to a nearly 30-year-old federal program that has provided billions of dollars in grants for charter schools, and predictably some charter supporters have launched an unrestrained attack.
The bipartisan charter lobby alleges, among other things, that President Biden wants to “gut” the Charter School Programs, is kowtowing to unions and is willfully harming marginalized students. One magazine piece has this headline: “Biden Abandons the Obama Legacy on Charter Schools” — as if that were something to behold — and this subtitle: “The Education Department chooses teachers unions over poor kids.”
That’s not what’s happening — for one thing, the administration hasn’t proposed cutting a dime from the program — but that hasn’t stopped the attacks on the proposals, which are being supported by Roberto Rodriguez, a strong charter school supporter who was an education adviser to President Barack Obama and is now Biden’s assistant education secretary for planning, evaluation and policy development.
“There is a bit of a mythology that this is an attempt to do away with charter programs or curb the programs or curb the growth of charter schools,” said Rodriguez in an interview. Sure, he could have turned against charters, but he hasn’t: “The administration supports high-quality schools, including high-quality charter schools.”
Charter schools are funded by the public but privately operated. They are not monolithic — no more than schools in traditionally operated public districts are. Each state has its own rules, some resulting in better-quality charter schools than others.
Before the coronavirus pandemic began in March 2020, about 6 to 7 percent of U.S. schoolchildren attended charter schools. Enrollment jumped during the pandemic — with most of the gain in virtual charters, which are the worst-performing schools in the sector — but new data shows the increases starting to fall.
The White House has been silent about the over-the-top protests — including an actual protest outside 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. NW with charter school students. The Education Department published tweets last week that, instead of calling out its critics for promoting falsehoods about its proposed reforms of the program, tried to explain what it was doing by saying, essentially, “It’s not as bad as you think.”
So here’s what Biden should have said to charter school supporters who are savaging the proposed changes to the Charter School Programs, which should be made final in the next few months after consideration of public comment:
Hey guys:
Look, I didn’t expect you to love the changes my administration is proposing to the Charter School Programs. You have never been good at accepting criticism — but really, isn’t your reaction a bit much?
A bunch of you said I want to “gut” the program. Gut the program? Charter critics would love that, but that’s not what I’m doing. I have proposed to Congress that we keep funding at the same amount as last year — $440 million. So much for gutting.
I’ll add that the Education Department, even under Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, couldn’t spend all of the money allocated to the program by Congress in 2019. That’s when more than $12 million was reallocated from the program to other federal education priorities due to a lack of demand for new charter schools in state and individual grants. During the coronavirus pandemic, some program money was allowed to be used for other purposes.
I have said my administration supports high-quality charters because it does. Charter opponents would rather we didn’t, but we do. But there are a lot of problems in the charter sector, and we can’t find any acknowledgment of that in your scorched-earth assault on us.
I expect that from Republicans — as George Will showed in a Washington Post column — that falsely said charters must “get permission” from a traditional public school to operate if our proposed reforms become official. They don’t — but let’s not let the truth get in the way.
And I expect that from the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, which sent out missives to supporters to speak out against the proposed reforms and launched media ads that accuse my administration of proposing changes that will hurt students of color.
Unfortunately, Democrats for too long have been part of this let’s-never-admit-there’s-a-charter-school-problem chorus. I read the op-ed that Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, a Democrat who started a charter school network in 2004, wrote in The Washington Post, which alleged that our proposed reforms would “create chaos and limit public school choice by instituting new rules that would gut” the program. As we said, we haven’t proposed cutting a dime, but, legally the money has to be paid out annually, whether there are good proposals for charters or not. We know full well that some applications that don’t adhere to all of the priorities we have set out in the proposed reforms will get federal money anyway. I also read the letter that three Democratic senators, Cory Booker (N.J.), Dianne Feinstein (Calif.) and Michael F. Bennet (Colo.) sent, along with Republicans, to my education secretary, Miguel Cardona, warning that our proposed program reforms “would make it difficult, if not impossible” for charter schools to build new facilities or expand. Love bipartisanship, but that’s just wrong.
I’ve also read editorials from charter school-supporting editorial departments. A Wall Street Journal editorial accused the Biden administration of sabotaging charter schools; a Washington Post editorial accused the administration of pandering to teachers’ unions and school district leaders. The headline of that piece calls our proposed changes to the charter funding program a “sneak attack.” A sneak attack in broad daylight?
I expect Republicans to accuse us of caving to teachers’ unions, but we’ve never understood the same from Democrats. My wife, Jill, and I, are big union supporters — she proudly belongs to the National Education Association — but let’s not kid ourselves about the power of the unions. If they had their way, do you think schools would look the way they do? Would teachers be forking out money of their own to buy basic supplies? Would we be worrying about Republicans — many of them racist — taking over Congress this fall? Would schools have broken HVAC systems and, in some places, unconscionably low teacher pay? Knock it off.
Do Democrats really think it’s a good time — with crucial midterm elections coming up — to ignore reality and falsely accuse a Democratic president of wanting to harm marginalized kids to kowtow to unions? Your union accusations make it sound like unions are the only ones that support our changes. Far from it. House Appropriations Committee Chair Rosa L. DeLauro (Conn.) wrote a public comment letter about what she called a “well-funded misinformation campaign incorrectly claiming” that a proposed reform “would prevent federal funds from going to any charter school that uses a contractor for any discrete service” — another claim by the charter lobby. Civil rights organizations such as the Southern Education Foundation have weighed in to support the proposed program changes; the foundation wrote:
Public funds are intended for public education, so we must invest in the charter schools that will serve their communities, provide equal access to high-quality instruction, and collaborate with the public school system to share successful innovations in teaching and learning that improve outcomes and opportunity for all students.
You talk about charters as if they were all the same, and you know they aren’t. Some are great. Some are awful. In 2016, the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, called for better regulation of virtual charter schools, a rare acknowledgment of big problems in the charter sector, but we haven’t heard much since.
Bottom line: The Charter School Programs division needs reform. I have read reports by a nonprofit advocacy group that say since 2019, up to a billion dollars of federal taxpayer money has been wasted on charter schools that did not open or were shut down — and that the Education Department failed to adequately monitor federal grants to these schools. The advocacy group, the Network for Public Education, opposes charter schools. But that doesn’t make their research any less valid. If you want to take the time, you can read about that here and here.
If you don’t care for that, you can read the report the NAACP — one of the longest-standing civil rights organizations in the country — wrote after it called for a ban on charter school expansion until the charter sector is reformed and traditional public school districts are not financially harmed by the spread of charter schools. It says in part:
“Charter schools were created with more flexibility because they were expected to innovate and infuse new ideas and creativity into the traditional public school system. However, this aspect of the promise never materialized. Many traditional inner city public schools are failing the children who attend them, thus causing parents with limited resources to search for a funded, quality educational alternative for their children. …With the expansion of charter schools and their concentration in low-income communities, concerns have been raised within the African American community about the quality, accessibility and accountability of some charters, as well as their broader effects on the funding and management of school districts that serve most students of color.”
By the way, despite some of your protestations, charter schools are draining critical funding from some school districts with policies that make little sense. In Oklahoma, for example, numerous school district leaders got furious about a funding decision made last year by the state Board of Education that forced them to share funding for school buildings with virtual charter schools that don’t have school buildings. Meanwhile, states including New York, Pennsylvania and New Jersey public school districts must pay tuition to charter schools costing them far more than they would pay if the student stayed in the district. Districts have lost millions of dollars in funding that has been sent instead to charter schools. Pennsylvania law funds charter schools as if 16 percent of all of their students are in special education — which costs more than students not in special education — but charters aren’t required to count so nobody really knows. School districts count each special education student.
So let’s talk about what my administration is trying to do with the federal Charter School Programs and why. The changes, as Washington Post education reporter Laura Meckler wrote in a piece we read about the proposed reforms, “go a long way to fulfilling” a vow that Biden made while running for president. He said he wanted to eliminate federal funding of for-profit charter schools because that part of the charter sector has been riddled with financial scandal, private enrichment and other problems. The biggest change we are proposing would affect for-profit management companies that often run charter schools. We want those companies that run entire charter operations to be ineligible for grants.
Scandals in the for-profit sector of charters have contributed to some that disillusionment; for example, you can read here about how many for-profit management companies evade state laws banning for-profit charters — by setting up nonprofit charters and then directing the schools’ business operations to related corporations.
In our proposed charter program changes, we also would like to see applicants for federal grants prioritize charter schools that already have their charter school approved — yes, as it is now, applicants can get federal money without an actual school — and that would collaborate with school districts.
My education team and I know there is a great deal of discontent over our priority that charter school funding applicants show that there is some interest in the community for a new or expanded charter school — which, really, doesn’t seem unreasonable. Why should the public fund a school where there is no demand? School districts don’t do that.
The “community impact analysis” we would like to see from applicants includes a priority that the charter would not further school segregation. You say we are insisting that charters serve diverse student populations. We’d like that, but let’s be clear what the proposed reform actually says: that an application from “racially and socioeconomically segregated or isolated communities would still be eligible for funding.”
You may not realize this — or just don’t publicly admit it — but in some places, charter schools are being used as white-flight academies, like decades ago when the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court ruling said segregated schools were unconstitutional.
In 2018, the federal Charter School Programs awarded a grant of $26.6 million to North Carolina to support “high-quality schools focused on meeting the needs of educationally disadvantaged students.” Thirty of the 42 charter schools that received CSP grants via the North Carolina Department of Education reported demographic information — and of those schools, more than one-third have significant overrepresentation of White students or a significant underrepresentation of Black students compared with the population of the public school district in which they are located. One overwhelmingly White private school, located near a public school with mostly Black students, was turned into a charter with the help of federal funding after making a pitch to families that included: “No current law forces any diversity whether it be by age, sex, race, creed.”
I think it makes sense to ensure that federal funding isn’t being used to create white-flight academies. Do you?
There’s a lot more we could talk about that we haven’t addressed in our regulations. For example: Charter schools are supposed to be open to all students, but many of them employ more than a dozen tactics that allow them to shape their student enrollment. And did you know charter schools can be bought and sold and people can get rich from the sale of publicly funded schools?
So, finally, can we move forward and keep our eye on the prize: making sure that America’s schoolchildren all go to high-quality schools? That’s what my administration and I are trying to do.
A progressive media-watch organization called FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting) criticized New York magazine writer Jonathan Chait for failing to report his wife’s role in the charter industry when writing about (and defending) charter schools and attacking teachers’ unions.
On several occasions, Chait has written about education issues, usually to defend charter schools, although he is a political journalist with no particular expertise about education policy. He claims that he doesn’t have to disclose his wife’s role in the charter industry, because he is an opinion writer. FAIR does not consider that an appropriate justification for not disclosing his conflict.
It’s strange to see a journalist who calls himself “liberal” attack teachers’ unions. As a rule, liberals are not anti-union.
Chait’s article at the center of the controversy criticized President Biden and his Department of Education for proposing regulations that would prohibit for-profit charter management organizations from receiving federal funds. For-profit charters are typically low performing and should be an embarrassment to the entire sector, yet the charter industry lobbyists have rallied round the sleaziest of the charter chains. Since Joe Biden promised during his campaign to eliminate federal funding for for-profit charters, no one should be surprised that he is following through.
The proposed regulations also ask charter operators to submit an impact analysis, summarizing the likely effect of their charter on the existing public schools and the need for the new charter, as well as spell out their plans to collaborate with the district where they would locate. The charter lobbyists consider this idea of collaboration with district schools to be abhorrent.
FAIR did not analyze the argument about the value or harm of the regulations. It did address Chait’s failure to disclose his wife’s connection to the federal Charter Schools Program.
FAIR wrote:
NPE executive director Carol Burris, in a post on fellow education expert Diane Ravitch’s blog (5/13/22), laid out a convincing case that Chait’s latest article oversteps even the limited disclosure he had put in the article’s footnote aside.
[Burris wrote]:
Now let’s talk about what Jonathan Chait failed to disclose as he opposed the CSP regulation reforms, using the same misinformation that has appeared in other op-eds.
His wife worked for Center City Charter Schools as a grant writerwhen that charter chain received two grants from the Charter School Program (CSP), the program whose loose rules he is now defending. Download the 2019 database that you can find here and match the years of dispersion to the resume of Robin Chait. But the undisclosed conflict continues to this day. Since 2018, Robin Chait has worked for WestEd, which evaluated the CSP during the Betsy De Vos era. And her employer, WestEd, once got its own $1.74 million grant from CSP.
FAIR’s research confirmed—and expanded upon—those claims.
WestEd, where Robin Chait has worked since October 2018, has received CSP funding from the Department of Education, most notably an open grant that’s already paid out $8.1 million to evaluate CSP and work with grantees. The contract, issued in September 2020, is one of a number of high-value DOE grants received by WestEd.
Also objectionable, although FAIR does not discuss it, was Chait’s characterization of the Network for Public Education as an organization funded by the teachers’ unions, which is false. That was his way of disparaging NPE, although for the life of me, I see nothing objectionable about taking funding from unions representing the nation’s teachers. It’s not like taking money from foundations of billionaires pushing privatization of the nation’s public goods, like the Waltons, Charles Koch, Michael Bloomberg, and Betsy DeVos.
Andrea Gabor is Bloomberg Professor of Business Journalism at Baruch College of the City of New York. She writes often for the Bloomberg website, where this article appears. Michael Bloomberg has written in opposition to Biden’s proposed regulations for the federal Charter School Program. Hopefully, he will read this article and change his views. The National Aliance for Public Charter Schools has been running a full-fledged panic attack in opposition to the sensible regulations, claiming falsely that they are a mortal threat to all charter schools; they are not. The lobbyists have even paid for ads on MSNBC, paid for by one of their billionaire funders, assailing the regulations.
Gabor is the author of “After the Education Wars: How Smart Schools Upend the Business of Reform.” It contains one of the best—maybe the best—analyses of what happened to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.
Andrea Gabor explains why the regulations will improve the charter sector.
She writes:
Forget the battle over critical race theory. The latest salvos in the public-school culture wars are being fired over the federal charter schools program and the sensible guidelines that are being proposed by the administration of President Joe Biden.
Congress extended the program in March, approving $440 million for state agencies to help charters with startup expenses such as staffing and technology. Almost immediately, the White House is received a barrage of criticism for issuing guidelines intended, most importantly, to rein in charter-school funding abuses.
In particular, the proposed regulations would prevent for-profit management companies that run nonprofit charters from accessing federal funds. Even ardent charter supporters shun for-profit charters, which significantly underperform traditional public schools, and the new guidelines would close loopholes that have fostered fraud nationwide and especially in states including Arizonawhere loose regulations have emboldened legislators to enrich themselves on the taxpayer’s dime.
That kind of common-sense rule should serve as a first step toward a truce in the decades-long conflict over the role of charters in public education. Alas, it probably won’t.
The debate about charter-school regulations has become a proxy for a wider and even higher-stakes fight over the proper role of government. Since at least the era of President Ronald Reagan, conservatives have seen privatization as a way to undermine public schools and teachers unions, rejecting guardrails and often ignoring the original mission of charters to foster educational innovation.
Meanwhile, public-school advocates have been so busy defending the traditional public-school system, which they correctly argue is essential to democracy, that they rarely focus on finding ways to improve it.
Indeed, rancor between charter and public-school proponents is so toxic that a potentially mutually beneficial Biden proposal for granting funding to charter schools — that they demonstrate collaboration with a public school or district — seems almost impossible to achieve.
That’s a shame because the new guidelines offer quite a few possibilities to find common ground; ways to strengthen the charter sector while also protecting public schools.
Consider the proposed requirement that new charters reflect the movement’s original promise of promoting teacher innovation and “robust family and community engagement.” Such an approach could rebuild public trust in charter-friendly cities like New Orleans, which dismantled its public school system and replaced it with private operators over 15 years ago following Hurricane Katrina and, in the process, alienated much of its African-American community.
Instead of engaging local families, officials began by firing the city’s mostly African-American teachers — a sizeable swath of its middle class — and replacing them with inexperienced Teach-for-Americarecruits, most of whom only lasted a year or two. At the same time, charter authorizers recruited out-of-state charter-management organizations that established a harsh-discipline schooling model that often worked against the interests of New Orleans’s poorest and most vulnerable children. The authorizers explicitly excluded even well-regarded local groups from winning charters.
Given no say in the new education system, community groups rebelled — not just in New Orleans, but in Indianapolis, Kansas City and other cities where the same model was being imposed.
New Orleans belatedly and reluctantly recognized the need for community engagement and eventually made room for a handful of independent, community-led charters like Morris Jeff, which fought an uphill battle for authorization and funding and was launched with the express intention of allowing teachers to unionize and have a say in school policies. The well-regarded school offers an international baccalaureate program and is among a minority of integrated schools, but New Orleans is still dominated by large charter management organizations.
Increasing community engagement would mean supporting more schools like Morris Jeff and inviting more family input. It should also mean giving teachers a role in school decision-making, which has been shown to improve both public and charterschools. To that end, charter schools should reserve a percentage of governing-board seats for family members elected by parent-teacher organizations, as well as teachers elected by colleagues. (Unlike public schools, which have elected boards, charters have appointed boards and sometimes exclude family members from serving.)
The new guidelines also could be used to promote racial integration. Charters “can be a great vehicle” for doing so by drawing on students from multiple neighborhoods and appealing to students of diverse backgrounds, said Halley Potter an educational researcher at the Century Foundation.
There are also important elements of the White House guidelines that predictably inflame charter advocates. For example, they might keep some charters from opening when they threaten the stability of nearby public schools as they have in the East Harlem neighborhood of New York City. There, high concentrations of charters led regular public elementary and middle schools to enroll double and sometimes triple the proportion of special-needs kids of nearby charter schools, which often discourage special-needs applicants.
Traditional public schools still educate the vast majority of American children. The hostility to almost every aspect of the Biden guidelines is sad confirmation of the animosity toward this vital institution itself. It also shows the difficulty of finding common ground that could quell the education wars and foster improvements across sectors.
Christopher Hooks of the Texas Monthly attended Trump’s latest tour date in Texas and reviewed the show. It seems to be a political revival show, with expensive tickets and opportunities to spend more money, with no explanation of what the money’s for. You really should subscribe to the Texas Monthly. It’s informative and delightful about a politically key state.
On Saturday, the presumptive 2024 Republican presidential nominee came to Austin to speak at a day-long conference attended by some six or seven thousand of his most passionate fans and supporters. In Ye Olden Days, that first sentence would be followed by a description of the future candidate’s remarks on politics and policy. But this has never been the way to cover a Donald Trump speech, and yesterday there wasn’t any new material. The only mystery was why his fans would wait for so long to see him, lining up before dawn to secure good seats.
Saturday’s riffs included an extended description of the contracting process for the replacement of Air Force One, and the story of how Trump crushed ISIS with the help of a general he identified only as “Raisin’ Cain.” I have been to a dozen or so Trump rallies, and these are stories I’ve heard several times. As had members of the audience, apparently: when Trump described how nervous he was flying into Iraq to visit troops, a man called out the punch line—“perhaps I should have been given a medal”—before Trump got there. When the former president caught up, the man laughed twice as hard as his neighbors.
Far more interesting were Trump’s supporters and allies. The conference, featuring speakers such as rock musician Ted Nugent and attended by allies such as Texas attorney general Ken Paxton, showed a movement falling deeper into a suffocating circle of televangelist-adjacent scammery—while its adherents grow ever more comfortable with the idea of the need for violence to triumph over their political opponents. Things are going great, in other words.
In late January, Trump held a rally in Conroe at the high point of the Texas’s GOP primary season. That rally, like most of the former president’s, was held by the joint fund-raising committee of Save America, an extension of Trump’s former (and possible future) campaign. Huge billboards hawked Trump’s new book, but the event was relatively civic-minded. He read, from the teleprompter, a careful speech endorsing all the requisite Texas GOP candidates.
By contrast, the event Saturday in Austin, at the city’s convention center, was a project of the American Freedom Tour, a for-profit traveling show that brings speakers to MAGA-heads around the country. The purpose is not to back candidates or even to get out the vote but to sell tickets. Trump was the headliner, while the undercard was filled out with relative heavyweights like former secretary of state Mike Pompeo and lighter weights, such as Kevin Sorbo, the actor who once starred in the nineties shlock show Hercules: The Legendary Journeys. While the turnout of seven thousand might not be impressive in another context, it was large given that each attendee had paid quite a bit to be there. The cheapest tickets, for the seats at the very, very back of the warehouse space, sold for between $45 and $95.
Attendees could purchase a seat halfway to the stage with a ticket at the “VIP” or “Delegate” level, at some $800 to $1,000, respectively. Both came with access to a breakfast with Dinesh D’Souza—the conservative filmmaker whose new work, 2000 Mules, makes the case that the 2020 election was stolen—and an invitation to an afterparty with Donald Trump Jr. Only the Delegate level, though, came with a “Full Color American Freedom Tour Program,” which turned out to be a mostly blank booklet in which attendees were encouraged to write notes about speakers’ remarks. The best seats, however, were reserved for the “Presidential” ticket holders, who paid some $4,000. As it turned out, attendees could actually pretty much sit anywhere. I walked in without a wristband and sat in an empty seat that was supposed to cost $3,000.
With this kind of cash exchanging hands, you might think that the American Freedom Tour was a fundraiser for conservative causes. Many folks who shelled out for a ticket doubtless expected this to be the case. But there is no information anywhere on the tour website about how the proceeds will be distributed. It is not a PAC, of course. The money goes to the speakers—including Trump and Trump Jr., presumably—and the folks who put the rally together.
The only stated goal of the American Freedom Tour is to hold more incarnations of the American Freedom Tour. Its website’s FAQ doesn’t explain exactly what the money is used for, but it does helpfully emphasize that no recording of any kind is allowed inside. There is a cursory “our values” page that explains that the four pillars of American Freedom are “faith, family, finance, and freedom,” which each are given a short paragraph. “Men, in particular our fathers and husbands,” it says, “are under attack, being maligned and parodied in popular culture.”
In the past, I’ve written that the marketplace for well-compensated speakers and evangelists for the right—sometimes derided by the left as an ecosystem of “grift”—is an enormous asset for conservatives. If oleaginous liberal would-be demagogues could make a healthy living touring the country, all the while firing up Democrats in tent rallies, the party might be in a better place. But there are limits, man. My jaw dropped a little when Brian Forte, CEO of the American Freedom Tour, got on stage for a fund-raising appeal for his own company. A giant QR code appeared on screen directing attendees to a donation page, and the older folks around me struggled to make it work. Forte, a thirty-year veteran of the motivational speaking industry, was asking for money from attendees who had already paid to be there.
He did it in unbelievable terms. “Freedom is not free! Think about that,” he told the audience, appropriating a phrase typically used to refer to the sacrifice made by dead American soldiers. He urged the audience to donate at least $20 for Trump’s sake, but the donation page offered options of up to $5,000. “You can’t afford to not do this,” he reasoned, “because America is at stake!”
He went on. “If you see someone next to you who does not have their phone out,” he said, give them the hard sell. “Tap them on the shoulder and say, ‘Come on, let’s do this together.’ Go ahead and do that now. Everyone should have their phone out.”
He wasn’t done. “This is your chance. We need you now. The president needs you now! America needs you now! It’s now or never! We’re warriors on the front lines to save America,” he said. “This is a battle between good and evil!”
The spiel went on for several more minutes, without Forte ever saying what the donations were for. Anyone who has ever been exposed to an evangelist of the Righteous Gemstones variety recognizes this kind of preaching. “Give me money and you’ll get into heaven” becomes “give me money and the country will be saved,” and it’s a more effective approach when you don’t explain the how.
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.
Voucher system
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.
Picking the most profitable
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.
Vicious circle
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.
Huge funds to spend
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.
Tom Ultican, retired teacher of advanced mathematics and physics in California, is now a significant chronicler of the Destroy Public Education movement. He attended the recent national conference of the Network for Public Education in Philadelphia and recapitulates the excitement we shared at being in person after a 2-year hiatus.
After every conference, attendees say, “This was the best one yet.” They enjoy meeting people who are doing the same work to fight privatization of their public schools. By the end of the conference, attendees say they feel energized, hopeful, and happy to know that they are not alone.
I urge you to read Tom’s post. You will get a sense of the embarrassment of riches available to attendees.
I should add that the Nebraska Save Our Schools group shared the Phyllis Bush Award for Grassroots Activism. Nebraska is one of the few states that has managed to protect its public schools and keep out both charters and vouchers, despite being a Red State.
The Pastors for Texas Children, a co-winner of the award, has repeatedly blocked vouchers in the Texas Legislature and has consistently fought for funding for public schools. PTC has opened chapters in other Red states, where they mobilize clergy to support public schools.
A high point for me was interviewing “Little Stevie” Van Zandt, a legendary rock star and actor (“The Sopranos”), who is dedicated to getting the arts into schools, not as an extra, but across the curriculum. we had a wonderful conversation. He has funded lesson plans based on rock and roll, available free at his website TeachRock.
All of the general sessions were taped. I will post them when they become available.
Jonathan Chait writes for New York magazine, where his latest article appeared, opposing the U.S. Department of Education’s proposed regulations for the federal Charter Schools Program (CSP). CSP currently spends $440 million annually to underwrite new charter schools. Chait titled his article “Biden Abandons the Obama Legacy on Charter Schools,” but it might as well have been titled “Biden Abandons the Betsy DeVos Legacy on Charter Schools.”
Chait also attacked the Network for Public Education, which had issued two reports (see here and here) documenting the waste, fraud, and abuse in the CSP, based on the Education Department’s own data. NPE found that almost 40% of CSP funding went to charters that either never opened or closed within a few years of opening. In the life of the program, almost $1 billion had been wasted. In addition, NPE pointed out the scandals associated with some high-profile for-profit charter operators, as well as the use of CSP money to open white-flight charters.
This year, for the first time since the CSP was created nearly 30 years ago, the Department proposed to ban the funding of for-profit charter management organizations and of white-flight charters. The regulations also ask applicants for an impact analysis that describes what effect the new charter is likely to have on existing public schools and why the new charter is needed. These sensible reform proposals sent the charter lobbyists into frenzied opposition, claiming falsely that these regulations were meant to destroy all charter schools. This was nonsense because they would have no effect on the thousands of existing charters, only on applicants for new federal funding, that is, charters that do not yet exist.
Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro, chair of the powerful House Appropriations Committee, sharply denounced the lies and misrepresentations of the “trade organization” for the charter industry. But, despite her reproach, the charter industry still promotes dishonest diatribes about the Department’s efforts to reform the CSP.
Carol Burris, the executive director of the Network for Public Education, was incensed when she read Chait’s defense of the charter industry’s effort to protect the for-profit managers who have abused CSP funds and of the operators that have used CSP funding to provide white-flight charters.
She wrote the following response.
In his recent column, “Biden Abandons the Obama Legacy on Charter Schools,” Jonathan Chait is perturbed that the U.S. Department of Education referred Chalkbeat’s Matt Barnum to me for comment on an article he was writing about the Department’s proposed regulations for funding new charter schools. He then scolds Barnum for not disclosing that the Network for Public Education has received donations from unions. He calls Barnum’s story “neutral.” Chait’s source for this big scoop? The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.
Jonathan Chait then parrots the “wild exaggerations and misrepresentations” that Rosa De Lauro called out last week after expressing her support for CSP reforms during the Education Department’s 2023 budget hearing. The Appropriations Chairwoman noted that “this kind of information campaign is a familiar tactic for the trade organization [National Alliance for Public Charter Schools]. It does represent charter schools that are run by risky low-quality for-profit education management organizations.”
Now let’s talk about what Jonathan Chait failed to disclose as he opposed the CSP regulation reforms, using the same misinformation that has appeared in other op-eds.
His wife worked for Center City Charter Schools as a grant writer when that charter chain received two grants from the Charter School Program (CSP), the program whose loose rules he is now defending. Download the 2019 database that you can find here and match the years of dispersion to the resume of Robin Chait. But the undisclosed conflict continues to this day. Since 2018, Robin Chait has worked for West Ed which evaluated the CSP during the Betsy De Vos era. And her employer, West Ed, once got its own $1.74 million grant from CSP.
But back to NPE funding. During some recent years we got modest donations from unions to bring teachers to our conferences. At our very beginning, we received start-up funds from the Chicago Teachers Union through a fiscal sponsor, Voices for Children. That ended in 2015. We will always be grateful to our friend, the late Karen Lewis, for that jump-start. Karen foresaw the growing attacks on public schools and teachers as an ominous trend and wanted to encourage allies to support a bedrock institution of our democracy.
We appreciate any tax-deductible donations we get. You won’t get favors, but you will always get a thank you. Our income comes from individual donations from our large number of supporters—educators, parents, family foundations, and other citizens who have a deep and abiding love for public schools.
This is not the first time Chait has been called out for not disclosing his wife’s connections with charters. But given the topic and her work in organizations connected with the Charter School Program, this is the worst omission yet. Shame on New York Magazine for not making him disclose and for letting him play fast and loose with the truth. And shame on Chait’s hypocritical critique of Barnum even as he hides the family connections with the program he defends.
Mercedes Schneider describes a new consulting team that is selling its services to states and districts. Most of its partners are protégés of Jeb Bush and learned his strategies of high-stakes testing, school choice, test-based accountability, and harsh treatment of teachers.
She writes:
Need help with your public or private business venture? Well, NY- and DC-based Ridge-Lane Limited Partners (LP) offers “venture development at the apex of public and private sector…”
Schneider reviews the bios of the firm’s principal actors, which are not reassuring.
She writes:
So, if you want to dip into some of this Ridge-Lane LP K12 “significant experience” (not in the classroom, mind you, but in Jeb Bush reforms, such as school grading, and Common Core, and PARCC, and pension funneling), then get your (or the taxpayer’s) proverbial checkbook ready so that these once state-ed superintendents can spin an income advising you out of those edu-dollars.
Diane Ravitch's blog 