On Wednesday, the New Hampshire legislature will vote on a voucher bill that is unnecessary and will harm the state’s fine public schools, which enroll nearly 90% of the children in the state. Parents should rise up and tell their legislators to support their public schools.
Joe Onosko, a professor of education at the University of New Hampshire, explains succinctly why this proposal should be rejected.
http://www.concordmonitor.com/SB-193-is-an-attack-on-NH-public-schools-14621827
If you aren’t angry yet about the Trump Tax scam, you should be. This article in the New York Times clearly lays out how it will produce tax savings for private school families while devastating state revenues that now fund public schools. The author, Nat Malkus, is deputy director of education policy at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute. After this tax pla, never again let it be said that Republicans believe in local control and states’ rights. They believe in federal dictation, so long as they are in charge.
He writes:
Congressional Republicans, traditional defenders of states’ rights, will deliver an unexpected one-two punch to state tax systems if the current version of their tax bill becomes law as expected.
The tax plan, negotiated behind closed doors, includes an expansion of 529 savings accounts and the partial elimination of state and local tax deductions. These changes will provide new avenues for people to avoid state income tax that states never envisioned. And those states will have a hard time making up the difference.
The first blow would come from expanding 529 college savings accounts, which offer tax advantages to encourage families to save money for college, to cover K-12 expenses, such as private school tuition and home schooling costs.
This amendment by Senator Ted Cruz passed only because of a midnight tiebreaking vote cast by Vice President Mike Pence. Under current law, earnings on contributions to 529 plans are not subject to federal taxes. These investment vehicles work well for college savings because deposits grow tax-free over a long time. Using 529 accounts for elementary or high school tuition, however, substantially shortens that period, making these accounts a minimal boost to school choice.
While this change would have only a small effect on the federal Treasury, it creates outsize impacts on the state income tax bases in the 33 states that instituted state tax deductions and tax credits to encourage 529 college savings. The federal expansion opens these state incentives to an entirely new area of expenditures, allowing private school families to funnel their tuition payments through 529s as a way to avoid state taxes.
Imagine for instance that a family in New York spends $10,000 on high school tuition but has not yet started saving for college. Congress’s 529 expansion opens New York’s $10,000 state income tax deduction for 529 contributions to private school tuition. This family could now open a 529 savings account, briefly park the $10,000 for private school tuition in it, and avoid about $600 in state income taxes.
That modest $600 for families takes a much bigger cumulative toll on New York’s income tax base. With about 465,000 New York private school students, roughly $3 billion might be cut from New York’s income tax base.
While the federal government limits its benefits to $10,000 in annual distributions per student for K-12 expenses, some states offer much larger state tax deductions, and their tax bases would be affected even more than New York’s will be. Illinois, for instance, allows deductions for $20,000 in contributions a year per beneficiary to 529 plans, while Pennsylvania allows $28,000. Colorado, New Mexico, South Carolina and West Virginia have broader tax loopholes: all 529 contributions are fully deductible, so participants’ entire private school tuition could be free of state tax.
With this law, the Republican Congress would be nullifying the intent of state legislatures by creating tax breaks for private school parents that are paid for by reducing state tax bases that pay, in part, for public schools. States did not choose to create tax-free private school tuitions, Congress did.
Not all states will bear the full brunt of this law. States without income taxes, like Senator Cruz’s home state, Texas, have no state income tax deductions for contributions to 529 plans to interfere with their state taxing sovereignty.
The second blow to state education funding would come from the new federal cap on the deductibility of state and local tax payments. Public schools are primarily funded by state and local taxes, partly by local property taxes, and partly by the state, often through income taxes. When districts are too poor to raise enough property taxes to fund schools, the state contributes funds to even the scales with wealthier districts.
Expanding 529 plans to deliver state deductions to private school families will erode the tax base that funds public schools, affecting high-poverty schools the most. By limiting state and local tax deductions at the same time, Republicans would make it harder for states and cities to raise taxes to make up for those shortfalls.
The easiest fix is to eliminate the 529 expansion, a federal action that transfers state tax dollars from the poor to the rich and which won’t substantively increase school choice for those who do not already have it. Doing so would be a principled stand for the party that professes to protect state sovereignty. Not doing so will affirm the worst caricature of Republicans and education — taking money from the poor to give to the rich.
The tax bill includes a 529 plan for K-12 tuition that will benefit the wealthy families who can put away $10,000 a year tax-free to save for private school.
This article explains how the plan works.
This is a giveaway to the families planning to send their babies to elite private schools.
Funny that someone thought this was worth spending federal money on, but not a cent (thus far) to save the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), which provides health insurance for millions of poor children.
Everything is a tradeoff.
Don’t be surprised a few years down the line when Republicans begin seeking massive cuts in social programs–Social Security and Medicare– to pay for the huge corporate tax cut that they will enact next week.
Nora Gordon, an economist at Georgetown University who studies school finance, explains how the GOP tax plan will hurt the nation’s poorest schools. Schools will suffer while corporations and wealthy individuals will enjoy big tax cuts.
She writes:
It’s common to hear people say that the quality of students’ education shouldn’t depend on their ZIP code. But the Republican House and Senate tax bills would make ZIP codes matter more than ever. They would create an incentive to hoard opportunity by raising funds that remain close to home.
Why does our education system have so much at stake? A vast majority of funding for public schools, about 90 percent, comes from the money raised by state and local governments. Currently, taxpayers can deduct their state and local taxes, and that deduction makes them more likely to support higher spending on programs funded by those taxes, including public schools.
With its bills, Congress would significantly cut the deduction of state and local taxes, slicing into that incentive. This is why education advocates are fighting to keep the deductions, and why those who believe state and local governments are too big want to get rid of them.
After a consideration of eliminating all state and local deductions, current proposals have been marketed as a political compromise: Both bills take away taxpayers’ ability to deduct income taxes but allow a property tax deduction of up to $10,000 per year. The problem is that states depend more heavily on income taxes, and local governments on property taxes, so the compromise favors raising funds at the local level. Structuring it this way will only add to inequality in the school system.
As an economist who has studied education funding and policy, to me the historical record is clear: State-level school spending is critical. Economic segregation across school districts means some areas need an infusion of resources to have a chance at serving their students well, and states are the primary source of that infusion. Research shows that when states send more resources to their neediest districts, achievement levels in those districts rise.
But states are already in a tough spot: The most recent data show they are still recovering from the recession, with over half of them spending less on K-12 now, in inflation-adjusted terms, than they did in 2008.
It’s worth noting that more is at stake for states than just education funding. Federal spending cuts are sure to come to pay for this tax bill. There will most likely be calls for cuts in programs that provide food, health care and income assistance to poor families. Just as people will look to the states to fill these new holes in the safety net, it will be harder than ever for states to raise the funds to do so.
Julian Vasquez Heilig spoke at the Journey for Justice National Town Hall in D.C. on December 12. He addressed his remarks to the charter supporters who dismissed claims that charters exacerbate segregation. Specifically, he spoke in response to an article in New York magazine by Jonathan Chait, who said that charters don’t cause segregation, they help its victims. Heilig contends that charters exacerbate segregation, as choice always does, and that they draw resources away from the districts that enroll most students.
Heilig has been an active member of the NAACP and chair of its education committee in California.
This is his speech:
Members of the civil rights community have expressed that charters are more segregated, are underperforming, and lack appropriate transparency and accountability to the public.
As a result, in 2016, the Movement for Black Lives, the NAACP and Journey For Justice all called for a charter moratorium.
A national conversation about charters is especially important for the African American community because a report by the NAACP’s Task Force on Quality Education found that one in eight African American students in the United States now attends a charter school.
Even though the popularity of charter schools has plummeted in the public discourse and in many quarters of the civil rights community, the rise in the number of charters has been particularly rapid during the past ten years. Many states have lifted caps on the number of charter schools contained within the original state legislation, owing in part to millions of dollars in financial incentives created by government grant programs and funding that has poured in from foundations funded by billionaires such as Broad, Walton, Gates, Arnold and others
Considering the rapid growth of charter schools, it’s important for the public conversations about school choice to distinguish fact from rhetoric and sloganeering.
Are charters more segregated that neighborhood public schools?
The AP recently reported that about 1 in 7 charters schools are 99% students of color.
In addition to media reports, the predominance of peer reviewed research examining national and local data on the segregation of students in charter schools over the past ten years has demonstrated that school choice is exacerbating existing patterns of segregation.
The research has actually shown this for about two decades. For example, using three national data sets, one research study found that charter schools are “more racially isolated than traditional public schools in virtually every state and large metropolitan area in the nation.”
Research conducted by Vanderbilt University and Mathematica argued that charters are not “creating greater segregation,” but a careful reading of the data reveals that in the majority of states examined, white and African American students were more likely to choose even more homogenous charter schools.
Why are charters more segregated? The argument is often made by charter proponents that their schools sit in segregated neighborhoods. However, one of the big problems with school choice is that research is demonstrating that “Parents choose to leave more racially integrated district schools to attend more racially segregated charter schools.”
The peer reviewed research has shown that Whites are less likely to attend charters schools with large numbers of Black and Latinos because White families purposefully avoid charter schools that focus on test preparation and “No Excuses” discipline. Recent research has also shown that White families are more likely to attend charters that have parent voice on the board— charters predominately serving Black and Latinos are much less likely to have board members that are parents.
In sum, peer reviewed research has demonstrated that the purposeful choice of African American and white families leads to schools with more homogenous racial compositions than neighborhood public schools and “explains why there are so few racially balanced charter schools.”
So what about the argument that charters perform better? A prominent study found that choice was bad for achievement on average as, “the relatively large negative effects of charter schools on the achievement of African America students is driven by students who transfer into charter schools that are more racially isolated than the schools they have left.”
Even CREDOs most recent study of urban students shows that in 93% of measurements of reading and math in large cities across the United States, charters actually still have a negative impact on Black students. In the cases where charter perform better, the difference is typically minuscule, like the amount of difference between two football teams that are 1-10 and 0-11. In somes cases where charters perform better overall, such as Philadelphia, the overall positive performance of charter can be attributed to White and Asian students success, rather than spectacular academic success for Black and Latino students.
Furthermore, it is very clear that after more than 25 years of trying, charters have failed to dramatically change the inequality status quo in our nation. However, where they are succeeding is setting democratically-accountable districts like Los Angeles on a collision course with bankruptcy.
Our society has spent hundreds of millions of dollars building, financing and funding charters schools at great expense to taxpayers— considering the evidence to this point, the underwhelming results, and in many cases reprehensible, should be considered a national disappointment.
See Julian’s speech here:
Michelle Gunderson, veteran teacher in Chicago, explains here what Mayor Rahm Emanuel is doing to the city’s schools and the damage he is inflicting on communities of color:
On December 1, the Board of Education of the Chicago Public Schools announced its plan to shutter Harper, Hope, Robeson, and Team Englewood High Schools. All of these high schools are located in the predominantly African American Englewood neighborhood. With their planned closing there will be no neighborhood open enrollment public high schools left in this community of 30,000 people.
Schools are the cornerstones of neighborhoods, the place where a community comes together and relationships are built. Once a neighborhood school is closed it is like giving the community a black eye. The message is clear – this part of the city is not deserving of a public school and its children can be educated elsewhere.
You will hear about a beautiful, new high school planned for Englewood. While this sounds good, it does nothing for the current students of these Englewood high schools. NONE of the current high school students at Harper, Hope, Robeson, and Team Englewood will be allowed to attend. The school will start with a freshman class in 2019 and build a new class each year.
In the meantime, current students are set adrift and told to search out another school in an adjoining neighborhood. This brings up both academic questions and serious safety issues for these youth. In essence, Englewood students will be shipped to other schools, and the end of their high school careers sacrificed for a “fresh start” for the new school.
There is only one word for pushing African American children outside of their community in order to make room for a future student population – apartheid.
If CPS sincerely cares for the children of Englewood the current high schools would stay open until the new one was built and there would be a plan for integrating their students into the new school. To ‘start clean’ with only freshmen is to deny the value and humanity of the current youth in this neighborhood.
The narrative around the school closings is that the schools are under-enrolled and that they are not meeting the needs of the students. Janice Jackson, chief education officer of Chicago Public Schools said, “When I look at Englewood, at the experience some kids are getting, I can’t make the case they’re getting a good high school experience.” On this, she is right. The high schools in Englewood have been starved of the resources needed for high quality school programming for years. They have been intentionally run into the ground so that their closings would be inevitable.
The Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) has been fighting for fair funding of schools for many years. The union’s underlying analysis is that the Chicago Public Schools purposefully defunded schools, claimed them as failures, and then proceeded to close them. The city is in fact “broke on purpose” so that these neighborhoods can be taken over and gentrified. What are the values of our society when children’s lives are sacrificed to the real estate ‘gods of gentrification’?
There will be readers who ask, why would a city government plan the demise of the high schools in an entire section of town? The answer is clear – real estate. Englewood sits in prime territory just south of Chicago’s Loop and with ready access to expressways and transportation. This is a real estate grab.
John Kuhn’s powerful and passionate 2-minute video about inequitable funding has gone viral!
Released days ago, it has already had nearly 900,000 views!
Help it pass one million!
Watch, tweet, post, share.
http://bit.ly/JohnKuhnNPEJustice . And the
NPE Letter Writing Action http://bit.ly/FairlyFundSchools
We can’t match the billionaires money, but we can beat them with our numbers and the power of our voices!
North Carolina is one of the states where the legislature has been working overtime to pass programs to harm public schools. Charters, vouchers, cybercharters, Teach for America, and regular assaults on the teaching profession.
That context makes it especially surprising and gratifying to see that the editorial board of the News-Observer wrote a strong critique of the GOP Tax Plan because it hurts public education.
This is a fantastic editorial:
There’s no doubt that tax-cut proposals in the House and Senate will increase income inequality today, but provisions in the bills could also weaken the earning power of many in the future by eroding the quality and the diversity of public schools.
One change that as approved by the Senate and also found in the House bill extends a tax benefit for college savings accounts to cover tuition for private elementary and secondary education. The change means that those who can afford to save money for non-public school tuition will be able to see that money grow tax-free.
Extending the tax break won’t mean much for families of modest incomes since they can’t afford to save large amounts for pre-college schooling, but it will have the effect of making high-priced private schools less costly to the wealthy. The Senate version of the change offered by Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas even allows those who home school to draw up to $10,000 annually out of the tax-favored accounts to cover loosely defined school expenses. In the end, the change reduces tax revenue to give the wealthy a break on private education costs.
This relatively narrow adjustment will be joined by sweeping proposals in both the House and Senate tax bills that limit federal deductions for state and local taxes. Those changes will make it harder for local and state governments to raise taxes to support public schools. Together, the changes will lighten the tuition bill at private schools while adding to the tax burden that supports public schools.
Of course, higher education is also threatened by provisions in the tax plans that would include levies on endowments and on tuition benefits provided to graduate students and children of college employees. But the plans’ broader threats are to public schools, which are already being undermined by Republican-backed efforts to increase the number of charter schools – publicly funded but privately run – and to expand the use of tax funds for private schools through voucher programs. Now that “school choice” movement has gained support at the federal level with the appointment of Betsy DeVos – a charter and private school advocate – as the U.S. education secretary.
Fueling re-segregation
As Republicans cut away at the financial foundation of public schools they are also accelerating the re-segregation of all schools at the elementary and secondary levels. Adding charters and using tax dollars to subsidize private and sectarian school tuition is leading to a great sorting by race. And that, rather than enhancing education, deprives children of learning through exposure to classmates of different racial groups and economic backgrounds.
In a recent report on charter schools, The Associated Press found the number of charter schools has tripled over the last decade and racial isolation has grown with them. Charters tend to be overwhelmingly white, or overwhelming one minority. The AP reported: “While 4 percent of traditional public schools are 99 percent minority, the figure is 17 percent for charters. In cities, where most charters are located, 25 percent of charters are over 99 percent nonwhite, compared to 10 percent for traditional schools.”
The trend worries even some charter school advocates. Pascual Rodriguez, principal of a Milwaukee charter where nearly all the students are Hispanic, told the AP: “The beauty of our school is we’re 97 percent Latino. The drawback is we’re 97 percent Latino … Well, what happens when they go off into the real world where you may be part of an institution that’s not 97 percent Latino?”
The AP report mirrors what an October News & Observer report found about racial segregation in North Carolina charter schools. The report found that the schools are more segregated and have more affluent students than traditional public schools.
Christine Kushner, a member of the Wake County Board of Education and a former chair of the panel, said that despite efforts to foster diversity in the Wake County school system, the state’s largest, minorities are the majority, largely because of an increase in Hispanic students and more white students enrolling in schools outside of the system. She said Wake schools remain strong, but their reduced diversity both in race and income is a setback.
“It’s troubling to me that we are going backward because I think diverse schools are what’s best for all children and economics and history affirm that,” she said. School choice is fine, she said, but public schools need to have the resources “to be the first choice for all parents.”
Good public schools and strong support through taxes are inseparable. But the tax bills in Congress are adding to the forces that are splitting that bond and jeopardizing public education.
Read more here: http://www.newsobserver.com/opinion/editorials/article188972429.html#storylink=cpy
Please watch this two-minute video of John Kuhn, Texas Superintendent, who tells the story of two adjacent school districts, one rich, one poor. He explains with eloquence and passion why schools should be equitably funded and how unjust it is to fund schools differently and expect to get the same results.
This video is part of a series of short videos produced by Michael Elliott for the Network for Public Education.
Please watch it, tweet it, share it on your Facebook page, and wherever else you reach your friends and acquaintances. Send it to everyone you know.
Kuhn is powerful and eloquent on behalf of children, communities, public schools, justice, and equity.
The tax bills passed by Republicans in the House and Senate have some differences, but they jointly express disdain for students, public schools, higher education, and the importance of learning and opportunity.
Jeff Bryant explores the education details of the two bills, which will be reconciled in a conference committee.
The Senate plan “would double to $500 the $250 deduction teachers get for purchasing school supplies with their own money, rather than eliminate the deduction as the House version does. And while the House would eliminate deductions for student loan interest, college tuition and expenses, and tax breaks used by university employees and graduate students, the Senate proposal would preserve them.
“But many other features of the Senate plan would deeply harm students and schools.
“Both the Senate and House bills propose an excise tax on private college endowments with assets of more than $100,000 per student. Endowment funds are used to help pay for academic programs, campus facilities, and student services, private college leaders and advocates say.”
Endowment funds are also used to pay for scholarships. Taxing these funds will reduce the funding available for students who can’t pay tuition in expensive private colleges.
“The biggest threats to local schools in both plans are their proposals to end federal deductions for state and local taxes (SALT) that households take when they itemize. The House plan limits the pain with a $10,000 ceiling, but the Senate plan does away with the deduction altogether.
“Any reduction to the SALT federal subsidy will imperil the largest sources of school funding to education by eliminating the federal tax benefit to schools, discouraging new state and local tax initiatives to support schools, and pressuring state and local officials to cut local taxes to appease tax payers who can no longer deduct those taxes from their federal returns.
“Another feature of the House bill that the Senate also proposes would increase how much schools pay for long-term debt by eliminating a tax exemption school districts get when they refinance their debts at lower interest rates using certain types of bonds.
“According to Education Week, in the most recent year reported, districts carried $409 billion in long-term debt – a rate of $8,465 per student – and paid $17 billion in interest on those loans. Taking away any ability to write off some of that interest as a tax exemption would decrease money districts have to pay for teachers and student learning opportunities.
Bryant writes that education funding for K-12 remains below 2008 levels in 29 states.
“The cuts to K-12 spending have “serious consequences,” CBPP authors contend, including crippling efforts to hire and retain the best teachers, reduce class sizes, expand learning time, and provide high-quality early childhood education.
“Of the 10 states that have cut state and local education spending the most – Florida, Arizona, North Carolina, Nevada, Georgia, Idaho, Alabama, Oklahoma, Michigan, and Utah (in descending order from 25 percent to 8.6 percent) – all have had a Republican “trifecta” in charge, including a Republican governor and Republican majorities in both chambers of the state legislature.”
He writes that:
“The Republican war on learning will have long term negative consequences to the nation.
“While the House tax plan’s cut to SALT deductions would “put nearly 250,000 education jobs at risk,” according to analysts at the National Education Association, the Senate plan to end the deduction would plunge the dagger deeper, potentially leading to a loss of $370 billion in state and local tax revenue over 10 years, the NEA calculates, and endangering 370,000 education jobs.
“Changes to higher-education tax benefits in the House tax plan “would cost students and families more than $71 billion over the next decade,” The Washington Post reports.
“Our country’s future depends heavily on the quality of its schools,” the authors of the CBPP study argue. The decade-long effort to cut K-12 school funding they chart “risk(s) undermining schools’ capacity to develop the intelligence and creativity of the next generation of workers and entrepreneurs.”
“Perhaps, the whole strategy behind GOP tax plans and budget cuts boils down to a short-term need to cut education in order to offset the large cuts Republicans are providing to wealthy families and corporations.
“But next year’s mid-term elections – in which a third of the Senate, 36 governors, and three quarters of states’ legislators are up for re-election – will give the rest of us a chance to speak up.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 