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Texas: Abbott Calls Special Session to Force Vouchers

By dianeravitch
October 9, 2023 //
12

Governor Greg Abbott really, really wants vouchers. The State Senate agrees with him. The House of Representatives is controlled by Republicans but it thus far has refused to pass them. Rural Republicans in the House have allied with urban Democrats because both know that vouchers will harm their community public schools.

But Abbott is pulling out all the stops. He even refused to raise teachers’ salaries or increase public school funding until he gets a voucher bill.

The Texas Observer comments:

Governor Greg Abbott has called lawmakers back to a special legislative session starting this coming Monday, October 9. His message to them: Pass school vouchers—or else.

“There’s an easy way to get it done, and there’s a hard way,” Abbott said during a September 19 tele-town hall. “If we do not win in that first special session, we will have another special special session and we’ll come back again. And then if we don’t win that time … We will have everything teed up in a way where we will be giving voters in a primary a choice.”

From bullying legislators to “co-opting” churches and religious services, Abbott “wants to force a voucher at all costs,” said Patty Quinzi, legislative director of the Texas American Federation of Teachers. Pulling the purse strings of Abbott’s voucher campaign are a handful of billionaires who have invested millions to weaponize far-right culture war propaganda to fund what the governor has branded as “school choice” for parents.

Meanwhile, many public school districts started this school year with a budget deficit after the Senate refused to use the state’s $33 billion budget surplus to increase school funding without the condition of passing universal vouchers.

During the regular session, the House twice rejected proposals for vouchers or “an educational savings account,” citing constituent concerns that voucher programs would siphon money from public schools. When the Senate attempted to force the House to accept universal vouchers in return for passing its school funding proposal, its author, Representative Ken King, pulled the bill.

“In the end, the Senate would not negotiate at all. It was a universal ESA or nothing,” King wrote in his public statement. “I am committed to protecting the 5.5 million school kids in Texas from being used as political hostages. What the Governor and the Senate [have] done is inexcusable, and I stand ready to set it right and continue to work for the best outcome for our students and schools.”

In early August, the House’s 15-member committee on Educational Opportunity and Enrichment issued its interim report, signaling some members’ willingness to compromise on school vouchers if they were limited to students with special needs and if the money to fund a voucher program came out of the state general revenue instead of the Permanent School Fund. Earlier this year, the Observer revealedhow limited voucher programs in other states served as a trojan horse for larger, universal voucher programs, leaving public schools with large deficits and a loss of federal civil rights protections for parents who took their children out of public schools.

“We are $40 billion below the national average for school funding, so we have no business talking about any kind of program that takes more money out of our public schools,” said Representative Gina Hinojosa, who serves on the committee but declined to endorse its recommendations.

Greg Abbott has vowed to keep calling special sessions until the Legislature passes a voucher bill.

Categories Bigotry, Education Industry, Funding, Privatization, Propaganda, Rural Schools, Teachers

Thom Hartmann: The Medicare Advantage Ripoff

By dianeravitch
October 8, 2023 //
39

At present, about half of all retirees are enrolled in a Medicare Advantage plan. MA takes the place of Medicare. In this article, Thom Hartmann explains why Medicare Advantage is a very bad deal. In New York City, the city administration and the municipal unions (!) are trying to push 250,000 retirees into a Medicare Advantage plan instead of Medicare. The retirees have formed an organization and have fought back in court. The city says that switching to MA will save $600 million a year. The retirees won the last round in court. To learn more, go to the website of the New York City Organization of Public Service Employees. (NYCRetirees.org).

He writes:

President George W. Bush and Republicans (and a handful of on-the-take Democrats) in Congress created the Medicare Advantage scam in 2003 as a way of routing hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars into the pockets of for-profit insurance companies.


Those companies, and their executives, then recycle some of that profit back into politicians’ pockets via the Citizens United legalized bribery loophole created by five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court.


Just the overcharges happening right now in that scam are costing Americans over $140 billion a year: more than the entire budget for the Medicare Part B or Part D programs. These ripoffs — that our federal government seems to have no interest in stopping — are draining the Medicare trust fund while ensnaring gullible seniors in private insurance programs where they’re often denied life-saving care.


Real Medicare pays bills when they’re presented. Medicare Advantage insurance companies, on the other hand, get a fixed dollar amount every year for each of the people enrolled in their programs, regardless of how much they spent on each customer.


As a result, Medicare Advantage programs make the greatest profits for their CEOs and shareholders when they actively refuse to pay for care, something that happens frequently. It’s a safe bet that nearly 100 percent of the people who sign up for Advantage programs don’t know this and don’t have any idea how badly screwed they could be if they get seriously ill.


Not only that, when people do figure out they’ve been duped and try to get back on real Medicare, the same insurance companies often punish them by refusing to write Medigap plans (that fill in the 20% hole in real Medicare). They can’t do that when you first sign up when you turn 65, but if you “leave” real Medicare for privatized Medicare Advantage, it can be damn hard to get back on it.


The doctors’ group Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP) just published a shocking report on the extent of the Medicare Advantage ripoffs — both to individual customers and to Medicare itself — that every American should know about.


The report, titled Our Payments, Their Profits, opens with this shocking exposé:

“By our estimate, and based on 2022 spending, Medicare Advantage overcharges taxpayers by a minimum of 22% or $88 billion per year, and potentially by up to 35% or $140 billion. By comparison, Part B premiums in 2022 totaled approximately $131 billion, and overall federal spending on Part D drug benefits cost approximately $126 billion. Either of these — or other crucial aspects of Medicare and Medicaid — could be funded entirely by eliminating overcharges in the Medicare Advantage program.

“Medicare Advantage, also known as MA or Medicare Part C, is a privately administered insurance program that uses a capitated payment structure, as opposed to the fee-for-service (FFS) structure of Traditional Medicare or TM. Instead of paying directly for the health care of beneficiaries, the federal government gives a lump sum of money to a third party (generally a commercial insurer) to ‘manage’ patient care.”

With real Medicare and a Medigap plan, you talk with your physician or hospital and decide on your treatment, they bill Medicare, and you never see or hear about the bill. There is nobody between you and your physician or hospital and Medicare only goes after the payment they’ve made if they sniff out a fraud.

With Medicare Advantage, on the other hand, your insurance company gets a lump-sum payment from Medicare every year and keeps the difference between what they get and what they pay out. They then insert themselves between you and your doctor or hospital to avoid paying for whatever they can.

Whatever you decide on regarding treatment, many Advantage insurance company will regularly second-guess and do everything they can to intimidate you into paying yourself out-of-pocket. Often, they simply refuse payment and wait for you to file a complaint against them; for people seriously ill the cumbersome “appeals” process is often more than they can handle.

As a result, hospitals and doctor groups across the nation are beginning to refuse to take Medicare Advantage patients. California-based Scripps Health, for example, cares for around 30,000 people on Medicare Advantage and recently notified all of them that Scripps will no longer offer medical services to them unless they pay out-of-pocket or revert back to real Medicare.

They made this decision because over $75 million worth of services and procedures their physicians had recommended to their patients were turned down by Medicare Advantage insurance companies. In many cases, Scripps had already provided the care and is now stuck with the bills that the Advantage companies refuse to pay.

Scripps CEO Chris Van Gorder told MedPage Today:

“We are a patient care organization and not a patient denial organization and, in many ways, the model of managed care has always been about denying or delaying care – at least economically. That is why denials, [prior] authorizations and administrative processes have become a very big issue for physicians and hospitals…”

Similarly, the Mayo Clinic has warned its customers in Florida and Arizona that they won’t accept Medicare Advantage any more, either. Increasing numbers of physician groups and hospitals are simply over being ripped off by Advantage insurance companies.

Not only is the Medicare Advantage scam a screw job for healthcare providers and people who are on the programs and are unfortunate enough to get sick, it’s also preventing Americans from getting expanded benefits from real Medicare.

As the PNHP report notes, for real Medicare to provide comprehensive vision, dental, and hearing benefits to all Medicare recipients would cost the system around $84 billion a year, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

Instead, though, the Medicare system is burdened with at least that amount of money in over-payments to Medicare Advantage providers — over-payments that have no health benefit whatsoever and merely inflate the companies’ profits.

A hundred billion dollars in excess profits can be put to a lot of uses, and the health insurance industry is quite good at it. The former CEO of UnitedHealth, “Dollar” Bill McGuire, for example, made off with over $1.5 billion dollars for his efforts.

And, because five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court legalized political bribery with their Citizens United decision, some of these companies allocate millions every year (a mere drop in the bucket) to pay off loyal members of Congress and to dangle high-paying future jobs to high-level employees of CMS who have the power to keep the gravy train going and thwart prosecutions.

As PNHP noted:

“Medicare Advantage is just another example of the endless greed of the insurance industry poisoning American health care, siphoning money from vulnerable patients while delaying and denying necessary and often life-saving treatment. While there is obvious reason to fix these issues in MA and to expand Traditional Medicare for the sake of all beneficiaries, the deep structural problems with our health care system will only be fixed when we achieve improved Medicare for All.”

We’re on the edge of the open enrollment period for Medicare, and the Advantage scammers will be carpet-bombing America with advertisements over the next few months. Representatives Pocan, Khanna, and Shakowsky have introduced the “Save Medicare Act” that would ban Advantage companies from using the word Medicare in their advertising.

They made a video about it that’s well worth sharing with friends and family:

As Shakowsky, Khanna, and Pocan note, “Only Medicare is Medicare.” Don’t be fooled by the Medicare Advantage scam.

And now that you know, pass it on and save somebody else’s health!

Categories Accountability, For-Profit, Funding, Health

Georgia: Report Warns that Costs of Vouchers Make Them Risky

By dianeravitch
October 3, 2023 //
3

The National Education Policy Center issued a report about the likely fiscal impact of vouchers, which finds that vouchers are a risky venture with no proven benefits. NEPC is noted for its peer-reviewed reports.

An NEPC Review funded by the Great Lakes Center

Key Takeaway: Tax-credit scholarship programs probably incur more costs than savings for state and school districts, placing financial strain on state budgets and driving the need for future budget cuts.

GRAND RAPIDS, MI (September 26, 2023) – A recent report from the Georgia Department of Audits and Accounts examines the monetary costs and benefits of the state’s Qualified Education Expense Tax Credit (QEEC), a voucher policy that provides a public subsidy for families to pay for private school tuition. A review of the report, however, contradicts its claim that the policy provides a net fiscal benefit to the state budget.

David Knight of the University of Washington reviewed Qualified Education Expense Tax Credit: Economic Analysis, and he found several methodological challenges that undermine the report’s conclusions and its usefulness.

One key claim in the report is that the tax credit results in $81 million of forgone state tax revenue per year. Another key claim is that the vouchers incentivize almost 20,000 students per year to choose private schools instead of public, thus removing the cost of educating those students from state and local budgets. Based largely on these two claims, the report concludes that QEEC provides a net fiscal benefit for Georgia’s state budget.

Professor Knight points to a lack of data about how many students per year do actually switch from public to private schools because of the voucher subsidy and incentive. In fact, existing private-school families have extremely strong incentives to accept the public subsidies. And if most of the vouchers are provided to support these students who were already planning to attend a private school, then the policy only subsidizes private school students with funding that could otherwise be returned to taxpayers or invested in the state’s public education system, which is open to all students.

While these calculations are all necessarily grounded in some speculation because of the unregulated elements of the voucher policy and the resulting lack of hard data, the most likely result of tax credit scholarship programs like QEEC is that the state and school districts incur more costs than savings, placing financial strain on state budgets that could require future cuts.

Because the report relies on unrealistic assumptions, its suggestion that program benefits outweigh costs is tenuous and risks misleading state education leaders. Instead, state leaders should invest educational dollars in policies that have a positive return on investment and therefore help, rather than harm, state and local budgets.

Find the review, by David Knight, at:
https://www.greatlakescenter.org

Find Qualified Education Expense Tax Credit: Economic Analysis, written by Greg S. Griffin and Lisa Kieffer, and published by the Georgia Department of Audits and Accounts, at:
https://www.audits.ga.gov/ReportSearch/download/29827

NEPC Reviews (https://nepc.colorado.edu/reviews) provide the public, policymakers, and the press with timely, academically sound reviews of selected publications. NEPC Reviews are made possible in part by support provided by the Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice: https://www.greatlakescenter.org

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Education Industry, Funding, Georgia, Privatization, Religion, Vouchers

Leonie Haimson: Why Bloomberg Is Wrong About Reducing Class Size

By dianeravitch
September 30, 2023 //
30

Leonie Haimson is executive director of Class Size Matters. She has worked tirelessly to persuade legislators in New York State to limit class sizes. Her efforts were successful in the latest legislative session when both houses passed limits on class sizes.

However billionaire Michael Bloomberg, who was mayor of New York City for 12 years, has been an outspoken critic of class size reduction. In this article that appeared on Valerie Strauss’s “Answer Sheet,” Haimson explains why Bloomberg is wrong.

Strauss writes:

In 2014, I wrote this: “Every now and then someone in education policy (Arne Duncan) or education philanthropy (Bill Gates) …. will say something about why class size isn’t really very important because a great teacher can handle a boatload of kids.”


Well, some can do that, but anybody who has been in a classroom knows the virtues of classes that are smaller rather than larger even without the research that has been shown to bear that out.


Now the issue is back in the spotlight, this time in New York City, where a new state law requires the public school system — the largest in the country — to reduce class sizes over five years. Opponents of the law are pushing back, especially Mike Bloomberg, mayor of New York City from 2002 to 2013. He called for smaller class sizes in his first mayoral campaign but has now changed his mind.


In an op-ed in several publications, Bloomberg says students don’t need smaller classes but better schools — as if the two were entirely unrelated — and he ignores research, such as a 2014 review of major research that found class size matters a lot, especially for low-income and minority students.

This post, written by Leonie Haimson, looks at the issue, and Bloomberg’s position. Haimson is executive director of Class Size Matters, a nonprofit organization that advocates for smaller classes in New York City and across the nation as a key driver of education equity.

By Leonie Haimson


The knives are out against the new class size law, overwhelmingly passed in the New York State Legislature in June 2022, requiring New York City schools to phase in smaller classes over five years, starting this school year. The law calls for class sizes in grades K-3 to be limited to no more than twenty students; 23 students in grades 4-8, and 25 in core high school classes, to be achieved by the end of the 2027 school year. The law was passed despite the opposition of the city’s Department of Education officials, who insist that it will be too expensive, and somehow inequitable, because, they say, the highest-need students already have small enough classes.

Most recently, Mike Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York City and an adviser to Mayor Eric Adams, published identical opinion pieces in three major outlets: Bloomberg News (which he owns), The Washington Post, and the New York Post, inveighing against the goal of lowering class sizes. His piece is clearly meant to sway opinion leaders and legislators to repeal the law, and because of his prominent position, some may listen without knowing about fundamental problems in his op-ed.

Class size reduction has been shown as an effective way to improve learning and engagement for all students, especially those who are disadvantaged, and thus is a key driver of education equity. The Institute of Education Sciences cites lowering class size as one of only four education interventions proven to work through rigorous evidence; and multiple studies show that it narrows the achievement or opportunity gap between income and racial groups.

Bloomberg claims that because of the initiative, “City officials say they’ll have to hire 17,700 new teachers by 2028.” Actually, the estimate from the New York City Department of Education (DOE) itself is far smaller. In their draft class size reduction plan, posted on July 21, DOE officials estimated that 9,000 more teachers would be required over five years. While it’s true that the Independent Budget Office estimated the figure cited by Bloomberg, this large disparity between the two figures appears to stem from the fact that, as the IBO pointed out, the DOE’s budget already includes 7,500 unfilled teaching positions, which schools have not been allowed to fill. While Bloomberg claims the cost will be $1.9 billion for staffing, the DOE’s own plan estimates $1.3 billion — and these costs could be considerably lower if they redeployed teachers who are currently assigned to out-of-classroom positions to the classroom to lower class size.

The legislature passed the new law in recognition that the city’s DOE is now receiving $1.6 billion in additional state aid to finally settle the Campaign for Fiscal Equity lawsuit launched more than 20 years ago. In that case, the state’s highest court found that, because of excessive class sizes, the city’s children were deprived of their constitutional right to a sound, basic education.

Yet since his election, Adams has repeatedly cut education spending, and now threatens to cut it even more, by another 15 percent. As a result of these cuts, class sizes increased last year and will likely be larger this year. Hiring enough teachers to meet the law’s requirements will be a challenge in any case, but it will be impossible to achieve if the administration’s repeated cuts and hiring freezes are implemented.

Yet in the end, smaller classes would likely strengthen teacher quality by lowering teacher attrition rates, especially at our highest-need schools, as studies have shown.

In his op-ed, Bloomberg claims that creating the additional space necessary to lower class size will cost $35 billion, which is misleading. DOE did include this estimate in its original May 2023 draft class size plan. However following pushback by critics who pointed out that this figure bore no relation to reality, they deleted that inflated estimate in their more recent July class size plan. If DOE equalized or redistributed enrollment across schools, this would likely save billions of dollars in capital expenses. Right now, there are hundreds of underutilized public schools, sitting close by overcrowded schools that lack the space to lower class size.

Bloomberg, echoing an erroneous DOE claim that funds spent on lowering class size will not help the highest-need students, wrote: “Under the new mandate, only 38 percent of the highest-poverty schools would see class sizes shrink, compared to nearly 70 percent of medium- to low-poverty schools … it won’t help the students who need it most.”

Actually, only 8 percent of schools with the highest poverty levels (with 90 percent or more low-income students) fully complied with the class size caps last year, according to an analysis by Class Size Matters. Thus, 92 percent of these schools would see their class sizes shrink if DOE complied with the law, rather than the 38 percent that Bloomberg claims.

Moreover, by solely focusing on schools with 90 percent poverty levels or more, his claims are misleading. A piece in the education publication Chalkbeat attempted to make a similar argument, by using class size data provided by DOE that shows that 68 percent of classes in the highest-poverty schools met the class size limit. This is far different than Bloomberg’s claim that 68 percent of these schools are achieving the limits in all of their classes.

In addition, the class size data, analyzed in conjunction with DOE demographic data, shows that there are many more NYC public schools in the other two categories summarized by Chalkbeat, “Low-to-Mid Poverty” (schools with 0-75 percent low-income students) and “High Poverty” (schools with 75 percent to 90 percent low-income students), than those in their “Highest Poverty” category. Most importantly, these two categories of schools enroll a supermajority of our highest-needs students.

In fact, 79 percent of low-income students, 78 percent of Black students, 74 percent of Hispanic students, and 74 percent of English-language learners are enrolled in these other two categories of schools, while only 21 percent to 26 percent of these students are enrolled in the “Highest Poverty” category.

This further indicates that without a citywide mandate to lower class size, smaller classes would likely never reach most of our most disadvantaged students.

Indeed, the highest-needs students, including students of color, low-income students, and English-language learners, have been shown to gain twice the benefits from smaller classes in terms of higher achievement rates, more engagement, and eventual success in school and beyond, which is why class size reduction is one of very few education reforms proven to narrow the achievement or opportunity gap. Thus, by its very nature, lowering class size is a key driver of education equity.

There is also no guarantee that the smaller classes in our highest poverty schools will be sustained without a legal mandate to do so. In July, DOE officials omitted the promise in their May class size plan that schools that had already achieved the caps would continue to do so, as pointed out by a letter signed by over 230 advocates, parents, and teachers. In fact, we found that fewer of the schools in every category achieved the class size caps last year compared to the year before.

Only 69 schools citywide fully met the caps in the fall of 2022, compared to 89 in the fall of 2021, and the number of students enrolled in those schools declined from 18,248 to only 13,905, a decrease of nearly 25 percent. Fewer still will likely do so this year.

So given that the data does not back up his claims, why is Bloomberg so apparently enraged at the notion that public school students would be provided the opportunity to benefit from smaller classes.

One should recall that when he first ran for mayor more than 20 years ago, Bloomberg himself promised to lower class size, especially in the early grades. His 2002 campaign kit put it this way: “Studies confirm one of the greatest detriments to learning is an overcrowded classroom … For students a loud packed classroom means greater chance of falling behind. For teachers, class overcrowding means a tougher time teaching & giving students attention they need.”

Yet class sizes increased sharply during the Bloomberg years, and by 2013, his last year in office, class sizes in the early grades in public schools had risen to the highest levels in 15 years. By that time, he had long renounced his earlier pledge, and had proclaimed in a 2011 speech that he would fire half the teachers and double class sizes if he could, and this would be a “good deal for the students.”

Bloomberg’s main educational legacy in New York City was a huge increase in the number of charter schools as a result of his decision to provide them free space in public school buildings, and his successful effort to persuade state legislators to raise the charter cap. During his three terms in office, the number of charter schools in the city exploded from 19 to 183.

Since leaving office, Bloomberg has continued to express his preference for charter schools, and has pledged $750 million for their further expansion in the city and beyond. A close reading of his op-ed suggests that one of the main reasons for his vehement opposition to the new law is because lowering class size may take classroom space in our public schools that, in his view, should be used instead for charter schools.

Indeed, he concludes the op-ed by saying “it would help if Democratic leaders were more supportive of high-quality public charter schools,” and goes on to rail against a recent lawsuit to block the Adams administration’s decision to co-locate two Success charter schools in public school buildings in Brooklyn and Queens — a lawsuit filed on the basis that it would diminish the space available to lower class size for existing public school students.

Of the $750 million Bloomberg pledged for charter expansion, $100 million was specifically earmarked for Success Academy. Regarding the lawsuit, launched by the teachers union along with parents and educators in the affected schools, Bloomberg writes, “It was an outrageous attack on children, and thankfully, it failed.”

Misleading people about the value of small classes to teachers and students as well as about class size data seems to be an attack on opportunities for New York City public school children, who deserve better. Class Size Matters hopes these efforts fail.

Categories Billionaires, Bloomberg, Michael, Budget Cuts, Charter Schools, Class size, Education Industry, Education Reform, Equity, Funding, New York, New York City

Michael Hiltzik: The House GOP Demands Cuts to Programs for the Neediest

By dianeravitch
September 29, 2023 //
3

Michael Hiltzik, my favorite columnist in the Los Angeles Times, writes about the demands of the House GOP to avert a government shutdown. Their draconian cuts would protect their wealthy donors (by cutting IRS agents) but savage the programs that are essential for the neediest families, adults, and children.

He writes:

It’s all well and good to treat the House Republicans’ careening toward a government shutdown as a cabaret farce staged for our amusement

However, the threat to ordinary Americans, especially those dependent on government programs, is no joke.

As outlined by the Center for American Progress and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, two progressive think tanks working from official communications including the budget resolution released Sept. 20 by House Budget Committee Chair Jodey Arrington, they would involve these cuts in the social safety net:

Even if the Republicans don’t provoke the shutdown currently likely to begin at 12:01 a.m. Sunday, the budget cuts House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Bakersfield) has said he would support to meet the demands of his caucus’ far-right wing would devastate government assistance to the most vulnerable Americans.

  • A cut of $14.7 billion, or 77%, in Title I education grants to school districts with high levels of poverty, which fund services and supports for students from low-income or disadvantaged backgrounds. The CBPP calls this funding “a core federal support for K-12 education.”
  • Reduction of the fruit and vegetable benefit in the Agriculture Department’s Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC)by 56% to 70%, affecting about 5 million participants.
  • Unsustainable reductions in low-income assistance programs for housing and heating.
  • $1.9 trillion in Medicaid cuts over 10 years.

These cuts go well beyond those agreed upon in the debt-ceiling negotiations last May, which McCarthy accepted.

As a sop to the Republicans’ rich patrons, the House caucus would rescind all of the $88 billion in additional funding for the Internal Revenue Service that was enacted as part of last year’s Inflation Reduction Act.

The absurd truth of all this “negotiating” is that it won’t help Speaker McCarthy, America’s most outstanding political invertebrate, get a funding proposal through his chamber that would be even remotely acceptable to the Senate. That includes Senate Republicans, who have signed on to a bipartisan spending scheme.

There are doubts that McCarthy can get any proposal through his caucus, which is effectively controlled by extremists who keep moving the goalposts by insisting on ever more draconian spending cuts. They show every sign of determination to shut the government down this weekend, even though it’s a political article of faith that the public always blames the GOP for shutdowns (as it should), leading to disaster at the ballot box.

The lack of character among congressional Republicans, not excepting those aligned with McCarthy, is truly amazing. These are people who have no compunctions about slandering working Americans while taking every opportunity themselves for slacking off.

Rep. Garret Graves (R-La.), one of McCarthy’s lieutenants, remarked during the debt-ceiling negotiations that Democrats were “willing to default on the debt so they can continue making welfare payments for people that are refusing to work.”

The serene nerviness of this slander was truly impressive, given that the House of Representatives had taken 12 of 20 workdays off in April and 10 of 22 workdays (not counting Memorial Day) off in May. Overall, the House has been scheduled to be in session only 117 days in 2023, fewer than half the 240 days most of the rest of us are at work.

The House took off the entire month of Augustand didn’t return to session until Sept. 12, all while the possible shutdown was looming. The rest were officially designated “district work days,” to which we can only respond, “Oh, sure.”

Graves has resurfaced during the shutdown negotiations, telling the Washington Post that the Republicans’ “bottom line is we’re singularly focused right now on achieving our conservative objectives,” which include “huge savings.”

As the Post toted up the numbers, those savings involved “taking more than $150 billion per year out of the part of the budget that funds child care, education subsidies, medical research and hundreds of additional federal operations.”

If there’s a silver lining in the House GOP’s performative horseplay, it’s that it has cured the political press of treating the standoff as a symptom of congressional dysfunction. It’s not; as is being reported more accurately and sensibly in recent days, it’s a symptom of Republican dysfunction and, more than that, McCarthy’s dysfunction.

McCarthy sold his soul to the Republican extremist in order to win the job of speaker. Now what will he do?

The extremists have made their priorities clear. Protect their rich donors, while slamming the door shut on those who rely on government aid to survive. They are a cruel and shameless lot.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Budget Cuts, Cruelty, Disruption, Elections, Evil, Extremism, Funding, Injustice, Republicans

Who Are the Billionaire Wilks Brothers of Cisco, Texas?

By dianeravitch
September 26, 2023 //
2

Dan and Farris Wilks are politically powerful billionaires who live in Cisco, Texas. They both finished high school but went no further. They got into fracking early on and sold their oil and gas business to the government of Singapore for $3.5 billion in 2011.

They are passionate evangelical Christians. They fund Christian nationalist groups. They fund anti-gay organizations and anti-abortion groups. They consider climate change a hoax. They are major funders of voucher advocacy. They would like to see every student enrolled in a private Christian school or home-schooled.

The brothers are closely associated with ALEC and the Koch network. They are big contributors to Senator Ted Cruz.

Dan and Farris Wilks are major funders of PragerU videos, which present history and economics from a rightwing perspective, echoing the views of Dennis Prager, the talk-show host who created the videos.

Read about Dan Wilks here.

Read about Farris Wilks here.

The Wilks brothers have been described as “the Koch brothers of the Christian right” for their funding of anti-abortion and anti-LGBTgroups. In addition to a variety of groups on the Religious Right, the brothers have funded organizations associated with the Koch brothers’ political network such as the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and the State Policy Network (SPN). Farris Wilks runs The Thirteen Foundation, which has been described as “one of the biggest and quietest anti-abortion donors in the United States.”

The Guardian summarized their negative influence here.

Experts who follow the influence of the Wilks brothers say their sprawling agendas and big checks spark strong concerns.Videos denying climate science approved by Florida as state curriculum

“Farris and Dan Wilks, who believe their billions were given to them by God, have spent the last decade working to advance a dominionist ideology by funding far-right organizations and politicians that seek to dismiss climate change as ‘God’s will’, remove choice, demonize the LGBTQ community, and tear down public education, all to turn America into a country that gives preference to and imposes their extreme beliefs on everyone,” said Chris Tackett, a Texas-based campaign finance analyst.

“The goal of [the] Wilks and those that share their ideology is to gain control of levers of power and control information. That’s why they invest heavily into politicians, agenda-driven non-profits and media organizations like PragerU and the Daily Wire. It is all connected.”

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Billionaires, Censorship, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Elections, Extremism, Funding, Racism, Religion, Republicans, Vouchers

Houston Chronicle Editorial: Three Theocratic Billionaires Threaten U.S. Democracy

By dianeravitch
September 26, 2023 //
2

The Houston Chronicle published a blistering editorial about the power of three billionaires who control Republican politics in Texas and threaten American democracy—not only in Texas. The three are adherents of Christian nationalism and dedicated funders of school vouchers. Their dream is to abolish public schools and enroll every student in a Christian school or home-schooled. They funded State Attorney General KennPaxton’s impeachment defense, and they are now funding Governor Greg Abbott’s campaign for vouchers.

The editorial board wrote:

Since its founding in the early 1880s, the little town of Cisco, 45 miles east of Abilene, has been in the news twice. In 1919, Conrad Hilton paid $40,000 for the Mobley Hotel in downtown Cisco, which eventually gained fame as the first in a worldwide chain of Hilton hotels. Eight years later, two days before Christmas 1927, Santa Claus and three of his helpers robbed the First National Bank of Cisco.

National notoriety will again fall on Cisco if Texas voters — Republican, Democrat and independent — don’t get engaged with their democracy sometime soon. The little town is home to the Wilks brothers, Dan and Farris, oil and fracking billionaires who, by playing Santa Claus to Republican officeholders receptive to far-right extremists, are on a mission to transform Texas into a Christian nationalist state. Their efforts, in conjunction with an even more influential West Texas oil billionaire, Tim Dunn of Midland, was on insidious display during the recent impeachment trial of the most corrupt state attorney general in America.

Ken Paxton skated, not necessarily because he was innocent of the charges that 121 House members, including 60 Republicans, brought against him. He’s back on the job and baying for RINO blood because most Republicans in the Texas Senate are either in thrall to the West Texas triumvirate or they tremble in terror at the prospect of being “primaried” by a Wilks-and-Dunn-anointed challenger. All 19 Republican senators and at least half of the Republican House members have taken money from the West Texas billionaires or their affiliated PACs and organizations.

The biggest recipient by far in this state is none other than Paxton himself. It’s likely that the Wilks and Dunn trio paid for his $4 million impeachment defense, which included the time and effort of very expensive Houston lawyers, Tony Buzbee and Dan Cogdell.

Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, the judge during the impeachment trial, also is beholden to the West Texans. Their Defend Texas Liberty PAC donated $1 million to the lite guv, while loaning him another $2 million. The PAC largesse came shortly before Patrick began presiding over Paxton’s trial, a trial that ended with a fiery Patrick speech denouncing the impeachment process.

In addition to being fossil-fuel billionaires, both Dunn and Farris Wilks are Christian nationalist evangelists — Dunn as a lay preacher for the Midland Bible Church, Wilks as a preacher for a Cisco congregation founded by his father called the Assembly of Yahweh Seventh Day Church. Dan Wilks and his wife oversee the Heavenly Fathers Foundation, a group funded with a portion of the $3.2 billion the brothers made when they sold the majority stake of their Cisco-based oil field trucking company, Frac Tech Services.

From the pulpit to the campaign pockets of politicians, the West Texans are on what they see as a God-imbued mission to transform Texas and beyond. Over the past 20 years, they’ve contributed nearly $100 million to think tanks, nonprofits, fundraising committees, websites and Texas candidates who support their crusade.

In their preaching and practice, climate change is merely God’s will; homosexuality is an evil on par with incest, bestiality and pedophilia; abortion is murder, unlawful with no exceptions; gun owners enjoy a God-given right to carry their weapons in public without permits or training; only Christians have the God-given right to hold leadership positions in government (which, as Texas Monthly reported, left former House Speaker Joe Strauss, who is Jewish, beyond the pale). Also, oil and gas is a gift from God to be used with gratitude. (They don’t mention God’s gift of sunlight and wind.)

Kel Seliger, a longtime GOP state senator from Amarillo, ran afoul of the triumvirate in recent years. Reasonable, affable and conservative, Seliger is no longer in the Legislature. “It’s a Russian-style oligarchy, pure and simple,” he told CNN last year. “Really, really wealthy people who are willing to spend a lot of money to get policy made the way they want it — and they get it.”

What those “really, really wealthy people” want these days is to destroy Texas public education, a hotbed, as they tell it, of critical race theory and other elements of what one Dunn-and-Wilks-backed group calls “Marxist and sexual indoctrination,” all funded by “far-Left elites for decades.” (That would be the Texas taxpayer.) [Bold-face added by DR, here and below.]

Their strategy, as Brandon Rottinghaus, a University of Houston political science professor, told Chron.com, is to recruit a generation of Wilks and Dunn-funded mouthpieces in state and local positions to push the narrative that public schools are harmful to students and their parents. Once public education is weakened beyond repair, they offer private religious schools as “a better way.”

With an insidious, well-funded effort, our home-grown theocrats will make sure that Gov. Greg Abbott has all the financial ammunition he needs in the next few weeks for his last-ditch, special-session effort to persuade lawmakers to use taxpayer money in the form of vouchers for private, often Christian-based schooling. Abbott calls it “school choice.” Rural lawmakers, who’ve fought the plan for years, know it’s school suicide.

The West Texans “want to destroy the public school system as we know it and, in its place, see more home-schooling and more private Christian schools,” former state Sen. Bob Deuell, a northeast Texas Republican, told CNN. Deuell, a physician, got crossways with the West Texans when he supported a bill that updated the state’s end-of-life procedures. Dan Wilks, falsely claiming that the legislation would “strengthen Texas’s death panels,” backed tea party activist Bob Hall, who defeated Deuell in 2014. Hall was one of Paxton’s most outspoken supporters during the impeachment trial.

Texas is a big state, but the West Texans have Christian nationalist ambitions beyond our borders. They are reliable supporters of U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz and, of course, former President Donald Trump, who decried Paxton’s “shameful impeachment.” In an expansive, post-impeachment mood these days, Paxton seems to be pondering a larger field of dreams for himself. He told Tucker Carlson last week he may challenge U.S. Sen. John Cornyn. “His time is done,” Paxton told a radio talk-show host.

If Trump wins the presidential election next year, the disgraced Texas AG would be a prime candidate to head the U.S. Justice Department. (His paramour, the woman he brought from San Antonio to Austin, could be installed in a Georgetown townhouse, only a short Uber ride away from Justice.) He (they) would be right at home in a Trumpian Washington, where, as U.S. Sen. Mitt Romney said to The Atlantic writer McKay Coppins, “A very large portion of my party really doesn’t believe in the Constitution.”

The party’s presidential nominee in 2012 has said he worries about the survival of America’s democratic experiment.

Whether it survives depends in large part on what happens here in Texas, where the national far right comes for funding and ideas. Decades of one-party rule have contributed to voter apathy and made our state a fertile testing ground for extreme policies. It’s telling, for example, that the AG was reelected last year with the support of about 13 percent of the populace (4 million votes out of a population of nearly 30 million). Paxton and other Dunn and Wilks dependents only have to listen to their West Texan Santa Claus trio, not to the people of Texas.

On a Friday morning in Cisco nearly a century ago, a little girl was among the first to notice that the Santa who stepped out of a stolen Buick and into the lobby of the First National Bank was a fake (and a dangerous one, at that). In Texas these days, maybe we’ve grown jaded. Perhaps it will be young voters of all political persuasions who will take the lead in calling out — and rejecting — the dangerous extremists in our midst. Perhaps taking heart from the brave Republicans who dared impeach an errant AG, they’ll elect representatives of the people, not altar boys and girls on call for Christian nationalists.

Categories Bigotry, Billionaires, Censorship, Dark Money, Democracy, Freedom, Funding, Home Schooling, Religion, Republicans, Texas, Trump

New Hampshire: Republicans Increase Vouchers Despite Public Opposition

By dianeravitch
September 18, 2023 //
7

Gary Rayno of InsideNH writes about the expansion of the state voucher plan by Republicans in New Hampshire, who control both houses of the legislature and the governorship. Income requirements were raised. Enrollment increased. 75% of last year’s students never attended a public school. The biggest beneficiary is religious schools. When the voucher program was first proposed, public opposition was overwhelming. Governor Sununu and the legislators didn’t care.

Open the link to read it all.

Rayno writes:

The war over public education was on full display last week in the battle over PragerU’s financial literacy course and the State Board of Education’s 5-0 decision to approve it.

Despite opposition from the vast majority of speakers and letter writers, the board — stacked with school choice advocates by Gov. Chris Sununu — voted 5-0, with board chair Drew Cline abstaining.

While the controversial organization’s foot in the door was lamented by many after the vote, the on-line financial literacy course will not “cost” the state anything, which cannot be said about the biggest battleground in the education war, the Education Freedom Accounts program.

Last week, Kate Baker Demers, the executive director of the Children’s Scholarship Fund NH, which administers the program, told the freedom account oversight committee about 1,600 new students joined the program for this school year bringing the total number of students to around 4,200, but noted those were rough figures and the Department of Education should be posting the exact figures soon.

While the program is growing, only one major change was made the last legislative session, which increased the financial threshold from 300 percent of poverty to 350 percent.

That increases the threshold for the current school year from $59,160 for a family of two, to $69,020, and for a family of four from $90,000 to $105,000 annually.

Once a family qualifies for the program there are no future financial limits on earnings.

Demers told the oversight committee 200 plus students’ families qualified under the higher income threshold than would have under the former limit.

Last school year, the Department of Education data indicates 3,196 students participated in the program with the average grant per student $4,860 with a total cost of more than $15.5 million without administrative expenses.

The program for the first two years was about $24 million over budget as the department’s estimates of student participation was much lower than reality.

For this school year, there are about 1,000 more total students participating, Baker Demers said about 600 students left the program to either return to public schools, who graduated (111), moved away or for some other reason.

Along with the 1,000 increase in students, lawmakers increased the state’s basic adequacy grant from $3,787 per student to $4,100, and also increased the amount of additional aid for students in low-income families, and with special education needs.

That is likely to make the new average per pupil cost go over $5,200 per student.

That would increase the total costs not counting administrative costs from the scholarship fund organization — to about $22 million this year, an increase of about $7 million.

The state budget contains $30 million in each year of the biennium for the program, so total costs are likely to bump against the $60 million if there is much growth in the program next year.

Most programs with increases like this would be curtailed and limited with talk about halting runaway growth, but that does not appear to be a big concern of the majority party, which has pushed the program along with Education Commissioner Frank Edelblut and Sununu.

Democrats are the ones seeking to put guardrails around the program that draws its money from the Education Trust Fund, the source of all state education aid that is not the Statewide Education Property Tax….

The program was sold as an opportunity for low-income families to send their child to a program more appropriate for their learning skills than a public school.

But that has not been the biggest driver and represents a small percentage of the students enrolled.

About 75 percent of the participants in the past were enrolled in private schools — either religious or secular — and in home school programs.

Whether that figure remains in similar proportion is not something anyone will know until the Department of Education shares its data on its website.

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Extremism, Funding, New Hampshire, Religion, Vouchers

Raymond F. Tirana: The Libertarian Goal for K-12 Schooling

By dianeravitch
September 10, 2023 //
27

Reader Raymond F. Tirana posted a comment in which he described the end goal of the libertarian overhaul of school funding. In Kansas, Florida, and other red states, he says, they are trying to shift responsibility for funding and providing schools from the state to parents. This will not only exacerbate segregate but increase inequity. Of course, they will do this under false pretenses, claiming to “widen opportunities” and to “save poor children from failing schools.” Don’t believe them.

He wrote in a comment:

What will really happen once the state offloads all responsibility for educating children: Inevitably, the budget will be slashed each year (Kansas is already enacting a flat tax that will decimate the State’s ability to raise revenue – people remember Koch Industries is based in Kansas, right?) until the public schools are forced to fold and Kansas parents will be lucky to get any crumbs from their masters to be used toward the education of their kids. This was Milton Freidman’s fantasy, and we are close to seeing it realized in Kansas, Florida and other states, as parents sit by and let their children’s future be stolen from them.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Budget Cuts, Corruption, Cruelty, Democracy, Deregulation, Disruption, Economy, Education Industry, Elections, Evil, Extremism, Failure, Florida, Funding, Hoax, Lies, Privatization, Republicans, School Choice, Vouchers

Fred Klonsky: Union Leader’s Choice of Catholi School is a Phony Issue

By dianeravitch
September 8, 2023 //
78

The Chicago media and choice supporters are whooping it up because Stacy Davis Gates, the head of the Chicago Teachers Union, sends her child to Catholic school. Big deal. It doesn’t matter where you choose to send your child. What matters is whether you demand that taxpayers pay for your private choice.

Fred Klonsky writes:

I was anxiously waiting for the six o’clock start of the U.S. Open semi final match between Coco Gauf and Carolina Muchova last night.

It was no disappointment.

But I had to wait for the end of the local news.

I thought local political reporter Mary Ann Ahern was going to have a stroke reporting that local Chicago Teachers Union President Stacey Davis Gates sends her kid to Catholic school.

Apparently Ahern has been on this story for days.

This morning the Chicago Sun-Times runs the story front page.

It’s a phony controversy.

Former CPS schools chief and perpetual losing candidate in every office he runs for penned an op-ed piece for the Tribune attacking Gates for her position against taxpayer funding of private and parochial schools.

That’s what this is all about.

It is no coincidence that this phony controversy over where Stacy Gates sends her son to school just happens to take place when the Illinois General Assembly is considering ending public money on private school vouchers.

Former mayor Lightfoot, Rahm Emanuel, the Obamas, and former secretary of education Arne Duncan all sent their kids to private schools.

Paul Vallas sent his kids to parochial school, as did ex-Mayor Richard M. Daley.

As do thousands of Chicagoans who are willing or able to afford it.

Me? I’m a public school grad as are my own kids and grandkids.

And I’m a retired public school teacher.

But my decision to send my children to public school and to teach in a public school was a personal one as is Stacy Gates’ decision to send her son to Catholic school.

The real issue is one of public policy: Should public money go to fund private and parochial schools?

Illinois and Chicago public schools are notoriously underfunded.

The legislature is now debating school funding.

So, suddenly CTU President Stacy Davis Gates sending her kid to a Catholic school is a headline and Mary Ann Ahern is spending days investigating this non-story.

That’s why I say it is a phony distraction.

Categories Chicago, Education Industry, Funding, School Choice, Unions, Vouchers
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