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Arnold Hillman: Save the Children of South Carolina!

By dianeravitch
October 6, 2022 //
9

Sit down and prepare for a long but very important read. You might conclude that the elected officials of South Carolina–Governor Henry McMasters, Senator Lindsay Graham, Senator Tim Scott, and the State Legislature–don’t give a damn about the children of South Carolina. You might be right.

Seven years ago, Arnold Hillman and his wife Carol retired as educators in Pennsylvania and moved to South Carolina. Instead of taking up golf, they became deeply involved in helping high school students in impoverished schools. Having served as volunteers in the schools, Arnold Hillman quickly realized that South Carolina ignores the needs of its children. There is no real system, he says. Charter schools have been a distraction, not a solution. He concludes that the schools of South Carolina need radical change. What are the chances of a deep Red state acting on his proposals? Sadly, not great. South Carolina has a well established record of tolerating neglect of its children, especially those who are impoverished and Black.

Arnold Hillman can be reached at arnold@scorsweb.org

Arnold Hillman writes:

THE NEED FOR RADICALIZATION IN EDUCATION

It’s time for us to look seriously at completely redoing the education system in South Carolina. As Senator Greg Hembree, Chair of the Senate Education Committee of the South Carolina Assembly told Barnett Berry, “ It is time to stop nibbling around the edges of school reform and the teaching profession.”1

No truer words have been spoken about our present education system. In fact, there really is no system. In the long scheme of things, our present way of doing education is a bunch of pile-ons from the original manufacturing design of Frederick Taylor and his scientific management. 

While Taylor was creating the assembly line process, Ford was dehumanizing it by considering people as cogs in a great machine. If you don’t see any relationship between these two mammoth names in our economic history, go to your local high school and watch when the bells ring and students change classes.

More specifically, South Carolina ranks low on education state rankings that use multiple variables. They are variously ranked from 40thin the nation to 49th. Education Week gives South Carolina a C- for education quality.2 While the Annie Casey Foundation grades education as 43rd in the nation.3

Each year the legislature and the administration in South Carolina claim that we have a new program that will increase test scores and general education standards. According to the numbers, that just is not so. We may introduce the newest panaceas and claim that they will create higher state, federal and NAEP scores, but that does not usually happen.

This is not a single person’s opinion. In this article in the State Newspaper of August 5, 2022, it declares that “ SC has among worst school systems in US, new ranking shows. Here’s why and what’s being done.”

Read more at: https://www.thestate.com/news/state/south-carolina/article264174836.html#storylink=cpy

The problems will continue. The same people will present small ideas that will hold forth for a while. Then these ideas and programs will fade into the distance and new people with other small ideas will approach these problems and fail once more. Take a gander at the history of education in South Carolina over the past 50 or so years.

Click to access History_of_South_Carolina_Schools_Virginia_B_Bartels.pdf

If what you see in our history disturbs you, then you are on the correct path to starting over again and creating a new way of teaching our children.

WHERE DO WE BEGIN ?

Minnesota passed the first Charter School law in 1991. It was followed by Massachusetts in 1993. The basic tenets of the laws were that these were going to be public schools, with independent management. They were also less restricted by state law and could become examples of innovation.5

Public schools would then have a chance to look at these innovations and use them in the regular public schools. That is not what happened. Charter schools became independent entities, sometimes managed by profit making organizations. Their history of innovation is slim. Furthermore, since they were able to disregard state law in many instances, while regular public schools could not copy any of the alleged innovations.

Here was a panacea that really had no possible way of succeeding for the overwhelming majority of public school children. Once again, here was an idea that would propel education into the 21st century and improve education for our children. It did not work that way.

As almost all of these panaceas fell by the wayside. It is evident that none of them had any chances of succeeding. The ideas that created these programs never seemed to begin with the children. They were always ideas that were promulgated to somehow enter the system and make things right. Few, if any of them, began with the needs of the children.

In any radicalization of education, students need to come first. All other things are just trimmings that come after. What is evident from all of these efforts to improve public education, is that they have no basis in children’s needs. Whether you agree with Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs or its revision or not, children have absolute needs when they are in school.5

Proof of these needs has been highlighted recently when mass school shootings have created social and emotional disturbances among children. These children need to feel safe.

We can list children’s needs from pre-school to 12th grade. They will all be familiar to you.

Safe and Stable environment

Proper nutrition

Structure

Sense of belonging

Consistency

Health Care

Emotional Support

Education

There are many more items that could be added to the list. The author has chosen these because of consistent information about South Carolina’s children that appears in public journals and media. Here are some statistics.

One in six (or 178,710) children in South Carolina are food insecure — numbers that are growing due to the pandemic-induced unemployment.

• Over 12,000 students experienced homelessness in 2017-19, and another unidentified 34,000 were estimated to be without a home.

• Over 40 percent of South Carolinians live in childcare deserts — a term used to describe a Census tract of more than 50 children under the age of five where there are no childcare providers.

• In 2019, about 10 percent of the 15,000 children referred to the Department of Juvenile Justice were for status offenses (truancy, curfew violation, etc.) reflecting underlying personal, family, or community problems, not criminal ones.

The simple truth is that many children in our state have few of the basic needs outlined above. This is not just a problem of poor and minority communities. 6

A kindergarten assessment at the beginning of the 2020- 21 school year was modified because of the pandemic. However, the results published by the Westend Corporation, the creator of the assessment, found these numbers statewide:

33% of the 48,000 of the kindergartners tested at the beginning of the year had an Emerging Readiness. This means that they will need significant help to reach readiness.

40% of the children were classified as approaching readiness and would need some kind of intervention.

27% of the children are actually demonstrating readiness.7

During the early days of the pandemic there were contrary opinions about wearing masks and getting vaccinations. Even today cases of Covid variants are spiking in a number of counties in the state, according to the DHEC. The situation is confusing. There is an elected Superintendent of Education who had differing views from those of the administration.

This confusion made life difficult for local decision makers. Who does one listen to, the Governor, the Superintendent of Education or the Department of Health and Environmental Control? Consequently, there was little consistency across the state.

Leadership at the local level became a problem when 32 of the 78 school superintendents turned over from March of 2020 to June of 2022. That is 41%.8 This lack of consistency has propelled many school districts into micro-management by school boards. These kinds of happenings are never a positive event for the children.

If South Carolina has a system of education, it is not apparent. The funding mechanisms for school districts relies on many layers of bureaucratic meddling. As in most states in the union, school districts are governed by local school boards. At the upper levels of the state government, the Governor, or an appointed official, such as a Chief State School Officer actually operates the system.

Leadership at the local level became a problem when 32 of the 78 school superintendents turned over from March of 2020 to June of 2022. That is 41%.8 This lack of consistency has propelled many school districts into micro-management by school boards. These kinds of happenings are never a positive event for the children.If South Carolina has a system of education, it is not apparent. The funding mechanisms for school districts relies on many layers of bureaucratic meddling. As in most states in the union, school districts are governed by local school boards. At the upper levels of the state government, the Governor, or an appointed official, such as a Chief State School Officer actually operates the system.

South Carolina is one of 12 states that elects its chief state school officer. There are pros and cons to this system. In some cases, it can stimulate cooperative action, while in others it stimulates conflict.In South Carolina, there are a number of bureaucratic layers to school governance. At the local level, there are school boards, superintendents of schools, county councils, and something called a legislative committee whose power is ill defined. It is composed of both state senators and state house members. There is also the Education Oversight Committee (EOC). This is the legislators’ way of keeping on eye on education and how it is performing across the state.

                 SO WHAT IS THE CONCLUSION ?

Underneath the edujargon and the political palaver, most folks know that education is not doing well in South Carolina. We will not delveinto higher education. This is a concluding thought from many people. 

Now, who do you blame? We blame everyone and no one. Many good hearted people of all political stripes have tried to fix things. They have not succeeded. The Covid-19 pandemic has pointed out that our system cannot deal with the realities of our current world. We have left our children to the devices of companies who are producing online products. We have left our teachers out there in the universe of online education with no tools at their disposal. They have tried mightily to do their job. It was mostly a futile attempt.

staff reports  |  Results from end-of-year examination scores revealed that South Carolina students are struggling in U.S. history, algebra and biology. More than a third of high school students failed algebra last year and 24% got a “D.” They scored even worse in history and biology with a mean of 65% and 66%, respectively.The culprit: Pandemic-related learning loss, education officials suspect.

State Superintendent of Education Molly Spearman said more work needed to be done to help students recover: “Preparing students to meet college and career-readiness standards must not just be an aspiration in our state,” she said, according to published reports. “It’s a responsibility that all of us must play a role in as we pursue meaningful solutions.16

As we get back to in-person education, the children have been besieged with social and emotional problems. Teachers are not able to handle such things by themselves. It is a gross miscalculation that all children are getting the help that they need. In fact, when they do get help, who is it that provides it ?

We are even further behind than we were in March of 2020. Yet, some school districts still seem to shine. In larger school districts, with many schools, there still seem to be those whodo well. They are singularly in the minority. How can we compare a school district with a median household income of $101,284 with one whose income is $26,074?9

Think of the resources that wealthy parents can provide for their child, compared to a child whose parents are just getting by and have no resources for their child, except for love.

O.K. RADICALS, WHAT DO WE DO ABOUT IT?

We begin with the children and the things that they need. We can look at the above-mentioned items as a beginning. As was said, there are many more things that children need. As they mature through the school and life experiences, their needs change. Do we know enough Piaget to list the things that the children need at particular ages. Notice, I did not say grades. As a noted educator and speaker Sam Clemens once said, “ How do you handle a kindergartner who comes into school carrying a New York Times when you also have a little one who walks in and needs to learn his alphabet?

It all begins at birth, or maybe even before. Without proper health care for expectant moms, the chances of a child having a normal entrance into this world is diminished. South Carolina’s infant mortality rate of 6.5% per 1000 live births is higher than the national average of 5.4% per 1000 live births. Pre-natal medical care is most lacking in rural areas of the state. 

How does one prevent this kind of statistic? There are a number of ways, if the state is of a mind. One way is a massive public campaign aimed at areas with few physicians and few clinics. The need for medical facilities in these places should become a state priority. 

A second, and more accelerated way is for consortia of school districts, local municipalities and hospitals to purchase medical vans. These vans have been in use in many rural and urban areas in the United States. The van could be under the jurisdiction of one of these entities for financial responsibility. The driver would be a staff member of one of these entities. 

Medical personnel could be secured with volunteers, dentists, school psychologists, doctors, nurses, PAs and others. The vans could advertise when they would be in a certain area. Pre-natal exams could be a major function, while children from 0-4 could also be seen by some of these specialists. 

A third method of securing health care for pre and post-natal care is an outreach program that is run by a local school district. The Appleton, Wisconsin School District has created a birth through five program that focuses on entire community resources to help parents in the community.

85% of the foundation for a child’s intellect, personality and skills is formed by age 5. Appleton Area School District’s Birth-Five Outreach offers an inclusive network of family care services, school information, and community support.Birth–Five Outreach builds positive relationships with families by offering connections to many school and community resources early on.11

A fourth possible method is to establish a 0-5 school building, or community building that will have all of the services needed by families with children from 0-5 and pre-natal care. In the early 1980’s such a school was created by the Titusville School District in Northwestern Pennsylvania. 

All of these suggestions are now in effect in the United States of America, but not in South Carolina. These programs are not only helpful to the individual parent and child, but to the community and to the schools that these children will go to.

        SO NOW THEY WALK INTO SCHOOL, OR DO THEY?

If we are going to deal with children where they are at, can we still use the old fashioned age requirement for kindergarten. Not only don’t we want to do that, but maybe we don’t even call the first year of school by that old name. There are things attached to the word, that it may be necessary to use some other word or some other description.

So many of the children that walk through those school doors are at variance with what we consider “ready to learn.” The differences between the children is immense. So what do we do? Here are some programs that could exist in a public school, a vocational school or a technical college.

A. Pre and postnatal care

B. Teenage pregnancy

C. Day Care for community members orschool staff

D. Day Care to programming 0-5

E. On site medical care

F. Training for students to learn day care skills

G. Special education programs for children with disabilities

H. Eldercare

I. Job Placement

J. Home for state reps and congress people

K. Psychological services

There are many definitions of what a school or series of schools might be. The origin of the term, “Community School” comes from Stewart Mott’s vision of the Flint community in Michigan in the mid 1930’s. As the head of General Motors, he was able to fund these programs through his Mott Foundation, which still exists today.

A simple definition of the term Community School comes from the NEA.

Community Schools are built with the understanding that students often come to the classroom with challenges that impact their ability to learn, explore, and develop to their greatest potential.  

Because learning never happens in isolation, community schools focus on what students in the community truly need to succeed—whether it’s free healthy meals, health care, tutoring, mental health counseling, or other tailored services before, during, and after school. 13

In recent times, here in South Carolina, Professor Barnett Berry has coined the term “ Whole Child,” education.14His thesis is that unless we take care of the complete needs of children, they will not achieve their maximum capabilities. He also believes that “Whole Child” education begins at birth. Although teaching, “The Whole Child” was concept from the 1950’s, Berry’s description of the process of “Whole Child Education” is much wider and includes so much more than just teachers in a classroom.

One form of “Community School” has been a building that was open 24 hours a day and accommodated an entire community’s needs. The current administration in Washington has increased funding for these kinds of “community schools.” That is not to say that they do not exist already. Here is an example of a school district that has recognized the problems  their children bring with them to school and has taken action.

https://inthepublicinterest.org/biden-proposes-increasing-funding-for-community-schools-by-15-times-the-current-level/ 12

The federal government has recently sent out a request for proposals with the intent of distributing the funding to school districts across the country to promulgate or expand community schools. The total of 468 million dollars in the federal budget proposal for 2023 expands the program. It will be distributed to schools that provide medical assistance, nutritional assistance, mental health, tutoring, enrichment and violence prevention services. The schools will have to be those who have been involved in these programs for a decade.

SO WHAT DOES ALL THIS HAVE TO DO WITH SOUTH CAROLINA EDUCATION ?

For the most part, South Carolina’s education system does not work for most of its children. The state has tried a number of changes, but to no avail. There is a feeling among educators and those who view the system, that caring for the students is not the priority that it should be.

A good example of this kind of attitude is the recent return of one billion dollars in taxes, rather than using these funds to upgrade education. The needs are so great in many districts.

The establishment of public education in the 19th century was challenged by churches and by religious organizations across the burgeoning country. In some states, religious leaders imposed their religious beliefs upon these new schools. As one example, in a number states, there were no events in schools on Wednesdays afternoons and evenings. Those times were set aside for religious experiences.

In other states, there were established times when students could be released early to go to religious studies in their churches. Certainly, no sporting events were to be held on Sunday. Bibles were distributed to 6th grade students in many schools across the nation.

These were but a few instances of church actions in public schools. Sometime at the end of the 1960’s, groups of right wing religionists and their acolytes met to try and undo public education in its entirety. Now, some 50 years later, that they are succeeding in their efforts. 

There can be no doubt that elite billionaires with a religious bent are moving to destroy public education. The issue of the separation of church and state is dissolving amidst a cacophony of yelps from these right wing relgionists, or faux religionists, that they are being discriminated against. 

It is a apparent that these plans are not only to create a side by side educational system, but to allow students, who they feel are not up to par,to remain in public schools. 

In the prior administration, billions of dollars were distributed to charter school privateers, religious schools, private schools and others. This Paycheck Protection Plan was to be used for businesses that had not been doing well during the Covid 19 pandemic. Interestingly enough, none of these dollars could go to public schools.15

The history of public education both here and in all parts of our land is the history of our success as a country. The forces that continue to try and dissolve public education have no idea what will come next. Here in an essay by Anya Kamenetz, reporter from NPR, explains the history and a possible future of public education.

​​​​END NOTES

1 “ A Whole Child Policy Analysis,” Barnett Berry, University of South Carolina, SC4Ed P. 4 2022

2. Annie Casey Foundation 2022 Kids Count data book

3 “Map A-F Grades Rating States of School Quality”, Education Week Research 2021

4 “Minnesota is the Birthplace of Charter Public Schools” Minnesota Association of Charter Schools

5 “ Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs” Simply Psychology April 2022

6   1 “ A Whole Child Policy Analysis,” Barnett Berry, University of South Carolina, SC4Ed P. 62022

7   Results of Modified Kindergarten Readiness Assessment 2020-21 Westend Corporation 2021

8   “Superintendent Turnover March 2020 to June 2022,”SCORS research Arnold Hillman 2022

9  Median Houshold Income South Carolina School Districts, U.S. Census 2020

10   “Infant Mortality and selected birth Characteristics” South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control 2021

11  https://www.aasd.k12.wi.us/families/birth-five_outreach

12   https://www.mott.org/about/history/

13   NEA statement on Community Schools- https://www.nea.org/student-success/great-public-schools/community-schools

14 “ A Whole Child Policy Analysis,” Barnett Berry, University of South Carolina, SC4Ed P. 4 2022

15  https://wlvr.org/2020/07/some-local-schools-get-paycheck-protection-funding-from-the-federal-government-while-others-dont/#.Yx6FtHbMKM8

16 Staff, StateHouse Report, September 23, 2022

“A Teacher’s Creed,” by Arnold Hillman
Categories Charter Schools, Childhood, Community Schools, Cruelty, Funding, Health, Ignorance, Inequity, Injustice, Real Education, South Carolina

Texas: Abbott’s Voucher Plan is a “Terrible Idea”

By dianeravitch
October 5, 2022 //
9

David DeMatthews and David S. Knight wrote in the San Antonio Express-News that Governor Greg Abbott’s voucher plan is “a terrible idea,” and they explain why. (Since I don’t have a subscription to the San Antonio Express-News, I am copying their tweet.)

David DeMatthews is an associate professor of educational leadership and policy at The University of Texas at Austin.

David S. Knight is the associate director of the Center for Education Research and Policy Studies and an assistant professor of educational leadership at The University of Texas at El Paso.

To summarize:

1. The vouchers don’t cover the cost of most private schools.

2. The money spent on vouchers will hurt public schools, which most students attend.

3. Budget cuts will force public schools to cut popular programs, like dual language education, STEM programs, and vocational training. These cuts will hit low-income districts the hardest.

4. Private schools that get vouchers are not held to the same standards of accountability as public schools, nor do they provide the same services to students with disabilities.

5. Studies of various voucher programs have consistently shown that they are no better than public schools and often worse.

6. Many voucher programs subsidize affluent students already attending private schools.

7. Texas already has one of the worst funded school systems in the nation, especially for children with disabilities. Vouchers will make it worse.

8. In rural communities, public schools are the hub of the community. They will be harmed by vouchers.

9. Vouchers are a terrible idea for Texas. The state needs well-funded schools staffed by high-quality teachers. Vouchers will undercut that goal.

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Community Schools, Disruption, Education Industry, Funding, Privatization, Texas, Vouchers

Federal Audit of Federal Charter Schools Program Finds Waste, Fraud, and Abuse

By dianeravitch
September 28, 2022 //
11

The U.S. Department of Education’s Office of the Inspector General conducted an in-depth audit of the federal Charter Schools Program, which was initiated in 1994 with a few million dollars by the Clinton administration. Thanks to astute lobbying by the charter industry, the modest program grew to $440 million a year with little or no accountability. Betsy DeVos pushed it aggressively to large charter chains, including for-profit chains.

You will be interested in this account of the audit, written by Valerie Strauss on her blog “The Answer Sheet” in the Washington Post, introducing an analysis by Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education.

This audit demonstrates the power and persistence of the Network for Public Education, a small but smart advocate for public schools. NPE operates with one full-time employee and a small number of part-time employees. Our work is motivated not by greed but by idealism and a passionate commitment to the common good. We believe in well-funded schools with experienced teachers for all children.

The introduction by by Strauss and the analysis by Burris has many links, but none transferred when I copied it. I copied some, but not all of them. I urge you to open the original and find the links.

Strauss begins:

The U.S. Education Department’s Office of Inspector General has released a new audit of the federal Charter School Program that found some alarming results about how charter school networks have used millions of dollars in funding. Among other things, the audit found that charter school networks and for-profit charter management organizations did not open anywhere near the number of charters they promised to open with federal funding. This piece looks at the new audit and what it tells us.


The reason this is not surprising is that investigations into the Charter School Programs by the Network for Public Education, an advocacy group that opposes the growth of charter schools, found that same problem, as well as others and reported it a few years ago. You can read my stories about their “Asleep at the Wheel” here and here. (The second report noted that the state with the most charter schools that never opened was Michigan, home to former education secretary Betsy DeVos, who has pushed to expand charter schools for decades.)


Charter schools are publicly funded but privately managed. The federal charter program, which began in 1994 with the aim of expanding high-quality charters, had bipartisan support for years, but many Democrats have pulled back from the movement, citing the fiscal impact on school districts and repeated scandals in the sector. The Biden administration is making some changes to the program in an effort to stop waste and fraud and provide more transparency to the operation of charters.


This piece was written by Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education and a former award-winning principal in New York. She has been chronicling the charter school movement and the standardized-test-based accountability movement on this blog for years. The Network for Public Education is an alliance of organizations that advocates for the improvement of public education and sees charter schools as part of a movement to privatize public education.


By Carol Burris


A new report issued by the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) entitled “The Effectiveness of Charter School Programs in Increasing the Number of Charter Schools” documents how states, charter management organizations, and charter developers often make wildly exaggerated claims regarding the number of charter schools they will open or expand to secure large grants.

The OIG, an independent watchdog of the U.S. Department of Education (the Department), found that for grants issued between 2013 and 2016, only 51 percent of the schools promised by Charter School Programs (CSP) recipients opened or expanded.


The OIG audit also exposed the sloppy record keeping and weak oversight that characterize CSP operations. Since 2006, the department has paid a private corporation, WestEd, millions of dollars to compile, check and update CSP records. WestEd’s present CSP contract exceeds $12 million. In total, WestEd has active contracts with the U.S. Department of Education worth more than $27.6 million. Yet an alarming number of grant records could not be found when requested by the OIG auditors. And while the Biden administration is attempting to clean up and reform the CSP, according to the independent OIG, more work needs to be done.


What did the Office of the Inspector General audit?
The audit had three goals. The first was to describe how the department’s Office of Elementary and Secondary Education tracked and reported the number of charter schools that opened and expanded using Charter School Program funds. A second goal was to determine whether CSP grant recipients actually delivered the number of charter schools they promised when they applied for their often multimillion dollar awards. Finally, the audit sought to determine how many schools were still open two years after CSP funding ended.


As its title stated, the audit was an attempt to measure the program’s effectiveness in fulfilling its mission. To conduct the audit, the OIG examined 2013 through 2016 CSP grant records. During that period, the department awarded 103 CSP grants to states, charter management organizations, or individual charter developers. Ninety-four were closely investigated by the OIG. The likely reason these years were chosen was that most grants are for five years. The auditors also found that the department often extends them further when grantees have not spent all of their money. Therefore, more recent grants were excluded because records were likely to be incomplete.

Incomplete and inaccurate records

The auditors noted that while the department, through WestEd, tracked spending and schools while grants were open, the tracking stopped as soon as the grant was complete. Therefore, the department had no way of knowing whether schools remained open beyond the years federal funds propped them up. This speaks to the purpose of the program — to open and expand high-quality charter schools.


When auditors asked the department to define the term high-quality, the department responded that the “CSP office does not determine whether a charter school is high-quality because state rules for determining high quality vary.”


“Additionally,” it said, “the determination of whether a charter school is a high quality is often the responsibility of charter school authorizers.” The department also told auditors that tracking a school’s existence after all money was doled out was not its job.


Even if the department wanted to do a quality check of schools as they were funding and expanding, the OIG found that there was no accurate base of information that they could rely on to determine whether they should continue what was often a multimillion-dollar grant. From the audit:


Although the CSP office created processes for tracking and reporting on charter schools that opened and expanded and charter schools that remained open through the grant performance period end date, those processes did not result in CSP grant recipients reporting precise, reliable, and timely information in their FPRs [final performance reports], APRs [annual performance reports], and data collection forms. The processes also did not result in the CSP office receiving all the necessary information to assess grant recipients’ performance or evaluate the overall effectiveness of the CSP.


Specifically, the department could not produce 13 percent of the required final reports from grantees and 43 percent of the required final data collection sheets. Auditors noted that grantees would report different numbers of schools opened or expanded among required collection forms and final reports. The accuracy of the final documents prepared by WestEd for the department was beyond the scope of the audit.

During our research for our second “Asleep at the Wheel” report, we found that the data collection sheets produced by WestEd and published in 2019 by then Education Secretary Betsy De Vos were replete with errors. Schools that had closed or never opened were reported as open or future. We also noted inaccuracies in recently submitted sheets we received from a Freedom of Information Act request, especially relating to the for-profit management status of the awardee.


But the OIG discovered a far worse problem yet. More than half of the schools that grantees committed to opening or expanding did not open or expand at all.

CSP grantees failed to meet commitments
Grant applicants asked for and received millions of dollars based on their promises to open and expand charter schools. However, when the auditors examined 94 grantee applications, they found that many grantees fell far short of their commitments.

The OIG determined that based on the commitments made in the 94 applications, state education agencies, CMOs, and developers promised to open or expand 1,570 charter schools using CSP funds.


As of July 2021, approximately 75 percent of the grant funding had been spent, yet grantees had only opened or expanded 51 percent of the charters they had promised.


This begs the question, where did millions of tax dollars go? I identified grantees by matching applications on the department website along with numbers in the data set with grant codes in the OIG report.


In its 2016 CSP application, the Florida Department of Education put forth what it called a “bold and ambitious plan to … develop a high-impact system to dramatically improve the opportunities of educationally disadvantaged students. The department said that it would use the grant to “support the creation of 200 new high-quality charter schools over the next five years.”

Florida received $70.7 million to achieve its “bold and ambitious” plan. According to the OIG report, it had only opened 33 percent — or 66 — of the schools it promised to open as of July 2021, although it had spent over 51 percent of the CSP funds.


Colorado’s 2015 application promised that it would open 72 charter schools with its over 24.2 million dollar grant. In the end, it opened fewer than half — just 33 — and expanded three schools. Nevertheless, it spent 87.5 percent of its funds.

Tennessee ambitiously promised to open 114 charter schools. It opened just 16, though it managed to spend 63 percent of its grant. These states are not outliers. The report shows a pattern.

And CMOs also failed to deliver. The KIPP charter network promised 65 schools for its jumbo $48,750,000 grant, one that well exceeded most states. It delivered 34 schools and expanded one.

Finally, there are grants to developers that the department directly provides. The Innovation Development Corporation received a $405,730 CSP grant to open The Delaware Met. It was open for just a few months before it was shut down. It also received and spent $72,000 to open DE Stem. That school was shut down before it even opened. Willow Public School, a Washington charter school, took and spent a $602,875 grant, opened, ran into trouble, changed its name, and then shut down.


The department and the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools attribute the problem to authorizer reluctance and state caps on the number of schools that can open. Really? Every state that got a grant has a state board that can override local rejections of applications. State applicants and the department are also well aware of caps. Take the case of the 2018 $78,888,888 CSP grant to the New York State Department of Education, which was outside the scope of the OIG audit.

In the New York State application review, which you can find here, raters acknowledge that New York State had not even used up its previous grant which was open beyond its terms and that charter expansion would be limited by the state cap on the number of charters. Yet they gave the application high scores, and it was approved. Where did that 2018 money go? Over $10 million went to provide staff development in technology for charter schools.

Jumbo grants

Why do states and charter management organizations ask for jumbo grants knowing they cannot deliver? Because they want the money to fund their charter school operations.


States and charter management organizations get to keep 10 percent of the cut for grant administration and technical assistance to charter schools. The bigger the grant, the bigger the cut.

Therefore, KIPP was allowed to keep nearly $5 million for its charter management organization, even though it fell way short of its commitment. The Florida Department of Education secured over $7 million for administrative services on its grant.
Second, there are no guidelines about how much an individual charter school can get. We have seen grants as low as $250,000 and grants to schools of $1.5 million. When a state realizes it cannot or will not meet its commitment, it just doles out larger amounts.


Third, until President Biden, no prior administration did anything about it over the Charter School Program’s existence. Therefore, states, CMOs, and individual schools realized pretty quickly that they could create grandiose applications, sometimes including falsehoods, and there would be no real consequences if commitments were never met.

The present department has taken a terrible beating for creating modest CSP reform regulations which are still being fought by the charter trade organizations and their proxies, including the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a charter school authorizer. Challenges include both a lawsuit and a Republican-sponsored bill to overturn the new rules.

But as the OIG audit shows, reforms are desperately needed.

.

Categories Accountability, Biden, Charter Schools, Closing schools, Corporate Reform, Corruption, Disruption, Education Industry, Failure, For-Profit, Fraud, Funding, Lies, Privatization, Propaganda, Scandals, School Choice

Florida Will Spend $1.3 Billion on Vouchers This Year, Diverted from Public Schools

By dianeravitch
September 27, 2022 //
33

A new report on Florida’s education budget found that vouchers will divert $1.3 billion from public schools this year alone. This is money that goes mainly to religious schools that meet no accountability standards and are free to discriminate and ignore state and federal laws.

The amount of public money being spent on private schools in Florida has increased substantially since 2019, according to a new report by the Florida Policy Institute and the Education Law Center.

The analysis estimates that some $1.3 billion in taxpayer funds will be diverted school vouchers this year, amounting to 10% of the overall funding the state earmarked for public school districts for the 2022-2023 school year.

“This enormous increase in the flow of public dollars to fund private education has happened so quickly that many Floridians are likely unaware of the financial impact being placed upon public school districts and the way these voucher programs are affecting the availability of their tax dollars for public education,” the report reads in part.

Private schools don’t have to comply with federal civil rights laws or state laws on standardized testing, teacher certification or certain building codes in the way that public schools do.

Leon County Schools Superintendent Rocky Hanna, who spoke at a press conference about the report’s findings, said expanding vouchers is taking away resources away from traditional public schools.

“Enough is enough,” Hanna said. “What’s happening is, we are diverting funds from students with special needs, from students who otherwise are going to lose programs that are vitally important to their academic success later in life….”

The report – titled ‘Florida’s Hidden Voucher Expansion’ – traces the growth in the state’s voucher programs to 2019, when the state legislature created the Family Empowerment Scholarship or FES.

State lawmakers expanded the program in 2021, loosening the qualifications for applying and rolling two other voucher programs into the FES – the McKay Scholarship and Gardiner Scholarship, which set aside funding for students with disabilities.

Now, families who make nearly $100,000 a year are able to qualify for the FES. Students are no longer required to have attended public schools to apply for a voucher; now, students who were homeschooled can also qualify. Families also have greater flexibility in how the funds can be spent, including on transportation, private tutoring, online learning and other costs.

The impact of the vouchers on school districts varies depending on how much they rely on state versus local money. Funding for the FES comes from the Florida Education Finance Program or FEFP – which allocates money on a per student basis and is a key source of revenue for local school districts.

The report estimates that in the Miami-Dade school district, $225 million will be diverted to private schools in the 2022-2023 school year, amounting to “8% of the district’s total FEFP budget”.

Bacardi Jackson is the Interim Deputy Legal Director for Children’s Rights at the Southern Poverty Law Center. She argues that diverting public funds into private schools is part of a long legacy of undermining students’ equal access to education – especially Black students.

Open the link and read on.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Education Industry, Extremism, Failure, Florida, Funding, Privatization, Vouchers

Bill Phillis: Ohio Launches “Tax-Eating Glutton”

By dianeravitch
September 24, 2022 //
4

Bill Phillis has spent years battling for the principle that public funds should go only to public schools. Rightwingers in the state have passed laws allowing charters, Cybercharters, and vouchers. Their appetite for public funds in insatiable. The charter lobby wrote the charter law. As Bill Phillis often reminds us, the funding of privately managed charters schools, private schools and religious schools directly contradicts the state constitution. But the school choice lobby ignores the state constitution. They think it doesn’t mean what it says.

Article VI, section 2:

The General Assembly shall make such provisions, by taxation, or otherwise, as, with the income arising from the school trust fund, will secure a thorough and efficient system of common schools throughout the state; but no religious or other sect, or sects, shall ever have any exclusive right to, or control of, any part of the school funds of this state.

Bill Phillis believes the state constitution means what it says.

He writes:

Education Savings Account (ESA), an Egregious Anti-Public School Scheme, Has Already Begun on a Small Scale in Ohio. The Privatization Crowd is Lobbying to Expand It.

The state’s two-year budget bill (HB110) provides for a $500 education savings account for certain K-12 students. Privatization gimmicks start small then grow into a tax-eating glutton. Privatizers are pushing for Ohio’s new education savings account to become a high dollar entitlement to students for education things such as laptops, tutoring, supplemental educational materials, or whatever. Whereas EdChoice vouchers can only be used at a private school, ESA’s can be used for whatever. Hence ESA’s fund parent-chosen education, not necessarily a private school. ESA’s are essentially public funds distributed to parents to purchase some kind of education for their children.

How is this scheme funded and how will the expanded version be funded? Right out of the K-12 public education budget line-items! Will it reduce funds for school districts? You bet!

How would this same type of funding scheme be used to fund Ohio’s physical infrastructure? Suppose, for example, each citizen would receive a proportionate amount of highway funds to purchase right of ways, aggregates, bituminous materials, etc., at their choosing? What chaos! The same applies to the social infrastructure. Without the public common school, the common good is diminished to a chaotic level.

Categories Education Industry, Funding, Ohio, Vouchers

Lloyd Lofthouse: Who Corrupted Our Political System with Big Money?

By dianeravitch
September 20, 2022 //
21

Our political system changed for the worse and became less democratic when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2010 to lift the ban on political spending by corporations and labor unions. The vote was 5-4. Justice John Roberts joined the conservative bloc to provide the deciding vote. The decision is explained and posted here on the Federal Elections Commission’s website.*

Lloyd Lofthouse, our frequent commentator and friend, wrote the following commentary about the ongoing and disastrous influence of big money in elections:

Private companies becoming citizens and doing this stuff is nothing new.

“But for 100 years, corporations were not given any constitutional right of political speech; in fact, quite the contrary. In 1907, following a corporate corruption scandal involving prior presidential campaigns, Congress passed a law banning corporate involvement in federal election campaigns. That wall held firm for 70 years.” …

“Then came Citizens United, the Supreme Court’s 5-4 First Amendment decision in 2010 that extended to corporations for the first time full rights to spend money as they wish in candidate elections — federal, state and local. The decision reversed a century of legal understanding, unleashed a flood of campaign cash and created a crescendo of controversy that continues to build today.”

https://www.npr.org/2014/07/28/335288388/when-did-companies-become-people-excavating-the-legal-evolution

“Citizens United is a conservative 501(c)(4) nonprofit organization in the United States founded in 1988. In 2010, the organization won a U.S. Supreme Court case known as Citizens United v. FEC, which struck down as unconstitutional a federal law prohibiting corporations and unions from making expenditures in connection with federal elections. The organization’s current president and chairman is David Bossie.[1]”

“Dark Money: Citizens United unleashed unlimited spending in our elections, and groups can now spend hundreds of millions without disclosing their sources of funding. We advocate for greater transparency in election spending.”

https://www.brennancenter.org/issues/reform-money-politics/influence-big-money/dark-money

*The FEC commentary begins with this paragraph about the Citizens United decision:

On January 21, 2010, the Supreme Court issued a ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission overruling an earlier decision, Austin v. Michigan State Chamber of Commerce (Austin), that allowed prohibitions on independent expenditures by corporations. The Court also overruled the part of McConnell v. Federal Election Commission that held that corporations could be banned from making electioneering communications. The Court upheld the reporting and disclaimer requirements for independent expenditures and electioneering communications. The Court’s ruling did not affect the ban on corporate contributions.

I do not understand the last sentence of the paragraph, which contradicts everything that precedes it as well as the practical effect of the CU decision. If there are any lawyers out there who can explain this apparent contradiction, I welcome your comments.

Categories Billionaires, Dark Money, Democracy, Elections, Funding

Jan Resseger: Heritage Foundation and Its Allies Support Drive for Vouchers in Ohio

By dianeravitch
September 18, 2022 //
13

Our reasonable and sensible friend Jan Resseger writes here about the efforts by the Heritage Foundatuon and its allies to saddle Ohio with vouchers. This is especially bizarre because researchers have consistently found that kids in public schools learn more than those in religious schools. Their goal: diminish or eliminate public schools.

She writes:

When you notice a particular educational trend moving across state legislatures, it is useful to investigate who’s behind the policy and who is making it so difficult to mount effective opposition. On Tuesday, this blog covered some of the far-right advocacy groups pressuring Ohio’s supermajority Republican legislature to pass House Bill 290, the Backpack Bill, which would bring a universal Education Savings Account (ESA) school voucher program to the state. Kathryn Joyce’s research for SALON demonstrates that the effort to pass a wave of universal ESA voucher bills is much broader than the particular groups working in Ohio.

Profiling a strategic effort by the Heritage Foundation to drive ESA vouchers through a number of state legislatures, Joyce describes the Heritage Foundation’s new Education Freedom Report Cardwhich rates the states in four categories: “In the category of education choice, Heritage’s primary focus is on education savings accounts (ESAs), a form of school voucher that allows parents to opt out of public schools and use a set amount of state funding (sometimes delivered via debit card) on almost any educational expenses they see fit. ESAs can be used towards charter schools, private schools, parochial schools and low-cost (and typically low-quality) ‘voucher schools,’ as well as online schools, homeschooling expenses, unregulated ‘microschools’ (where a group of parents pool resources to hire a private teacher) or tutoring.”

“In terms of regulatory freedom, Heritage weighs whether states enforce ‘overburdensome’ regulations… The chief concern here appears to be (weakening) teacher certification credentials…. In the third category, transparency, the report rewards states that have ‘strong anti-critical race theory’ laws, high rates of engagement by groups like Parents Defending Education… and laws requiring school districts to provide exhaustive public access to any student curricula or educational materials… Lastly, in terms of spending, the report compares per-pupil (public school) spending not just to learning outcomes but also to matters like the future tax burden created by teacher pensions.”

In states whose legislatures are considering universal Education Savings Account bills like Ohio’s HB 290 Backpack Bill, legislators are receiving lots of help from far-right organizations pumping out “model legislation” that can be adapted to the needs of any state legislature. Joyce points out that the Heritage Foundation’s new report includes “a section containing model legislation written by the Goldwater Institute, the libertarian law firm, Institute for Justice, and (from) the Heritage Foundation itself, covering more ‘anti-CRT’ proposals, more requirements for schools to publicize their training materials for students and staff, and more or bigger ESA voucher programs.” You will remember that Tuesday’s blog post on Ohio quoted the Ohio Capital Journal’s Zurie Pope reporting that Ohio legislators sponsoring the Ohio House Bill 290, have received guidance from the Ohio Center for Christian Virtue, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), EdChoice (the former Friedman Foundation for EdChoice), and Heritage Action.

The top scorers on the Heritage Foundation’s Education Freedom Report Card are Florida with the top ranking and Arizona coming in second. Kathryn Joyce publishes comments from public education supporters in both states. In Florida, Andrew Spar, president of the Florida Education Association notes that Florida ranks 45th in the United states in average per-student public school funding. He comments: “In their report, it seems like the states that fund their (public school) students at a higher level have a worse ranking than those who invest less in their children… the Heritage Foundation celebrating the rankings of how well you underfund public schools, how well you dismantle public schools.”

In Arizona, Beth Lewis, director of Save Our Schools Arizona, “which is currently leading a citizen ballot referendum against the state’s new universal ESA Law,” said “The fact that the Heritage Foundation ranks Arizona second in the country, when our (public) schools are funded nearly last in the nation, only underscores the depraved lens with which they view the world… Heritage boasting about realizing Milton Friedman’s dream reveals the agenda—to abolish public schools and put every child on a voucher….”

Ohio is not the only state where politicians are currently being pressed by far right advocates to adopt one of the model ESA bills that are available to anyone who wants one.

States whose legislatures have enacted Education Savings Account vouchers to date include Florida, Arizona, North Carolina, Mississippi, Tennessee, West Virginia, New Hampshire, Indiana, and Missouri. ESA programs were passed but later found unconstitutional in Nevadaand Kentucky under the provisions of their state constitutions.

For example, for the Wisconsin Examiner, Ruth Conniff reports that education policy has become a huge issue of contention between “Republican candidate Tim Michels, Donald Trump’s choice for governor of Wisconsin, who is challenging incumbent Democratic Gov. Tony Evers, the former state schools superintendent, this fall.” Evers has managed to hold off the school privatizers in both houses of Wisconsin’s Republican-dominated state legislature for the past four years. Last week, Conniff explained: “A group of heavy hitters in Wisconsin politics announced Thursday that they are forming a coalition to push for universal school choice and ‘parents’ rights.’ The group, which calls itself the Wisconsin Coalition for Education Freedom, includes Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce, Americans for Prosperity, the American Federation for Children, School Choice Wisconsin, and the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty… Michels and Evers are far apart on a lot of issues, from abortion to immigration to how the state runs elections, but one of the most profound impacts of the Wisconsin governor’s race will be the way it shapes the future of education. Michels’ education blueprint calls for an immediate, statewide expansion of Wisconsin’s school choice program… Michels said, ‘I will introduce universal school choice in my first budget in 2023… Among the other goals of the Wisconsin Coalition for Education Freedom is a ‘Parents’ Bill of Rights’ which would encourage lawsuits against school districts that don’t take direction from parents on these issues.”

Conniff concludes: “But beyond these flashy culture-war issues is a steady march toward a privatized education system that is on its way to bankrupting Wisconsin’s once-great public schools.”

Categories Accountability, Corporate Reform, Disruption, Education Industry, Extremism, Funding, Ohio, Vouchers

Jan Resseger: The Far-Right Groups That Work with the Ohio Legislature to Defund Public Schools

By dianeravitch
September 18, 2022 //
3

Jan Resseger is a careful researcher and thoughtful political analyst who lives in Ohio. In this post, she has compiled a list of the far-right groups who influence the Ohio legislature as it wreaks havoc on the public schools that most children attend.

She writes:

Ohio is overrun with far-right advocates pushing the privatization of public education through the expansion of both vouchers and charter schools and with people spreading alarm about public school teaching of divisive subjects. This should not be surprising in our notoriously gerrymandered Republican state legislature. Here are some of the extremist organizations whose lobbyists counsel our legislators, help them draft legislation, and make political donations.

The Buckeye Institute

Sourcewatch describes this Ohio organization: “The Buckeye Institute… is a right-wing advocacy group based in Ohio. It is a member of the $120 million-a-year State Policy Network (SPN), a web of state pressure groups that denote themselves as “think tanks” and drive a right-wing agenda in statehouses nationwide.” Sourcewatch further describes the State Policy Network: “SPN groups operate as the policy, communications, and litigation arm of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), giving the cookie-cutter ALEC agenda a sheen of academic legitimacy and state-based support.”

On Tuesday of last week, The Buckeye Institute released a new report outlining its strategy for helping students “regain lost learning” during the pandemic: “In its new policy report… The Buckeye Institute outlines how empowering parents, funding students first, and enhancing school choice can counteract the ill effects the pandemic had on learning loss for Ohio’s K-12 students.” While The Buckeye Institute claims to focus on individual students in its response to the past two years of COVID disruption, the new report doesn’t mention students at all. There is nothing about giving students extra attention in smaller classes or more enrichments and activities to make school exciting or more counselors and mental health support. Instead the report addresses the more abstract issues of school ownership and governance. In essence universal marketplace school choice via vouchers is the solution: “The report offers four commonsense policy solutions that will improve the K-12 academic experience:

  • “Broad-Based Education Savings Accounts: Create a broad-based ESA initiative to reform Ohio’s education system and its long-standing government-run education monopoly…
  • “Universal Open Enrollment: Make it easier for all families to send students to their school of choice by requiring all Ohio public schools to participate in inter-district open enrollment.
  • “Expanded Tax Credit Scholarships: Increase the maximum tax credit from its current $750 limit to $2,500 to make it easier for grant organizations to offer larger scholarships (vouchers) to more students in need.
  • “Enhanced Spending Transparency: Require all public school districts to operate more transparently by sharing their spending data with parents in Ohio Checkbook.”

The Center for Christian Virtue

The Center for Christian Virtue recently purchased an office building across the street from the Statehouse in Columbus to bring the organization right into the center of power in Ohio. One of the Center for Christian Virtue’s new initiatives is to help locate private religious schools in churches—schools that qualify for tax-funded EdChoice vouchers. For the Statehouse News Bureau, Jo Ingles reports: “A new, private school has been commissioned in Columbus, but it’s not like many others… Inside the walls of the Memorial Baptist Church on the west side of Columbus, classrooms normally used for Sunday church services are being readied for kindergarten through second grade students who have been going to local public schools. That’s according to Aaron Baer, president of the Center for Christian Virtue, a conservative Christian organization. He said seven churches came together to create this new model school. This is a pilot project for the Center for Christian Virtue. And the group said it’s just the first of many that will use church facilities for a private Christian school.” “Children who enroll in the school this year can use state money through Ohio’s EdChoice Scholarship Program to pay for their tuition because they will fit the income or school attendance area guidelines… Other Christian-based schools are now receiving money from the EdChoice Scholarship program.”

Ingles adds that, “Baer’s organization is leading the charge for majority Republicans state lawmakers to adopt a bill, commonly called the “backpack” bill, that would expand the Ed Choice Scholarship even more to allow any student, regardless of income or where they live, to use public money for private schools. ”

For the Ohio Capital Journal, Zurie Pope reports that the Center for Christian Virtue has gone farther than merely supporting HB 290, the Backpack Bill. Members of the Center for Christian Virtue’s staff helped write the language of the bill: “(D)ocuments obtained by the Ohio Capital Journal through a public records request reveal CCV’s involvement in HB 290 has been more extensive than previously known, and included the advice and promotion of outside groups like Heritage Action and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). This past February, a legislative aide for McClain (one of the bill’s sponsors) emailed a draft of the bill to CCV legislative liaison Nilani Jawahar and CCV lobbyist and Ohio Christian Education Network Assistant Director Corine Vidales.” The Ohio Capital Journal‘s report also names so-called academic research the drafters of the Backpack Bill considered as they were drafting the bill: “Both studies were created by EdChoice, an Indiana-based think tank that advocates for school choice. Ohio’s private school voucher program is also called EdChoice.” Finally, explains Zurie Pope, of the Ohio Capital Journal, the executive director of the Ohio Christian Education Network, Troy McIntosh, “sent a draft of the bill to Stephanie Kruez, a regional director for Heritage Action, the policy arm of the right-wing think tank, The Heritage Foundation.”

The Thomas Fordham Institute

The Ohio Capital Journal‘s Susan Tebben reports that the Thomas Fordham Institute has joined a lawsuit pushing to overturn reasonable and sensible new rules recently imposed by the U.S. Department of Education to improve oversight of the federal Charter Schools Program. The Fordham Institute functions not only as an Ohio think tank, but also as an approved sponsor of its own Ohio charter schools. Tebben explains: “An Ohio group that supports charter schools has joined in a lawsuit fighting against what they say is ‘hostility’ in rule-making by the U.S. Department of Education. The D.C. and Ohio-based Thomas Fordham Institute, a conservative education policy think tank, spoke as a ‘charter school sponsor’ for the state of Ohio, arguing that rules regulating enrollment and use of charter schools… will ‘disadvantage some or all of the charter schools sponsored by Fordham’… The part of the rule that charter school advocates have a problem with states charter schools would need to prove public schools are over-enrolled, and encourage but don’t require ‘community collaboration’ with fellow school districts.” The lawsuit Fordham joined claims: “The most successful charter schools are those that provide educational alternatives to under-enrolled schools, not those that simply house excess numbers of students.” Ohio’s Fordham Institute is supporting the idea that charter schools should operate in competition, not collaboration, with the public school districts in which they are located. Neither does Fordham worry about the areas in Ohio where too many low quality charter schools with fancy advertising are sucking essential dollars from the public schools that serve the majority of the community’s students.

The Fordham Institute’s Aaron Churchill recently published a detailed set of priorities the Fordham Institute will be advocating this winter when the legislature begins to debate Ohio’s FY 2024-2025 biennial state budget. Churchill explains that Fordham will lobby to expand the charter school funding formula, expand special targeted assistance for charter schools, raise the facilities alliance to cover building costs, and support a credit enhancement to make building restoration and construction more affordable for charter schools. Fordham will also lobby to make EdChoice vouchers available for all students living in families with income up to 400 percent of the federal poverty level and allow brand new private schools to receive publicly funded vouchers from students even in a private school’s first year of operation. To its credit, Fordham will push to make the academic quality of private schools accepting vouchers more transparent by requiring, for the first time, private schools to release standardized test scores. Fordham will also lobby to make interdistrict public school choice universal across all the districts in the state, removing discretion for local school boards to decide whether to participate.

Hillsdale College Barney Charter School Initiative

In the first of an important three-part expose for SALON last spring, Kathryn Joyce outlined the fast-growing initiative of Michigan’s conservative Christian Hillsdale College to disseminate its Classical Academy curriculum—which is Christian as well as classical—nationwide by encouraging charter schools to incorporate its model curriculum: “Hillsdale is not just a central player, but a ready-made solution for conservatives who seek to reclaim an educational system they believe was ceded decades ago to liberal interests. The college has become a leading force in promoting a conservative and overtly Christian reading of American history and the U.S. Constitution. It opposes progressive education reforms in general and contemporary scholarship on inequality in particular… Across the nation, conservative officials from state leaders to insurgent school board embers are clamoring to implement Hillsdale’s proudly anti-woke lesson plans, including the ‘patriotic education’ premises of its recently released 1776 Curriculum, or add to its growing network of affiliated classical charter schools.”

The NY Times‘ Stephanie Saul explains the Hillsdale College Barney Charter School Initiative’s name: “Hillsdale’s charter school operation… began in 2010 with a grant from the Chicago-based Barney Family Foundation, endowed by Stephen M. Barney, a financial industry executive.  Saul continues: “The Hillsdale charter schools are neither owned nor managed by Hillsdale. Instead, the schools enter agreements to use the Hillsdale curriculum and the college provides training for faculty and staff, as well as other assistance—all free of charge.”

The number of Hillsdale Classical Charter Schools is growing in Ohio.  I currently count four either in operation already or getting set to open: the Cincinnati Classical Academy; the Northwest Ohio Classical Academy in Toledo; the Heart of Ohio Classical Academy in Columbus; and the Southeast Ohio Classical Academy in Athens.  Another Hillsdale Classical Academy is a private school, the Columbus Classical Academy, which, I’m sure, accepts vouchers which have been permitted for religious schools since 2002 under the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Zelman v. Simmons Harris.

Four of these schools, however, are charter schools—which Ohio considers public schools. As schools with an explicitly Christian curriculum, these charter schools, deemed public by Ohio law, raise obvious questions about church-state separation. After the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision in Carson v. Makin, a Maine school voucher decision which affirmed the constitutionality of publicly funding schools that explicitly teach religion, perhaps these Ohio Hillsdale charter schools will ultimately be tested with further litigation.

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Disruption, Education Industry, Extremism, Failure, Funding, Inequity, Injustice, Ohio

New York: Hasidic Private Schools Are Failing But Flush with Public Funds

By dianeravitch
September 12, 2022 //
33

The New York Times conducted an investigation of Hasidic religious schools and reported that they are failing schools but have received more than $1 Billion in government funds in public funds in the past four years.

The Hasidic Jewish community has long operated one of New York’s largest private schools on its own terms, resisting any outside scrutiny of how its students are faring.

But in 2019, the school, the Central United Talmudical Academy, agreed to give state standardized tests in reading and math to more than 1,000 students.

Every one of them failed.

Students at nearly a dozen other schools run by the Hasidic community recorded similarly dismal outcomes that year, a pattern that under ordinary circumstances would signal an education system in crisis. But where other schools might be struggling because of underfunding or mismanagement, these schools are different. They are failing by design.

The leaders of New York’s Hasidic community have built scores of private schools to educate children in Jewish law, prayer and tradition — and to wall them off from the secular world. Offering little English and math, and virtually no science or history, they drill students relentlessly, sometimes brutally, during hours of religious lessons conducted in Yiddish.

The result, a New York Times investigation has found, is that generations of children have been systematically denied a basic education, trapping many of them in a cycle of joblessness and dependency.

Segregated by gender, the Hasidic system fails most starkly in its more than 100 schools for boys. Spread across Brooklyn and the lower Hudson Valley, the schools turn out thousands of students each year who are unprepared to navigate the outside world, helping to push poverty rates in Hasidic neighborhoods to some of the highest in New York.

The schools appear to be operating in violation of state laws that guarantee children an adequate education. Even so, The Times found, the Hasidic boys’ schools have found ways of tapping into enormous sums of government money, collecting more than $1 billion in the past four years alone.

City and state offficials have failed to enforce laws requiring religious schools to offer a curriculum that is substantially equivalent to those in public schools. The politicians defer to Hasidim because they vote as a bloc.

Their graduates are ill-prepared to enter society. Their knowledge of math, science, history, and basic grammar is meager.

The students in the boys’ schools are not simply falling behind. They are suffering from levels of educational deprivation not seen anywhere else in New York, The Times found. Only nine schools in the state had less than 1 percent of students testing at grade level in 2019, the last year for which full data was available. All of them were Hasidic boys’ schools.

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Ethics, Failure, Funding, Religion, Separation of church and state

Charter Schools Collected $1 Billion in PPP Loans That Were Forgiven

By dianeravitch
September 9, 2022 //
14

Since President Biden announced a program to forgive $10,000-20,000 in student loan debt, new attention has been paid to the Trump administration’s Paycheck Protection Program. PPP doled out billions of dollars to businesses of all kinds, many of which didn’t need the money but took it anyway. Free money.

Among those that collected significant sums were religious schools, private schools (some of which had multi-million dollar endowments), and charter schools.

Regular public schools had a separate stream of money to help them survive COVID-19, but they were not allowed to apply for PPP money, which was only for private businesses and nonprofit.

Charter schools were allowed to double dip. Betsy DeVos was Secretary of Education, after all. So charter schools qualified for public school funding and for PPP.

Carol Burris wrote a brief summary:

More than 1,100 charter schools (about 1 in 7) received PPP loans and had those loans forgiven, according to an investigation by Craig Harris of U.S.A. today. Whether they ever needed the money is questionable since 93% of them were located in states that funded them at the same or higher levels than before Covid 19.

Charter schools, in total, received more than 1 billion dollars in PPP funding. Kipp alone got $28 million even though, according to Harris, they had $78 million in assets.

For-profit charter chains also collected PPP funds and public school funds, although they lost no funding.

ProPublica published a database of every organization that received a PPP loan. Go to the website and type in “charter school,” “Catholic school” or “private school,” “religious organization” and you will see the Trump administration’s extraordinary generosity. Check your own zip code. You will be stunned by the big giveaway to private and religious schools, even televangelists.

Categories Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Education Industry, For-Profit, Funding
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