The race for governor in New York State should not be close but it is. Governor Kathy Hochul has been a responsible governor who tries to improve the lives of New Yorkers.
Her opponent Lee Zeldin is a lackey for Trump. He has supported everything Trump advocated. hHecsupports charters and vouchers. He opposes gun control.
The NYC Kids PAC outlined the differences between them:
Dear all:
An important election is happening right now for Governor and other statewide and local races. Early voting is being held today and Sunday, and then election day is Tuesday. You can check out your ballot and your voting sites here.
NYC Kids PAC strongly urges you to vote for Gov. Kathy Hochul, who has fully funded the CFE decision that is sending another $1.3 billion to NYC public schools, signed the class size bill that will lead to smaller class size caps phased in starting next fall, and supports strong gun control measures, including banning guns from schools.
In contrast, her opponent, Lee Zeldin, is an extremist who is a proponent of school privatization, announced his education platform outside of a Success charter school, and supports voucher-like “tax credits” to pay for tuition to private schools. He even opposes “red flag” laws to remove weapons from individuals deemed to be a threat and is against the ban against carrying guns in schools — all of which would make our children less safe.
So please vote for Kathy Hochul, if you haven’t already; the choice between her and Zeldin is crystal clear.
New York City has received thousands of migrants busses by Governor Greg Abbot of Texas. The city is doing its best to help them. Their children are in public schools.
The school I visited hasn’t received an extra penny, and the principal was told that she would have to wait until November or beyond, for the standard mid-year adjustment to their budget.
When asked when these schools with large numbers of migrant students would receive more funding, Chancellor Banks said at the CPAC meeting this week,and again at a D75 Town Hall meeting, that they were waiting for federal government to kick in with more aid. Here’s the exact quote from the Chancellor at CPAC meeting.
“You might want to be as helpful as possible but if you don’t have the dollars I think the sense here is that the federal government will at some point is going to come and provide a level of support um you’ve got midterm elections that are happening over the next couple of weeks so that’s a lot of this is political as well in terms of when the aid and the support will come but I think I think here in New York the leadership feels as though the federal government is not going to abandon us here.”
However, the DOE still has over more than four billion dollars of unspent federal Covid aid, and an $8 billion reserve fund, so the idea that they couldn’t front the money to schools before the feds provide more dollars is absurd. The account of my visit to this school follows.
Forest Wilder writes in the Texas Monthly about a scheme hatched by charter operators and voucher zealots to launch private school vouchers, which have been stalled in the legislature for years. Vouchers were originally intended to allow white students to escape racially integrated school. Now they are falsely sold as a means of helping poor kids “escape failing schools,” but in fact they are almost always used to subsidize the private school tuition of affluent families.
The article shows how a charter chain—ResponsiveEd—is trying to sneak vouchers into the state. Responsive Ed was called out in Slate in 2014 for teaching creationism. Slate wrote: “Responsive Ed has a secular veneer and is funded by public money, but it has been connected from its inception to the creationist movement and to far-right fundamentalists who seek to undermine the separation of church and state.”
Today, ResponsiveEd has two charters in Texas which operate 91 different charter schools, including an online school. When Betsy DeVos was Secretary of Education, she gave ResponsiveEd a five-year grant for $40.8 million to expand. The CEO of ResponsiveEd is Board Chair of the Texas Charter School Association. State Commissioner Mike Morath approved 13 new campuses for the chain in 2022.
Wilder writes:
The proposal landed on Greg Bonewald’s desk like a pipe bomb. Bonewald, a soft-spoken career educator, had served as a teacher, coach, and principal in the fast-growing Hill Country town of Wimberley for fifteen years. In 2014, he took a bigger job as an assistant superintendent in Victoria, about two hours to the southeast. But he maintained an affection for Wimberley, and when its school board sought to bring him back as superintendent this year, he was thrilled. His honeymoon would be short.
In a document obtained by Texas Monthly, stamped “Confidential” and dated May 3—the day after Bonewald was named the sole finalist for the job—a Republican political operative and a politically connected charter-school executive laid out an explosive proposal for “Wimberly [sic] ISD.” (Out-of-towners frequently misspell “Wimberley,” much to the annoyance of locals.) Apparently, the plan had been in the works for months and had been vetted by the outgoing superintendent. But Bonewald said no one had bothered to mention it to him.
One of the authors of the plan was Aaron Harris, a Fort Worth–based GOP consultant who has made a name for himself by stoking—with scant evidence—fears of widespread voter fraud. In June, he cofounded a nonprofit called Texans for Education Rights Institute, along with Monty Bennett, a wealthy Dallas hotelier who dabbles in what he regards as education reform. The other author was Kalese Whitehurst, an executive with the charter school chain Responsive Education Solutions, based in Lewisville, a half hour north of Dallas.
Their confidential proposal went like this: Wimberley would partner with Harris and Bennett’s Texans for Education Rights Institute to create a charter school tentatively dubbed the Texas Achievement Campus. But “campus” was a misnomer, because there would be none. The school would exist only on paper. Texans for Education Rights would then work with ResponsiveEd, Whitehurst’s group, to place K–12 students from around the state into private schools of their choice at “no cost to their families.”
The scheme was complex but it pursued a simple goal: turning taxpayer dollars intended for public education into funds for private schools. The kids would be counted as Wimberley ISD students enrolled at the Achievement Campus, thus drawing significant money to the district. (In Texas, public schools receive funding based in large part on how many students attend school each day.) But the tax dollars their “attendance” brought to the district would be redirected to private institutions across the state.
The plan was backed not only by an out-of-town Republican operative and a charter-school chain with links to Governor Greg Abbott, but by a Wimberley-based right-wing provocateur who bills himself as a “systemic disruption consultant.” Texas education commissioner Mike Morath—an Abbott appointee—also seemed to support the deal.
Its proponents have called the scheme pioneering and innovative. Though the effort ultimately failed in Wimberley, one of its backers says he is shopping the plan around to other districts. Critics have raised all manner of alarms.
“I’m not accusing anyone of laundering money, by the legal definition, but there sure are a lot of hands touching a lot of money in this,” said H.D. Chambers, the superintendent of Alief ISD, a district in the Houston area that serves 47,000 students. He also pointed to another, more sweeping, concern: “It’s a Trojan horse for vouchers.”
Please open the link and read the rest of the story.
Here is good news. The politicians in Mississippi tried to divert public funds to benefit private schools. This is taking from the poor and middle-class to benefit the children of the affluent. The judge said no. in most red states, state judges have repeatedly ruled that state constitutions are invalid when it comes to funding private and religious schools. All state constitutions require that public funds are for public schools. Mississippi is lucky to have a judge who ruled that the state constitution means what it says.
(JACKSON, MS October 13, 2022) On Thursday, Hinds County Chancery Court Judge Crystal Wise Martin ruled that a recent law which would allocate $10 million of federal pandemic relief money to infrastructure grants for private schools is unconstitutional. This ruling by Judge Martin is a major victory for Parents for Public Schools, a national organization based in Mississippi with chapters in several states.
Parents for Public Schools (PPS), represented by The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)-Mississippi, Democracy Forward, and the Mississippi Center for Justice, filed a complaint in June petitioning the court to prevent the State from implementing this grant program. The attorneys representing PPS argued that Section 208 of the Mississippi Constitution prohibits the use of any public funds in support of private schools, and thus, the money allocated through this law is indeed unconstitutional.
The grant program, created as the result of one law and funded by an additional law, would allow only private/independent schools in Mississippi which are members of the Midsouth Association of Independent Schools to receive up to $100,000 each for infrastructure improvements, yet public schools are not eligible to apply for these grants. By contrast, the Mississippi Legislature created a loan program for public schools to improve infrastructure; however, those loans, although interest free, must be repaid to the State within 10 years. The grants to private schools do not have to be paid back.
PPS Executive Director, Joann Mickens, testified during the hearing in August that any public funding spent on private schools has a detrimental impact on public school students due to the Mississippi Legislature’s historic underfunding of public schools. “For 23 of the past 25 years, the Legislature has chosen to underfund the Mississippi Adequate Education Program (MAEP), which is the State portion and main source of funding for Mississippi’s public schools. One of the results of this is that we now have schools all over the state that are struggling in multiple ways, including – and especially in – infrastructure needs. For over 30 years, PPS has worked with parents, public schools, and other organizations to improve equity and student outcomes in public schools,” said Mickens.
“Parents for Public Schools advocates on behalf of public schools because each child, each family, each community, and our collective democracy depend on education. We chose to enter this arena in Mississippi knowing that victory would not mean monetary gain for us or even for Mississippi’s public schools. We entered this argument because one of our core values is to educate all children well and equitably. In this case, we’re standing up for almost half a million children, their families, and their communities. In doing that, we stand up for a stronger, better Mississippi and against perpetuating inequity. We’re grateful to PPS parents and families who spoke up, for our legal representatives, and for the Court’s wise decision to honor the plain and clear language of our constitution,” said Becky Glover, Policy Analyst at Parents for Public Schools, Inc.
Vangela M. Wade, president and CEO of the Mississippi Center for Justice: “Today’s ruling is a resounding victory for the hundreds of thousands of public school students in Mississippi. At a time when public schools are already strapped for resources, the legislature’s attempt to funnel $10 million to private schools was egregious. We thank the court for its ruling but also recognize that much more must be done to foster high-quality public education for all Mississippi school children.”
“We are elated with the Court’s ruling, which affirms our argument that the Mississippi Constitution explicitly forbids appropriating public funds to private schools. Public funds must have a system of accountability. Senate Bill 2780 and Senate Bill 3064 funneled taxpayer dollars to private schools, which have no responsibility to taxpayers. This outcome returns $10 million to Mississippi taxpayers,” Joshua Tom, legal director at ACLU of Mississippi.
“Today’s ruling is a victory for the Mississippi Constitution and every person who cares about public education in the state,” said Will Bardwell, Senior Counsel at Democracy Forward. “When the state legislature violated the Constitution by directing public money to private schools, it did more than merely continue Mississippi’s shameful history of undermining its children’s public schools. It broke the law, period. Today’s ruling makes clear: no one, not even the Mississippi legislature is above the law.”
Parents for Public Schools, Inc. is a nonpartisan nonprofit that began in Mississippi more than 30 years ago by parents who organized to support their public schools while educating and mobilizing themselves and others to demand higher standards and better resources for each student. Following interest from other cities around the nation, the National Office for Parents for Public Schools, Inc. (PPS) was founded in 1991. Since then, PPS has become a diverse, national organization of community-based chapters whose mission is to advance the role of parents and communities in securing a high-quality public education for every child by providing professional leadership training that prepares parents and others to become equal partners with and responsible stewards of their public schools.
Democracy Forward Foundation(“Democracy Forward”) is a nonprofit legal organization founded in 2017 that litigates cases involving government action on behalf of organizations, individuals, and municipalities. The organization has taken 650 legal actions and achieved victories supporting democracy and improving the lives and well-being of people and communities. Democracy Forward Foundation is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization.
ACLU of Mississippi is a non-partisan, not-for-profit organization that defends and expands the constitutional rights and civil liberties of all Mississippians guaranteed under the United States and Mississippi Constitutions, through its litigation, legislative and public education programs. It is an affiliate of the national ACLU.
The Mississippi Center for Justice is a nonprofit, public interest law firm dedicated to dismantling the state’s culture of inequity and injustice. Supported and staffed by attorneys and other professionals, the Center pursues strategies to combat discrimination and poverty statewide.
For nearly 20 years, the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow was a darling of Ohio politicians. It’s founder, William Lager, made campaign contributions, mostly to Republicans, and Lager’s multiple companies collected nearly $1 billion for its online services. GOP luminaries we’re graduation speakers—names like Jeb Bush, John Kasich and other state officials.
The Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow, an online charter school based here, graduated 2,371 students last spring. At the commencement ceremony, a student speaker triumphantly told her classmates that the group was “the single-largest graduating high school class in the nation.”
What she did not say was this: Despite the huge number of graduates — this year, the school is on track to graduate 2,300 — more students drop out of the Electronic Classroom or fail to finish high school within four years than at any other school in the country, according to federal data. For every 100 students who graduate on time, 80 do not.
The state auditor decided to audit ECOT (even though he was a recipient of Lager campaign funding.) The audit determined that large numbers of students didn’t exist and sought repayment of $67 million. Lager decided to declare bankruptcy rather than repay the state. ECOT had an online auction of stuff it had purchased with state funds.
Bill Phillis writes that the state is still trying to recover money from Lager:
Attorney General Yost Seeks a Court Order to Prevent the ECOT Man (William Lager) From Disposing of or Transferring Assets or Property. FREEZE LAGER’S ASSETS!
William Lager, via his operation of ECOT, Altair Learning Management, IQ Innovations, and Third Wave Communications illegally collected hundreds of millions from the state (school districts). The state has been attempting to recover at least part of the stolen revenue via the judiciary. Lager has put portions of his assets beyond the reach of his creditors.
The Ohio Attorney General, on September 27 filed a motion in Franklin County Common Pleas Court to freeze Lager’s assets.
Previously, the Court had identified that Lager had personally benefitted in the amount of $46,614,198.83. The Court had also specified that ECOT illegally paid Lager’s companies $161,602,806.30
It is amazing that Lager was empowered by campaign contributions to steal hundreds of millions of tax dollars over a couple decades before getting caught. A lot of state agencies—Ohio Department of Education, State Board of Education, Governor’s office, Attorney General offices, Auditor offices—were asleep at the switch, while enjoying favors from Lager. AMAZING!
Despite the multiple scandals, Ohio continues to divert more and more money to failing charters and vouchers.
GOP-controlled West Virginia enacted a voucher program that allots $4,300 to attend private schools. A Circuit judge enjoined the program, and it is now being argued before the State Supreme Court.
Critics point out that $4,300 is insufficient to pay for any private school, and the money will be used to underwrite the tuition of affluent students. The poor and students with disabilities will be left behind in underfunded public schools.
The vouchers, cynically called HOPE scholarships, violate the state constitution’s promise of a free public education for every child.
Note: if you open the link, which I hope you will, read the article in one sitting. After one look, it goes behind a pay wall.
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.”
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
