This is a link to a gift article.
Several reporters at The New York Times worked together for months unraveling the secrets of Jeffrey Epstein’s financial success. How did he go from being a high school math teacher to a multimillionaire? His greatest trick, it appears, was cultivating and leveraging friendships among people who were wealthy and powerful. Name-dropping was a tactic. So were lying and boasting, as he rose in elite circles, cultivating contacts, references, women, and friends.
Garry Rayno of InDepthNH keeps a close watch over the legislature in New Hampshire. He is particularly interested in the state’s relatively new voucher plan. It was sold, as usual, as a plan to help poor kids “escape failing schools.”
That wasn’t what happened.
Predictably, the legislature removed income limits and the program now subsidizes affluent families whose children never went to public school.
The program this year will cost $51.6 million. Almost $50 million goes to students already enrolled in private or religious schools.
Meanwhile, the funding for vouchers is drawn from the state’s Education Trust Fund, which was intended for public schools. That means the subsidy for nonpublic schools comes right out of the public schools’ budget, with no tax increases to compensate public schools. The vast majority of New Hampshire’s students are now subsidizing the nonpublic schools.
There is a new regime at the Department of Education that has released more than the most basic information about the Education Freedom Account program.
For the program’s first four years, the department released spreadsheets detailing the numbers of students, where they live and how much each student received in grants with a total cost of the program and the quarterly state distributions to cover those grants.
The money does not really go to the parents, its goes to the Children’s Scholarship Fund NH, which takes its cut and sends the rest in the child’s name to ClassWallet, a company that received early stage investments twice from the Chinese-based venture capital firm Sinovation Ventures.
A 2018 Defense Department report flagged the company as participating in China’s “technology transfer strategy,” a state initiative to acquire foreign innovation.
Several states that also use ClassWallet for voucher money distribution have raised concerns about data security and foreign influence like Arizona and Missouri, but not New Hampshire, although Gov. Kelly Ayotte issued Executive Order 2025-04 which would appear to prohibit doing business with a company with investors like ClassWallet.
ClassWallet does not technically work for the state, but it was hired by a state contractor, Children’s Scholarship Fund of NH, which administers the EFA program.
How many parents of EFA students would want their education spending data potentially accessed by a foreign country like China?
That information is not what was released late last month by the Department of Education, but is easily found with a Google Search, which ironically also brings up that Sinovation Ventures was co-founded by former China Google President Kai-Fu Lee.
The information released last month provides far greater detail than released under former DOE Commissioner Frank Edelblut, who kept the program’s details out of the public’s eye, such as where the money went and if the children’s foundation was carefully vetting income levels and other requirements to access additional grant money.
A small sample compliance report by the now long gone DOE overseer of the EFA program, indicated it was not following guidelines.
The 100 applications sampled for the report over the first two years of the program had a 25 percent error rate that resulted in a rebate to the state for only those applications improperly approved not for 25 percent of the program’s costs.
One of the biggest criticisms of the program is that very few of the students using the state’s money are actually leaving public schools to join the program. Instead the vast majority of the students using EFAs were already in religious or private schools or homeschooled when their parents applied to participate in the state-funded program that draws its funding from the Education Trust Fund, which also pays for the bulk of state aid to public schools, no matter how meager compared to every other state in the country.
This year the program is projected to cost $51.6 million and will cost an additional $61.9 million next year, totaling $113.5 million for biennium, which makes it $26.7 million over budget.
And if you read the fine print of the data released last month, only $1.68 million on the low end, to $4.42 million on the high end for this school year, and $2.52 million if you use the four-year average is going to kids who were not in public schools when they joined the program out of the $51.6 million for this school year.
The data from the DOE notes that for the current school year only 343 students left public schools to join the program whose enrollment is now 10,510 students, which is nearly double what it was last year before the Republican-controlled legislature removed any earnings cap for the program.
That 3.26 percent of the students is the low end of the estimate above, and if you use the number of new students this year compared to last school year, which is 4,745, the new students from public schools is 7 percent and the high figure.
If you add the kids leaving public schools for the last four years, the number is 1,162 which compared to enrollment over those four years of 23,937 and the number is the four-year average.
That means state taxpayer money going to support students who were not in public schools when they joined the EFA program for this school year would be between $49.92 million and $47.18 million.
That is money the state was not paying to educate these kids because they were in religious or private schools or homeschooled and not supported by state dollars.
In essence that is a new education cost for the state, but no new taxes, or fees or anything was created to pay for it.
Instead, it is money drawn from the Education Trust Fund which was established after the Claremont education decisions to support public education.
As Rayno writes: For those receiving the money on the upper end of the income scale, the little less than $5,000 grant average is a subsidy that allows another ski trip to Aspen or Tahoe this winter.
So when lawmakers say the state doesn’t have the money to increase its share of public education costs, it really means “we do not want to increase the state’s share, but we are OK subsidizing religious and private schools and homeschooling.”
For those receiving the money on the upper end of the income scale, the little less than $5,000 grant average is a subsidy that allows another ski trip to Aspen or Tahoe this winter.
But the above figures are probably a little generous because they do not account for the kids who joined the EFA program from public schools and then returned to public schools either before or after one year.
Data released by the department indicates that last school year, 101 of the former public school students who switched to the EFA program, re-enrolled in public schools.
For the 2023-2024 school year, 75 EFA students returned to public schools, and for the 2022-2023 school year, 38 re-enrolled in public schools.
But those are not the only ones leaving the EFA program every year.
It also does not include EFA students who either graduated or completed their course of instruction that school year or left for unexplained reasons.
For the 2024-2025 school year, 151 EFA students left the EFA program because they graduated or completed their course of study along with the 101 who returned to public schools, and the 887 who left for unexplained reasons.
The total number of students leaving the program that school year was 1,139 or 21 percent of the total EFA enrollment for the year.
For the 2023-2024 school year, 108 students either graduated or completed their course of study, with the 75 who returned to public schools, and 525 who left for unexplained reasons.
The total number of students leaving the EFA program that school year were 708, or 19 percent of the total EFA enrollment.
For the 2022-2023 school year, 76 students graduated or completed their course of studies, along with the 38 who re-enrolled in public schools and the 344 who left for unexplained reasons.
The total number of students leaving the program was 458 students or 15 percent of the enrollment that year.
Total students leaving over the three-year period was 2,305 from a total three-year enrollment of 12,557 or 18.4 percent.
What would we say about a dropout rate of nearly 20 percent if it were a public school?
This is not the widely successful program its advocates tout on the floor of the House and Senate and does not save school districts the amount of money Edelblut used to claim because more than 90 percent of the students in the program were not in public schools, but he counted them as savings to school districts.
This program is not serving the children of low-income parents who want an alternative to public schools, but those parents who can already afford to pay for their children to attend those alternatives without the state’s taxpayers’ help.
That is not government helping the most vulnerable, it is Robin Hood in reverse, a system New Hampshire knows very well.
Garry Rayno may be reached at garry.rayno@yahoo.com.
Gary Rubinstein is a teacher of mathematics at Stuyvesant High School in NYC and a prominent critic of corporate reform. He started his career as one of the first corps members of Teach for America. After many years inside the reform world, he saw its flaws and became an apostate. Like me. With his superb mathematical skills, he has debunked charter school “miracles,” TFA data, the Tennessee Achievement School District, which did a lot of boasting but failed.
His review is a delight to read.
He writes:
Fifty years after the publication of her first book, ‘The Great School Wars’, author and historian Diane Ravitch has released her long awaited memoirs. In ‘An Education: How I Changed My Mind About Schools and Almost Everything Else’ Ravitch takes us through her life from her childhood in Houston through the ups and downs of a long and productive life driven by truth and integrity.
What makes this book a ‘must read’ is that it has the three elements that a great autobiography should. First, her life story is interesting on an objective level. Anyone picking up the book and reading over the book jacket will know that Ravtich is someone who achieved fame and notoriety through the unlikely passion of the history of Education in America. But in this book we learn about the sorrow she had to endure between her great triumphs. So her story, even if it weren’t so well written, would make a very good book. A second component of a great autobiography is the author’s ability to reflect on 80 plus years of life and find the pivotal moments that changed the course of her life. But for an autobiography to be ‘great’ it must be infused and brought to life with excellent precise writing. As ‘An Education’ has all three aspects, this is a book you are going to want to read and then keep to re-read over the years when you are in need of inspiration.
If you have read any of Ravitch’s education books, you know that she is a master of absorbing decades of events and processing them and creating an insightful, and incredibly efficient, thesis which she develops over the course of a book. As she explains in this book, she learned her craft while writing as a journalist for The Wellesley News and then for The New Leader magazine. In all her books she exhibits this efficient technique that would make Strunk and White beam. But, by design, Ravtich’s books on Education are stripped of emotional language. Those books educate you through a series of well chosen facts that lead you to understand the implications and big moments without having to spell out every detail. The big question, which this new book answers with an emphatic ‘Yes’ is whether or not her kind of writing can be used to evoke the joy and the sorrow she experienced through her full 87 years of living.
When I started reading this book, I would bookmark interesting passages that show her talent for memoir. Eventually I realized that I was bookmarking almost every page. So after the first 50 of so pages, I had to slow down on the bookmarking. Here are some of my favorite moments (I will try not to give away too much).
Since Ravitch can write a full tale in the span of five or six lines, there are so many interesting stories in this book. As a writer she reminds me of one of those painters, I don’t know so much about painting to know what this is called – maybe impressionistic? – who, rather than producing a full photographic quality image, instead just does the minimal with the paint and brush to convey the emotion and ideas. This is something that is very difficult to do yet she makes it look easy.
A few pages later, Ravitch relays an amusing story about how as a teen she found a pearl in an oyster and ended up in the newspaper for it and also got food poisoning from eating the oyster: “The next day, after the newspaper appeared with a photograph of me in short shorts, identified by name, strange men began calling the house, asking for me and saying impudent things. That went on for days, along with the vomiting. My mother was not amused.” This is so efficient, not a word wasted and it does convey the absurdity and the humor with a minimal delivery reminiscent of maybe Bob Newhart.
Here’s one I liked: “The only Sunday school teacher I remember was a strapping guy who discussed Bible stories and the Jewish religion with us. He told us that when he was our age he had run away with the circus.” Ah, see how great this is? In the first sentence she sets up the scene. And then in just a few words tells us the perfect thing to understand this guy. No more is needed and no more is said.
Throughout the book, Ravitch takes stories and moments that could easily fill several pages and finds a way to convey them in a few words. For the reader, this has the effect of injecting all the humor and sometimes the sorrow of these moments directly into our brains without it having to be processed and translated in our minds.
Though these two examples are fun and convey the innocence of childhood, Ravitch is similarly terse in her telling of some of the deepest tragic moments of her life. When these happen in the book, the descriptions are so efficiently written that, like sometimes when bad things happen in life unexpectedly, we find ourselves pausing and wondering if that really just happened. The matter of fact telling of memorable moments of life, both big and small, happy and tragic, has a powerful effect on the reader.
The book really gets rolling when Ravitch enters college in 1956 at Wellesley. In one sense she is a fish out of water and then she eventually completely at home with the lifelong friends she made there. This was a really fun chapter to read as Ravitch has the first of her many brushes with fame, like her friend Maddy – eventually Madeleine Albright. Just as always, Ravitch perfectly sets up the matter of fact description of her friend’s background and then, in an instant it is revealed who she became known as. The Madeleine Albright story was less than one page long.
One of my favorite parts was the description about a satirical musical Ravitch and her friends wrote for the Wellesley Junior Show. It was hilarious. I kind of want to see the full script but her description of it, as all her descriptions, gave us just enough that we feel like we saw the whole show but forgot some of the missing details.
After college, Ravitch starts domestic life but isn’t quite content. She then goes on a lifelong quest for love and for purpose. As she goes through different eras in her life, she meets a new cast of colorful characters, some famous, some not, but always relevant to her story.
In this book we learn how she went from being the wife of an influential New York City figure to the influential Dr. Ravitch the Education guru of this country. As she rises in the ranks, she finds herself in the company of so many famous people — even several presidents, yet she conveys in her telling of these encounters that, to her, it wasn’t such a big deal. They are all just people. Anyone who has gotten the chance to meet her in person and see her interact with so many people who are not famous will see that she treats non famous people like they are special and is always asking them questions rather than talking about herself.
One of the funniest anecdotes in the book is when she inadvertently got Isaac Asimov angry with her over small talk related to word processors. Again, this is only a few lines, but another interesting adventure in Ravitch’s full life that put her often in the room with all kinds of famous people.
While married to her husband, Diane unexpectedly meets her soulmate who happens to be a woman. In the chapter about the genesis and growth of her relationship, they have now been together for almost 40 years, she is able to convey what it means to finally experience the joy of true love.
In the last chapters of the book we learn about the Washington years in the Department of Education and how that came about and what she tried to accomplish there. We also learn about what it took to renounce much of her work and to follow the evidence into a more evolved system of beliefs about what can improve education in this country. She lost a lot of friends and titles in the process but she kept her personal integrity and commitment to the truth.
Throughout the book, the theme is that Ravitch is never just one thing or the other. Is she a education conservative or an education liberal? Is she straight or gay? Is she a southerner or a north easterner? Is she an introvert or an extrovert? Is she a socialite or a homebody? And throughout her life she is sometimes one and sometimes the other. She is someone who defies categorization. And though in the subtitle she says she ‘changed her mind about schools and almost everything else’ she never changed her core belief that you don’t just stay in the same place just because you are comfortable there.
And like with her, this book is a lot of different things. On one level it is an amusing and interesting read about someone whose choices led her on an unlikely adventure ending with her being, in some circles, a huge celebrity. But it is also an inspirational tale of how having values and staying true to them can help you overcome some of the unfortunate obstacles you have to deal with in life. And though I doubt it was intended to accomplish something else, I think that for many readers they will want to write down their own memoirs after reading this. Ravitch makes it look so easy to analyze your life, find the key moments in it and write some succinct prose – though of course it isn’t so easy but still a worthwhile task.
After finishing this book, I had an experience that only a few people were also able to have. In the acknowledgements in the ‘friends’ section, among sixteen other names, there was my own. I got a chill seeing this, never expecting it. But this made me think something else, also a lesson, though maybe unintended from this great book. This book reminds us of the importance of relationships. Everyone you know has a story to tell. Some people’s lives may not have the highs and lows of Diane Ravitch’s but for each person, their joys and sorrows are meaningful to them. And even if they don’t have the capability to write the way Ravitch can, if they could, you might find yourselves in the acknowledgement page for that friend or family member. So enjoy the relationships you have while you can and remember that you are an important person in many people’s lives.
So pick up a copy today and take a ride through the ups and downs of a well lived life. Though she has made a career of writing about education and teaching, through this book she educates and teaches us that if you keep an open mind and are committed to learning and following the facts, you might end up in a comfortable home a long way from where you started.
Kristen Buras lives in New Orleans and has written several notable books about the charter school takeover of the city’s schools. After two decades at Emory University and Georgia State University, she currently works in New Orleans as a scholar-activist. She is cofounder and director of the New Orleans-based Urban South Grassroots Research Collective, a coalition with Black educational and cultural groups that melds community-based research and organizing for racial justice. Buras has written multiple books on urban educational policy, including Charter Schools, Race, and Urban Space: Where the Market Meets Grassroots Resistance and What We Stand to Lose: Black Teachers, the Culture They Created, and the Closure of a New Orleans High School.
Her latest report appears here:
The Stories Behind the Statistics: Why a Report on ‘Large Achievement Gains’ in Charter Schools Harms New Orleans’ Black Students
Buras’ latest report exposes how “Large Achievement Gains” in New Orleans’ charter schools mask persistent inequities
The National Center for Charter School Accountability (CCSA), a project of NPE, has released a new independent report, The Stories Behind the Statistics: Why a Report on ‘Large Achievement Gains’ in Charter Schools Harms New Orleans’ Black Students, authored by noted scholar Dr. Kristen Buras. The report delivers a penetrating critique of the widely circulated “success narrative” surrounding the charter-school takeover of New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina. It challenges the Education Research Alliance for New Orleans (ERA)’s claims of significant achievement gains. It reveals how shifting metrics, questionable data, and students’ lived experiences paint a far more complex—and troubling—picture.
The Stories Behind Statistics raises substantial concerns about the foundations of ERA’s conclusions. First, it details how Louisiana officials repeatedly modified the school performance metrics in ways that boosted the apparent success of charter schools, creating an illusion of dramatic improvement. Second, it questions the reliability of the data ERA relied upon, noting allegations, lawsuits, and documented violations—including grade-fixing, financial mismanagement, and other irregularities—that have occurred across the New Orleans charter sector. Third, the report underscores the longstanding lack of meaningful oversight and accountability for charter schools, which further undermines confidence in the performance data.
Finally, the report scrutinizes ERA’s surveys on teaching quality and school climate, demonstrating that the experiences of Black students—when examined at the school level—are far more negative than ERA’s brief suggests. To bring these realities into focus, Dr. Buras incorporates original qualitative research, including firsthand testimony from students and parents describing their experiences in New Orleans charter schools.
The Stories Behind the Statistics urges policymakers, researchers, and the public to look beyond celebratory headlines and examine the deeper structural issues that continue to shape the city’s all-charter experiment—issues that profoundly affect the educational experiences of Black youth and their families.
According to Network for Public Education President Diane Ravitch, “As cities and states across the nation look to New Orleans as a model of charter-school reform, this report cautions how important it is to dig deeper than surface metrics. Without transparency, accountability, and attention to student experience, reforms that appear successful on paper may in fact perpetuate inequities and undermine educational justice for students.”
Garry Rayno of InDepth NH reports on the status of the New Hampshire voucher program, called Education Freedom Accounts. The program is growing beyond the budgeted amount, and the number of students it serves is expected to grow as family income limits are removed.
The program was sold, as it always is, as a way to save low-income children from low-performing schools. Actually, that claim is simply a hoax. By now, we know that vouchers mostly subsidize students who were already in private and religious schools. That’s the case in every state with vouchers. In New Hampshire, 80% of the students who take vouchers never were enrolled in public schools. In Arkansas, it’s 88%. The state is subsidizing their tuition, which was previously paid by their parents.
Garry Rayno writes:
CONCORD — Information released by the Department of Education this month shows the Education Freedom Account program has 10,510 students enrolled this school year.
The figure is based on average daily membership as of Oct. 1.
The program is capped at 10,000 students with exemptions for continuing students, students in the same family and students from households below 350 percent of the federal poverty level, or $74,025 for a two-member family and $112,525 for a four-member family.
According to the DOE information, the program with the current enrollment level will cost the state $51.6 million, while the program is budgeted for $39.3 million, or $12.3 million over budget this fiscal year.
Because the program hit the 10,000 cap this year, the cap will be increased to 12,500 next school year, which with similar distributions of children from lower income households, special education needs and English as a second language students, would project to be $61.4 million while $47 million is budgeted for fiscal year 2027, or $14.4 million over budget.
The total cost of the EFA program for the biennium would project to be $113 million, or $26.7 million over budget for the biennium.
The average grant under the program for this school year is $4,911, which is down from last school year when it was $5,204 when the program cost $28 million and served 5,321 students.
The percentage of low-income students who qualify for free and reduced lunch and receive additional money of $2,393 per student has fallen with the expansion of the program this school year to any student qualified to attend school in the state regardless of family earnings.
The percentage of students for low-income families dropped from 37 percent last school year to 19 percent this school year, while the percentage of students needing special education services increased from 7 to 9 percent, while English language learners totaled 20 this school year while there were only two students the year before.
Students qualifying for special education services receive an additional $2,185, and English language learners receive an additional $832 per student.
The base adequacy grant every EFA student receives is the same as public school students $4,266, which goes to the school district.
At the Joint Legislative Performance Audit Oversight Committee meeting Friday, the Legislative Budget Assistant’s Office said the audit of the EFA program is expected to be presented to the Joint Legislative Fiscal Committee by next summer.
Christine Young, director of the LBA’s Audit Division, said her agency is currently doing field analysis and reviewing observations, which are concerns raised about practices or following statutes or rules.
The performance audit is required by law, but the LBA was unable to access program data because the DOE and the Attorney General’s Office said that information belongs to the administrator of the program, Children’s Scholarship Fund NH, which the state hired.
The LBA sought the information from the company, but was denied under the advice of former Department of Education Commissioner Frank Edleblut and told the committee the audit would have to focus on the DOE’s oversight of the program.
Young told the committee to date 40 observations have been noted with 15 finalized, most dealing with eligibility.
She said another 20 observations are being drafted.
A compliance report done by the DOE several years ago of the first two years of the program found about 25 percent of the applications to the program and for additional money for services were approved without the required documentation by the Children’s Scholarship Fund NH.
The organization may retain up to 10 percent for administering the program, which would be over $10 million this biennium.
The program was touted as an opportunity for low-income parents to find alternative educational programs for their children if they do not do well in the public school environment.
But as is the case in other states with similar programs, the vast majority — or about 80 percent — of the students enrolled in the program were not attending public schools, but attended religious and other private schools, or homeschooled when they joined the program.
With the expansion this year, many families whose children attend religious and private schools or homeschools, receive what is essentially a state tax paid subsidy.
The cost of the program when it was expanded to all eligible students in Arizona nearly bankrupted the state, and similar problems occurred in Ohio and North Carolina.
In the only vendor listing published by the Children’s Scholarship Fund NH, was for the first year of the program and is no longer on the Children’s Scholarship Fund’s website, the vast majority of grants went to religious and private schools.
Critics of the program have long claimed it lacks guardrails and accountability, but program supporters say parents are the best judge whether their child is receiving a good education.
Garry Rayno may be reached at garry.rayno@yahoo.com.
Andy Spears is a veteran education journalist with a Ph.D. in education policy and a specialization in school finance. He lives in Nashville, but covers the national scene.
Spears writes:
In this post, he reports on an ominous development in Tennessee. A new organization in Tennessee has declared its intention to lure nearly 500,000 students out of public schools and into charter schools and voucher schools. The collapse in funding for public schools is likely to end public schools altogether.
Spears writes:
While state leaders consider expanding the state’s private school coupon program, a new nonprofit takes a bolder approach. A group calling itself Tennessee Leads registered with the Secretary of State as a 501(c)(4) issue advocacy organization with the goal of effectively ending public education in Tennessee by 2031.
The group was registered on October 14th and lists a business address of 95 White Bridge Road in Nashville. This is a nondescript business building in West Nashville.
The Registered Agent for Tennessee Leads is listed as “Tennessee Leads.” The group’s website says an IRS nonprofit application is pending.
In short, it is not yet clear who is backing this movement.
However, the group is not shy about its goals.
We support legislation to significantly increase the availability of Education Freedom scholarships, aiming to provide 200,000 scholarships annually by 2031. This initiative is designed to empower parents with more choices for their children’s education.
And:
Our efforts include advocating for the expansion of public charter schools, with a goal to increase student enrollment from 45,000 to 250,000. This initiative seeks to offer diverse educational opportunities and foster innovation in teaching.
If achieved, these two goals combined would take nearly half of all K-12 students in the state out of traditional public schools.
The group doesn’t really say the current model isn’t working – they just say they like “choice.”
The state’s current private school coupon scheme (ESA vouchers) has 20,000 students.
Moving that to 200,000 would cost at least $1.5 billion per year and take significant funds from local public schools.
Other states that rapidly expanded school vouchers saw huge budget hits to both state and local government.
[See Andy Spears’ post about Arizona’s universal school vouchers, which he refers to as “private school coupons for rich families.”]
[See his post on Indiana vouchers, where the costs rose neatly tenfold in less than a decade. The Indiana voucher is also a coupon for the rich to cash in at private schools. He predicts that Tennessee will be shelling out $1.4 billion a year for well-off kids to attend private schools by 2035.]
He writes that vouchers are a mess in Florida, because thousands of students are “double-dipping,” collecting voucher money while attending public schools.
[See his article on double-dipping and the voucher mess in Florida.]
He continues:
Florida relies on two official student counts each year — one in October and another in February — to allocate funding to school districts through the Florida Education Finance Program (FEFP). But after the October 2024 Count, major red flags appeared. Nearly 30,000 students (at an estimated cost of almost $250 million) were identified as both receiving a voucher and attending a public school. In some districts, almost all (more than all in one district) of their state funding had been absorbed by voucher payouts.
So, the Tennessee Leads plan would lead to a rapid decrease in state funds available for public schools – or, a significant increase in local property taxes – possibly, both.
It’s also not clear how Tennessee Leads plans to build charter school capacity to house an additional 200,000 students. Unless the plan is to just hand existing public schools over to charter operators – you know, like the failed Achievement School District model.
Oh, and there’s something else.
Tennessee Leads wants all schools to use Direct Instruction at all times for all students.
We advocate for the implementation of Direct Instruction methodologies across all public schools, ensuring that teaching practices are grounded in research and proven to be effective in enhancing student achievement.
Except studies on Direct Instruction suggest the opposite – that it does not improve student learning – in fact, it may be harmful to student academic and social growth.
Here’s more from a dissertation submitted by an ETSU student:
No statistically significant results (p = .05) were found between the year before implementation and the year after implementation with the exception of one grade level. Furthermore, no significant differences were found at any grade level between students participating in Corrective Reading and students not participating in Corrective Reading on the 2003-2004 TCAP Terra Nova test.
To be clear, Direct Instruction is highly-scripted learning – down to the pacing, word choice, and more – the “sage on the stage” delivers rote learning models and students are told exactly how to “do” certain things – the “one best way” approach with little room for student discovery.
A remarkable body of research over many years has demonstrated that the sort of teaching in which students are provided with answers or shown the correct way to do something — where they’re basically seen as empty receptacles to be filled with facts or skills — tends to be much less effective than some variant of student-centered learning that involves inquiry or discovery, in which students play an active role in constructing meaning for themselves and with one another.
That is: Scripted learning/Direct Instruction is not evidence-based if the evidence you’re looking for is what actually improves student learning.
It holds true not only in STEM subjects, which account for a disproportionate share of the relevant research, but also in reading instruction, where, as one group of investigators reported, “The more a teacher was coded as telling children information, the less [they] grew in reading achievement.”
It holds true when judged by how long students retain knowledge,7 and the effect is even clearer with more ambitious and important educational goals. The more emphasis one places on long-term outcomes, on deep understanding, on the ability to transfer ideas to new situations, or on fostering and maintaining students’ interest in learning, the more direct instruction (DI) comes up short.8
One wonders who, exactly, wants to advance an extreme privatization agenda while also mandating that those students remaining in traditional public schools are subjected to a learning model proven not only not to work, but also shown as likely harmful in many cases.
Eventually, an IRS determination letter will be issued, or the Registered Agent will be updated on the Secretary of State’s site. Or, perhaps, the “about us” section will offer some insight into the actors who would end public schools in our state.
On the day after this post appeared, Spears learned that a well-known political consulting firm was behind the proposal for Tennessee Leads. The firm had previously worked for the Tennessee Republican Party and for Governor Bill Lee. He wrote a new post.
It’s not at all clear why Governor Lee and his fellow Republicans are so enamored of charters and vouchers. Tennessee was the first state to win Race to the Top funding from the Obama administration. It collected a grand prize of $500 million. With that big infusion of new funding for “reform,” the public schools should be reformed by now. But obviously they are not.
Worse, Tennessee put $100 million into a bold experiment that was supposed to demonstrate the success of charter schools. The state created the Educational Achievement Authority, hired a star of the charter movement to run it, and gathered the state’s lowest-performing public school into a non-contiguous all-charter district. The EAA promised that these low-scoring schools would join the state’s top schools within five years. Five years passed, and the targeted schools remained at the bottom of the state’s rankings.
In time, the legislature gave up and closed the EAA.
Similarly, the evidence is in in vouchers. In every state that had offered them to all students, the vast majority are scooped up by affluent families whose kids never attended public schools. When public school students took vouchers, they fell far behind their public school peers.
Are Republican leaders immune to reading evidence?
Every so often, I read a story about education that is truly annoying. The most recent one is in The Atlantic. It was written by Idrees Kahloon, a staff writer at the magazine. It is titled “America is Sliding Toward Illiteracy.” The subtitle is “Declining standards and low expectations are destroying American education.”
As a historian of American education, I have read the same story hundreds of times. In the 19th century, these warnings that children were not learning anything in school were commonplace. The cry of “crisis in the schools” appeared frequently in every decade of the 20th century. We are only 25 years into this century, and similar views appear in the popular press regularly.
Long ago, attacks on the schools were intended to produce more funding for them, or higher standards for those entering teaching..
Now they serve the purposes of those pushing privatization of public schools, those who are promoting vouchers, charters, homeschooling, and every other way of destroying public schools.
Test scores have fallen! The culprit? Smart phones! Social media! Low expectations! Low standards! Bad teachers! Bad Schools!
George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind law of 2002 raised standards and expectations but it raised them absurdly high, to a literally unreachable goal. A rebellion formed among those who didn’t think it possible that “all students” would reach “proficiency” by 2014.
NCLB required that all students would be “proficient,” not just at grade level, by 2014. By NAEP standards, “proficient” does not mean grade level. It means “A” performance. In no other nation in the world are all students rated “proficient” on the NAEP scale. Nor has any district or state ever reached that goal.
But the Cassandras of American education have monopolized the podium for many years, wailing that we will be an impoverished third-world country if test scores don’t rise dramatically.
Think about it. The biggest explosion of doom-and-gloom was caused by the Reagan-era report called “A Nation at Risk” in 1983. It flatly predicted that our economy was imperiled by a “rising tide of mediocrity.” But what has happened since 1983? Our economy is booming, we have not been eclipsed by other nations. We continue to be a land of innovation, creativity, scientific and medical pre-eminence.
How is our nation’s success possible, given the cry for more than 40 years that our schools are hobbling our economy and compromising our future?
Instead of complaining about our schools and lambasting them nonstop, the critics should be complaining about poverty and inequality. These are the root causes of poor student outcomes.
If the critics are worried about our future, they should shout out against Trump’s orders to withhold funding for research in science and medicine. If they really wanted great schools, they would stop diverting public funds to nonpublic schools and homeschoolers–where there are low or no standards for teachers– and make sure that every student has certified, experienced teachers, small classes, and the amenities available in every school that are typically available only in wealthy suburban districts.
No, our kids are not sliding into stupidity. If you don’t agree, I dare you to take an eighth grade math test and release your scores. You will be surprised.
The greatest generation sits in our public high schools today, unless our government continues to impose moronic policies of choice and competition that have failed for the past thirty-five years.
The mainstream media never tires of printing stories about the “miracle” of charter schools. A few days ago, the Washington Post published an article by Eva Moskowitz, leader of the Success Academy charter chain, titled “These schools are the answer to unlocking every child’s potential: Children born into poverty should not be consigned to failing schools.” The article was shameless self-promotion, announcing that she was expanding her brand into Florida.
But much to my surprise, readers were not buying any of her pitch. The comments following the article overwhelmingly criticized charter schools, saying they chose their students, they kicked out those with low scores, they excluded kids with disabilities, they were no better than public schools.
If all those readers get it, why don’t the editors at the mainstream media?
They still cling to the myth of charter success in New Orleans. NOLA has not been great for the students and their parents. But it has been a public relations coup.
Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education, pulls back the curtain in The Progressive.
Her article: “The ‘Miracle’ of New Orleans School Reform Is Not What It Seems: The city’s all-charter school experiment is a cautionary tale about what happens when democracy is stripped from public education.”
After the hurricane, parents wanted well-resourced community-based public schools. Instead they got charters focused on testing and no/excuses discipline.
The entire “reform” project is based on the practice of “charter churn.” Of 125 charters that have opened since Hurricane Katrina, half have closed and been replaced.
Burris writes:
The truth is that the all-charter experiment in New Orleans was built on the displacement of Black educators, the silencing of parents, and the infusion of foundation dollars with strings attached. As a result, students and families have faced disruption, instability, and hardship as charter schools open and close. Two decades later, the “miracle” is not what it seems. It is instead a cautionary tale about what happens when democracy is stripped from public education and governance is handed over to markets and philanthropies.
Long ago, back in the 1990s, the idea of vouchers was proposed as a brand new idea. Its advocates said that vouchers would “save poor kids trapped in failing public schools.” They presented themselves as champions of poor and needy kids and predicted that vouchers would change the lives of these children for the better. Eminent figures proclaimed that school choice was “the civil rights issue” of our time.
Of course, as many writers have explained, vouchers were not a brand new idea. They were popular among segregationists after the 1954 Brown decision. Several Southern states passed voucher laws in that era that were eventually knocked down by federal courts as a ploy to maintain all-white schools.
Trump’s first Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos –never considered a leader of civil rights–championed vouchers. So does Trump’s current Secretary of Education Linda McMahon.
But guess who’s getting vouchers? Not the poor kids. Not the neediest kids. Mostly the kids who were already enrolled in religious and private schools.
The story is the same in every state but accentuated in states where every student can claim a voucher, regardless of family income, as in Florida and Arizona.
Now the numbers are available in Arkansas: 88% of students who use vouchers never attended public schools.
Benjamin Hardy of The Arkansas Times reports:
On Oct. 3, the Arkansas Department of Education released its annual report on school vouchers (or as the state calls them, “Educational Freedom Accounts”). The voucher program, which was created by Gov. Sarah Sanders’ Arkansas LEARNS Act in 2023, gives public money to private school and homeschool families to pay the cost of tuition, fees, supplies and other expenses.
Among the takeaways of the new report: Just one of every eight voucher participants in Year 2 of the program was enrolled in a public school the year before. (Year 2 was the 2024-25 school year; we’re currently in Year 3.)
This matters because Sanders and other school choice supporters often frame vouchers as a lifeline for poor families to escape failing public schools. Opponents of voucher programs say the money tends to mostly go to existing private school and homeschool families.
Private school families as a whole tend to be higher income. And because the Arkansas program is open to everyone, regardless of how wealthy they are, the voucher program puts money in the pockets of many households that could already afford private school.
If you read only one article about what happened to the students, teachers and schools in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, this is the one. Ashana Bigard is a parent of students in New Orleans. Elizabeth K. Jeffers taught in the NOLA district.
Turning New Orleans into an all-charter district may have raised test scores–although New Orleans is still a low-performing district in one of the nation’s lowest performing states–but as you will learn by reading this article, the transformation was a disaster for students, their families, their communities, and their teachers.
This article was produced by Our Schools. Ashana Bigard is the director of Amplify Justice, an educational advocate, and author of Beyond Resilience: Katrina 20. A dedicated mother of three, she serves as an education fellow for the Progressive magazine’s Public Schools Advocate project and is a director-producer of numerous video and audio productions. Follow her on Bluesky @AshanaBigard. Elizabeth K. Jeffers, PhD, is an assistant professor at the University of New Orleans who began teaching in pre-Katrina New Orleans public schools. Her scholarship focuses on school choice and community-based inquiry. Her research has been published in Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, Educational Policy, the International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, and other scholarly journals. Follow her on Bluesky @ekjeffersphd.
To mark the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina’s devastation of New Orleans, numerous articles and opinion pieces have appeared in prominent media outlets touting the supposed improvement of the city’s public school system since the storm.
Katrina’s immediate aftermath saw the state of Louisiana disempower the democratically elected school board by taking over the management of 107 out of 128 schools. This led to the termination of 7,600—mainly Black and women—teachers, paraprofessionals, cafeteria workers, clerical workers, principals, and other permanent employees, and the eventual conversion of all of the city’s public schools into privately managed charters.
A Washington Post column, “‘Never Seen Before:’ How Katrina Set off an Education Revolution,” by British journalist Ian Birrell, proclaimed the transformation a “miracle.” Another opinion piece in The 74, “The Inconvenient Success of New Orleans Schools” by Ravi Gupta, the founder and former CEOof a charter school network, stated that the New Orleans school system shaped by Katrina was “a model that should theoretically appeal to both sides of America’s education debates. It delivered the academic results that reformers promised while addressing the equity and community concerns that critics raised.”
As proof of their arguments, both authors pointed to a June 2025 report, “The New Orleans Post-Katrina School Reforms: 20 Years of Lessons” by Douglas N. Harris and Jamie M. Carroll of the Education Research Alliance for New Orleans. Pulling from the data presented in that study, Birrell said the case for declaring New Orleans-style education reform a “remarkable success” is “pretty definitive,” and Gupta called this supposed success an “unequivocal conclusion.” As a longtime youth advocate and community leader and an assistant professor at the University of New Orleans, who was a public school teacher in the city, we invite you to consider whether this data alone proves that New Orleans public schools and the families they serve are better off after 20 years of “reform.”
Although Gupta warns against “[falling] into the tyranny of the anecdote when reporting on fraught education debates like those over the meaning of the New Orleans reforms,” we’d like to tell you about Rio, whose last name has been withheld for privacy reasons. Rio attended 12 different schools in New Orleans, many of which were shut down suddenly, before he finally graduated from a school that is now also closed. Rio’s story is not atypical of the human costs of the New Orleans school system, where closures are a defining feature and evidence that the disaster Katrina wrought on the schools is still happening.
Forced to traverse the fragmented charter system that has replaced the public system of neighborhood schools, New Orleans students are often traumatized by multiple school closures. Decades of researchattest to the academic, emotional, and economic harms that result from severing social connections that families, faculty, and staff have had with schools and with one another.
For instance, obtaining a job reference letter from a former teacher should be simple for students to do, but that task becomes an obstacle course for many young adults from New Orleans, like Rio. Black Man Rising, a national group providing outreach and mentorship for Black youth, had to intervene to help him obtain the letter that made the difference between him being able to financially support himself and being just another addition to the statistics of Black youth who are unemployed and incarcerated.
Rio’s story illustrates a central paradox of the New Orleans system: Black families and communities continue to be severed and displaced as a result of failed leadership at the federal, local, and state levels. While the storm may be over, the disaster continues. On the other hand, white children in New Orleans rarely experience school closures.
In addition to severing families from their neighborhood schools and educators, Katrina reforms have nearly obliterated democratic participation in ways that would shock most Americans.
New York University professor Domingo Morel contends in his book Takeover: Race, Education, and American Democracy that state takeovers do not generally improve test scores or graduation rates; instead, they are about removing political power, as Black school boards have historically functioned as entryways for Black political leaders.
In a similar vein, Louisiana legislators, in the immediate aftermath of Katrina, passed Act 35 in November 2005, which expanded the state-run Recovery School District’s (RSD) jurisdiction over New Orleans public schools during an emergency session when voters were dispersed across the country and many were still searching for their loved ones. The new laws removed the parent and teacher approvals required for charter conversions.
State legislation also enabled the termination of the majority Black teaching force, gutting the teachers’ collective bargaining unit, United Teachers of New Orleans (American Federation of Teachers, Local 527), and further removing obstacles for top-down reform. Research conducted by University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Kevin L. Henry and his co-author has shown how the “charter school authorization and application process” used in post-Katrina New Orleans “reproduces white dominance.” While another study published in the journal Urban Education points to how charter schools consolidate power “in ways that limit local Black political power.”
Consider the example of Kira Orange Jones, whose case perfectly illustrates how educational democracy has been dismantled. In 2011, Jones raised $478,000for her Board of Elementary and Secondary Education campaign—much of it from out-of-state donors connected to Democrats for Education Reform and charter school advocacy groups. Her opponent raised just $19,000, creating a 25-to-1 spending disadvantage. But the campaign money was just the beginning. Jones simultaneously served as executive director of Teach For America’s (TFA) Greater New Orleans chapter while sitting on the board that approved TFA’s $1 million state contract with Louisiana. When ethics complaints were filed in 2012, the Louisiana Ethics Board overruled its own staff’s recommendation that Jones choose between her TFA position and her board seat.
While NOLA Public Schools mandates charter school governance boards to include an alumnus or a parent, legal guardian, or grandparent, who is either elected or appointed, Katrina school reforms have nearly obliterated democratic participation. Parents often don’t find out when school board meetings are happening, let alone have access to board members’ email addresses or phone numbers to voice concerns. Even local reporters who tried to obtain basic contact information for charter school board members have been stonewalled. There is no state requirement that charter school boards meet at times that are convenient for working parents to attend.
The absence of neighborhood schools is an additional obstacle for parents who rely on public transportation. And although charter schools seemingly returned to an elected school board in 2018, the public has virtually no control over individual charter schools, which maintain complete autonomy over curricula, calendars, certification requirements, contracts, and daily operations.
Louisiana has long been among the states with the highest rates of student suspensions and expulsions, and Black students are more than twice as likely to be suspended compared to white students and receive longer suspensions for identical infractions, according to an analysis of 2001to 2014 figures by Education Research Alliance for New Orleans. In New Orleans, suspension and expulsion rates rose sharply after the storm but then stabilized. Nevertheless, some charter schools continued to suspend and expel high percentages of students.
But that’s just the official data. More recently, several parents have reported that their children are being sent home from school without receiving official suspension papers. Elizabeth’s field notes attest to students’ reports of one charter school network sending students to “the RC room” (restorative center) where they are forced to sit in cubicles, complete detention assignments, and write apology letters in a secluded room. This shadow suspension system allows schools to push out Black students without creating the paper trail that might trigger oversight or intervention. Children lose days or weeks of education in bureaucratic limbo, with no formal process and no recourse. And large numbers of students, often labeled as “behavior problems,” remain enrolled in alternative schools, rather than mainstream degree programs, according to state data.
New Orleans teachers once lived in their communities. Most were career educators who taught generations of children, creating lasting bonds that extended far beyond the classroom.
Ashana experienced this personally at a small school called New Orleans Free School. As someone who is extremely dyslexic, she felt inadequate throughout most of her educational life until she encountered teachers like Woody, Janice, Jeanette, and Jim—two of whom, Jeanette and Jim, have since passed away. Woody still leaves encouraging comments under articles she has published, telling her he is proud of her. He, along with the others, encouraged her and insisted she could be brilliant despite her spelling difficulties. They told her she could be a writer. They emphasized that we all have different skill sets that we can develop, and that none of us is perfect, but that we can practice and grow.
This encouragement didn’t end when Ashana left Free School. The advice and support continue today. That’s what it means to have authentic relationships with your teachers. That’s what it means to be rooted in your community. Unfortunately, Ashana didn’t have the opportunity to send her children to that school to be educated by those incredible educators. The school that gave her a love of learning shut down.
The structure of charter schools severs critical bonds between schools and families. For instance, in her book Beyond Resilience: Katrina 20 Ashana recounts a teacher reaching out to her for resources to help with one of her students years before the storm. The child’s mother, who worked two jobs as a housekeeper and restaurant server, struggled to care for her seven children.
Her nine-year-old son often arrived at school dirty and disheveled because their washing machine had broken, and despite the mother’s instructions, the children didn’t wash their uniforms in the tub while she worked overnight shifts. Although the mother worked tirelessly, her extremely low reading level meant she was unaware of how to apply for assistance programs that could have helped her family. Most importantly, she probably didn’t believe she qualified for help. This teacher understood the family’s circumstances and worked to connect them with resources rather than simply reporting the situation to authorities.
This kind of close relationship between educators and families has become increasingly rare in the Katrina experiment. For instance, Ashana encountered a similar situation that ended differently. A family facing tough times was reported to the Office of Children and Family Services (OCFS) multiple times for neglect. When OCFS attempted to provide services, the mother, terrified that her children would be taken and placed in foster care as she had been, and having suffered abuse in that system, fled Orleans Parish with her children. She moved them to a motel in St. Bernard Parish, leaving everything behind. The children weren’t enrolled in school for almost a year until someone tracked them down and helped them return to the city and reintegrate into the school.
Somehow, punitive measures for Black parents and children have been equated with success—which raises the question: What exactly is the reform proponents’ definition of success, and what was the goal from the outset?
The current system has replaced community-based educators with a top-heavy administrative structure. New Orleans charter schools spend significantly more money on administration, even as teacher shortages remain high. For instance, InspireNola Charter Schools, which only manages seven schools, paid three executives a total of $667,000 for the fiscal year 2023.
Meanwhile, the constant “churning” of schools and the absence of a collective bargaining agreement have led to a larger system that dehumanizes teachers. In fact, the RSD required certified teachers who chose to return to their pre-Katrina schools to complete a “basic skills test” (akin to a literacy test).
But that was only the beginning of the disaster for New Orleans educators. One Black veteran explained to Elizabeth: “The RSD was bouncing teachers around like balls.” That is, the state takeover district issued letters labeling numerous experienced teachers as “surplus” when their schools transformed into charters. Many of these schools recruited inexperienced teachers who were expendable, accepted lower salaries, and could be programmed to adhere to the ideology of reform. The absence of collective bargaining power, arbitrary closures, and charter takeovers eventually led many career teachers to “choose” between commuting several hours a day to schools in outlying parishes and changing careers. Twenty years after the district’s purging of its unionized teachers (the United Teachers of New Orleans), only five of the city’s 90 charter schools are unionized.
In another example, Ashana recounts in her book about how a teacher whom she advocated for brought a doctor’s note to her school’s chief financial officer to document a urinary tract infection and request restroom breaks. The administrators emailed her to offer reimbursement for adult diapers. This example of denying teachers basic respect and humanity illustrates what is seen as a continual disaster. If educators are treated this way, imagine the conditions students face.
The current “choice” system has created impossible decisions for families. Consider the mother in New Orleans East who must choose each morning which of her two children to accompany to their bus stop, because the system doesn’t allow siblings to attend the same school. She would have to explain to her young daughter, who is clutching a bright orange whistle for safety, “Today I’m going to stand with your brother, but tomorrow it’ll be your turn.” The little girl, frightened at the prospect of standing alone, pleads with her mother, but is told, “I’m sorry, you know this is just the way it is for right now.”
This mother, with tears in her eyes as her children clung to her legs, captured the cruel reality. With this new choice system, she doesn’t get to choose to have both of her children sent to the same school. She gets to choose which one she can stand with every morning. That’s no choice at all.
I have quoted too much already. Open the link to finish this sobering and important article.
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