Gary Rayno writes in InDepth NH about a Democratic proposal to put the State Department of Education in charge of the voucher program. Called “Education Freedom Accounts, the program was sold as a way to help low-income students in bad public schools transfer to better private schools. But about 75% of the students getting voucher money were already enrolled in private and religious schools. The free-market State Education Commissioner Frank Edelblut (who home-schooled his own children) projected that the program would cost $3.3 million, but it has actually cost $27 million in its two years of operation. Edelblut promised it would cut property taxes, but the cost of the program is projected to grow.
Rayno writes:
CONCORD — Several lawmakers seek changes to the new Education Freedom Account program with a package of bills addressing issues raised in its first two years of operation.
The program was included in the state’s two-year operating budget passed in 2021, and has been significantly over budget projections with more students than anticipated and what many view as insufficient oversight.
“It is hard to have oversight,” said the prime sponsor of House Bill 626, Rep. David Luneau, D-Hopkinton, “when you don’t have transparency, when you don’t have the data to look at.”
The bill, which had a public hearing Wednesday before the House Education Committee, would have the Department of Education administer and manage the program instead of the Children’s Scholarship Fund NH, which receives 10 percent of the program’s grant distribution under its contract with the state. The organization’s no-bid contract was approved by the Executive Council soon after the program was approved in the state’s operating budget.
The program allows the money parents receive to roll-over from year to year, unless the amount exceeds what would be a quarterly payment.
If the student graduates, leaves the freedom account program or is removed from the program for misuse of funds, the parents would be required to return any excess money to the Education Trust Fund under the bill.
The bill would also require students in the program to take one of the statewide assessment tests required of public school students as a comparison of how well the students in the program are doing, Luneau said.
Luneau and other supporters of the change say the program needs more oversight, accountability and transparency given the millions of dollars being distributed to parents.
The state has spent about $27 million during the first two years of the program, well above the $3.3 million budget Education Commissioner Frank Edelblut projected would be the cost.
He asked for $30 million each year of the next biennial budget in requests to the Governor’s Office.
Luneau told the committee that is $90 million in the first four years of the program coming out of the Education Trust Fund, and $9 million of it going to the scholarship fund.
He said he believes with added staff, the department could manage and administer the program for much less money and have the data needed for better accountability, transparency and assessment.
Why use tax dollars to pay the overhead of a private company, when you are already paying the department to oversee kids’ education in the state, Luneau said.
To date, about 75 percent of the funds for the program have gone as subsidies to parents of students who were enrolled in private or religious schools prior to the program’s start.
Of the 3,000 students in the program this year, about 700 attended a public school the year before.
Luneau said the reports include the kids who were in private and religious schools before the program began to show how successful it is, but that is not saving any taxpayers money but is using money from the Education Trust Fund.
Luneau is prime sponsor of another bill prohibiting using the money as a subsidy for private or religious school tuition.
Supporters of the program sold it as a way for lower income parents to afford to find the best education opportunities for their students while saving property tax dollars for taxpayers.
Luneau said taxpayers who fund public schools receive a great deal more accountability, oversight and transparency of their tax dollars than they do in the freedom account program, adding the reports the scholarship fund has provided are laughable; they are so incomplete.
The view of Republican legislators is that parents alone offer accountability. If they don’t like the program, they will leave it. Since 3/4 of them are already enrolled in private and religious schools, they should be overjoyed that the taxpayers are underwriting the cost.
Billy Townsend writes in the Tampa Bay Times about how Florida politicians game the NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress) scores to boast about unearned “success.” The gaming consists of bragging about fourth grade scores (which are high) while ignoring eighth grade scores (which are unimpressive).
The big Florida trick is third grade retention—holding back the children in third grade who have low reading scores. This artificially boosts fourth grade scores. But then comes the eighth grade scores, and Florida falls behind. They can’t hide the low-scoring students forever.
He writes:
A close look at ‘the Nation’s Report Card’ shows how Florida fails its students as they move up through the grades.
A few years ago, just before COVID hit, a Stanford University study of state-level standardized tests showed that Florida’s “learning rate” was the worst in the country — by a wide margin.
Florida has the worst learning rate, according to a Stanford study. [ Provided ]
Florida students learned 12 percent less each year from third to eighth grade than the national average from 2009 to 2018. The next worst state was Alabama, according to The Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford University. Florida’s political and education leaders completely ignored that finding.
Contrast that deafening silence with the hype and misinterpretation that comes with the release of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), “the Nation’s Report Card.” When those results came out last fall, Gov. Ron DeSantis crowed on Twitter that, “We kept schools open in 2020, and today’s NAEP results once again prove that we made the right decision. In Florida, adjusted for demographics, fourth grade students are #1 in both reading and math.”
Tellingly, DeSantis ignored the eighth grade results, which came out far worse than fourth grade — just as they have in every NAEP cycle since 2003.
The “Nation’s Report Card” is a snapshot of group proficiency taken by different cohorts of kids every two years in reading and math in fourth grade and eighth grade. It produces state-by-state results and proficiency rankings. It does not track individual kids year over year. But it does tell you how Florida’s fourth and eighth graders compare with students in other states. I crunched the data, and here’s the bottom line: Florida’s students perform worse as they move up through the grades. There is consistent, massive systemic regression with age. And the gap is widening.
This is a state failure, not a local one attributable to individual districts. Yet, in every NAEP cycle, Florida politicians and education leaders brag about fourth-grade NAEP results in press releases.
But ignoring the eighth grade results or the “learning rate” study does not change these facts:
· Florida kids regress dramatically as they age in the system. Since 2003, Florida’s eighth grade rank as a state has never come close to its fourth grade rank on any NAEP test in any subject.
· The size of Florida’s regression is dramatic and growing, especially in math.Florida’s overall average NAEP state rank regression between fourth and eighth grade since 2003 is 17 spots (math) and 18 spots (reading). But since 2015, the averages are 27 spots (math) and 19 spots (reading).
· No other state comes close to Florida’s level of consistent fourth to eighth grade performance collapse. In the last three NAEP cycles — 2017, 2019 and COVID-delayed 2022 — Florida ranked sixth, fourth and third among states in fourth grade math. In those same years, Florida ranked 33th, 34th and tied for 31st in eighth grade.
· For comparison, Massachusetts typically ranks at or near #1 among states on both the fourth grade and eighth grade NAEP for math and reading. Its eighth grade rank has never been more than one spot lower than fourth.
· Florida has never matched the U.S. average scaled score on eighth grade math NAEP.
· In COVID-marred 2022, Florida’s eighth grade scale scores in reading and math both lost 8 points relative to the national average, compared to fourth grade. That’s larger or equal to the overall collapse of NAEP scores nationwide attributed to COVID.
To restate, what happens every NAEP cycle between fourth and eighth grade in Florida matches and mostly exceeds the negative impact of COVID. Overall, recent NAEP cycles show Florida collapsing from elite test scores in fourth grade reading and math to abysmal in eighth grade math and average in eighth grade reading, even after its much-hyped approach to COVID in 2022.
And, worse, there is no reason at all to believe Florida’s test performance regression with age stops at eighth grade. The only two years the NAEP tested 12th graders — 2009 and 2013 — the Florida collapse worsened significantly with further age, but against a smaller pool of states.
Willful ignorance, useless testing
So what to make of this?
You can rest assured that your top education officials know all about Florida’s eighth grade NAEP and learning rate failures, which is why they never discuss them. I suspect these test data realities helped drive Florida to drop its big state growth test — the Florida Standards Assessment — and move toward a “progress monitoring” regime this year that may or may not create functionally different data reporting models.
The discourse around Florida’s NAEP performance — and the catastrophic learning rate that we ignore on our state tests — makes me deeply skeptical of standardized tests and their use in our education systems and society. I see them as punitive political and social sorting tools, rather than “assessments” designed to help individual children reach their potential.
Forget whether test results are valid or biased. We can’t even accurately describe what the test results say — on their face — about the success of our state school system. So what use are they?
Florida’s politicians, education leaders, policy community and journalists should look at these results and ask this basic question: The data tells us your child will regress dramatically every year he or she stays in the Florida system. What’s going on?
If we can’t do that, then why do we force standardized tests on kids at all?
What we should be studying
I’ve been attempting to draw attention to this dramatic Florida regression dynamic for years. So I was pleased to the see the Tampa Bay Times Editorial Board and Hillsborough County Schools Superintendent Addison Davis notice and publicly address the massive drop in test performance between fourth and eighth grade in Florida on the 2022 NAEP. But I was puzzled by suggestions that it was something new, caused by COVID. It isn’t; and it wasn’t.
Indeed, if we took standardized tests seriously as diagnostic and development tools, we would have long ago started asking: What causes this? What changes need to be made beyond rebuilding and supporting a developmentally focused teacher corps? What are the system quirks of Florida that cause this dynamic?
Here are some good questions to ask and study:
· Why doesn’t “learn to read, read to learn” work in Florida?
One of our treasured education cliches is “learn to read” so you can “read to learn.” It’s essentially the policy justification for imposing mass retention on third graders, as Florida does. And yet, although Florida routinely ranks high fourth grade NAEP reading, our readers immediately lose massive ground relative to other states. The data shows that Florida’s often punitive emphasis on “learn to read” by third or fourth grade creates no benefit in “reading to learn” in later grades — in math or reading. Why not?
· What is the role of mass third grade retention in Florida’s fourth grade peak and subsequent collapse?
Florida pioneered mass third grade retention based on reading standardized test scores in 2003. This prevents the lowest scoring third grade readers from taking the NAEP with their age cohort in fourth grade. And when that low scoring third grader finally takes the fourth grade NAEP, retention has made it as if he or she is a fifth grader taking the fourth grade NAEP.
Florida law theoretically subjects more than 40 percent of Florida’s roughly 200,000 public school third graders to retention because of low scores. A smaller — but still significant — number is actually retained. Florida does not appear to publish that actual total number of third graders retained.
· What is the cost to the individual children and overall system performance?
Is that affecting Florida’s learning rate for older kids and the eighth grade NAEP collapse? A 2017 study of a cohort of southwest Florida students showed that seven years after retention, 94% of the retained group remained below reading proficiency. It also showed that third and sixth graders find retention as stressful as losing a parent.
· How many voucher third grade testing refugees are there? What effect do they have on the fourth grade NAEP?
Third grade retention is not Florida’s only way to get low scoring fourth graders off the books for the NAEP. It’s been well-established that Florida over-testing and third grade retention is a primary sales tool for vouchers.TheOrlando Sentinel’sPulitzer-worthy “Schools without Rules”report in 2017 about voucher schools reported: “Escaping high-stakes testing is such a scholarship selling point that one private school administrator refers to students as ‘testing refugees’.”
How many testing refugees are there? And how does Florida’s massive voucher program — America’s largest and least studied — affect performance on the NAEP by allowing low scoring kids to duck it?
· What effect do voucher school dropouts have on scoring when they return in massive numbers to public schools?
Enormous numbers of “low-scoring” kids duck third and fourth grade tests and then come back into the public system to be counted in the eighth grade NAEP and other yearly tests. That’s likely a recipe for score collapse. But there is no hard data to analyze. Florida is long overdue for such a study, and voucher advocates know it will be a data bloodbath.
· Does chasing test scores kill test scores over time?
Test-driven instruction isn’t engaging. Kids come to understand how useless these tests are to their lives; and they behave accordingly. Teachers come to hate the test-obsessed model and leave the profession. How has that affected test scores?
A longstanding waste of human potential
For me, the eighth grade NAEP and “learning rate” failures are evidence that we’ve wasted a generation of human potential and severely damaged Florida’s teaching profession. Will anyone “follow the data” where it leads? Will anyone ask: Should our kids peak at age 9 and decline inexorably from there?
I believe Florida has long had one of America’s worst test-performing state school systems because of its governance model and intellectual corruption and pursuit of useless measures and fake accountability.
I
Billy Townsend was an award-winning investigative reporter for The Lakeland Ledger and Tampa Tribune. He oversaw education reporting as an editor for The Ledger. He has been an independent writer and journalist since 2008, focused on Florida history, education and civic systems. He was an elected Polk County School Board member from 2016-2020. Today he writes the Florida-focused email newsletter “Public Enemy Number 1.” He can be reached at townsendsubstackpe1@gmail.com.
Peter Greene explains school issues better than anyone. In this post in the Bucks County Beacon in Pennsylvania, he explains why vouchers fail, why renaming them doesn’t make them better, and why anyone who cares about the quality of education should forget about vouchers/ESAs.
He writes:
School Vouchers Have Been A Disaster—Now Advocates Are Trying To Rename Them
What you need to know about education savings accounts, a kind of “super-voucher.”
Although a sizable number of Republican candidates in the 2022 midterm elections who were counting on school vouchers to be a winning issue—including Tudor Dixon in Michigan, Kari Lake in Arizona, and Tim Michels in Wisconsin—went down to defeat, school vouchers are not about to go away. Voucher advocates are instead changing the name and pushing for education savings accounts (ESAs).
ESAs are legal in around 10 states so far, but if this new idea for promoting school choice hasn’t already been proposed in your state, it may be appearing there soon. Here’s what education savings accounts are, how they work, and what policymakers and families in your state should consider before rushing headlong into adopting this idea.
What Are ESAs?
Education savings accounts are a kind of super-voucher. While traditional vouchers give parents a chunk of taxpayer money that they could use for tuition at the school of their choice, an ESA gives parents a chunk of taxpayer money that they can spend on private school tuition or a variety of other educational expenses.
Tennessee’s ESA law offers a typical list of eligible expenses that not only include private school tuition and fees but also textbooks, school uniforms, tutoring, transportation to and from school, computer software, tech devices, summer school tuition, and tuition and fees at a postsecondary school.
ESAs provide a wider range of choices—and a wider range of ways for vendors to get their hands on education tax dollars without having to open a whole school to get voucher money.
The money comes to parents by way of a company hired to handle these funds. Step Up for Students and ClassWallet are two examples of these “scholarship management” companies. These companies handle the actual disbursement of the monies, often through debit cards; they also take a cut of the funding.
Where Does ESA Money Come From?
Funding for an ESA program can come from several different paths.
One pathway is via tax credit programs that allow corporations and individuals to contribute directly to “scholarship” funding while getting a dollar-for-dollar tax credit. Former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos proposed this on a national scale with her failed Education Freedom Scholarships.
Proponents like to say that tax credit funding does not involve any government spending, which is technically correct because the money never touches government hands. But because it is a tax credit, it does cost the taxpayers. A million dollars in tax credit scholarships means $1 million of revenue the government does not get, leaving a hole that must be made up either by raising taxes or cutting other state and federal programs. Kentucky set up tax credit scholarships to fund its ESA program; the tax credit scholarship program was thrown out in December 2022 by the state’s supreme court for being “unconstitutional.”
Another pathway to ESA funding comes from new laws enacting “backpack funding,” where per-pupil funding that would have gone to the student’s home school district goes to the student’s ESA instead. This can be particularly damaging in states like Arizona, where the money is pulled from the student’s assigned district even if the student has always attended private school. In other words, the school’s operating revenue is reduced by the per-pupil funding, but its operating costs are reduced by zero dollars.
ESAs can also be funded by taking the money off the top of the state’s education budget, meaning the costs of the vouchers hit all school districts, whether they have students choosing vouchers or not.
In addition, a suggestion was made that pandemic relief funds be distributed via ESA-style programs (Oklahoma was one state that tried it).
GOP legislators have also tried to propose that federal funding intended for poor students or students with special needs, such as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), be turned into school voucher programs, a particularly ironic proposal, as students usually give up their rights under IDEA when they move out of the public education system. This repurposing of federal funding for education will no doubt become part of the rhetoric used for ESA funding.
How Are Tax Dollars in ESA Spent?
Tracking how tax dollars are spent in ESA programs is difficult if not impossible because these programs have hardly any accountability.
ESAs, like vouchers, have proven to be a way to use public tax dollars to fund private religious schools. In fact, in states where voucher programs exist, vouchers primarily fund religious schools (particularly Catholic ones). While the separation of church and state, when it comes to education, is already being increasingly whittled away, ESAs, like vouchers, allow states to circumvent that wall entirely.
Ryan Walters, who was just elected as Oklahoma’s education chief, bragged that the private sector would be a “more efficient way” to handle the funds, and he gave ClassWallet freedom to administer the state’s ESA program. But ClassWallet has admitted that it has “neither responsibility for, nor authority to exercise programmatic decision making with respect to the program or its associated federal funds and did not have responsibility for grant compliance.” In other words, nobody is checking to see how the money is really spent.
In most ESA programs, parents can select from an official list of vendors. One might assume that such a list would include vendors that have been screened to make sure that they are qualified providers of high-quality materials and instruction, but one would be wrong. In many states, a vendor is included in the list after simply meeting some very basic requirements. Tennessee’s ESA program leaves oversight of education vendors largely up to the management of its private contractor. Arizona’s ESA program doesn’t even have a list of approved schools, vendors, or providers, leaving the destination of taxpayer funding up to the “discretion” of the account holder.
The argument is that free market forces will keep vendors in line and that parents’ ability to make choices will work better than government regulations. One might also argue that the Food and Drug Administration should be shut down and the market should be allowed to regulate food manufacturing behavior. If a company gets sloppy or cheap and starts producing poisoned food, the market will correct it. All we have to do is let some consumers be poisoned in the process.
Not only are taxpayers’ interests unguarded in ESA systems, but parent and student interests are unguarded as well. Parents have to navigate an unregulated marketplace, an asymmetrical market where sellers have far more information than buyers, and where marketing materials take the place of useful information.
What Risks Do ESAs Pose to Students and Families?
Whether school choice advocates are pushing vouchers or ESAs, they frequently fail to mention the most fundamental issue for students and their families—private schools do not have to admit anyone they don’t wish to admit, either by placing various barriers in the way (not offering transportation or meals) or by simply putting restrictions in place.
That was one of the takeaways from Carson v. Makin, a Supreme Court decision that declared that Maine must allow voucher money to go to religious private schools, even if they are clearly discriminatory. Many ESA laws include a sort of non-interference clause that declares that accepting voucher money does not make the school a state actor, and the state may in no way dictate to the school how it will operate. In other words, they may teach what they want and discriminate as they like, even if they accept taxpayer dollars. Students with special needs, as well as LGBTQIA+ students, find they may have far fewer “choice” options than others.
ESA programs fail to protect students in other important ways. Should a family run out of ESA money, or find that they’ve been bilked by a bad vendor, or even be dumped by a vendor that goes out of business midyear, there are no real protections for families of students. Some school choice advocates have suggested that this risk would be minimized by providing third-party consumer reviews via a service like Yelp. But generally, it’s assumed that the invisible hand of the market, wearing its caveat emptor ring, is supposed to do the job of quality oversight.
In one striking example, an ESA bill proposed in Utah in 2022 included a requirement that parents sign a statement that they “assume full financial responsibility for the education” of their child. That means if they run out of voucher money or get left high and dry by a bad vendor or find the vendor incompetent, they are on their own. Presumably, in such a situation, a student would have no recourse but to return to a public school, though that school might get zero funding for that student.
Do ESAs Improve Education Results?
Most importantly, study after study shows that voucher programs in all their forms do not foster excellence in education. ESAs are a newer creation and so have been studied less, but given that the ESA system has even fewer guardrails than traditional vouchers, there’s no reason to think that the educational results would be any better.
In any case, under ESA, poor educational outcomes would be the parents’ problem, and the solutions we’ve seen for this problem are grim.
For instance, some voucher proponents (including DeVos) suggest a low-cost use for vouchers would be microschools, in which a handful of students gather in someone’s home around a computer with some online lessons while an adult “coach” keeps an eye on things. It’s not anyone’s first choice for a great education, but if that’s what you can afford—well, enjoy your choice.
That is the heart of voucher programs, whether you call them vouchers or education savings accounts or freedom scholarship accounts; they get the government out of the school business and turn education into a commodity that is the responsibility of parents alone. In voucher world, the state hands you your debit card and washes its hands of you. “Enjoy your freedom, and good luck.” And if an excellent education is not readily available because the ESA money is inadequate or your child has special needs, and your local public school is struggling with reduced funding, well, that’s your problem.
It’s all about the three D’s—disrupt, defund, and dismantle. Call the voucher system whatever you would like, but it is about reducing education from a public good and shared societal responsibility to a simple consumer good.
Peter Greene is a recently retired classroom secondary English teacher of 39 years. He lives and works in a small town in Northwest Pennsylvania, and blogs at Curmudgucation.
The AFT commissioned a highly reputable polling form to find out how voters think about the big education issues. The poll was conducted after the election last November. Bottom line: Voters want better, well/resourced public schools; few are interested in the Republican agenda of fighting “wokeness,” censoring books, and choice.
New Polling Reveals GOP/McCarthy Schools Agenda Is Unpopular and at Odds with Parents’ Priorities
Latest Data Show Parents, Voters Reject Culture War Agenda, Support Academic Focus and Safe Schools Instead
WASHINGTON—The American Federation of Teachers today released new national polling that shows voters overwhelmingly reject House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s anti-school, culture war agenda. Instead, voters want to see political leaders prioritize what kids need to succeed in school: strong fundamental academic skills and safe and welcoming school environments.
“The latest education poll tells us loud and clear: Voters, including parents, oppose McCarthy’s agenda to prioritize political fights in schools and instead support real solutions, like getting our kids and teachers what they need to recover and thrive,” said AFT President Randi Weingarten.
“Rather than reacting to MAGA-driven culture wars, voters overwhelmingly say they want lawmakers to get back to basics: to invest in public schools and get educators the resources they need to create safe and welcoming environments, boost academic skills and pave pathways to career, college and beyond.”
According to Geoff Garin, president of Hart Research Associates: “One key weakness of the culture war agenda is that voters and parents reject the idea that teachers today are pushing a ‘woke’ political agenda in the schools. Most have high confidence in teachers. Voters see the ‘culture war’ as a distraction from what’s important and believe that politicians who are pushing these issues are doing so for their own political benefit.”
Polling conducted by Hart Research Associates from Dec. 12-17, 2022, among 1,502 registered voters nationwide, including 558 public school parents, shows that support for and trust in public schools and teachers remains incredibly strong:
93 percent of respondents said improving public education is an important priority for government officials.
66 percent said the government spends too little on education; 69 percent want to see more spending.
By 29 points, voters said their schools teach appropriate content, with an even greater trust in teachers.
Voters who prioritized education supported Democrats by 8 points.
Top education priorities for voters include providing:
students with strong fundamental academic skills;
opportunities for all children to succeed, including through career and technical education and greater mental health supports, as examples; and
a safe and welcoming environment for kids to learn.
According to voters, the most serious problems facing schools include:
teacher shortages;
inadequate funding;
unsafe schools; and
pandemic learning loss. (And, critically, voters and parents are looking forward to find solutions: by 85 percent to 15 percent, they want Congress to focus on improving schools through greater support, rather than through McCarthy’s investigation agenda.)
“COVID was terrible for everyone,” added Weingarten. “Educators and parents took on the challenges of teaching, learning and reconnecting and are now asking elected officials to focus on the building blocks of student success. Instead, legislators in 45 states have proposed hundreds of laws making that harder—laws seeking to ban books from school libraries; restrict what teachers can say about race, racism, LGBTQIA+ issues and American history; and limit the school activities in which transgender students can participate. Voters are saying that not only are these laws bad policy—they’re also bad politics.”
In state after state in the November midterms, voters elected pro-public education governors and school board candidates and rejected far-right attacks on teachers and vulnerable LGBTQIA+ students.
The survey’s confidence interval is ±3.0 percentage points.
Click here for toplines, here for the poll memo and here for the poll slides.
The short answer is: Nothing. At least in Washington, D.C.
The story in New York is different.
Federal and local prosecutors are investigating whether his multiple lies broke any laws. Anne Donnelly, the local prosecutor in Nassau County, where he was elected, is a Republican, and she too has opened an investigation.
Federal and local prosecutors are investigating whether Representative-elect George Santos committed any crimes involving his finances and lies about his background on the campaign trail.
Federal prosecutors in Brooklyn have opened an investigation into Mr. Santos that is focused at least in part on his financial dealings, according to a person familiar with the matter. The investigation was said to be in its early stages.
In a separate inquiry, the Nassau County, N.Y., district attorney’s office said it was looking into the “numerous fabrications and inconsistencies associated with Congressman-elect Santos” during his successful 2022 campaign to represent parts of Long Island and Queens.
It was unclear how far the Nassau County inquiry had progressed, but the district attorney, Anne Donnelly, said in a statement that Mr. Santos’s fabrications “are nothing short of stunning.”
Why are the Republicans in Congress silent?
Charlie Sykes, who used to be a conservative Republican, writes in The Bulwark that Kevin McCarthy needs Santos’ vote. End of story. His colleagues are saying “He’s learned his lesson,” although he remains defiant. Santos says “Everyone embellishes his resume.” But the proper word is not “embellish,” it’s “lie.” The Congressman-elect lied about his education, lied about his employment, lied about his religion, lied about his family. What part of his resume is true? No one knows.
Probably none of it except his name.
Sykes writes:
Of course, a political party with any sort of intact immune system would move quickly to send this sociopath back to ScamLand, whence he came.
But this is the GOP circa 2022, and so it faces a painful dilemma. With a narrow majority in the House, Republicans (and especially Kevin McCarthy) need his vote, of course.
But that’s not the real problem here, is it?
After years of ignoring, enabling, and rationalizing Big Lies and small ones, it will now be exceedingly difficult for the GOP to find their misplaced conscience that might morph into outrage and something like a moral standard. As Nick Catoggio writes:
Anyone willing to set aside their qualms about Trump for the sake of holding executive power logically should be willing to set aside their qualms about Santos for the sake of holding legislative power
David Brooks is a regular commentator on PBS Newshour every Friday night. He is typically banal but inoffensive. This past Friday, he was both banal and offensive.
Judy Woodruff asked him and his colleague Jonathan Capehart to choose people who deserve something nice or a piece of coal in their Christmas stocking. Brooks said he would give the President’s Chief of Staff Ron Klain a model train set for his stocking, but he would give ”the teachers’ unions” a piece of coal because they bear a large share of the blame for the “long, overly overly long” school closures that affected “student attainment” (he meant test scores, not attainment) and that have impaired the “lifelong prospects of a generation of young people,” widened inequality, and impaired social mobility (view here, at 10:51 minutes in or the last segment of the hour). He didn’t name any other villains, just the unions.
This is wrong on many counts.
The teachers’ unions didn’t cause the closures. The pandemic did.
Many teachers were fearful for their lives. Some were immunocompromised or lived with family members who were vulnerable. They reasonably wanted reassurance that schools would reopen safely, and that’s what the AFT demanded in a series of policy documents—starting in April 2020–calling for a safe reopening. By that, the union meant regular testing and sanitizing, masking, social distancing to the extent possible, and ventilation in classrooms. The Trump administration wanted the schools open with no money for safety measures.
Districts went online not because the unions told them to but because the CDC recommended it, and normal concern for the safety of staff and students prevailed.
No one knew at the time what the right course of action was, so school boards and superintendents erred on the side of caution, to protect the lives of staff and students. Was this unreasonable? As a grandmother, I don’t think so.
Stay open and take chances or close the school and shift to virtual learning? It was a tough decision, and it was not made by the teachers’ unions.
Success Academy in New York City is a high-profile charter chain. Its teachers are not unionized. Its CEO Eva Moskowitz decided to close the schools and go virtual in mid-March 2020. In January 2021, Moskowitz decided to close the schools for the year, go virtual, and shorten the calendar by a month. Other non-union charter schools followed SA’s lead.
During the shutdowns, teachers taught virtually, and some double-tasked by teaching some students online and some in their classes.
The demands and uncertainties of the pandemic, coupled with the absurd attacks on teachers for teaching honestly about U.S. history and the outlandish claims that teachers were”grooming” their students for sexual deviance, were profoundly demoralizing. Many teachers left the profession. The number of new entrants has shrunk. Not a word of sympathy or concern from David Brooks.
As for his assertion that the lives of an entire generation have been blighted because of school closings, that is simply hysterical speculation. Very few students liked virtual learning, nor did teachers. But it was necessary for a time. There is no reason to believe that students were irreparably harmed. They are resilient and will bounce back if their teachers get the resources they need and lower class sizes.
It would be far better to hear Brooks advocate on behalf of teachers on national television rather than trot out the tired rightwing cliche about “evil” teachers unions.
Teachers need support, not disrespect. They have had a much more difficult three years than David Brooks.
*******************************
For David Brooks’ benefit, here is the AFT reopening plan issued in April 2020.
This post was also written for Judy Woodruff, so that she won’t be blindsided the next time David or any other guest spouts anti-union, anti-teacher propaganda.
The claim that public schools “indoctrinate” their students is an integral part of the rightwing attack on public schools . This is a canard, a bald-faced lie.
The rightwingers insist that any efforts to teach tolerance and acceptance of others is “indoctrination.” Teaching children the importance of justice, they say, is “woke.”
This is the mission of public schools: to teach children academic skills and knowledge, of course, but also to teach them to work with people who are different from them and their family.
Teaching children to live, work, and play with others and to respect others is important to the functioning of our democracy. We are a people of many diverse origins, different nationalities, different religions. One of the implicit functions of public schools is to help bind us together as one nation, one people who share civic values.
Do you know which schools truly indoctrinate students? Religious schools. That is one of the essential goals of religious schools. They teach the doctrines of their faith. That is why they exist.
Yet, driven by religious zealots, red states are draining public money from public schools for religious schools.
The latest movement is to allow religious schools to become charter schools, enabling them to access public funds for teaching their doctrine.
CHURCH V. STATE — Oklahoma’s departing attorney general just took a big step toward achieving a conservative education milestone.
— Astate law that blocks religious institutions and private sectarian schools from public charter school programs is likely unconstitutional and should not be enforced, Attorney General John O’Connor and Solicitor General Zach West wrote in a non-binding legal opinion this month .
— Their 15-page memo leans on a trio of recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions that favored religious schools and won rapt attention from conservative school choice advocates and faith groups. Oklahoma Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt said the advisory opinion “rightfully defends parents, education freedom, and religious liberty in Oklahoma.” Newly-elected state Superintendent Ryan Walters called it “the right decision for Oklahomans.”
— “The policy implications are huge because this is the first state that is going to allow religious charter schools,” said Nicole Stelle Garnett , a University of Notre Dame law professor and influential religious charter school supporter who wants other states to follow Oklahoma’s lead . “The legal implications are huge because this is the first state that says that they have to,” she told Weekly Education.
— Now it’s time to see if faith-based Oklahoma institutions successfully apply for taxpayer support to create charter schools that teach religion as a doctrinal truth just like private schools do today, and if legislators will push to change state law.Also watch if legal authorities in other Republican-led states pen similar opinions.
— Those looming decisions and court fights will set the stage for renewed constitutional debates about the line between church and state.
Make no mistake: the bogus claim that public schools “indoctrinate” students is being used to advance the public funding of religious schools whose very mission is indoctrination.
This post is so important that it is the only one I have scheduled today. Please read it and share it with your friends, your local newspaper, your local radio station, your elected representatives, social media, anyone who cares about the future of our society. This is not a reprint. The author, Josh Cowen, wrote this post for this blog.
Josh Cowen, a professor at Michigan State University, has been studying vouchers for more than 20 years. He has been a member of the teams conducting major studies of vouchers. When I read his article in The Hechinger Report, where he declared that he was convinced that vouchers were disastrous for students who use them, I wanted to know more about him and his experience. I wanted to ask him, “Why did you change your mind?” That’s the question that’s been asked of me hundreds of times. I have a simple answer and a complicated answer: the simple answer is “I was wrong.” The complicated answer is contained in my recent books, starting with The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education.
I invited Josh to explain his views for my blog, and he graciously accepted. I consider this piece to be one of the most important statements I have posted in the decade this blog has been live. Please note two points he makes:
One, vouchers harm the children who leave public schools to use them.
Two, most of the early voucher research was conducted by researchers who were partisan supporters of vouchers.
Josh Cowen writes:
It’ll be a few more days for the final election results to be tallied nationwide, but it seems clear that with midterm wins by voucher supporters in places like Oklahoma, Texas and even Pennsylvania—where even the Democratic gubernatorial victor is on record in cautious favor—voucher opponents are going to have to keep working hard to block public funding of private and religious schools.
School vouchers have devastating effects on student outcomes. Full stop. That’s something even the nation’s voucher advocate-in-chief Betsy DeVos has had to admit, because the data are so stark.
Large-scale independent studies in D.C.,Indiana, Louisiana, and Ohio show that for kids who left public schools, harmful voucher impacts actually meet or exceed what the pandemic did to test scores. That’s also a similar impact in Louisiana to what Hurricane Katrina did to student achievement back in 2005.
Think about that next time you hear a politician or activist claim we need taxpayer support for private schools to offset what the pandemic did to student learning. Here, their cure would in test score terms be quite literally worse than the disease.
There’s another data point you need to know up front: vouchers overwhelmingly fund children who were already in private school without them. In states that have released those numbers—Arizona, New Hampshire, and Wisconsin—we know more than 75% of voucher applicants came from private schools.
The bottom-line: most kids using vouchers didn’t need them to go to private school, and the few kids who actually did use vouchers to transfer sectors schools suffer average test score drops on par with what a once-in-a-generation pandemic did to test scores too.
If you’re a picture person, our friends at the National Coalition for Public Education were kind enough to put their considerable talents into two graphics based on these data I provided to them.
Notice the citations these graphs include. They’re the same as the hyperlinks above. These data come from independent sources and from non-partisan journalists. That’s a critically important part of this story.
And then there’s this, before we get into the details: the same people pushing vouchers are the same people working to undermine fair elections and the right to vote.
None of these are metaphors, and this is not a drill.
So how did we come to this?
1. A Quick History of Voucher Research
First let’s talk about the evidence.
I came into the school voucher research community early. It was around 2001 or so, as a young graduate student assistant for a study of privately funded vouchers led by the conservative professor Paul E. Peterson who was based at both Harvard and the conservative Hoover Institution at Stanford (never heard of Hoover? Think Condoleeza Rice.)
Peterson and his protégé Jay Greene had already done one study of Milwaukee’s publicly funded voucher program, as well as the one in Cleveland that was about to be the subject of the U.S. Supreme Court’s first favorable ruling on voucher funding. That work generally showed positive results for vouchers. As did the research of a young academic named Cecilia Rouse, who is now President Biden’s chief economist.
But they were small programs. What policymakers and researchers call a “pilot phase.” Back then when both parties cared at least nominally about evidence, you wouldn’t expand a program like vouchers without testing it. So those early tests seemed somewhat positive.
The first research I joined was Peterson and team’s next project: multi-site studies in Dayton, New York City, and Washington D.C. Those programs were also pilot-size. And the New York site in particular showed some limited evidence of voucher success. But overall the lead researchers focused as much on things like parental satisfaction and measures of civic engagement as metrics. That work resulted in a book called The Education Gap. You can find my name in the credits if you own a copy. If you don’t own one, don’t waste your money.
No one knew it at the time, but the mixed results documented in The Education Gap were to be the best vouchers were ever going to do—and ever have done since by an academic based team looking at voucher test scores.
Just a short time later in 2005, I joined a new voucher evaluation led by Patrick Wolf, another Peterson protégé and contributor to The Education Gap. Wolf was by then ensconced with Jay Greene at the University of Arkansas Department of Education Reform, a Walton Family-funded academic group that was about to train a new generation of voucher advocates. Most notably Corey DeAngelis, now at Betsy DeVos’s 501(c)4 voucher lobbying group American Federation for Children.
The Milwaukee evaluation, which was officially done for the state of Wisconsin, lasted from 2005-2010. We found no evidence in five years that voucher kids outperformed public school kids. Two exceptions: we found limited evidence that graduation rates and college enrollment were somewhat higher for the voucher kids. We also found that voucher kids improved when the state required private schools to participate in the same No Child Left Behind-style accountability systems as public schools. In particular once voucher schools knew their performance would be made public they—shockingly!—improved their outcomes.
At the same time as the Milwaukee evaluation, Patrick Wolf and other Arkansas colleagues were working on a new evaluation of Washington D.C.’s federally funded voucher program. That study showed no difference in test scores, but large positive graduate results.
That pattern of “no test score benefits, some attainment benefits” has stuck in the research narrative even among voucher skeptics. But as I recently explained in a piece for the Brookings Institution, it’s just that: a narrative. Other studies in New York, Louisiana and Florida all show no real advantages for vouchers on educational attainment.
And certainly nothing to offset the cataclysmic results that began to come out after the early-stage evaluations I just described. The newer D.C.,Indiana, Louisiana, and Ohio studies that took place after 2013 and have showed pandemic and Katrina-sized harm to student test scores are all of at-scale voucher programs.
What do I mean by “at scale?” I mean that despite limited evidence in those pilot programs, vouchers have been steadily expanding across the country, and within states. So those D.C., Indiana Louisiana and Ohio studies represent our best understanding to date of what happens when you expand vouchers beyond the initial test phase. The answer: horrific impacts on student outcomes.
There are a number of reasons this could be, but I tend to argue we need not overthink this. Vouchers just don’t work. The kids who stand to gain from private schooling were and are already there. For the vast majority of kids, they’re better off in public schools. That’s what the latest voucher research shows.
As an example of what I mean: consider that in Wisconsin (which has not had a statewide study since ours ended in 2010), 41% of voucher-receiving schools have opened and then closed and failed since public funding began in the early 1990s.
That’s what happens when policymakers divert tax dollars to private schools: it’s like venture capitalism for education. It’s like Theranos but for private schooling. New providers race to gobble up new taxpayer money, but most of them have no business near kids.
Now, to fully understand why these terrible policies exist and in fact have never spread faster and further than they are today, we need to understand the politics. And to understand the politics, we need to understand the money.
On the one hand it’s pretty simple. Once you understand that the same people pushing vouchers are the same people funding groups that insist Donald Trump won the election and are now organizing a similar “Big Lie” for 2022’s results, you understand a lot. But read on.
2. Funding Vouchers, Funding Election Lies
It’s difficult to tell how much money has been spent to advocate for school vouchers over the years. But we know perhaps the biggest single funder—perhaps even larger than Betsy DeVos herself—is the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. The Bradley Foundation is a little-known group based in Wisconsin and they’ve given tens of millions of dollars to voucher activism over the years.
Bradley not only funds voucher activism, it funds voucher research too. It was a major funder of the Milwaukee evaluation I was part of and described above. I don’t think they directly influenced our results, but generally speaking you don’t want activism and research funding to mix. Think about it this way: should the Sackler family fund research on the addictive properties of oxycontin? Should Exxon fund studies about the existence of climate change?
For me though, the real problem today is that the Bradley Foundation is hardly limiting itself to supporting research and political advocacy for private schooling. As the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer has meticulously documented in her reporting on financing behind Big Lie activism sowing doubts about President Biden’s 2020 victory, the Bradley Foundation is the convening funder around those activities—the “extraordinary force”, in Mayer’s words, funding and coordinating the Big Lie and other efforts to undermine the integrity of democratic elections.
Bradley is not alone. The Heritage Foundation, a right-wing organization known for its pro-voucher advocacy is, according to Mayer, “working with the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC)—a corporate-funded nonprofit that generates model laws for state legislators—on ways to impose new voting restrictions.”
In recent months, Heritage has also distributed talking points that under the guise of objective research attack school diversity and inclusion and directly question health care support for LGBTQ children. Heritage has recently released a report-card style rubric rating state laws on a so-called “Education Freedom” index for tax-supported private tuition. That report card includes the extent to which issues like diversity or sexual preference are components of public school teaching curricula.
The author of each of these documents is a Heritage Senior Fellow named Jay P. Greene. The same Jay Greene who while a conservative scholar at the University of Arkansas was co-director of that Bradley-funded voucher project that hired me back in 2005.
Greene is not alone in the Heritage-Bradley nexus. Cleta Mitchell, a lawyer who participated in Donald Trump’s infamous phone call to the Georgia Secretary of State demanding evidence that would overturn the state’s election results, was actively training poll watchers to question voters leading up to the 2022 midterms in places like my own state of Michigan. The night before the election, the New York Times even ran a story about Mitchell’s work in Michigan. The headline read: “Fueled by Falsehoods, a Michigan Group is Ready to Challenge the Vote.”
Mitchell is a known elections conspiracy theorist, according to CNN, and figures prominently in Mayer’s New Yorker reporting on broader election-related organizing. In her spare time Mitchell is on the Board of Directors of—wait for it!—the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. She’s actually an officer on the Board too.
Michigan is important because we have a voucher proposal waiting to go to the state legislature—even though voucher opponent Gretchen Whitmer has won reelection. That proposal, backed by billionaire and privatization advocate Betsy DeVos, exploits a quirk in the state law allowing lame-duck Republicans to pass the voucher plan without the governor’s signature.
The spokesman for the DeVos voucher campaign is a man named Fred Wszolek. Wszolek is also the strategist for a group that tried unsuccessfully to prevent abortion access from becoming enshrined in the Michigan state constitution. And he heads a political action committee (PAC) called Michigan Strong, which has worked to elect now-defeated DeVos-backed GOP gubernatorial candidate Tudor Dixon.
Also working for Dixon was Kyle Olson of the Education Action Group, an entity devoted to right-wing education reform that’s received money from Charles Koch, the DeVos Family and Harry Bradley—he of the Bradley Foundation.
That’s just one example, but you get the idea: the same people working to push school vouchers are the same people working to undermine elections. And in some cases even reproductive rights.
3. So Why Now?
I’ve spent the last six months writing column after column in opinion pages across the country trying to warn ordinary readers who aren’t education lifers about the dangers of vouchers. You can read samples here or here or here or here if you like. There are more than 10 in all.
Because of my long career working in the middle of all these voucher advocates and researchers, I’ve been asked multiple times what changed my mind. Or, more specifically, why am I speaking out today?
I hope the story I’ve told you above answers some of that. But the reality is, I was also doing other things. I had a young family, other research interests, and other professional tasks like editing the country’s premier education policy journal.
Most of all I had a naïve sense that the facts would speak for themselves. Remember, those pandemic-sized voucher failures began appearing back in 2013. I was an associate professor then, newly arrived at Michigan State University after receiving tenure at the University of Kentucky.
To me, after a decade of mixed-at-best results that I outlined here, I assumed that catastrophic results like those in Louisiana—and then confirmed in Indiana, Ohio, and D.C.—would have killed vouchers a thousand times over.
It’s sort of quaint now, that assumption of mine. In my research community, which is centered in the Association for Education Finance and Policy, we talk a lot about using evidence to inform policy. It’s a nice idea, but vouchers are the big, glaring and alarming counterpoint. We have never seen such one-sided, consistently negative research results as we have for school vouchers in the education research community.
And yet they thrive.
To me, the piece to that puzzle is politics. Negative voucher results aren’t the only thing to happen since 2013.
2016 happened. Donald Trump happened. January 6th happened. Dobbs v. Jackson happened.
Voucher advocates are overwhelmingly on one side of those events. And they’ve racked up some wins.
We know voucher programs exist today not for how they might help some kids, but for how they might exclude others. We know private schools taking public money can and often do discriminate against certain children. In Florida for example, one private school barring LGBTQ kids has received $1.6 million so far in taxpayer funding. In Indiana, more than $16 million has gone to schools refusing to admit LGBTQ kids—or even kids with LGBTQ parents!—or about 1 out of every 10 private schools on the taxpayer dime.
I wish I had come around earlier to the level of alarm I’m raising today. Others have even without having to take a kind of road to Damascus like I did.
I’m a tenured full professor now. I’ve had a successful career working hard to bring evidence to public policy. I firmly believe that school vouchers are a fundamental threat not just to student learning, but also to democracy and to human rights.
So on vouchers I’ve come to the same view any number of us would if we stumbled onto a massive fraud in our workplace, or if we saw a young child being bullied simply for being who they are. None of it is okay.
And if you see something, you have to say something.
Vouchers were originally sold as a way to “save” poor children of color from failing schools. We now know that this claim is not true. Poor kids who use vouchers typically fall behind their peers in public school. In state after state, vouchers are subsidizing students who are already enrolled in private schools and never attended public schools. The funding of vouchers takes money away from the public schools attended by most students, meaning larger classes, fewer resources.
Nearly Half of Universal Voucher Applicants are from Wealthier Communities
Total State Private School Subsidies Reach $600M
Dave Wells, Research Director
Curt Cardine, Research Fellow
Distribution of Universal ESAs vs. Distribution of Students
Key Findings:
45% of universal Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA) applicants come from the wealthiest quarter of students in the state. Their families live in zip codes where the median household income is $80,000 or more, more than 30% greater than the state’s median income.
32% of universal ESA applicants are from families with a median income less than $60,000, which comprise just over half the students in the state.
80% of universal ESA applicants are not in public school, meaning these students are already attending private schools, being home schooled, or just entering schooling. At a cost of about $7,000 per voucher this equates to potential new cost to the state of $177 million.
Arizona will spend more than $600 million on private school subsidies—universal ESAs and Student Tuition Organization Scholarships—in the 2022-23 school year.
Only 3.5% of all applicants came from zip codes that had a district high school or 2 K-8 district schools with a D or F grade. No zip codes with a median income above $80,000 had a district high school or 2 K-8 district schools receiving a D or F grade.
There will be an increased risk of fraud with lax oversight to ensure that families don’t double dip by using both ESA and STO scholarship funds.
Now that the October 15, 2022 deadline to apply has passed, the Grand Canyon Institute (GCI) has analyzed the zip code distribution of applications for the new universal Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA) voucher program that Gov. Ducey signed into law in July. GCI’s analysis finds that the program’s primary beneficiaries are students from wealthier families, similar to its previous analysis before the deadline, and that 92.5% of those students have access to well-performing schools.
Zip codes were provided by the Arizona Dept. of Education for universal voucher applicants. The total number of universal voucher applicants numbered 31,750. From that number GCI deducted 69 that were either out of state or had left the zip code blank. This report updates an earlier GCI analysis published on October 6. In September, GCI evaluated details of the program, including the inability to measure academic impacts of the program due to the absence of accountability measures in the legislation. Academic impacts were also part of a 2018 GCI report regarding Arizona’s private school subsidy programs.
GCI compared the distribution of applications to both the median household income as well as the distribution of K-12 students in the zip codes of applicants using data from the 2020 American Community Survey by the U.S. Bureau of the Census.
As noted in the graphs below, about 45% of all applications come from parents or guardians residing in zip codes that have a median household income of $80,000 or more, more than 30% greater than the state’s median household income.($61,529) These represent the wealthiest quarter of students in the state (gold and silver parts of the graphs). This is similar to GCI’s October analysis.
By contrast, parents or guardians in zip codes with a median household income less than $60,000 which comprise just over half the students in the state, represent not quite one-third of all applications (blue section). This is also similar to GCI’s October analysis.
Gov. Ducey in his press release after signing the universal voucher expansion noted, “This is a monumental moment for all of Arizona’s students. Our kids will no longer be locked in under-performing schools.” GCI examined this claim by identifying zip codes that either contained a district high school with a D or F grade OR had at least two K-8 district schools with a D or F grade. One school with a D or F grade hardly speaks poorly for a zip code. For instance, one Kyrene District elementary school in 85284 (South Tempe) received a “D,” but that is not indicative of the very highly rated schools in that relatively affluent zip code. Zip codes typically have many schools, so even in the D or F zip codes, most schools (district or charter) did not receive a D or F. Consequently, GCI’s D or F zip code identifier understates school grades within those zip codes.
GCI found only 3.5% of all applicants came from zip codes that had a high school or 2 K-8 schools with a D or F grade. No zip codes with a median income above $80,000 had a high school or 2 K-8 schools receiving a D or F grade.
These results belie the claim that the program was primarily designed for average and lower income families. Rather, similar to the flat tax passed by the legislature, the primary beneficiaries of this government policy are wealthier families.
Total Private School Subsidies $600 Million
($180 Million from Universal ESAs)
Arizona has extensive subsidy programs for private schools. Dollar-for-dollar tax credit donations to private Student Tuition Organizations amounted to $250 million in FY2021 from individuals and corporations. In addition, the existing ESA program which serves a large number of students with disabilities was on track to cost the state at least $190 million plus administrative costs for FY2023 based on program growth. Collectively private school subsidies likely cost at least $440 million since tax credit data was less current.
Universal voucher access looks to add up to $180 million to that number taking the total cost of private school subsidies to in excess of $600 million dollars.
The Arizona Department of Education reports that about 80% of universal ESA applicants are not in public school, meaning these students are already attending private schools, being home schooled, or just entering schooling. At a cost of about $7,000 per voucher this equates to a cost of $177 million.
The remaining 20% of applicants are currently attending public district or charter schools. The voucher formula provides 90% of the state’s per pupil funding formula for charter schools plus charter additional assistance. While students moving from charters to private schools represent a net savings of about $700, vouchers to students who attended district schools represent a net cost to the state’s general fund. The voucher exceeds what the state is currently paying because district additional assistance is significantly less than charter additional assistance. Charter additional assistance is between $2,000 and 2,300 per pupil while district additional assistance is between $500 and $550. The difference exceeds the 10% overall reduction from charter payments for vouchers. In addition, students moving from wealthier district schools cost the state even more. Under the state’s education equalization formula their districts rely primarily on local property taxes, not state funding.
Movement from charter schools is more likely to occur, from GCI’s past analysis. However, the loss from district movement is significantly more, such that it’s likely to be an overall net cost to the state.
An unknown number of these students may already be using the STO private school scholarship program, so some parents may switch to ESAs which would reduce the net cost to the state. Likewise, not every applicant may qualify.
The estimated total cost of up to $180 million is significantly higher than the $33.4 million projected by the Joint Legislative Budget Committee for FY2023. The 31,7500 applicants are more than five times what the Joint Legislative Budget Committee projected of about 5,800 applicants in the first year of the program. The JLBC estimate though was very rough and saw the program doubling in year two.
STO scholarship award amounts are likely to increase in order for them to stay more competitive with the universal ESAs and because the number of of STO scholarship applicants may decline. Keep in mind, STO scholarships are administered by privately-run organizations that can take up to 10% of tax credit donations to cover administrative costs. Universal ESAs represent competition for their business. Some past STO scholarship awardees may switch to the universal ESA program, which could reduce contributions to STOs (it was common for STO donors to contribute on behalf of a particular recipient), but since the tax credit costs contributors nothing, they may persist.
Many of the new applicants are likely homeschooled students, which the JLBC had estimated at 38,000 who are now eligible for state funding.
Risk of Misuse Rises Significantly
Two potential issues arise with universal vouchers that might fall under the general category of fraud-whether pursued civilly or more likely with internal enforcement-relates to violations of the ESA contract. These occur if an ESA recipient were to misspend monies or double dip by receiving an STO scholarship simultaneously in violation of the ESA contract. Since ESAs go through the Department of Education, students are well tracked. An audit process is designed to prevent misspent dollars.
As GCI noted in September, already a number of permitted ESA expenses are questionable. But with a wider program that expands to homeschool, such oversight may be more challenging. Parents or guardians accepting ESAs sign a contract where they also agree not to accept an STO scholarship. However, the state does not track recipients of STO scholarships outside broad aggregate reporting to the Arizona Department of Revenue. It has been evident for a number of years that many parents or guardians seek and receive scholarships from multiple STOs, such that in 2019-2020 about 90,000 scholarships were awarded to around 50,000 private school students who were not receiving an ESA voucher (see diagram above). While some parents or guardians may not currently be in compliance with this restriction, the narrower scope of ESA eligibility limited that opportunity. However, with universal vouchers, the potential that a parent or guardian might attempt to double dip from both the ESA and STO scholarship programs rises significantly and an effective mechanism to catch when that occurs does not appear to exist.
For more information, contact: Dave Wells, Research Director dwells@azgci.org, 602.595.1025, Ext. 2
The Grand Canyon Institute (GCI) is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to informing and improving public policy in Arizona through evidence-based, independent, objective, nonpartisan research. GCI makes a good faith effort to ensure that findings are reliable, accurate, and based on reputable sources. While publications reflect the view of the institute, they may not reflect the view of individual members of the board.SUPPORT US
Billy Townsend, Florida blogger, has reported regularly on Florida’s gaming of NAEP scores. He writes here that Governor Ron DeSantis is carrying out Jeb Bush’s old trick to inflate 4th grade NAEP scores. He calls the governor Ron Jebsantis. The trick is third grade retention, which ensures that the lowest scoring third graders never take the fourth grade NAEP test (the kids who take the NAEP test are selected at random).
Thus, DeSantis put out a flashy press release celebrating fourth grade NAEP scores in the test scores recently released. But, as usual, DeSantis neglects to mention the collapse of eighth grade NAEP scores. Somehow the kids who were retained in third grade managed to skip fourth grade and rejoin their classmates by eighth grade.
Here are his numbers, drawn from NAEP reports:
With that in mind, here is a view of Florida’s 2022 NAEP scores peaking in elementary school and dramatically worsening with the older cohorts —- which is ALL of the red numbers after the green baseline.
I personally put no stock in the twelfth grade numbers (which Billy extrapolated) because NAEP stopped testing seniors a decade ago. Seniors know that NAEP doesn’t count and they don’t do their best. Some don’t even try. Their answer sheets had doodles, or some just picked the (A) answer to every question or some were blank.
But the stark drop from fourth grade to eighth grade says something’s fishy in Florida.
Diane Ravitch's blog 