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Wacky Heritage Foundation Report Warns that Charter Schools Are “Woke”

By dianeravitch
July 14, 2024 //
16

A recent Heritage report warns that parents can’t trust charter schools because so many of them are just as “woke” as public schools. Some are even more woke than public schools.

The report, written by Jay Greene, Ian Kingsbury, and Jason Bedrick, asserts that the major philanthropic foundations supporting charter schools—the Walton Family Foundation and the Gates Foundation—are also woke. This is where it gets crazy. Walton is woke? The anti-union, rightwing Waltons?

The solution the authors prefer is a fully funded voucher system, where schools are not regulated by the state and do not need money from woke philanthropies like Walton or Gates. That way, parents who are racist, homophobic, and sexist can find a school that teaches their values.

They begin:

There is a loose set of political and social values that can succinctly be labeled as “woke.” These woke values tend to be characterized by a departure from traditional American and classical-liberal values of individual responsibility and equal treatment in favor of emphasizing differentiated treatment by group identity and social rather than individual justice. Of course, there is a constituency of parents who favor an education infused with these woke values—but they tend to be a distinct minority. As past research suggests, when parents have more control over the education of their own children, that education tends to be less woke.

Given that parental empowerment is associated with less woke education, one might expect that charter schools—which are chosen by parents rather than strictly assigned based on the location of a family’s home—are less woke than nearby public schools operated by school districts. But school choice could produce more woke options if those choices are highly regulated and controlled by distant regulators and philanthropists. School districts still retain a fair amount of responsiveness to the preferences of the communities they serve given their democratic governance.

Charter schools, on the other hand, might become less responsive to the preferences of local parents if they have to please state authorizers to be established and remain open and if they are overly dependent on national philanthropies to subsidize their operations. Those charter schools may have to adopt woke values to gain permission to open from the public authorities that grant them their charter and to receive funding, especially for capital expenses, from large donors with progressive values.

Parents may nevertheless choose woke charter schools, either because they are among the minority that hold those values or because safety and quality of instruction may induce parents to select a school that is otherwise at odds with their values. By contrast, policies that permit private school choice with vouchers or K–12 education savings accounts do not require permission from an authorizer for schools to open their doors and therefore are less likely to require capital funds from donors since they often already have school buildings. That means that private schools are typically more directly accountable to parents than charter schools and so are more likely to reflect the values of the families they serve.

It is an open question whether highly constrained and regulated types of school choice, like charter schools, are actually less responsive to parental preferences regarding values than are public district schools, which are also regulated and insulated from parental control by unions and the imperfections of democratic governance.

The purpose of this Backgrounder is to examine whether, on average, charter schools embrace a woke education more strongly than do nearby public schools operated by school districts. By analyzing key words in student handbooks as a proxy for wokeness, the authors find that charter schools actually tend to be more woke than traditional district schools. The authors consider how regulatory and donor capture of charter schools could be reduced so that this type of school choice could be more responsive to parental preferences regarding the values emphasized in the education of their own children.

They conclude:

School choice should empower parents to obtain an education for their own children that is consistent with their values. That is still occurring with private school choice, but with charter school choice it is falling short. Regulatory and financial constraints need to be removed from charter schools so they can better align with the values preferences of parents. In states and localities where charter schools have not been able to be more responsive to parents, private school choice is the better path for avoiding the woke capture of school choice.

Categories Charter Schools, Disruption, Education Industry, Extremism, Privatization, School Choice, Walton Foundation

North Carolina: Five Words for Voters: “And You’re OK with That?”

By dianeravitch
July 13, 2024 //
7

Leaders of the pro-public school organization called Public Schools First in North Carolina discovered that many public school parents and advocates are unaware that the state’s General Assembly has passed a budget that gives vouchers to the rich. They are distributing the following opinion piece from the Greensboro News to inform the public:

Our Opinion: Five words for GOP candidates: ‘And you’re OK with That?’

“And you’re OK with that?”

As Republican candidates for the state legislature begin to the make the rounds this fall, they should be hearing those five words over and over from constituents of all political stripes.

At every stop, on every stump, they should be pressed to give straight answers to that simple question on three issues:

Private-school vouchers

Even as they’ve increased taxpayer funding for private school tuition, adding wealthy families to the dole, many local public districts, including our own in Guilford and Forsyth counties, complain that they are seriously underfunded.

To be more specific, your party plans to plow hundreds of additional millions in taxpayer money into private school tuition assistance. Although 40% of that money ($96 million) would go to middle-class and working-class families earning between $57,721 to $115,440 a year (for a family of four), 44% (or $107 million) would go families earning $115,441 to $259,740.

And 16% (or $39 million) would go to those who need it the very least: wealthy families earning more than $259,741 annually.

One Democratic lawmaker likened it to asking low- and moderate-income taxpayers to help pay for a wealthy kid’s Porsche.

How do you square that with your rhetoric against “the welfare state” and profligate spending of other people’s money?

How do you square it with public school funding gaps throughout the state?

And how do you tell public schools no, that’s all we have to spend and then turn around and tell rich families y’all come. Who do we make the check out to?

Keeping secrets

Your party also slipped a provision into the state budget bill last fall that allows state lawmakers to decide for themselves whether they will make any of their documents accessible to the public. 

By law, they also get to choose whether to destroy or sell documents. They’re the decider. Which means they’re creating their own deep state right here and now on Tobacco Road.

What are they trying to hide and why?

And what gives them the right to membership in this exclusive club, but not others (the governor, the lieutenant governor, the attorney general and other North Carolina officials who are elected statewide need not apply)?

Easy money

Then there’s the provision the Republican-controlled legislature embedded within an (unnecessary) anti-masking bill that allows more “dark money” donations to political candidates in North Carolina.

As the current law stands, candidates must disclose the names of donors to their campaigns. They also are prohibited from taking donations from corporations, and contributions from individuals and political groups may not exceed $6,400.

This bill would change all that by making it legal for political parties in the state to take money from “Super PACs,” which are allowed to keep their donors secret and may receive unlimited amounts of money.

Those Super PACs would be able to collect the money and pass it on to the political parties, which could then funnel it to candidates, no questions asked.

At least your party has made no secret of the fact that it designed this new rule specifically with the GOP gubernatorial candidate in mind. Mark Robinson substantially trails his Democratic opponent, Josh Stein, in fundraising.

To recap, are you OK with:

Channeling taxpayer money to rich people as public schools go wanting?

Keeping documents and correspondence a secret from the public … unless you decide to share it?

And allowing anonymous cash to flow unfettered to candidates of both parties?

If the answer is yes, please explain how any of this benefits most North Carolinians and why we should vote for you anyway.

And how this in any way resembles government for, by and of the people.

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Corporate Reform, Disruption, Education Industry, Elections, Ethics, North Carolina, Privatization, School Choice, Segregation, Vouchers

Peter Greene Debunks the Leading Evangelist for the School Choice Movement

By dianeravitch
July 9, 2024 //
5

Peter Greene, who taught for 39 years in Pennsylvania, wrote recently in The Progressive about Corey DeAngelis, who travels the nation to trash public schools and to advocate for vouchers. If you hate public schools and unions, he’s your guy. If you adore Betsy DeVos and her plans to destroy local communities and to get more children into discriminatory religious schools, he’s your guy.

Greene writes:

Corey DeAngelis is an influential, if not the most influential, voice in the rightwing campaign to demonize public schools and privatize public education. The guy’s résuméhits all the bases in the libertarian gameplan. After earning a doctorate at the University of Arkansas’s education reform program (funded bythe pro-school choice Walton family), DeAngelis helped found the Education Freedom Institute, became a senior fellow at the Reason Foundation, worked as an adjunct scholar at the CATO Institute, took up an appointment as a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, and was hired on as a senior fellow at Betsy DeVos’s American Federation for Children.

He still holds all of those jobs, but his more common title is “school choice evangelist.” As the recent school voucher wave has surged in state after state, DeAngelis has been there to spread the word. While on tour in support of his new book, he distills the current pro-voucher argument.

In a recent talk at the Heritage Foundation, DeAngelis touched on most of the main arguments for vouchers (many of them false) and revealed a few truths about the pro-voucher strategy.

1. The Evil Unions and COVID

The villainy of the teachers union is a thread that runs through much of DeAngelis’s argument, especially related to the COVID-19 pandemic narrative. DeAngelis blames the unions (and American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten) for “fear mongering” and accuses them of extorting ransom payments by holding schools hostage. The unions, he charged, used the pandemic to empower themselves and the “government schools” that he calls “a jobs program for adults.”

There’s no recognition that teachers had a legitimate fear during the pandemic or that hundreds of educators died of COVID-19. Nor did he mention the many private and non-union charter schools that also closed their doors. Every problematic decision that he cited from pandemic times is blamed on the union, with no mention that Betsy DeVos’s Department of Education provided little or no guidance to districts facing difficult decisions in an evolving situation.  

DeAngelis’s narrative argues that parents viewing Zoom school were appalled and awakened by what they saw. That oft-repeated tale stands in contrast to polls that show the vast majority of parents were satisfied with how their schools handled COVID-19. A 2022 Gallup poll found that, while the general public’s opinion of public schools is “souring,” parents’ favorable opinion of their own school matched pre-pandemic levels. The common sense conclusion to draw from this data is that people who don’t have first-hand experience with public schools are developing a low opinion of them based on some other source of information.

DeAngelis’s argument has other flaws. He claimed that the unions extracted a huge ransom from schools. But he also argued that pandemic relief funds given to schools never reached teachers and were, instead, soaked up by administrative bloat, which would seem to be a big tactical blunder on the unions’ part.

2. The Evil Unions and the Democratic Party

DeAngelis made the unusual claim that Democrats aren’t having kids, but Republicans are. But that, he said, won’t save conservatives because schools are fully “infiltrated by radical leftist union teachers.” The left uses schools as a way to control other people’s children. The Democratic Party, he added, is a fully owned subsidiary of the teachers’ union.

DeAngelis also repeated a false narrative of the National School Board Association’s supposed campaign to muzzle parents. In fall 2021, local school boards found their usually sleepy meetings had turned into wild, threatening, and even violent chaos. The NSBA turned to the Biden Administration for help, calling some of the actions “the equivalent of a form of domestic terrorism or hate crimes.” This was quickly and inaccurately cast as the Democratic administration calling parents domestic terrorists.

The resulting controversy caused the NSBA to lose some members, which DeAngelis seemed happy about. “Play stupid games, win stupid prizes,” he said.

This narrative that smears public school-friendly groups fits a general pattern of conservative attacks on groups seen as Democratic Party supporters.

Open the link to read more about the DeVos-funded public school hater who is spreading his propaganda across the nation.

Categories Betsy DeVos, Bigotry, Billionaires, Democracy, Education Industry, Evil, Extremism, Privatization, Propaganda, Segregation, Shame, Unions, Vouchers

Chris Hayes: What Is Project 2025? A Frightening Plan for Trump’s Next Term: LINK ADDED

By dianeravitch
July 8, 2024 //
50

It occasionally happens that I forget to add a link. I forgot to add the link for this great segment by Chris Hayes. I was embroiled in a computer glitch all day (my computer and printer are not communicating). Please watch the segment to learn what horrors Trump has in store for us.

Chris Hayes has a regular evening news program on MSNBC.

In this short video, he explains Project 2025, which spells out plans for major changes in the government and in our freedoms.

It’s a short video. Please watch.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Billionaires, Civil Rights, Democracy, Deregulation, Disruption, Education Industry, Elections, Environment, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Freedom to Read, Funding, Gender, Privatization, Shame, Trump

Will Arkansas Citizens Demand Accountability for Voucher Schools?

By dianeravitch
July 5, 2024 //
5

Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders and the Arkansas, which has a Republican supermajority, passed a voucher plan that allows the state’s voucher schools to evade the accountability required of public schools.

Outraged citizens have been gathering signatures for a referendum that would subject voucher schools to the same accountability as public schools. Today is the deadline to submit signatures. We will know soon if the rebellion against voucher schools’ freedom from accountability succeeded.

The Arkansas Times reported.

Organizers are racing to try to meet the signature threshold for an ambitious ballot initiative that would dramatically reorient the state’s K-12 education priorities and hold private schools receiving public funds to the same standards as those for public schools.

They still need thousands of signatures and face an uphill climb to meet the threshold by the July 5 deadline. We won’t know until the bitter end whether or not the group manages to get over the hump (more than a thousand volunteers are working at events across the state over the next 24 hours).

But I think it’s worth taking a moment to examine the stakes. The Arkansas Educational Rights Amendment would force the legislature to make real commitments to areas of educational need with a proven track record of improving learning outcomes. And it would force accountability on the governor’s voucher scheme, which is funneling tens of millions of dollars in taxpayer money into the pockets of private school families via a program with a long history of catastrophic failure in improving learning outcomes when states actually take the trouble to fairly measure and transparently report results at the private schools.

At a time when Republicans have total control of state government and Gov. Sarah Huckabee haughtily rules as if she has an infallible and possibly divine mandate, the education amendment would be the most comprehensive and far-reaching progressive policy victory in Arkansas since Medicaid expansion passed more than a decade ago.

Legislating by direct democracy

The education amendment is somewhat unusual for a ballot initiative, which usually present relatively straightforward “up-or-down” questions on issues like the minimum wage, casinos, weed, etc. The ballot initiative currently collecting signatures to reverse the state’s abortion ban is like that. Yes, there are details — abortions are allowed up to 18 weeks and for certain exceptions such as rape, incest and saving the life of the mother — but the fundamental issue is a yes-or-no question about whether or not abortion should be legal.

If someone wants to quibble with the headline above and say that the abortion initiative would be the biggest win in terms of liberal priorities in the state, I wouldn’t argue much. But it’s different in kind. The education amendment lays out a very broad-reaching slate of priorities and then would force the Legislature to act. It doesn’t articulate just how lawmakers should go about implementing it. It just establishes certain areas that are an absolute priority — required by law — tying lawmakers hands. The ripple effects through every aspect of the budget would be massive. It would steer the state toward a massive policy project that state leaders don’t want to do. The Legislature has prioritized vouchers and tax cuts skewed toward the wealthy and ignored issues like access to pre-k. If the public votes for this constitutional amendment, it would mandate that the Legislature make new tradeoffs.

This is why Arkansas Republican lawmakers are not fans of direct democracy. The overwhelming majority of voters in the state are going to back the candidate with an “R” by their name. But that doesn’t mean they share their narrow ideological obsessions. They will happily vote for minimum wage increases by huge majorities even if their elected officials hate it. With the advent of one-party rule, the state’s government is not responsive to issues that voters care about that don’t align with doctrinaire right-wing dogma. That’s why you’re seeing more expansive efforts to legislate from the bottom up via ballot initiative. Pre-k is popular; vouchers are not.

Equal standards and transparency for public and private schools getting vouchers

The push to put the education amendment before voters comes in the first year of Arkansas LEARNS, the education overhaul backed by Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders and passed by the Republican supermajority in the Legislature last year. Among the law’s most controversial provisions was the creation of a voucher program to help families cover the tuition and other costs of private schools. The program began this year and will be phased in until all K-12 students in the state are eligible to apply starting with the 2025-26 school year.

One curious feature of LEARNS is that the accountability measures it establishes for private schools accepting vouchers are not the same as those for public schools. The amendment would seek to reverse that, insisting on the same accreditation and testing for all schools receiving public funds, as well as public reporting by school of the results. This would allow citizens to see how well the voucher program is working as compared to public schools and help guide parents.

In the early days of voucher programs, advocates wanted to arrange apples-to-apples comparisons of student performance because they thought the voucher students would perform better. But once voucher programs scaled up to statewide efforts, the results were awful: Students who switched from public school to private school via voucher saw their test scores plummet to an unheard of degree — akin to the learning loss associated with a natural disaster like Hurricane Katrina or the COVID pandemic.

You might think such empirical results would give voucher advocates pause, but instead they shifted gears to trying to keep the test results secret or making comparisons impossible. Like many other new voucher programs in red states sweeping the country, Arkansas allowed private schools receiving boatloads of public money to arrange their own standards and tests, with none of the results made public. What could go wrong?

The irony here is that voucher advocates were often the ones screaming loudly about the need for accountability via testing in public schools, and pointing to those very results to disparage the quality of education in public schools. So you wind up with this very strange two-step: Voucher advocates will say something like, “these public school standards have led to lots of kids being below grade level in reading, let’s try something new.” But the measurement of how many kids are at grade level in reading is itself something we know via the standards, assessment and reporting! If voucher advocates claim to want to improve on these metrics, why wouldn’t we measure and report them at private schools, too?

I’ll let you know what happens. Republicans are terrified of voucher referenda: They always lose. To the extent that the public learns that voucher schools are actually worse than public schools and that the primary beneficiaries of vouchers are private school families whose children never attended public schools, the more likely that the public will oppose vouchers. Sending public money to private schools has never won a state referendum.

Categories Accountability, Arkansas, Education Industry, Privatization, Religion, Separation of church and state, Vouchers

Ohio: Charter Schools Ripping Off Taxpayers

By dianeravitch
June 28, 2024 //
2

Steve Dyer, former legislator and perennial budget hawk, tracks wasteful spending on charter schools in Ohio in this post. Ohio is throwing away billions on charters and vouchers, at the expense of its public schools, which typically outperform its privatized schools. A pro-charter analyst concluded that Ohio’s charter schools were among the worst in the nation.

Dyer writes on his blog Tenth Period:

It’s difficult to say that a $1.3 billion state program can go under the radar, but lately it seems that Ohio’s charter school industry has done just that, thanks in large part to the absolute explosion of taxpayer funded subsidies given to wealthy private school parents.

And while the state’s largest taxpayer ripoff ever — in excess of $200 million plus — happened as the result of the infamous ECOT scandal (the state is only going after about $100 million of the $200 million plus that I calculated because they just didn’t do the forensic audit of years prior to the couple prior to the school shutting down), the per pupil funding explosion in Ohio’s charter schools has been equally remarkable.

The amount of money the state sends, on average, to Ohio’s charter schools is now more than what 129 Ohio School Districts SPEND per equivalent pupil, including all locally raised property and/or income taxes. 

That’s right. 

Ohio now provides Ohio’s Charter Schools (all but 5 of which rated in the bottom 25% of all schools nationally) more money on average than 1 in 5 Ohio school districts spend per equivalent pupil, including all their local property tax money. 

I’ve included a list of all the school districts that spend less per equivalent pupil than Charter Schools receive on average in state aid.

That’s quite a list, don’t you think?

This explains how Ohio’s charter schools now get nearly $1.3 billion in state aid while having fewer students than they had in the 2013-2014 school year, I suppose. That year — the record for number of charter school students — had about $300 million less going to charters despite having about 1,000 more students than today.

This is why it’s critical to keep our eyes on all the privatization efforts, not just the shiniest one in front of us. 

It is. Inevitable.

Organize and vote accordingly.

Because if there’s one thing I’ve learned in about 25 years of following, analyzing and writing Ohio education policy, it’s that there is nothing more certain than Ohio Republican elected officials taking tax dollars out of the hands of our 1.4 million public school students and instead stuffing the bank accounts of political contributing profiteers and wealthy private school parents. 

Categories Budget Cuts, Charter Schools, Disruption, Education Industry, Elections, Failure, For-Profit, Funding, Ohio, Politics, Privatization, Scandals

CNN Report Blasts Vouchers in Arizona

By dianeravitch
June 26, 2024 //
13

As you might have noticed, the mainstream media has not paid much attention to the reckless privatization of America’s public schools. This “movement” is a response to billionaire dollars, not to public demand. The beneficiaries are students who were already enrolled in private schools, whose parents can afford the tuition, not poor students.

It’s rare when a major TV show or newspaper features a story on the billionaire funded effort to destroy our nation’s public schools.

CNN recently aired a segment showing how Arizona was sending millions of dollars to voucher schools that discriminate against certain groups of students, while underfunding the public schools that most children attend and that accept everyone.

The feature story aired on Anderson Cooper’s CNN program. Even Ja’han Jones, who writes the blog for Joy Reid’s show, noticed the story.

CNN pointed out that rightwing evangelical churches are expanding as nearby public schools are drained of resources.

CNN reported:

Near the edge of the Phoenix metro’s urban sprawl, surrounded by a wide expanse of saguaro-studded scrubland, Dream City Christian School is in the midst of a major expansion.

The private school, which is affiliated with a local megachurch where former President Donald Trump held a campaign rally this month, recently broke ground on a new wing that will feature modern, airy classrooms and a pickleball court. It’s a sign of growth at a school that has partnered with a Trump-aligned advocacy group, and advertises to parents by vowing to fight “liberal ideology” such as “evolutionism” and “gender identification.”

Just a few miles away, the public Paradise Valley Unified School District is shrinking, not expanding. The district shuttered three of its schools last month amid falling enrollment, a cost-saving measure that has disrupted life for hundreds of families.

One of the factors behind Dream City’s success and Paradise Valley’s struggles: In Arizona, taxpayer dollars that previously went to public schools like the ones that closed are increasingly flowing to private schools – including those that adopt a right-wing philosophy.

Arizona was the first state in the country to enact a universal “education savings account” program – a form of voucher that allows any family to take tax dollars that would have gone to their child’s public education and spend the money instead on private schooling.

A CNN investigation found that the program has cost hundreds of millions of dollars more than anticipated, disproportionately benefited richer areas, and funneled taxpayer funds to unregulated private schools that don’t face the same educational standards and antidiscrimination protections that public schools do. Since Arizona’s expanded program took effect in 2022, according to state data, it has sent nearly $2 million to Dream City and likely sapped millions of dollars from Paradise Valley’s budget.

And Arizona is hardly alone: universal voucher programs are sweeping Republican-led states, making it one of the right’s most successful efforts to rewrite state policy after decades of setbacks.

This expansion of vouchers in red states was facilitated by millions of dollars spent to fund far-right legislators in state races by Betsy DeVos’s American Federation for Children and other billionaires, like Jeff Yass, a Trump supporter and the richest man in Pennsylvania. Yass said to CNN: “School choice is the civil rights issue of our time,” an oft-cited but phony claim.

In fact, school choice benefits the haves, not the have-nots, and it encourages segregation. Schools choose, not students or families.

In an internal presentation obtained by the progressive watchdog group Documented and provided to CNN, AFC boasted that it had “deployed” $250 million “to advance school choice over the last 13 years,” and that that spending had led to “$25+ billion in government funding directed towards student choice.” 

In 2018, nearly 2/3 of Arizonavoters rejected universal vouchers. Koch-funded Governor Doug Ducey kept pushing them, ignoring the will of the voters, and they were adopted in 2022. Now every student in the state can get a voucher, and most who take them come from families that can afford to pay their own tuition bills.

But unlike some other states that have adopted voucher programs, Arizona has no standardsrequiring private schools to be accredited or licensed by the state, or follow all but the most basic curriculum standards. That means there is no way to compare test scores in public schools to students in the ESA program.

“There’s zero accreditation, there’s zero accountability, and there’s zero transparency,” said Beth Lewis, a former teacher who leads an Arizona nonprofit that advocates against school privatization.

Arizona’s voucher program is busting the state’s budget. The state is facing a $1 billion deficit, caused largely by funding private schools that are discriminatory and whose academic progress is unknown.

On the other side of the Phoenix metro area, the private Valley Christian Schools received nearly $1.1 million in ESA funding last year despite facing allegations of LGBTQ discrimination in federal court. Valley Christian fired high school English teacher Adam McDorman after he voiced support for a student who came out as pansexual, McDorman alleged in a 2022 lawsuit. In an email that McDorman provided to CNN, the school’s then-principal argued that the idea that it was possible to be both “homosexual or otherwise sexually deviant and also a Christian” was a “hideous lie.”

Public schools are barred from discriminating against students because of characteristics like their religion or sexuality, but no such rules cover private schools. In court documents, Valley Christian lawyers have argued that the school had the religious liberty to fire McDorman. The school declined to comment because the case is pending.

In an interview, McDorman said his former school taught creationism as a scientific fact, and “whitewashed” American history to downplay the harms of slavery. He was surprised to learn about the level of public funding it was receiving.

Will the defunding of public schools be an issue in the Presidential election? Trump will surely boast about the progress of.school choice. Will Biden speak up against this nefarious effort to destroy public schools?

Categories Arizona, Education Industry, Media, Privatization, Vouchers

New Hampshire: Why the GOP Is Determined to Destroy Public Schools

By dianeravitch
June 25, 2024 //
10

Every time I see New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu interviewed on CNN, he plays the role of the GOP “moderate.” Don’t be fooled. When it comes to education, he’s a clone of Betsy DeVos.

Veteran New Hampshire Garry Rayno pulls away the mask of “moderate” that Sununu wears in this article in InDepthNH.

This is an important article for everyone to read, no matter where you live. It explains succinctly the true goals of the privatization movement.

He writes:

Public education has been since its inception with the work of Horace Mann, the great equalizer.

Students from poor families have been able to compete with students from the other side of the tracks, maybe not in reality, but close enough to at least have an opportunity to excel.

Many of the founding fathers understood the need for an educated public if democracy was going to survive and thrive.

A responsible citizen is an informed citizen, and that appears to be the problem today. Too many people interested in power instead of governing don’t want a truly informed public. Instead, they want enough of the public spoon fed “alternative facts,” conspiracy theories, and outright lies to ensure they retain power although they have views that are both harmful to the majority of citizens and allow the tyranny of the minority to overturn the will of the majority.

At the heart of the minority’s transformation plan is the destruction of the public school system.

New Hampshire has had a front row seat to the war on education since Chris Sununu was elected governor and named his rival for the Republican nomination in 2016, Frank Edelblut, to be Education Commissioner, a man without any experience in public education, which was the first for someone holding that position in our lifetime.

If Sununu did not know what would happen when he put Edelblut in charge of this critical state department, shame on him, because Edelblut’s one term in the House was a roadmap for his actions during his two terms as commissioner, his second ending in March 2025.

Sununu has also packed the State Board of Education with school choice advocates instead of supporters of public education, so you have the two entities in the executive branch responsible for the state’s public education systems, maybe not anti-public schools, but certainly not advocates for the state’s public education system.

According to the statutes, the education commissioner “is responsible for the organizational goals of the department and represents the public interest in the administration of improving the effectiveness and efficiency of administrative and instructional services to all public schools in New Hampshire.”

Notice it says public schools, not private schools or religious schools, or homeschooling, or learning pods, or any of the other non-public entities that are approved vendors under the state’s Education Freedom Account program, some with questionable philosophies or intent.

An attempt by lawmakers this year to better define the education commissioner’s qualifications and responsibilities to the public school system was defeated this term by the same element that pushed to establish the EFA program and then to expand it, although this year’s attempt to increase the income threshold to participate in the program failed on the last day of the session to act on bills.

The outright attacks on public education began in New Hampshire about a decade ago but gained more warriors as FreeStaters/Libertarians swelled the ranks of the House and Senate Republican members.

The attack on public education here has been much the same as it has been in other states, mostly in the south and the west, with claims of the indoctrination of students by leftwing faculty members.

They have also attacked educators directly and have tried to pack school boards — without much success — to undermine curriculum, educators and slash budgets as happened in Croydon several years ago when the annual school meeting was poorly attended due to a snowstorm.

The Republican majority in the 2021-2022 legislature passed the state’s divisive concepts law forbidding teaching controversial subjects such as institutional racism.

The law was recently found unconstitutional by a US District Court judge.

That was the same term the EFA program was approved after earlier unsuccessful attempts.

Both the EFA program and the divisive concepts law were included in the state’s biennial budget package because they were not likely to pass on their own.

The same folks also tied education into the trumped out recent outrage over the LGBTQ community and sold it as an attack on parental rights.

The intent was to start a war between parents and educators, although parents already have many of the rights touted by the anti-public school advocates.

The theory touted was that educators were keeping information from parents about their students and their sexual identification and that educators were urging students to explore different sexual identities.

Then came the book banning other areas of the country experienced like Florida where some school libraries were stripped of books.

The red herring advocates touted here came from a national app that contains almost every book published that students could access both in schools and at home, and not on school library shelves.

Some tried to enlist town and city libraries in the surveillance of children and what they read and accessed, but that did not go very far.

All of this goes to create the appearance that schools are hotbeds of leftist politics and anti-parental values, some fueled by Edelblut in an op-ed he sent to media outlets.

And despite all this ginned up controversy, local public schools that educate about 90 percent of the school age children in the state remain very popular with parents and the public at large.

If that is true, you have to ask what is behind the push to demonize public schools like political candidates demonize opponents.

Keep in mind this attack on public education occurs at the same time when the superior court’s latest education funding decision says the state does not provide enough money to cover the cost of an adequate education for every student and the way it raises its biggest contribution to public education — the Statewide Education Property Tax — is unconstitutional.

Education is governments’ —not just state government’s — single biggest expense, costing about $3.5 billion a year.

If you are a Libertarian or Free Stater who believes “taxation is theft,” destroying public schools will shift the cost directly to parents, and you could keep a lot more of your money to spend as you see fit and not for the good of society.

And if you espouse the philosophy of the Koch Foundation or former US Education Commissioner, Betsy DeVos, you not only keep more of your money, one of the largest union-backed workforces in the country will be dismantled when certified teachers are no longer needed.

Without a public education system, a child would receive the education his or her parents could afford and for many, particularly minorities, and the historically poor, that may not be much beyond the time they turn 16 and have to go to work to keep the family treading the economic waters.

And then maybe they will work for a lot less than if they had a high school, or even a college education.

And without even an adequate education, how informed will the general public be or how capable of the critical thinking needed to realize all those folks touting their parental rights really do not have their best interests at heart.

Garry Rayno may be reached at garry.rayno@yahoo.com.

Distant Dome by veteran journalist Garry Rayno explores a broader perspective on the State House and state happenings for InDepthNH.org. Over his three-decade career, Rayno covered the NH State House for the New Hampshire Union Leader and Foster’s Daily Democrat. During his career, his coverage spanned the news spectrum, from local planning, school and select boards, to national issues such as electric industry deregulation and Presidential primaries. Rayno lives with his wife Carolyn in New London.

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Budget Cuts, Charter Schools, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Elections, Extremism, New Hampshire, Privatization, Vouchers

Ohio: The Corrupt GOP Politicians Defunding Public Schools and Their Students

By dianeravitch
June 24, 2024 //
6

Marilou Johanek is a veteran journalist in Ohio. She writes here about the Republican politicians who used their power to impose universal vouchers on the state. The main beneficiaries are children of the affluent who are already enrolled in private and religious schools and who can already afford the tuition. The losers are the vast majority of public school students, whose schools are underfunded.

What does the future hold for states that skimp on the education of the next generation while lavishing billion-dollar subsidies on the families of the well-off?

Johanek writes:

My way or the highway may be your boss’s motto and your cross to bear. But if that is the mantra of publicly elected officials in a representative government — as it sure seems to be in Ohio — all of us have a problem. A big one. 

The political bosses in Ohio conduct the people’s business with take-it-or-leave-it ultimatums. They’re not running a democracy; they’re dictating decisions made. They do not entertain questions about their extremist agenda to ban invented threats, ignore real ones, claw back rights, reduce women to breeders, welcome polluters to state parks, or defund public education to pay for private schools. 

When challenged over their arguably lawless mandates, Ohio Republican leaders mount a full court press to dismiss, disparage, intimidate, and circumvent countervailing forces that dare confront absolute power. Consider the all-out effort of GOP chieftains to scuttle a statewide lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the Republican fetish to fund private schools with hundreds of millions of apparently unlimited public tax dollars.

The partisans sprang into action to protect the $1-billion-dollar-and-counting boondoggle they created last year with universal vouchers that pay private school tuition for the affluent few at the expense of the many — a majority of Ohio students who attend traditional public-school districts. Ever since GOP lawmakers — led by Ohio Senate President and go-to financier of diocesan schools Matt Huffman — opened the government dole to any private school student with their voucher change slipped into the state budget, unaccountable public spending on private schools has exploded.

The amount of tax dollars going to students already attending private, mostly religious schools tripled the first school year uncapped voucher money was there for the taking. Many of the private school families sweeping up the easy cash earn north of $250,000 annually. The initial Republican rationale for diverting state educational funding from public to parochial schools was that the public handouts offered low-income families in failing school districts access to better school options. 

But that excuse was a ruse to subsidize religious education with taxpayer money and gradually starve public education of critical financial support. The flood of public funds to prop up Catholic schools came from the same general revenue pool that was supposed to keep public school districts afloat not be shortchanged by private education giveaways.  

The fallback for fiscally depleted districts is school levies that fail more often than not. Which, as every public school parent knows, means likely cuts to staff, extracurricular programs, student support services, and capital improvements, decades overdue, shelved again.

Little wonder that more than 200 school districts across Ohio have joined a growing coalition contesting the unprecedented release of public funds to every private school family — regardless of income or quality of home district — in a lawsuit bound for trial. 

They argue the private school “EdChoice” voucher expansion breaking the public education budget violates the state constitution by creating a separate, unequal and segregated school system of privatized education bankrolled with money the state is constitutionally obligated to spend on public education alone. Meanwhile public school students go to class in crappy buildings erected in the 1950s (because there’s no money to build a new ones) and enjoy fewer, if any, electives in music and art, or reading tutors, or enough counselors, AP course offerings, gifted services, or small class sizes, etc. 

The billion-dollar windfall to offset private school tuition many families can afford would be a godsend to public schools making do with less. God bless those who choose to send their students to expensive parochial institutions. But none of us agreed to collectively finance your private school choice that, frankly, serves a private interest, not a public one.

We agreed instead to fund what serves the greater good, not what satisfies individual preference. We do the same with other public services (besides free public education) when our taxes support local law enforcement, fire protection, mental health resources, metro park amenities and other community systems that benefit everybody. The lawsuit to strike down Ohio’s harmful universal vouchers recently added the Upper Arlington school district, in a suburb of Columbus, to its ballooning list of participants.

Ohio’s Republican Lt. Gov. Jon Husted personally pressured the district to pass on the legal fight before the school board voted to join it. Ohio’s Republican Attorney General Dave Yost tried and failed to get a Franklin County court to dismiss the voucher lawsuit altogether. Huffman, the architect of the school privatization scheme in the legislature, refused to sit for a lawsuit deposition. 

He even balked at submitting written answers. Finally, the Lima Republican appealed to the Republican-majority state supreme court (he engineered) to judge him above accountability per the litigation. The GOP my-way-or-the-highway bosses aren’t finished trying to out-maneuver public school advocates fighting for fair and equitable public funding. But their secret is out. 

In the school year that just ended, taxpayers forked over a billion dollars’ worth of tuition payments for a slice of well-off students enrolled in pricey private schools. That’s not okay with public school families eying another school levy or their kids will do without. The state’s autocrats bosses should be on notice; their take-it-or-leave-it dictate on universal vouchers went too far. 

It provoked a public education crusade willing to see you in court, Messrs. Huffman, Yost and Husted. So save the trial date. It’s Nov. 4. 

Categories Budget Cuts, Disruption, Education Industry, Fake, Funding, Ohio, Privatization, Religion, Separation of church and state, Shame, Vouchers

Jan Resseger: Defunding Public Education with Vouchers and Tax Cuts

By dianeravitch
June 20, 2024 //
4

Jan Resseger writes with cogency and insight about the frightening trend to defund public education. Trump once said that he loves the poorly educated—the rubes who buy whatever lies he is peddling, the gullible who hang on his every word, the low-information voters who trust him—and that same philosophy seems to be dominant in red states. That is, to defund public schools with a costly combination of tax cuts and privatization, while enriching grifters, religious proselytizers, and stripmall charters.

Resseger writes:

Ohio’s fiscal troubles certainly have been exacerbated by the hugely expensive universal EdChoice Expansion voucher expansion now projected to divert over a billion dollars in the current fiscal year out of the school foundation budget line (that also funds the state’s public schools) to pay for private school tuition mostly for upper income students already enrolled in private and religious schools.

But the depletion of the state’s fiscal capacity isn’t merely attributable to the universal school voucher expansion.  In mid-May, The Statehouse News‘ Jo Ingles published a brief warning from Ohio’s Governor Mike DeWine about the tax cut his Republican legislative colleagues inserted into the budget he signed in June of 2023:  “Ohio’s tax revenue has come in below projections for four out of the last five months. And while some state leaders who advocated for tax cuts in the last budget say they’re still waiting to see more data, Gov. Mike DeWine said he thinks that’s why the state is seeing a shortfall.” Ingles elaborates: “The Office of Budget and Management had projected close to $23.2 billion in tax revenue by this point in the fiscal year, but it’s collected just under half a billion less… DeWine hasn’t included an income tax cut in any of the three budgets he’s proposed. But his fellow Republicans in the legislature passed $3.1 billion in tax cuts in the budget that took effect last July, largely through consolidation of four tax brackets into two. DeWine signed the budget into law.”

As part of a major report last November on the danger of state tax cutting, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities reviews what happened in Kansas back in 2012, when according to  far-right dogma, the Kansas legislature and Governor Sam Brownback tried to boost the state’s economy through what they hoped would be economic growth followed by trickle-down economics: “Billed as a way to boost the state economy, the tax cuts led instead to plunging revenues and cuts in K-12 schools and higher education, as well as other public services… In 2017 lawmakers agreed on a bipartisan basis to repeal most of the tax cuts.” (States’ Recent Tax-Cut Spree Creates Big Risks for Families and Communities, report, p. 10)

Tax cutting in Ohio has never been quite as damaging as it was in Kansas, but it has been a persistent problem for years. Back in 2017 after the state passed a biennial budget without a tax cut, PolicyMatters Ohio’s Zach Schiller celebrated: “The biggest news about taxes in the new Ohio budget is what isn’t in it… Ohio has been on a tax-cutting spree that has lasted most of the last dozen years. These cuts have sapped the state of billions of dollars a year of vitally needed revenue….”

Times have changed, however. A week ago the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities launched a  project to track tax slashing today across far-right Republican states. One story features Ohio: “States have gone on a tax-cutting spree in recent years. More than half have slashed income taxes for wealthy people and corporations, in some cases by extraordinary amounts.” In Ohio: “Republican members of the state legislature are blaming slowing economic growth for the emerging revenue gap, but that is likely compounding the problem rather than causing it. The more straightforward culprit is a pair of personal income tax cuts passed in 2021 and 2023 (the two most recent biennial state budgets). The cuts are already costing the state nearly $2 billion in lost revenue each year… Ohio also made a flurry of other costly tax and budget choices last year. Most notably, the state cut its Commercial Activity Tax and removed income limits for its private school voucher program, leading to a spike in enrollment. These changes, which mostly benefit corporations and wealthy families, could exacerbate the state’s revenue shortfalls.”

When states cut taxes as Ohio just did in the two most recent biennial budgets, the result is not merely a one time revenue loss. In last November’s report, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities details what has been happening in Ohio and 25 other states: “State policymakers nationwide have embarked on a tax-cutting spree over the past three years, using the cover of temporary budget surpluses stemming from robust federal aid in response to COVID-19 and the economic recovery that followed. The tax cuts—-most of which are both permanent and tilted toward wealthy households and corporations—-will weaken state revenues by large and growing amounts over time, limiting these states’ ability to maintain support for schools and other vital public services….”

Permanent tax cuts affect state budgets again and again, year after year: “Twenty-six states cut their personal income tax rates and/or corporate income tax rates, 13 of them multiple times. Permanent cuts to tax rates are especially harmful to state balance sheets since they reduce revenues every year going forward absent further legislative action, in contrast to temporary or one-time tax cuts… Combined, the cuts will cost those 26 states an estimated $124 billion by 2028, including $13 billion that they have already lost (2022-2023) and $111 billion over the next five years….”

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities projects that by 2028, the tax cuts that were part of Ohio’s biennial budgets passed in 2021 and 2023 will cost the state more than $10.5 billion.

The fiscal consequences for Ohio will, of course, also be complicated by the annual cost of the uncapped, ever-expanding universal EdChoice Expansion vouchers, enacted in the budget passed in 2023. Ohio has five different private school voucher programs. Earlier this week, the leader of the Ohio Coalition for Equity and Adequacy of School funding, Bill Phillis published data showing that in the past year, due to the legislature’s action, the new  EdChoice Expansion vouchers grew explosively by 274.3 percent.

In late March, the Cleveland Plain Dealer‘s Laura Hancock reported that the enormous expansion of EdChoice Expansion vouchers in Ohio will bring the state’s investment in its five private school tuition voucher programs to at least a billion dollars by the end of the current fiscal year on October 1, 2024.  In Ohio, a total of 152,118 students, according to Hancock’s data, now attend private schools using tax funded vouchers, with most of the new participants in the universal EdChoice Expansion program upper income students who were already enrolled in private schools at their parents’ expense. The state simply began giving away to these families $6,165  for each K-8 student and $8,407 for each high school student.

Ohio is on the cusp of completing the enactment of the Fair School Funding plan, a new public school funding formula designed to ensure that Ohio’s 610 public school districts can all afford the real costs of the services necessary to meet the needs of Ohio’s 1.6 million students in public schools, including the needs of disabled students, English learners, and students in districts where family poverty is concentrated. Our legislators have always said the phase-in must be renegotiated in each biennial budget because its full enactment will depend on the amount of state revenue available. In 2023, Ohio’s legislators completed the first two steps of the phase in.

Clearly the full funding of the third step of the plan in the budget that must pass by June 30, 2025 will be threatened by a revenue shortage created by not only the extravagant voucher expansion for the wealthy but also by the legislature’s repeated state tax cuts.

Categories Budget Cuts, Democracy, Education Industry, Equity, Extremism, Funding, Ohio, Privatization
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