Josh Cowen of Michigan State University is a veteran voucher scholar. He has been doing voucher research for nearly two decades. For years, he was hopeful about the outcomes for students. He recently realized that the results were appalling. Students who took vouchers and left their public school actually lost ground academically. The real benefits of vouchers went to students who were already enrolled in private schools; their family, which could afford the tuition, won a subsidy from the state. In some states, even wealthy parents won a state subsidy for their children. vouchers do not help poor students; instead, they are harmed.
If you’ve ever run a small business or talked to a business owner, you might have heard the phrase “under promise, over deliver” as a strategy for customer service.
Unfortunately, when it comes to school voucher plans like those being considered by Pennsylvania lawmakers this spring, what happens is the opposite of a sound investment: a lot of overpromising ahead of woeful under-delivery.
As an expert on school vouchers, I think about the idea of what’s promised in the rhetoric vs. what actually happens when the realcost sets in. To hear voucher lobbyists tell it — usually working for billionaires like Betsy DeVos, or Pennsylvania’s own Jeff Yass — all that’s needed to move American education forward is a fully privatized market of school choice, where parents are customers and education is the product.
One promise that never holds up is the idea that states can afford to create voucher systems that underwrite private tuition for some children, while still keeping public school spending strong.
Other states that have passed or expanded voucher systems have rarely been able to sustain new investments in public schools. Even when those voucher bills also came with initial increases in public education funding. Six out of the last seven states to pass such bills have failed to keep up with just the national average in public school investment.
But for children and families — especially those who have been traditionally underserved by schools at different points in U.S. history — the cost of school vouchers goes beyond the price for taxpayers.
Although most voucher users in other states (about 70%) were, in fact, in private schools first, the academic results for the kids who transfer are disastrous. Statewide vouchers have led to some of the largest academic declines in the history of education research — drops in performance that were on par with how COVID-19 or Hurricane Katrina affected student learning.
Although school vouchers have enjoyed fits and starts of bipartisan support from time to time, today’s push for universal voucher systems across the country is almost entirely the product of conservative politics. All 12 states that created or expanded some form of a voucher system in 2023 voted for Donald Trump in 2020. Of those that passed voucher laws since the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020, only two (Arizona and New Hampshire) voted for Joe Biden that election year.
In states like Arkansas and Iowa, voucher laws either immediately followed or immediately preceded extreme new restrictions on reproductive care, a weakening of child labor laws, and other conservative policy priorities.
And this isn’t just about electoral politics. The right-wing origins of school vouchers have real day-to-day implications for who gets to use them and who is left out. We know from states like Florida, Indiana, and Wisconsin that the latest voucher bills allow schools to discriminate against certain children if schools can claim they do so for religious reasons.
Who pays that particular price? Examples include students with disabilities and children and parents from LGBTQ families, who may be asked to leave or not even admitted at all. And that’s because when it comes to vouchers, it’s not really school choice at all. Families don’t get their choice of schools; instead, schools get their choice of which families to admit.
And the price tag for all of this usually comes in wildly over budget anyway. The big culprit for those cost overruns goes back to who actually gets a voucher. Because most voucher users were in private schools first— paid by the private sector before — voucher costs are actually new expenditures taxpayers have to make. In the worst-case scenario, Arizona, vouchers cost more than 1,000% beyond what their advocates first promised.
Despite claims some supporters make that vouchers are part of an efficient education market, the result is really the opposite of any strategy a successful business would recognize.
To put it plainly: The promises rarely pan out, and eventually, the check comes due.
It has always been a goal of the billionaires who fund privatization to block accountability and democracy. Eli Broad once memorably said that he prefers to invest in districts under mayoral control so he doesn’t have to deal with the public. The public asks questions and wants to know who is making decisions about their children’s education. So much simpler to have one person to handle problems.
The charter school lobby has persistently fought public oversight and accountability. They are more than willing, even eager, to take public money. But they don’t like public officials asking questions about how the money was spent.
The big battle over public oversight is happening right now in Colorado. All the major right wing groups—the Koch machine, ALEC, Philip Anschutz (producer of “Waiting for Superman”) are there, battling against public schools.
On March 7, three Colorado legislators introduced a charter school accountability bill to establish improved guidelines for authorizing and renewing charter schools by local school districts. The bill would strengthen the authority that elected school boards have regarding their governance of charter schools, and it also provides citizens with expanded information about the operations of charter schools in their districts.
According to its backers and public education advocacy groups, this is the first major legislation to prescribe more charter school accountability since the first Charter Schools Act was passed in 1993. Current state legislation often limits local control over the charter school approval process, funding requirements, and waivers from state legislation. Given that nearly two-thirds of the state’s 64 counties experienced an “absolute decline in the under-18 population over the last decade,” the charter school accountability bill would empower local school boards to address the overall enrollment needs of the district. While charter schools primarily utilize taxpayer dollars for their funding, many charter schools allow private interests to invest in their growth and development, which can create potential conflicts of interest.
Pro-charter school organizations don’t agree with this legislative effort to increase accountability as they believe this bill would “kill” charter schools. Republicans have been especially vocal in their opposition to this bill, even though the bill promotes increased local control over charter schools. The pro-charter organizations hired over 30 lobbyists to oppose the bill. Lobbying can be expensive, but the organizations opposing the bill have connections to several billionaire-funded foundations.
American for Prosperity and Advance Colorado issued a press release on X stating the bill would “mark the beginning of the end of charter schools in Colorado,” and together, the two groups “would work overtime to make sure the bill was soundly defeated.” According to the Colorado Times Recorder, Advance Colorado is a conservative dark money group said to be funded by billionaire Phil Anschutz. Formerly known as Unite Colorado, Advance Colorado has “given over $17 million to support major Republican political groups and efforts in Colorado.” Colorado Dawn, another dark money group headed by State Board of Education member Steve Durham and Colorado state Sen. Paul Lundeen, gave millions to Ready Colorado, which also has lobbyists opposing this bill.
The upcoming lobbying effort in Colorado’s legislature is not unique, as similar high-paid lobbying efforts occur wherever there is significant charter school legislation. In Nashville, a local news reporter exposed who 67 pro-charter lobbyists worked for during legislative hearings on several charter bills in 2022. In the video that accompanied his report, Phil Williams highlighted the direct connections that the pro-charter lobbyists have with billionaires. His investigative report documented that “Americans for Prosperity is linked to billionaire Charles Koch,” and they also “received funding from billionaire Bill Gates and the Walton family of Walmart fame.”
As in Tennessee, the Colorado lobbyists will meet frequently with legislators to convince them this bill is not necessary. The legislators will need to weigh the benefits of the bill with the concerns of those who participate in a massive letter-writing campaign initiated by the lobbying organizations to oppose the legislation. The bill’s backers hope this will be the legislators’ opportunity to update 30-year-old legislation and begin to ensure increased local control and accountability for the millions of taxpayer dollars that fund the charter schools educating 15% of the state’s K-12 student population.
COLUMBUS, Ohio – The number of Cuyahoga County students receiving state-funded scholarships to attend private schools has skyrocketed this year after state lawmakers expanded a voucher program, but state data suggests that doesn’t necessarily mean more kids have opted out of public schools.
Across the county’s 31 districts, the number of students receiving tuition payments in the EdChoice-Expansion scholarship — one of five school voucher programs run by the state, and the one lawmakers expanded over the summer to give at least partial tuition payments to families of all income levels— has increased nearly four-fold, from about 2,500 students last year to nearly 9,200 this year.
Those districts, however, have not seen a corresponding loss in student population, indicating that most of the families newly benefitting from the vouchers were already enrolled in private schools, rather than fleeing a school district besieged by violence or bullying, mediocre test scores or other problems.
The data cut against arguments lawmakers and advocates have made over the years that vouchers are necessary to give families a chance to choose private schools over the public school district where they live.
In Rocky River, EdChoice-Expansion scholarships were nearly 20 times higher on Feb. 1 than last year. In Bay Village, they increased 17 times. Westlake’s increase is 14 times higher, according to an analysis of state data by The Plain Dealer / cleveland.com.
The number of students across Ohio who are attending private schools on state-funded scholarships spiked this year because the legislature — in the two-year budget bill signed by Gov. Mike DeWine — removed income eligibility caps for EdChoice-Expansion. Last year, the cap was 250% of the federal poverty level for a scholarship, or $75,000 for a family of four. Now, there are no income caps, although families only get partial scholarships when they earn above 450% of the poverty level, or above $135,000 for a family of four.
Full scholarship amounts are $6,167 for grades K-8 and $8,407 for grades K-12.
Enrollment losses in Cuyahoga County district classrooms, however, are more modest than the jump in private school vouchers. State data shows that families that live in the boundaries of suburban district schools— some of which are among the best performing in the state — but may have never set foot in a public school now are receiving vouchers.
Enrollment in Rocky River City School District fell by just 22 students between last year and this year, even though the number of kids receiving vouchers shot up from 16 to 309. In Bay Village City School District, there are 30 fewer students, despite a voucher jump from 13 to 229. Westlake City School District has 19 fewer students; vouchers in the district spiked from 41 to 581.
In the Cleveland Metropolitan School District, the number of kids receiving EdChoice Expansion vouchers increased from nine to 28 this year, a miniscule number compared against its student population of more than 32,000. But students in Cleveland also are eligible for the Cleveland Scholarship, which has no income caps, and is the oldest in the state, having been established in 1995. As of Feb. 26, there were 8,218 students in the Cleveland Scholarship program.
Garry Rayno writes about state politics for InDepthNH, a subject he has covered for the past three decades. Here he explains how the old adage that “all politics is local” has been reversed. Now, with the advent of big money, all local politics is influenced by national agendas. Read what he has to say about vouchers. As in every other state, most vouchers are claimed by students already enrolled in private and religious schools. There has been no mass exodus from public schools. In fact, there has been almost no decline in public school enrollment. Taxpayers are now subsidizing families who can afford private schools on their own.
Rayno writes:
CONCORD – You can expect partisan politics to play a larger role in the legislature during the second year of a two-year term.
It is an election year and both parties are hard at work appealing to their bases and defining the other party as the bad guy.
However, the ill-will appears to be growing over the last decade and there is a reason or two for what is occurring.
More and more state legislatures are put in the middle of national issues that once were the purview of the political professionals.
One of the major reasons for the national attention is the US Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision swinging open the doors of the Brinks Trucks to let millions of dollars of outside money pour into a small state like New Hampshire to sway the outcome of elections.
The $1.3 million of campaign funds spent in 2022 on the New Hampshire Legislature by groups affiliated with the Koch Foundation would have been unimaginable before the court’s decision giving corporations first amendment rights as if they were individuals.
The national parties are also reaping the rewards of the decision and in turn spend rigorously to elect their candidates.
All that money investment does not come free as the people contributing expect a hefty return on investment.
Consequently many national wedge issues find their way into the legislative agendas of both parties.
The last few sessions of the House this month reflect some of what there was little of in years past.
For example House Bill 1156, which targets the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control over their guidance during the pandemic and its future guidance coming in a couple of months on pandemics to come.
The contention is that the two organizations put the state’s sovereignty at risk while revisiting the shutdown and masking debates from the pandemic’s greatest impact.
On its own, given the political philosophy of the majority of the Republican House members, it does not appear to be unusual.
But if you Google state sovereignty and WHO and CDC you will see that many other state legislatures have similar if not identical bills before them this year.
The national battle over electronic vote counting machines made it all the way down to town meeting votes this year, although the ban was not very successful, the push has been ongoing since the “Big Lie” over voter fraud in the 2020 election.
The National Republican Party had touted “voter integrity” which really means disenfranchising as many voters as possible before the 2024 election.
House Bill 1569 would do away with the affidavit exemption allowing a person to vote if a registered voter forgot a photo Id or the proper paperwork for same-day registration. That in itself will disenfranchise thousands of voters, and essentially does away with same-day registration, which New Hampshire adopted so it would not have to have motor-voter registration under the Help America Vote Act.
This change is likely going to court if it passes the Senate and the governor signs it.
The bill also expands the challenged voter provision, which puts the onus on the challenged voter to go to superior court to prove otherwise which means thousands more will be disenfranchised.
Other bills approved by the House last week would shorten the time period for voter purges from the checklist.
On the other side, the House killed House Bill 1364 which would have resulted in criminal charges if someone intimidated an election official, exerted improper influence over the election process or tampered with electronic ballot counting devices.
While that has not been an issue in New Hampshire as it has in some other states, mostly in the south and southwest, you have to wonder why the House killed the bill unless some of what would be illegal is planned for the next election.
Democrats also pushed a bill to have the state join the Election Registration Information Center, which has not interested the state in the past, and was killed last week.
Democrats proposed a series of House resolutions, which indicate the wishes of the legislature, but do not have the weight of law that included universal health insurance, and differentiating between individual and corporate rights (sound familiar).
Perhaps the most costly example of New Hampshire following a national agenda is the Education Freedom Account program, which began three years ago following other nearly identical programs in places like Arizona, Florida, Wisconsin and Louisiana.
A recent study by the Cleveland Plain Dealer of the program in Ohio which greatly expanded its program last year, noted that despite the number of new students in the program, the enrollment in the public schools did not decline, meaning most of the students benefiting from the expansion were already in private schools meaning it’s ultimately a subsidy for parents who already could afford to pay the tuition.
The study found that about 65 percent of the total grants were private school grants and most were to religious schools.
Those numbers also reflect what the New Hampshire program has seen, that most of the students enrolling in the program were already in private or religious schools, or homeschooling when the program began with 1,635 students in the 21-22 school year and growing to about 4,500 students for the 23-24 school year.
The year before the program began there were 164,918 students in public schools, according to data on the Department of Education’s website, and the first year of the program there were 164,950 students in public schools, the second year, 163,681 and this school year 165,082. [Emphasis added]
That too would indicate that most of the students receiving EFA grants are not leaving public schools to join the program.
The program’s income cap is expected to increase to 500 percent of the federal poverty level, next school year — the House has passed the bill, it is expected to pass the Senate and the governor has said he would sign it.
Parental rights are another issue that has been targeted nationwide by Republicans while Democrats continue to push for raising the minimum wage, which is a national issue since the state did away with its own minimum wage in the 2011-2012 term and moved to the federal rate.
And transgender issues have been before the legislature, particularly for minors, as they have been in many other states.
All the same issues surfacing at the same time would certainly indicate that some groups or organizations are behind the efforts.
And the political parties are also using state legislatures to continue what they hope will be the dividing lines in the upcoming election.
Oh for the days of clashes over education funding and shoreline protection.
But we are still fighting over education funding, but it’s at least our own fight.
The Grand Canyon Institute is a nonpartisan nonprofit research organization in Arizona. Its latest report concludes that charter schools are more accountable than vouchers. Vouchers suck up nearly $1 billion a year in public money and are completely unaccountable. Oucher schools are subject to no financial audits, do not have to comply with the state curriculum, and are not audited for academic performance.
Step right up and get your free money, grifters! Courtesy of Arizona taxpayers and GOP legislators!
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Charters are Accountable, Independent Private Schools are Not Yet nearly a billion public dollars flow to unaccountable private schools
Phoenix —On Monday, the State Board for Charter Schools, a public body, voted unanimously to issue a notice of intent to revoke the charter contract for ARCHES Academy, currently located in Apache Junction.
The school appears to have both academic and financial problems and recently addressed an issue with a fire marshal. This action represents the kind of responsible oversight of charter schools that serves to protect the interests of students, parents and taxpayers.
In sharp contrast, independent private schools are required to have no such oversight, even though they currently receive nearly $1 billion in state public funding. That nearly matches the state general fund support for the state university system. Public funds that support private schools come from redirected general fund dollars through tax credit donations to Student Tuition Organizations and by funds from Empowerment Scholarship Accounts (ESA)/vouchers directly from the General Fund. Last year GCI estimates private school tax credits cost $285 million (the formal report is due by March 31) and ESA/vouchers cost $592 million, so, collectively, nearly $900 million in public support for unaccountable private schools (note: this figure includes an amount for ESA homeschooling).
The table below uses the case of ARCHES Academy to contrast charter schools (which are privately owned public schools) with private schools that operate independently with the level of oversight and accountability required.
Please open the link to see the table comparing Arches charter school and private schools receiving vouchers.
In 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Maine must pay the tuition of children at religious schools if it pays any private school tuition. Maine has a historic system of paying for students to go to private high schools if their own district does not have a public high school.
The state of Maine insisted that it would not pay tuition to schools that violate the state’s anti-discrimination. The two Christian schools that won the case did not accept LGBT students or students who practice a religion different from that of the church.
A Christian school in Maine must adhere to the state’s LGBT antidiscrimination policy to qualify for a state tuition assistance program while the lawsuit against the state continues, a federal judge has ruled.
U.S. District Judge John Woodcock, a George W. Bush appointee, denied a preliminary injunction Tuesday requested by Bangor Christian Schools run by Crosspoint Church, concluding that the church’s lawsuit against assorted state officials is not likely to succeed.
He ruled that Bangor Christian Schools must follow all the Maine Human Rights Act provisions.
“The Court determines that the educational antidiscrimination provisions do not violate the Free Exercise Clause because they are neutral, generally applicable, and rationally related to a legitimate government interest,” wrote Woodcock.
“The Court concludes further that the educational provisions do not violate the Free Speech Clause because they regulate conduct, not speech. Finally, the Court concludes that the employment provisions do not proscribe any constitutionally protected conduct.”
First Liberty Institute Senior Counsel Lea Patterson, who represents Crosspoint, denounced the decision and expressed plans to appeal the ruling.
“Government punishing religious schools for living out their religious beliefs is not only unconstitutional, it is wrong,” said Patterson, as quoted by Bangor Daily News.
In 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in Carson v. Makin that Maine cannot lawfully stop parents from using a state tuition program to send their children to Christian private schools.
The lawsuit that led to the Supreme Court ruling was driven by parents from Bangor Christian School who sued Maine over the ban on state tuition assistance for families sending their children to a private school that includes sectarian aspects in its curriculum.
A new report ranks US states in terms of how well their legislatures are protecting public schools and the students who attend them. From expanding charters to launching illiberal attacks on kids and families, a worrying number of states failed the test.
State legislatures play an enormous role in making public school systems functional and safe. (SDI Productions / Getty Images)
On February 8, sixteen-year-old nonbinary sophomore Nex Benedict died of causes that have yet to be explained to the public. The day before, Nex had told a police officer they were beaten by three schoolmates in a bathroom at their Oklahoma high school. Sue Benedict, Nex’s grandmother and adoptive parent, told the Independent that Nex suffered from identity-based bullying, beginning shortly after Oklahoma governor Kevin Stitt signed a lawforcing trans students to use bathrooms that match the sex listed on their birth certificates.
In addition to the bathroom ban, Stitt has signed severalotherlaws targeting trans youth. There are currently fifty-four other anti-LGBTQ bills before the Oklahoma legislature. While the exact cause of Nex’s death remains unverified, it’s clear that the violence preceding it occurred in an increasingly hostile environment for LGBTQ youth in the state of Oklahoma.
According to the American Medical Association and the National Institutes of Health, bathroom bans put vulnerable kids at risk for serious harm. And even when anti-LGBTQ laws don’t pass, researchindicates that young people are adversely affected by proposed legislation that puts their safety and humanity up for debate, fueling a climate of tension and suspicion which can exacerbate bullying behavior and mental health issues. Per 2019 data, majorities of LGBTQ kids have experienced harassment or bullying in school, leading to increased absences and potentially dire long-term consequences. But LGBTQ students in schools with LGBTQ-inclusive curriculum and policies are more likely to feel safe and report that their peers accept them.
In other words, adults — from educators to social media personalities to lawmakers — set a tone that appears to be highly determinative of whether school is a place where kids like Nex can safely be themselves.
This pattern is hardly restricted to LGBTQ issues. State-level legislation shapes the societies in which kids live and schools operate. For this reason “Public Schooling in America,” the latest data-packed national report card from the Network for Public Education (NPE), focuses on the extent to which each state legislature protects young people, both in and out of public school systems.
While the previous two NPE report cards have focused primarily on school privatization, this one goes further, connecting the dots between seemingly distinct attacks on public schooling that are advancing as part of the push for Christian nationalism: charter and voucher expansion, publicly funded homeschooling, defunding of public schools, and illiberal restrictions on kids and educators.
Using a points system based on how statehouses treat the above topics, NPE awarded “A” grades to five states, both red and blue, that demonstrate a strong commitment to students and democratically governed public schools: 1) North Dakota, 2) Connecticut, 3) Vermont, 4) Illinois, and 5) Nebraska. Seventeen states — all but two of which are governed by a Republican trifecta— earned “F” grades. The poorest scoring of these “F” states will come as no surprise to anyone paying attention to school privatization or the anti-LGBTQ laws curtailing kids’ and educators’ rights: 47) Arkansas, 48) North Carolina, 49) Utah, 50) Arizona, and 51) Florida.
Ultimately the report underscores a critical point: while schools are directly tasked with prioritizing child well-being and student safety, they don’t perform these duties in a vacuum. State legislatures play an enormous role in making public school systems functional and safe — or, in many cases, severely undermining them.
Privatization: Vouchers and Charters
Vouchers, which subtract taxpayer dollars from public education and turn them over to privately operated schools and service providers (including for-profit and religious schools), have notched considerable statehouse wins in recent years. In 2023 alone, seven states launched new voucher plans, while others made existing programs available to wealthy families who have never sent their kids to public schools.
Significantly, while voucher programs’ costs to taxpayers have mushroomed since 2000, bathing state budgets in red ink, overall private school enrollment actually decreased from 11.38 percent in 1999 to 9.97 percent in 2021. That’s because vouchers aremostpopular among privileged parents whose kids were already attending private schools. These privatization schemes may be propping up academically impoverished religious schools, but they are not incentivizing an exodus from public education.
Vouchers take various forms, including traditional vouchers or tuition grants, tuition tax-credit scholarship programs (TTCs), and education savings accounts (ESAs), which turn large sums of public money over to parents with virtually no strings attached. With all vouchers, and ESAs in particular, there are few or no safeguards to prevent fraud or ensure that kids are actually learning core subjects.
Vouchers are a preferred tool of religious extremists seeking state-funded Christian education, but most state constitutions have clauses prohibiting public funding of religious institutions. ESAs and TTCs are designed to evade these restrictions by funding families rather than schools (ESAs), or allowing people to donate to private school scholarships instead of paying their taxes (TTCs). Generally speaking, voucher-funded private schooling is rife with discrimination that would be illegal in public school systems. A 2023 report by the Education Voters of Pennsylvania, for example, found that 100 percent of surveyed voucher schools have policies that overtly discriminate against kids based on LGBTQ identity, disability status, academic ability, religion, pregnancy or abortion history, or other factors.
Vouchers have made splashier headlines than charter schools of late, as Republicans abandon the decades-old bipartisan education reform truce. But Christian nationalists have also been using charter schools to press their agenda, with a significant increase in right-wing “faith-friendly,” “classical,” or “back-to-basics” charter schools (and at least one officially religious church-run charter school on track to open in Oklahoma). Another in-depth report from NPE documents this rise, noting that these charter schools, which market themselves to conservative white families, are nearly twice as likely to be run by for-profit corporations as the charter sector at large.
The growth of online charter schools, which have terrible academic track records, and charter schools run for a profit has continued apace. Thirty-five states allow for-profit corporations to manage nonprofit charter schools, and in six states (Arizona, Florida, Michigan, Nevada, Ohio, and West Virginia), for-profits manage over 30 percentof all charter schools. Fraud and mismanagement result in the frequent shuttering of publicly funded charter schools, sometimes leaving families in the lurch mid–school year. Since 2019, NPE has been collecting news stories of charter school malfeasance and abrupt closures (charter churn). Thirteen states have racked up at least fifty such reports: California takes the prize for one hundred and eighty charter scandal stories, and Pennsylvania comes in second.
Though often cleverly referred to as “public,” charter schools are not equally accessible by all kids. In School’s Choice, researchers Wagma Mommandi and Kevin Welner show how charter schools use branding and promotional strategies to sway enrollment toward students with more resources and fewer needs than the general population.
In an even more blatant example of the nonpublic nature of charter schools, NPE points to the phenomenon of workplace charters. Under Florida law, such schools are permitted to restrict enrollment to the children of a specific firm’s employees — functioning as a form of labor discipline reminiscent of the last century’s coal “company towns.” At the Villages Charter School (VCS)’s six campuses, parental employment is verified monthly. If a VCS parent hates working at the Villages (a large, highly profitable retirement community) and wants to quit, they had better be prepared to upend their kids’ educational and social lives.
Homeschooling
The number of homeschooling families spiked during the COVID-19 pandemic and has continued to rise. Journalists at the Washington Post found a 51 percent increase over the past six years in states where it’s possible to track homeschooling trends. Once a practice found mainly among fundamentalist Christians in rural areas, it is now the fastest growing education sector.
Thirteen states directly subsidize homeschooling through vouchers or tax credits. A flourishing tech-based industry (including charter schools for homeschooling families) has emerged to cash in on these state subsidies, with parents putting taxpayer dollars to questionable uses. In Arizona, a proliferation of news stories has documented homeschooling families spending ESA money on things like LEGO sets, snowboarding trips, ninja training, and aeroponic indoor gardens. Very few states have regulations in place to ensure that homeschooled children are receiving basic academic instruction. In fact, most states allow parents to issue a diploma with no verification of student learning.
Culture warriors like Chaya Raichik have used the slippery concept of “grooming” to gin up fears about adults hurting kids in public schools. In reality, because public schools are governed by strict child safety laws including background checks and mandated reporting, they are much more likely to detect and prevent abuse than minimally regulated private schools and totally unregulated homes. Eleven states don’t even require parents to report that they’re homeschooling their kids, while fourteen more just require a onetime notice with no follow-up. Only Pennsylvania and Arkansas conduct any form of background check on homeschooling parents.
The Coalition for Responsible Home Education has cataloged about one hundred and eighty horrific stories of homeschooled children suffering and even dying from neglect, abuse, and torture in their educational settings. Nicole and Jasmine Snyder, for example, experienced things like having their heads bashed against a wall, being forced to stand in a dark hallway for long stretches, and having urine and feces smeared on their faces as punishment for potty accidents. They starved to death in 2016 and 2017, weighing five and ten pounds respectively. Because they were homeschooled, no one outside the family had any idea the abuse was happening. Their murders were not revealed until 2021.
Public School Financing
Researchers have clearly established the relationship between school funding and student learning outcomes. And because school funding enables everything from adequate staff-to-student ratios to heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems to essential structural repairs, it’s undeniably a student safety issue.
To rank school funding, NPE looked at the following metrics from the Education Law Center, which issues an annual school funding report: funding levels (cost-adjusted, per-pupil revenue from state and local sources), funding distribution (how states allocate funds to high-needs schools serving economically disadvantaged students), and funding effort (the relationship between a state’s GDP and its investment in schools). They also looked at average teacher salaries, adjusted for each state’s cost of living.
The states that earned the most points for funding public education and narrowing resource discrepancies were New York, New Jersey, and Wyoming. Florida lost every single available point for school funding, while Arizona, Idaho, and Nevada lost all but one. Washington, DC, Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont all stand out for having exceptionally low teacher pay despite relatively high per-pupil spending.
It’s important to recognize that numerous GOP-controlled states are in the process of defunding their public schools — through spending cuts and policies that drain public coffers by enabling skyrocketing voucher costs coupled with generous tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy. If this experiment is allowed to continue, it will ultimately disfigure the landscape of community life and civic participation.
Freedom to Teach and Learn
Because the right-wing attacks on students and educators have ramped up in conjunction with efforts to defund public schools and boost private alternatives, this NPE report card includes a new category, Freedom to Teach and Learn, which encompasses a range of factors pertaining to student safety and well-being: laws protecting LGBTQ students in public schools, corporal punishment bans, censorship and curriculum bans, collective bargaining for teachers, and teacher quality…..
[Please open the link to read the rest of this important article.]
NBCT teacher Justin Parmenter has been reviewing the religious schools that now receive public funding and frequently posts his findings on Twitter (X is banned here).
Taxpayers in North Carolina should be outraged to learn where their dollars are going.
He writes:
A Union County pastor is under fire for saying from the pulpit that he would not convict a rapist if his victim were wearing shorts. And if you’re a taxpayer in North Carolina, you are funding his organization….
Tabernacle Christian School has received voucher dollars every school year since 2014-15 for a grand total of $3,649,766 in public taxpayer funds (that data available here).
In the past two years alone, Bobby Leonard’s organization has received nearly $2,000,000 ($902,315 in 2023-24 and $923,328 in 2022-23).
I would venture to say that the vast majority of North Carolinians would prefer NOT to have their hard-earned tax dollars subsidizing institutions that espouse hateful and violent philosophies like Bobby Leonard’s.
Unfortunately, private schools are legally permitted to discriminate against students based on factors like religious beliefs and sexual orientation, even when they’re receiving public funding.
And discriminate they do.
This voucher-receiving school in Fayetteville, NC specifically bans “Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Muslims, non Messianic Jews, Hindus, and Buddhists” and refers to homosexuality as “deviate [sic] and perverted.”
Please open the link and see how well compensated these religious schools are by North Carolina’s taxpayers.
A homeschooling mother with extremist views upset the establishment incumbent for the position of state superintendent of public schools. The incumbent had a 10-1 financial advantage but still lost.
Ultra-conservative challenger Michele Morrow defeated incumbent Catherine Truitt in the Republican primary for state superintendent of public instruction.
With 99% of precincts reporting, Morrow has 52% of the vote to 48% for Truitt, who is the only incumbent Council of State member who lost to a primary challenger. Truitt had entered the Republican primary with a major fundraising lead and the endorsement of many prominent GOP elected officials.
Morrow will face off against former Guilford County Superintendent Mo Green, who has nearly two-thirds of the vote in the Democratic primary…
Truitt, 53, was elected superintendent in 2020. The former classroom teacher has political credentials such as having been senior education adviser to then GOP Gov. Pat McCrory.
Truitt’s endorsements included U.S. Rep. Virginia Foxx; state Sens. Phil Berger and Ralph Hise; and state Reps. John Bell, Destin Hall and Jason Saine. Truitt had raised $327,003 compared to $37,764 for Morrow.
But Morrow and her supporters portrayed Truitt has being a liberal, pointing to how she had been supported by U.S. Sen. Thom Tillis, who is unpopular with many conservative Republicans.
Morrow, 52, is a home-school parent and former missionary who is an activist working with groups such as Liberty First Grassroots and the Pavement Education Project.
Morrow was among the supporters of then President Donald Trump who protested in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021, but says she did not storm the Capitol Building.
She says her plan is to “Make Academics Great Again” in North Carolina by prioritizing scholastics and safety over Critical Race Theory and DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion). Morrow has accused public schools of indoctrinating students, “teaching children to hate our country” and training students in “transgender theory.”
If elected, Morrow says she will “make sound basic moral instruction priority number one.” Morrow also promises that “you better believe that our teachers will be well versed in the true history of our great nation.”
The lobbyist, an official with Betsy DeVos’s Tennessee Federation for Children, made clear that Republican legislators who opposed vouchers would face harsh retribution. He pledged that anti-voucher Republican legislators would be challenged in a primary by well-funded opponents committed to pass vouchers. Money would come in from out-of-state billionaires and millionaires to knock off Republicans who voted against vouchers.
The story came from NewsChannel 5 in Nashville.
NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WTVF) — A secret recording reveals how ultra-wealthy forces have laid the groundwork for the current debate in the Tennessee legislature over school vouchers by using their money to intimidate, even eliminate, those who dared to disagree.
In the recording obtained by NewsChannel 5 Investigates from a 2016 strategy session, Nashville investment banker Mark Gill discusses targeting certain anti-voucher lawmakers for defeat as a form of “public hangings.” At the time, Gill was a member of the board of directors for the pro-voucher group Tennessee Federation for Children.
Using their vast resources to defeat key incumbents, Gill argues, would send a signal to other lawmakers in the next legislative session…
Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee has teed up the issue this year with a plan for school vouchers that would send hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to private schools.
It follows a years-long effort by school privatization forces to elect lawmakers who would vote their way and to destroy those who would not.
In the 2016 recording, Mark Gill discusses the prospect of turning against Republican Rep. Eddie Smith from Knoxville because Smith had voted against a bill designed to cripple the ability of teacher groups to have dues deducted from teachers’ paychecks.
Gill has served on the Tennessee Board of Regents overseeing the state’s community and technical colleges since 2019.
“Think about it,” Gill says.
“What better way to say to people, OK, you want us to fall on our sword for you, to spend thousands of dollars — which I did personally — to get you elected, and you come up here and do this sh*t. Let me just show you what the consequences of that are,” Gill says…
At the time, Gill was also considering targeting Republican Judd Matheny from Tullahoma because Matheny was viewed as being too close to Tennessee teachers and would be a good “scalp” to hang on the school privatizers’ efforts.
“He also has, I think, put himself in a position where his scalp could be very valuable to all school reformers,” Gill says, noting Matheny’s relationship with the Tennessee Education Association. “He is one of the people who has bought the TEA line that you need to side with the TEA because of the teachers and that’s your safest route.”
The reporter for NewsChannel 5 played the recording for J.C. Bowman, leader of the Professional Educators of Tennessee.
Bowman was stunned.
“Judd Matheny was a conservative — a big Second Amendment guy. Some of the names they mention in there — conservative all the way through. So you are going to eat your own…”
NewsChannel 5 Investigates noted to Bowman that Gill was not talking about convincing lawmakers that the Tennessee Federation for Children was right on the issue of school vouchers.
“No, they are not even making that comparison,” the teacher lobbyist agreed.
“If you put this issue on the ballot — and that’s what I would say, put it on the ballot — vouchers would lose.”
“I don’t think anybody is going to get unseated without some substantial independent expenditures coming in there,” Gill says, acknowledging that wealthy special interests would need to spend a lot of money to knock off lawmakers who did not vote their way.
That strategy was apparent in 2022 when Republicans Bob Ramsey and Terri Lynn Weaver were targeted and defeated.
Weaver was among those Republicans who in 2019 refused to bow to pressure to vote for school vouchers.
And like these ads taken out against Bob Ramsey, Weaver also faced attacks from school privatization forces for supposedly being a corrupt career politician — attacks funded by so-called dark money.
“Tremendous amounts of money, much of which is outside money, [the] money was not from my district,” Weaver said. “They slander you. They want to win — and they’ll do anything to do it.”
Bowman said Gill’s strategy represents “the absolute destruction of people.”
We wanted to know, “Is there anyone on the public education side of the debate playing this sort of hardball politics?”
“None that I know of,” Bowman said. “I know of nobody playing that.”
To read the complete article and to listen to the recording, open the link.
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