Peter Greene writes here about the latest news from Pennsylvania, where he lives. The Republican-dominated state senate passed a voucher bill. Newly elected Democratic Governor Josh Shapiro has said he supports vouchers. He’s getting lots of kudos from Rightwingers. Is this why we was elected? It’s now up to House Democrats, who have a sliver majority, to stop this giveaway to private and religious schools.
Peter Greene writes:
Choicers in Pennsylvania are so close they can taste it, and everyone has come off the bench to help push this newest bill past a governor who has said he likes vouchers just fine—under certain condition. This is from my piece from Forbes.com this morning.
Democrat Josh Shapiro made no secret of his support for school vouchers when he was campaigning for the Pennsylvania governor’s seat. Now conservatives are pushing him to put that support to work.
The Lifeline Scholarship Program has been kicking around Harrisburg in a variety of bills that presented a variety of school voucher formats as voucher supporters looked for a version that would garner enough support to pass. The current iteration is a traditional school voucher, essentially a taxpayer funded tuition subsidy for students attending private schools.
Under this bill, students in the lowest 15% of schools in the commonwealth (as determined by standardized test scores) would be eligible.
The voucher system would be a chance for school voucher proponents to get their foot in the door, an especially tasty victory in a state with a Democratic governor. To add to the pressure to pass, a coalition of right wing voucher fans has sent Shapiro a letter arguing for the voucher program.
First, he details the background of the leaders of the voucher lobby. All have long-time connections to rightwing causes. Most were hired to push West Virginia’s expansive voucher plan, which passed in 2021.
If ever there was a state that needs a strong public school system, it’s West Virginia. But with big Koch money, the Koch puppets will make that impossible.
Instead of good public schools, West Virginians will have the “freedom” to find a good education on their own!
After identifying the staff and board, Greene writes:
So we’ve got the picture now– Cardinal Institute for West Virginia Policy (which belongs to the State Policy Network) is a Koch organization.
Cardinal Institute is all for the usual Koch version of liberty. They are pushing a West Virginia Miracle, and the four pillars are “Economic Freedom, Labor Freedom, Education Freedom, and Montani Semper Liberi – a culture of freedom.” They would like to promote “limited government, economic freedom, and personal responsibility.” They’ve got a podcast– “Forgotten America.” And they promise a “new paradigm”–
An “island” of poverty in the wealthiest country the world, West Virginia’s brighter future depends on a new paradigm – a new way of looking at the world with new ideas and a philosophy built on innovation, human flourishing, and a recognition that freedom is the greatest alleviator of poverty the world has ever seen. Ours is a philosophy built on the entrepreneur, the tinkerer in the garage, and the idea that small government means more room for people to create and build their own futures.
It’s a curious pitch in a state that is not exactly known for government overreach. West Virginia is a state with a history of labor struggles and a history of state government that exerts its power mostly to aid guys like Charles Koch. Regular people have always had plenty of room in this state that is renowned for its poverty— worst health, worst education levels, worst employment, and geography that makes it hard for basic infrastructure like roads and water and electricity and internet to reach some citizens. (And at least one community gutted by the departure of its WVU college campus–but hey, they’re free now.) It’s hard to imagine that any of these problems would be solved by less government, but libertarians gotta libertarian.
So what does Ballangee say about Mount Everest?
In his Education Next piece, Ballangee comes close to honesty about the larger goals of his particular arm of the school voucher movement.
There is a common misconception among education reform advocates that passing universal choice legislation is akin to summiting Mount Everest. Upon universal choice’s enactment into law, it is done. Time to exhale and pop the champagne, for the mountain has been scaled.
In other words, voucher laws are not the end game. Simply making a voucher program available is not enough.
Next, the program has to be pushed and promoted. There will be a urge, then a steady growth “as families become aware of the program and hear from neighbors, fellow church attendees, and other connections about their new options” (just in case you had doubts about voucher ties to religion). Nut awareness must be built and PR must be provided to popularize the program. Failure for an education choice program does not often come in the form of mistakes, fraud, or incompetence. More frequently, the problems are apathy and ignorance.
I don’t know. There’s an awful lot of fraud and incompetence in the school choice world. Nor am I sure how the lack of interest in a choice program is not the same thing as a lack of market demand. But of course modern marketing means creating a demand for your product. So, Ballangee asserts, somebody will need to work on that.
Someone will also need to build/attract a supply of educational “providers.” “Help private schools sign up,” he says, skipping over the question of why a successful private school would want to sign up. Somebody has to reach out to edupreneurs and get them signed up, too. Basically, be an education broker.
Now that choicers need to spend less time lobbying legislators, “the nexus of a successful program [he means a privatizing program, not an educational program] will shift somewhat from legislative considerations, lobbying, and bill design towards family outreach and relationship cultivation, specific government agency relationships, and broad marketing campaigns.”
Also, you’ll have to prepare for those “legions of entities” looking to “besmirch” the program (public education establishment, unions, union-friendly media).
And this–
You have to figure out how – not if – to help the families about to embark on this journey for the first time…
You must figure out how to manage each “case” not only for the sake of the family and child but also for the overall health of the program.
There will be grandparents who have never used a computer now asked to upload a birth certificate on their grandchild’s behalf. There will be parents with limited education who know only one thing when it comes to navigating this fresh bureaucratic concoction: “my child needs something different.” Be sympathetic, but, more importantly, develop competence.
Learn the law and accompanying statutes backwards and forwards or find someone who does. You must have a path or contact for families to use. “I don’t know the answer, but I know someone who might” will become one of the most useful phrases in your reform handbook.
In short, Ballengee is outlining all the new business opportunities available on the mountaintop voucher peak. The only one he left out was the booming business in K-12 education loans for all those parents for whom state’s voucher won’t cover the cost of their education provider. Not only will government stop providing public education, but there are many opportunities to make a buck or ten in the newly free and unregulated marketplace of education stuff.
The Koch mountaintop
Because here’s what “freedom” means on Koch mountain– you are free to try to get to the top if you can, and I am free to ignore any of your problems (unless you pay me to help you), because the dream remains a world in which I have no responsibility to my fellow travelers on the earth (and certainly don’t have to pay taxes to provide services for Those People).
Ballangee isn’t going to have any discussion of how well vouchers work as far as education goes (hint: not very well). But that’s okay, because, as he says, “education choice is good and a moral necessity.” I’m of the opinion that guaranteeing each child a decent education is the moral necessity, and, as always, I question the assumption that “education choice” must somehow involve the free market, one of the great unexamined assumptions of the modern choicer movement. Are choice and freedom important values in life? Damn right they are–which is why we as a society bear a responsibility for getting every child an education that will help them freely access more choices.
In the end, Ballengee’s mountain is one that Ayn Rand would probably approve of.
Though the last few steps up the mountain are the steepest and most difficult, they are also closest to what we are looking for when we embark on our journey: helping children find their own path to their own personal summit.
In other words, I’ve got my summit, Jack. Go find your own.
“Helping” I suppose could mean choice advocates just helping out of the goodness of their hearts (though their hearts, bless them, don’t know much about actual education). But I suspect that help will be provided, for a price (or a cut of your voucher), to those who can find it and access it while navigating a sprawling unregulated complicated marketplace. It’s funny, because another thing we could do is collect all the experts in delivering education under one roof, where they’d be easy to find. And we could pay them with public tax dollars, and recruit and hire them with the understanding that they are there to help students climb their own personal mountain. But then some of us would have to pay taxes to fund it, and they might not be willing to make it all about christianist ideas.
So instead, Koch-trained folks imagine a mountain, an Everest. By the way, do you know what Everest looks like these days? It’s a crowded mess of wealthy, resource-rich tourists who are hiring someone else to guide them. Well, that’s Everest.
The peak of the school voucher mountain looks a lot like wealthy, well-resourced folks looking down at the folks struggling on the slopes of other mountains and saying, “Well, don’t they look free. I wonder if they’ll make it.”
Tom Ultican was a computer scientist before he became a high school teacher of advanced mathematics and science in California. Now that he is retired, he is a scholar of the corporate reform movement, whose goal is to privatize public schools.
In this illuminating post, Ultican analyzes a documentary called “The Right to Read,” which he compares to the propaganda film “Waiting for Superman.” Behind the film, he writes, is the whole apparatus of the corporate reform movement, armed with derogatory claims about public schools and a simplistic cure for literacy.
He begins:
The new 80-minute video “The Right to Read”was created in the spirit of “Waiting for Superman.” It uses false data interpretations to make phony claims about a non-existent reading crisis. Oakland’s NAACP 2nd Vice President Kareem Weaver narrates the film. Weaver is a full throated advocate for the Science of Reading (SoR) and has many connections with oligarch financed education agendas. The video which released February 11, 2023 was made by Jenny Mackenzie and produced by LeVar (Kunta Kinte) Burton.
Since 2007, Jenny Mackenzie has been the executive director of Jenny Mackenzie Films in Salt Lake City. Neither Mackenzie nor Burton has experience or training as educators. However, Burton did star on the PBS series “Reading Rainbow.” He worked on the show as an actor not a teacher.
One of the first media interviews about “The Right to Read” appeared on KTVX channel 4 in Salt Lake City. Ben Heuston from the Waterford Institute answered questions about the new film and the supposed “reading crisis” in American public schools. Heuston who has a PhD in psychology from Brigham Young University claimed that two-thirds of primary grade students in America read below grade level. That is a lie. He is conflating proficiency in reading on the National Assessment of Education Performance (NAEP) with grade level and should know better.
Ultican shows the graphs of NAEP scores over the past thirty years: reading scores have been unchanged for 30 years. The rhetoric about “the crisis in reading” is a hoax.
Misinterpreting the data shown above is the basis for the specious crisis in reading claims. It is known that students develop at different rates and in the lower grades the differences can be dramatic. That explains some of the low scoring. All but a very small percentage of these fourth grader will be reading adequately when they get to high school.
America’s leading authorities on teaching reading are frustrated. Their voices are being drowned out by forces who want to monetize reading education and privatize it.
Ultican names names and identifies corporate sponsors. Somebody expects to make a heap of money from this latest manufactured crisis.
Kris Nordstrom of the North Carolina Justice Center reports on a shocking study of the state’s voucher program. It found that a significant number of voucher schools receive more vouchers than they have students. Most of those profiting by the state’s negligence are religious schools.
Will anyone care?
He wrote:
This session, General Assembly leaders have placed a massive expansion of the state’s voucher program at the top of their education agenda. Legislative leaders in both the House and the Senate want to triple the program’s size by opening it to wealthy families who have already enrolled their children in private schools. But new data shows that the existing program lacks adequate oversight and is potentially riven with fraud.
Data from the two agencies charged with overseeing private schools and North Carolina’s Opportunity Scholarship voucher program show several cases where schools have received more vouchers than they have students. Several other private schools have received voucher payments from the state after they have apparently closed.
An analysis of this data shows 62 times where a school received more vouchers than they had students.
For example, Mitchener University Academy in Johnston County reported a total enrollment of 72 students in 2022. That same year, the state sent them vouchers for 149 students. Based on this data, either every student received two vouchers, or the school pocketed about $230,000 of state money for students that never existed….
The actual number could be higher. Since 2015, 449 vouchers have been awarded to schools that failed to report their enrollment to DNPE.
In addition, 23 schools continued to receive vouchers after they stopped reporting to DNPE altogether. It’s unclear whether these schools were operating in the years they received vouchers. For example, Crossroads Christian School of Statesville submitted reports to DNPE from 2009 through 2019. They stopped reporting to DNPE in 2020. Yet that same year, the school received $57,300 for 15 voucher students, even though it’s unclear whether the school was operating for the entire school year.
These data discrepancies should represent a major red flag for lawmakers pushing voucher expansion. These discrepancies could represent innocent mistakes, or they could represent massive fraud. Unfortunately, lawmakers have failed to equip either DNPE or SEAA with the staff or authority to determine the reason for the discrepancies.
Josh Cowen is a Professor if Educatuon Policy at Michigan State University who spent nearly two decades involved in studying the effects of vouchers. In this post, published here for the first time, he responds to a school choice advocate, Chad Aldeman, who recently made his case for his views.
Josh Cowen writes:
Can’t we all just get along?
That’s the question underlying a new column by education reform specialist Chad Aldeman.
Although he avoids saying so directly, he’s talking about the latest rush to expand school vouchers in state legislatures during the current lawmaking cycle. It’s mostly happening in red states, and supporters have broader names including the all-encompassing “school choice,” which Aldeman uses, to the more jingoist “education freedom.”
It’s worth reading and considering. I’ve done so in part because, as Peter Greene has pointed out, Aldeman is among the more serious thinkers on education reform issues and because he hints at questions I get myself a lot from journalists covering reform: what would it take to get me to support voucher programs today?
Aldeman lays out what he calls the “progressive vision” for these programs. And by merging vouchers in that vision with charters and inter-district choice, he makes it difficult to distinguish meaningful differences between each in both origin, intent, and policy result.
But if you read my own stuff, most recently in Time Magazine,you know I’m concerned above all right now with vouchers—much as I have other critiques too, such as the increased Christian Nationalism of the charter school movement that Carol Burris and others have recently noted.
The focus of Aldeman’s vision is the idea that a.) public schools aren’t so strong on academic outcomes, or in their history of discrimination and that b.) it’s possible to acknowledge that while backing reasonable restraints on voucher-like programs to prohibit discrimination with public funds and to safeguard educational quality.
There are two overarching blindspots in that vision. Active discrimination against children is fundamental to the voucher movement. Today it’s LGBTQ children, but 60 years ago it was against Black children as vouchers popped up in places like Texas to avoid desegregation orders. Now, tens of millions of dollars already go to private schools that exclude gay families. And a recent report from Wisconsin carefully details how voucher schools work the system to avoid what anti-discrimination rules do exist, not just for LGBTQ kids but students with disabilities too. In short: they admit all students (as Aldeman recommends) but then expel them, because legal protections are much stronger on the front end than the back end.
Most current legislation protects schools’ right to maintain their “creed” (do a word search on whatever state code you want, you’re likely to find it). That’s an all-encompassing word that allows schools to hide behind religious beliefs when it comes to excluding certain kids. Removing that word, as Aldeman’scolumn rightly implies would have to be done for an equitable voucher system, is politically impossible.
Kenneth Starr, of Clinton/Lewinsky fame, was actually the lead counsel defending vouchers in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, the original Supreme Court case that ruled vouchers constitutional way back in 2002. Vouchers are that ingrained in Republican Party politics—both the old guard establishment that Starr came from, and the MAGA wing today that’s carrying on the legacy.
Aldeman’s case would have progressives simply ignore the political realities of the voucher movement. In essence, in the spirit of compromise, we’re to ignore decades of efforts to divert tax dollars toward unregulated markets, fundamentalist religious organizations, and anti-labor movements in the interest of moving education policy forward.
(The last point itself ignores substantial evidence that vouchers fail on academic terms in the first place).
But so-called “educational freedom” is too existential a question. Not for nothing, but this latest push comes on the heels of the Supreme Court’s removal of reproductive freedom among our constitutional protections. In my state, the same political operatives fighting to pass school vouchers in 2022 were also fighting to keep reproductive rights off the ballot. That’s not an accident.
On the voucher-backing Bradley Foundation’s board of directors is a lawyer named Cleta Mitchell. Mitchell was on the phone with Donald Trump during his infamous Georgia phone call, and all over the January 6th report. More recently she suggested that young citizens should lose the vote, and has been active in other voter suppression efforts. Speaking of January 6th, a vice president at Hillsdale College—the same Hillsdale so active in education freedom and Christian Nationalism more broadly—was partly behind the Michigan chapter of the fake electors scheme. Again: not an accident.
So when Aldeman suggests that progressives are being a bit overdramatic by worrying about threats to democracy, he’s either ignoring this evidence or he’s asking us to engage in a thought experiment that pretends that evidence doesn’t exist.
Here’s my own thought experiment: in a world in which none of us is perfect, and all of us are wrong some of the time, how would you rather be wrong?
For my part, I’d rather be too worried about LGBTQ exclusion, too worried about the loss of reproductive freedom, too worried about the ties between voucher backers and voter suppression. If I’m wrong, the worst that would happen is a few extra people already in private school would have to keep paying for it on their own.
But if the danger is real, then the erosion of civil liberties, of human rights, and—yes—democracy will have happened not just because of MAGA Republicans or Charles Koch or Betsy DeVos. It’ll happen because the progressive vision, as Alderman calls it, was either blinded or simply asleep at its post.
Tony Evers ran for Governor of Wisconsin on a pro-public education platform. He had been the State Commissioner of Education, and he pledged to reverse the damage done by Republicans to the state’s once-eminent public schools. After years of Republican governors who supported privatization, Evers portrayed himself as a champion of public schools.
The Network for Public Education did not support him. One of our allies in Wisconsin warned that he was two-faced. When we did not support him, other Wisconsin friends were shocked and told us we were wrong about Evers. They said he would be a great friend to public schools.
Sadly, Governor Evers turned out to be a traitor. He just signed a bill giving more funding to voucher schools than to the state’s woefully underfunded public schools.
He betrayed his campaign promises and his supporters. Shame on Tony Evers!
The Wisconsin Public Education Network sent out the following bulletin:
Dear friends of Wisconsin students and their public schools,
You have likely heard the news that Gov. Evers signed into law today both the shared revenue bill and SB330/AB305, a bill that gives a bump to spending authority for low revenue districts while dramatically expanding state funding to private schools and independent charters. Combined with a gap-widening budget omnibus proposal that provides woefully inadequate and inequitable resources to public schools, the move is part of a larger deal that fails to meet any of the priority needs of students in Wisconsin’s public schools, marking 16 YEARS of preK-12 budgets that fail to keep pace with inflation.
All day, our phones have been buzzing with messages of outrage, frustration, and betrayal.
From the Wisconsin Alliance for Excellent Schools board of directors:
The action taken by the Joint Committee on Finance falls well short of the state’s constitutional responsibilities in the area of K-12 education and must be dramatically improved by the state legislature. If not, the budget must be vetoed by the governor and recrafted in order to pass Constitutional muster.
Our chief concerns with this budget deal:
Public school students have been defunded relative to inflation for fourteen years and the per pupil adjustments proposed by the Joint Committee on Finance will extend that defunding streak to 16 years.
During that period of time, funding for students with disabilities was frozen for a decade and the promised, but not guaranteed, 33% reimbursement rate for special education will continue to keep Wisconsin near the very bottom of all states in that category.
Local property tax payers will be forced to cover the costs of a massive expansion of the unaccountable voucher program.
Private schools will be provided more direct aid from the state than most public schools are even allowed to spend (see fiscal memo here).
Shared revenue deal usurps the authority of the MPS board by requiring reinstatement of police officers on school property.
We call on the state legislature to fix this budget bill by restoring special education reimbursement to a minimum of 60%, providing an inflationary increase in spendable aid to all students in public schools, and removing irresponsible provisions to expand spending on private education. We urge Governor Evers to veto any bill that arrives at his desk that fails to meet these critical needs of Wisconsin students.
Unfortunately, 15 minutes after our board of directors issued their statement on these fast-tracked proposals, we learned Gov. Evers had already signed into law the largest stand-alone voucher aid expansion in state history and a shared revenue bill that undermines Milwaukee Public Schools, so we issued this response. We hope you will share it widely, as it details some of the most harmful and gap-widening provisions of the “compromise”:
This deal will provide private voucher schools more guaranteed state aid than the average public school is even allowed to spend per student,
while public schools will see a less-than-inflationary increase to state aid and a less than 2% increase to special education, cementing funding discrimination for kids with disabilities.
Raising the low revenue limit ceiling by $1000 is a nice gesture, but it doesn’t even bring those districts up to the state average in spending authority.
Public school students and local property taxpayers will pay the price, while private schools that can legally discriminate and pick and choose their students get a blank check from the state.
With voucher enrollment caps set to come off entirely in 2 years, this is the most reckless and irresponsible thing Wisconsin could do with its massive surplus, especially when we consider that the nearly 80% of students participating in the statewide voucher program never attended a public school.
The three top concerns of the public at all four of the budget hearings (preK-12 public schools, higher ed, and childcare) were all put on the chopping block to reach this “compromise” and nearly $2 BILLION of Gov. Evers’ original budget proposal for public schools was exchanged for this massive, unconscionable, unconstitutional voucher expansion. The state is already not meeting its obligation to its children, and this budget demonstrates a refusal to use the biggest surplus we’ve ever seen to make a meaningful start toward doing so. It’s time to hold Wisconsin accountable for doing better.
The good news: it’s not too late to fix this.
CALL ON LAWMAKERS TO FIX THIS BUDGET SO THAT PUBLIC SCHOOL STUDENTS’ NEEDS ARE MET BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE, AND CALL ON GOV. EVERS TO VETO THE ENTIRE BUDGET BILL IF IT DOESN’T.
And let them know: we are watching every single vote that betrays Wisconsin students.
Find your lawmakers here or call 800-362-9472 for the Wisconsin legislature hotline. Contact Gov. Evers at (608) 266-1212 or online here.
Every single lawmaker has a vote on this bill, and needs to hear from us. Don’t assume you know how they’ll vote – let them know what local kids need!
We know Governor Evers has pledged to do what’s best for kids, and it’s not too late for him to back out of a deal that has gone way too far in selling out students in the public schools we are morally and constitutionally responsible to support. He needs to hear from you!
We continue to advocate for the following to meet the needs our kids have now:
no less than $1,510/per pupil in new spendable funds to their districts to catch up with inflation;
60% reimbursement of special education costs to begin closing the gap between the state’s special ed. support for public and private schools;
prioritizing funds where needs are greatest;
and putting a moratorium on the use of public dollars on unaccountable private and privately-operated schools.
It’s not too late to deliver a budget that meets these needs. Our kids are counting on us to do it.
Stay tuned for additional action steps and details on how you can get involved, and please continue to follow WisconsinNetwork.org/budget for updates!
– Your friends at Team Public
LOCAL LEVEL ACTION. STATEWIDE IMPACT. Wisconsin Public Education Network is a project of the Wisconsin Alliance for Excellent Schools, a nonprofit, nonpartisan public education advocacy organization. To support our work, donate here!
William Phillis, founder of the Ohio Coalition for Equity and Adequacy, reports on the evolution of vouchers. Initially, they were sold as a way to “save poor kids from failing schools.” but now they are a subsidy for upper-income families.
Darrel Rowland, ABC6 (WSYX6) and Fox28 News tweets about vouchers
Darrel Rowland, a former Columbus Dispatch reporter, public affairs editor and senior editor, gleaning data from Howard Fleeter’s June 2023 Policy Brief on Vouchers in Ohio, in a series of Tweets, sheds light on the trend in income level of voucher users. The data show that the percentage of low-income EdChoice voucher users has dropped from 32% in 2014 to 15% in 2023. The State Budget for fiscal years 2023-2024 and 2024-2025 will ratchet-up EdChoice voucher expansion. In the future, EdChoice voucher users will be mostly in the higher income brackets. Low-income students were exploited by voucher advocates to get the voucher foot-in-the-door. Universal vouchers will result in higher private school tuition, which will eliminate voucher participation for nearly all low income students….
School-funding numbers cruncher extraordinaire Howard Fleeter looks at Ohio’s vouchers Two main findings:
1. Originally intended to help students at low-performing public schools ‘escape,’ vouchers are now benefiting a growing number of students already attending private schools
2. Percentage of low-income students assisted through these programs has significantly declined while more students in wealthy families are accessing vouchers Fleeter, consultant for public schools groups, concludes that recent GOP legislative changes “reflect a pronounced “change in the focus of Ohio’s voucher programs from one of expanding opportunity to one where the state simply pays for vouchers for students whose families have already demonstrated that they have the means to afford private school”
In FY 2014, 35% of one (Cleveland-style) voucher program’s recipients were from low-income backgrounds, but by FY 2023, this number had decreased to 7%. For another (EdChoice), the percentage of low-income students receiving vouchers dropped from 32% in FY 2014 to 15% in FY 2023
Learn about EdChoice Vouchers: An Existential Threat to Public Schools
Peter Greene was a teacher in Pennsylvania for 39 years. He is now a regular writer at Forbes and a super star blogger. This column appeared on his blog. He responded to Rick Hess’s claim that school choice is not an attack on public education but part of a long history of trying to improve them. From my perspective, it’s hard to understand how public schools improve by defunding them and replacing them with religious schools, low-quality private schools, home schooling, and cyber charters.
This is what Peter Greene wrote:
Rick Hess (American Enterprise Institute) is one of those occupants of the reformy camp that I take seriously, even when I think he’s wrong. So when he raises the question of whether or not school choice is an “attack” on public education, I think it’s a question worth talking about, because I think the answer is a little bit complicated. So let me walk through his recent piece on that very question bit by bit.
After an intro suggesting that choice expansion flows directly from the pandemic while ascribing opposition to choice to a shadowy cabal that flows from teachers unions, Hess gets to his point, which is that seeing choice as an anti-public school is “misleading and misguided.”
Hess puts choice in the context of a century’s worth of public school fixer-uppers, “a barrage of reforms.” He offers a list–“compulsory attendance, district consolidation, larger schools, smaller schools, magnet schools, standards, test-based accountability, merit pay, and more.”
Some of these ideas were good. Some weren’t. But in hindsight, it’s pretty clear that they weren’t “attacks” on public education; rather, they were attempts to improve it.
I disagree. Some of these ideas were offered with sincere hope for the best. But I’m going to single out the standards movement and test-based accountability for special recognition here.
If you weren’t teaching during the rise of No Child Left Behind, Common Core, and Race To The Top, I’m not sure if I can really capture for you the dawning sense of horror, frustration and futility among teachers at the time.
Word came down that new regulations required us to get test scores up– a little bit per year for starters, then ramping up to an impossible climb, until somehow every single student would be above average. If not, there would be penalties, maybe the complete dismantling and rebuilding of the district, perhaps as a privately-run charter school. “This is not possible,” educators said. “All will learn all,” replied the Powers That Be. “Don’t you believe that students can learn? And which child do you propose to leave behind.”
Then there were the tests themselves. Not very good, and with results coming back with so little detail–and so very late in the game–that they were less than no help at all. “Well, if we just teach the standards, the tests scores will follow,” said some optimistic educators. That didn’t happen. Schools rejiggered curriculum, pulled students away from untested material like art and recess so that they could be double-whammied with test prep.
“Maybe Obama will fix it,” we hoped. He did not. He doubled down. And 2014–the year for 100%–came closer and closer, the year when anyone dealing with educational reality knew that every district in the country would be either a) failing or B) cheating.
And through those years, one at a time or in small groups, teachers arrived at an unpleasant conclusion.
They are setting us up for failure. They want us to fail.
Why would they want that? The rhetoric had already been around on the far right, back all the way to Milton Friedman and on through his intellectual spawn– public education should be dismantled. There was a new push for vouchers and especially charter schools, and that coincided with rising noise about “failing” public schools. There was very little “let’s expand the educational ecosystem” and an awful lot of “we must help students escape failing public schools.” The constant refrain of “school choice will force public schools to improve because competition” was also an omnipresent crock, a slap in the face to educators who were already working their butts off and resented the suggestion that they were either incompetent or lazy. And that thread runs all the way up guys like Christopher Rufo arguing that to get to universals school choice, you have to get to universal distrust of public schools.
Maybe school choice wasn’t in and of itself an attack on public education, but it certainly seemed as if attacking public education was a means of promoting school choice.
I have no doubt that there are people who believe that education would work better if handled by the free market (I think their belief is magical, misguided and wrong, but I do believe it’s sincere). I believe there are technocrats who believe that standards, tests and data would improve education (ditto).
But to be a public school educator on the receiving end of all this (and more) absolutely felt like an attack. The irony is that when reformsters eventually figured out that the attack-filled rhetoric wasn’t helping and they dialed it back, the attacks themselves had become more real.
But let’s get back to Hess.
Public education can encompass a lot of approaches, and it can be organized in many different ways. Rather than blindly insist that “defending public schooling” requires clinging to outdated policies from decades (or centuries) past, we would do better to clarify principles, examine particulars, and then debate proposals.
All of this language is doing a lot of work, but as far as it goes, Hess and I probably agree more than we disagree. But the disagree part comes in the very next paragraph.
Indeed, the pandemic was a stark reminder that there are lots of ways to deliver schooling, including innovations such as learning pods, microschools, virtual tutors, and education savings accounts.
Learning pods and microschools are okay if you’re wealthy. As policy ideas in the vein of the DeVosian, “Well, your voucher may not be enough to get into a good private school, but you can always start a microschool,” they suck. I don’t think there are more than a hundred people in the country who came out of the pandemic thinking virtual education is a great idea. And education savings accounts are just vouchers with extra super-powers and porcine lip gloss. And none of these are really new ideas. They also all suffer from the same issue, which is the notion that any school choice system must be done free market style. We can do a great choice system without the free market at all (but that’s a post for another day).
Hess identifies one of the issues as the fuzziness of the word “public.” On this point, I think he gets some things wrong.
Choice opponents assert that public schools are “public” because they’re funded by public tax dollars.
No, that’s choicers. It’s been part of the charter school argument that charter schools are public schools because they are funded with public dollars. This pro-public ed writer (I’m not anti-choice, but I am anti-most-of-the-versions-of-choice-with-which-we’ve-been-presented) would say that public schools are public because they the public funds them, owns them, and operates them via representatives. Furthermore, they are public schools because they have a responsibility to the public to serve all students.
You can argue, as Hess and others do, that districts regularly hire outside firms to handle certain functions and occasionally outsource the teaching of certain students with exceptional special needs. But in all those cases, the responsibility for the management of those outside contracts rests with the public school district. A charter or private voucher-fed school carries no such responsibility. A public school district cannot, as can charters and voucher schools may, simply show parents the door and say, “Good luck. Your child is not our problem.” Do all public systems meet that responsibility as well as they ought to? Absolutely not. But at least the responsibility exists. A parent who thinks the public system is short-changing their child can (and often will) sue the district. They have no such option in a choice system, as such systems are currently conceived.
Hess is correct in calling public education “a pretty expansive category.” But it hinges on far more than whose money is being used.
In fact, I’d argue that it is the responsibility portion that is the big difference in the brand of choice being pushed by many these days. Our public system is based, however imperfectly, on the notion that we bear a collective responsibility for educating the young. Modern choice, particularly the current version sold under the culture warrior parental right brand, is about saying that getting a child an education is the responsibility of the parents, and that’s it. Yes, many choicers are also trying to privatize the ownership and provision of education, but it is the privatizing of responsibility for a child’s education that is perhaps the most profound and fundamental shift.
More importantly, simply calling something “public” doesn’t make it a good thing. While the phrase “public schooling” is suffused with happy notions of inclusivity and fairness, “public” isn’t a magic word.
Ain’t it that truth. Public education has a wide variety of issues–though some of those are the direct result of reformster attempts to “fix” things (see above re: standards and testing). But I’ve never argued that I’m against modern school choice and ed reform because public schools are perfect the way they are and everything else sucks. My most fundamental issue is that public schools have some serious issues, and modern ed reform and school choice don’t solve any of them (yes, that is also another long post). They just weaken public school’s ability to work on them while blowing through a giant pile of taxpayer money.
The point isn’t to play word games but to understand that things are less clear-cut than defenders of the status quo are prone to acknowledge. There are many ways to provide and serve the aims of public education.
After all these decades in the ed biz, I’m inclined to assert, repeatedly, that everything in education is less clear-cut that the vast majority of people acknowledge. Some folks on my side of the aisle are quick to infer nefarious and/or greedy motives when, sincere ideology is sufficient explanation (much as some folks in the choice camp assume that the only reason someone would stick up for public ed is because she’s on the union payroll). Some choicers are simply ignorant of how any of this school stuff works. Some are up against a particularly dysfunctional local version of public education. Some are anti-democrats for whom this is just one issue of many, one more way in which the government steals their money to spend it on Those People. Some want to recapture education for a particularly conservative version of christianist religion. Some want to social engineer their way to a more efficient society. Some are serious people, and some are not.
In short, the choicer and reformster camp contains a great variety of individuals.
Are some of those individuals interested promoting school choice as a way of making public education better? Is it possible to make public education better by incorporating some choice ideas? I believe that latter is true, and I swear I’m going to post about it in the not too distant future, and as for the former, well… yes, but.
But for all the variety in the choicer camp, they mostly adhere to two flawed premises– that a choice landscape should rest on a bedrock of free market mechanics and that the resulting system shouldn’t cost a cent more than the current one. As long as we start with those premises, school choice must be a zero sum game, and even if all the people who have spent the past four decades trying to tear public ed down so that choice will look better–even if all those people shut up, the zero sum game feature seems guaranteed to turn school choice into an attack on public education.
Kathryn Joyce is an outstanding journalist who has written several excellent articles about the far-right conspiracy to destroy public education. In this important article, published by both the Hechinger Report and Vanity Fair, she examines the rightwing takeover of public schools in Sarasota, Florida, by the extremist Moms for Liberty and their hero Governor DeSantis.
Joyce begins:
SARASOTA COUNTY, Fla. — On a Sunday afternoon in late May 2022, Zander Moricz, then class president of Sarasota County’s Pine View School, spent the moments before his graduation speech sitting outside the auditorium, on the phone with his lawyers. Over the previous month, the question of what he’d say when he stepped to the podium had become national news. That March, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis had signed the Parental Rights in Education Act, quickly dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” law for its ban on all mention of gender identity and sexuality in K–3 classrooms and restriction of those discussions in higher grades as well. Moricz, a student LGBTQ+ activist, had led several protests against the act that spring and joined a high-profile lawsuit against the state. In early May, he charged on Twitter that Pine View’s administration had warned that if he mentioned his activism or the lawsuit at graduation, his microphone would be cut. (In a statement released last year, the school district confirmed that students are told not to express political views in their speeches.)
In the tumultuous weeks leading up to the ceremony, Pine View — Sarasota’s “gifted” magnet institution, consistently ranked one of the top 25 public high schools in the country — was besieged with angry calls and news coverage. Moricz stayed home for three weeks, he said, thanks to the rvolume of death threats he received, and people showed up at his parents’ work. When a rumor started that Pine View’s principal would have to wear a bulletproof vest to graduation, he recalled, “the entire campus lost their minds,” thinking “everyone’s going to die” and warning relatives not to come. His parents worried he’d be killed.
But after all the controversy, graduation day was a success. Moricz, now 19, delivered a pointedly coded speech about the travails of being born with curly hair in Florida’s humid climate: how he worried about the “thousands of curly-haired kids who are going to be forced to speak like this” — like he was, in code — “for their entire lives as students.” Videos of the speech went viral. Donations poured into Moricz’s youth-led nonprofit. That summer, he left to study government at Harvard.
Half-a-year later though, when Moricz came home, Sarasota felt darker.
“I’m wearing this hat for a reason,” he said when we met for coffee in a strip mall near his alma mater in early March. “Two years ago, if I was bullied due to my queerness, the school would have rallied around me and shut it down. If it happened today, I believe everyone would act like it wasn’t happening.”
These days, he said, queer kids sit in the back of class and don’t tell teachers they’re being harassed. A student at Pine View was told, Moricz said, that he couldn’t finish his senior thesis researching other states’ copycat “Don’t Say Gay” laws. (The school did not respond to a request for comment through a district spokesperson.) When Moricz’s nonprofit found a building to house a new youth LGBTQ+ center — since schools were emphatically no longer safe spaces — they budgeted for bulletproof glass.
“The culture of fear that’s being created is doing exactly what it’s supposed to do,” he said. And much of it was thanks to the Sarasota County School Board.
Over the last two years, education culture wars have become the engine of Republican politics nationwide, with DeSantis’s Florida serving as the vanguard of the movement. But within the state, Sarasota is more central still.
Its school board chair, Bridget Ziegler, cofounded the conservative activist group Moms for Liberty and helped lay the groundwork for “Don’t Say Gay.” After a uniquely ugly school board race last summer, conservatives flipped the board and promptly forced out the district’s popular superintendent. In early January, when DeSantis appointed a series of right-wing activists to transform Florida’s progressive New College into a “Hillsdale of the South” — emulating the private Christian college in Michigan that has become a trendsetting force on the right — that was in Sarasota too. In February, DeSantis sat alongside Ziegler’s husband and Moms for Liberty’s other cofounders to announce a list of 14 school board members he intends to help oust in 2024—Sarasota’s sole remaining Democrat and LGBTQ+ board member, Tom Edwards, among them. The next month, Ziegler proposed that the board hire a newly created education consultancy group with ties to Hillsdale College for what she later called a “‘WOKE’ Audit.” (Ziegler did not respond to interview requests for this article.)
The dizzying number of attacks has led to staffing and hiring challenges, the cancelation of a class, a budding exodus of liberals from the county, and fears that destroying public education is the ultimate endgame. In January, Ziegler’s husband, Christian — who chairs the Florida Republican Party — tweeted a celebratory declaration: “SARASOTA IS GROUND ZERO FOR CONSERVATIVE EDUCATION.”
It wasn’t hyperbole, said Moricz. “We say that Sarasota is Florida’s underground lab, and we’re its non-consenting lab rats.”
For as long as Florida has been grading schools and school districts — a late 1990s innovation that helped spark the “school reform” movement — Sarasota, with its 62 schools and nearly 43,000 students, has enjoyed an “A” rating. Perched on the Gulf Coast just south of Tampa, the county’s mix of powder-soft beaches and high-culture amenities — including an opera house, ballet and museums — have made it a destination for vacationers and retirees. And that influx has made Sarasota one of the richest counties in the state.
Since many of those retirees, dating back to the 1950s, have been white Midwestern transplants, it’s also made Sarasota a Republican stronghold and top fundraising destination for would-be presidential candidates. Both the last and current chairs of the state GOP — first State Senator Joe Gruters and now Christian Ziegler — live in the county. Sarasota arguably launched Donald Trump’s first presidential campaign, thanks to Gruters’s early support. These days, though, Sarasota isn’t just conservative, but at the leading edge of Florida’s turn to the hard right.
Partly that’s thanks to the Zieglers, who have become one of Florida’s premier power couples, with close ties to both Trump world and the DeSantis administration and a trio of daughters enrolled in local private schools. As founder of the digital marketing company Microtargeted Media, Christian did hundreds of thousands of dollars of work for pro-Trump PACs in 2021, the Sarasota Herald-Tribune reported. After being elected state GOP chair this February, he announced his goal was “to crush these leftist in-state Democrats” so thoroughly that “no Democrat considers running for office.” Although Bridget stepped down from Moms for Liberty shortly after its founding, she subsequently helped draftFlorida’s Parents’ Bill of Rights, which helped pave the way for DeSantis’s 2021 ban on mask mandates and ultimately last year’s “Don’t Say Gay” law. In 2022, the right-wing Leadership Institute hired her as director of school board programs, and built a 6,000-square-foot headquarters in Sarasota to serve as a national hub for conservative education activism. This winter, DeSantis also appointed her to a new board designed to punish the Disney Company for criticizing his anti-LGBTQ laws….
Last year, when Ziegler was up for reelection and two other board members were terming out, she ran as a unified slate with former school resource officer Tim Enos and retired district employee Robyn Marinelli. The candidates drew support from both DeSantis’s administration — which unprecedentedly endorseddozens of school board candidates across the state — and local members of the far-right. A PAC partially funded by The Hollow’s owner campaigned for the “ZEM” slate (a shorthand for the candidates’ surnames) by driving a mobile billboard around the county, calling one of their opponents a “LIAR” and “BABY KILLER” because she’d once worked for Planned Parenthood. Proud Boys hoisted ZEM signs on county streets and a mailer was sent out, castigating the liberal candidates as “BLM/PSL [Party of Socialism and Liberation]/ANTIFA RIOTERS, PLANNED PARENTHOOD BABY KILLERS, [who] WANT GROOMING AND PORNOGRAPHY IN OUR SCHOOLS.” (Enos and Marinelli did not respond to requests for comment for this article.)
Open the link and read all of the article. It is a devastating article about the takeover of the school board by hateful extremists whose tools are fear and divisiveness.
Jeff Bryant writes often about education. He lives in North Carolina. In this article, he tries to solve the mystery of why Democratic state legislator Tricia Cotham switched sides and joined the Republican Party, giving them a supermajority in both houses of the General Assembly?
Cotham was a Democrat who had campaigned in promises to oppose school vouchers; to defend LGBT rights; and support abortion rights.
Once she gave the Republicans the decisive vote in the lower house, the Republicans had a veto-proof majority and were in a position to override any veto by Democratic Governor Roy Cooper.
Cotham, the new Republican, reversed her vote on everything she campaigned for or against. She supported Republicans’ efforts to reduce abortion rights; she endorsed school vouchers; and she sided with Republicans in their attack on trans youth.
In other words, she betrayed the people who voted for her and cast her lot with the hard-right Republicans who have aligned themselves with anti-progressive, anti-liberal, anti-Democrat policies.
Why? She said the Democrats were mean to her. She said they ignored her. She said she didn’t get the committee assignments she wanted. Are these good reasons to join forces with a party that has sought to destroy public education, demoralize teachers, and gerrymander the state to protect its advantages?
None of this made sense. A person doesn’t change their fundamental values because of hurt feelings.
Jeff investigated and determined that her decision was transactional. What did she get in exchange for double-crossing her constituents and her colleagues? Read his article to find out.
Diane Ravitch's blog 