Archives for category: Privatization
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

I Interview Josh Cowen about the Hoax and Failure of Vouchers

By dianeravitch
January 16, 2023 //
5

Periodically, the Network for Public Education sponsors a conversation with an important voice in education policy. On January 11, I interviewed Josh Cowen, Professor of Education Policy at Michigan State University.

Josh has been an insider in voucher research for almost 20 years. It’s a small club, and he knows the research and the researchers. Josh came to the conclusion that vouchers have been a disaster for the students who leave public schools, supposedly to be “saved” by them.

But he points out that 70-80% of the students who use vouchers were never enrolled in public schools. Many return to the public schools. The political pressure for vouchers comes from politicians and parents seeking a subsidy for students already attending private and religious schools. The claim that they will help “save kids from failing schools” is a hoax to cover up the real purpose of vouchers: to transfer funds to private and religious schools.

The discussion was oversubscribed. Many people who wanted to watch the zoom were turned away. You can watch the recording here. The link is at the bottom of the page.

Categories Accountability, Corporate Reform, Disruption, Education Industry, Failure, Fraud, Funding, Lies, Privatization, Research, Vouchers

Michigan: Same Groups Push Voucher Bill, Voter Restriction Bill; Both Fail to Get on Ballot

By dianeravitch
January 14, 2023 //
8

In Michigan, conservative groups tried to get two initiatives on the ballot in 2022, but did not file enough valid signatures in time. The same consultants promoted both propositions.

Betsy DeVos poured millions into the voucher campaign, in hopes of getting it passed by a Republican legislature and avoiding a referendum. In a previous referendum, Michigan voters overwhelmingly rejected vouchers for private and religious schools.

Democrats won control of both houses of the legislature in 2022, so that idea is dead, for now.

Beth LeBlanc of The Detroit News reported:

Conservative groups last month abandoned their efforts to pass voter-initiated laws seeking to create stricter voter identification rules and a tax-incentivized scholarship fund in Michigan that could be used for private school education.

The demise of the Let MI Kids Learn ballot initiative serves as a blow to the West Michigan family of former U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, the Republican mega-donor who helped to launch the effort to create a tax incentive that would finance private school scholarships for students whose parents could not afford the tuition.

Members of the DeVos family contributed roughly $7.9 million toward the Let MI Kids Learn ballot initiative in 2021 and 2022, making up the lion’s share of the financing for the effort, according to state campaign finance records….

The end of the Let MI Kids Learn ballot initiative marks a “major victory for public school students, parents and educators,” said Casandra Ulbrich, a spokesperson for an opposition group called For MI Kids, for MI Schools.

The Secure MI Vote initiative, which also was pulled on Dec. 28, had largely been rendered irrelevant by the November passage of Proposal 2, which cemented in the Michigan Constitution voting rules that Secure MI Vote sought to change in statute, said Jamie Roe, spokesman for the Secure MI Vote effort and a Republican political consultant.

Categories Betsy DeVos, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Michigan, Privatization, School Choice, Vouchers

The Phony “Culture Wars” Are Hurting Students, Teachers, and Schools

By dianeravitch
January 14, 2023 //
36

Far-right extremists concocted a cascading series of so-called culture wars that have no basis in fact or reality. Their purpose is to undermine public trust in teachers and public schools, paving the way for divisive “school choice,” which defunds public schools.

Teachers are intimidated, fearful that they might violate the law by teaching factual history about race and racism. Students are deprived of honesty in their history and social studies classes. Schools are slandered by extremists. Needless divisions are created by the lies propagated by zealots whose goal is to privatize public funding for schools.

First came the furor over “critical race theory,” which is not taught in K-12 schools. CRT is a law school course of study that examines systemic racism. The claim that it permeates K-12 schools was created as a menace threatening the children of America by rightwing ideologue Chris Rufo, who shamelessly smeared the teachers of America as purveyors of race hatred that humiliated white children. Rufo made clear in a speech at Hillsdale College that the only path forward was school choice. The entire point of Rufo’s gambit was the destruction of public trust in public schools.

Then came a manufactured brouhaha over transgender students who wanted to use a bathroom aligned with their sexual identity. The number of transgender students is minuscule, probably 1%. And yet again there was a furor that could have easily been resolved with a gender-neutral bathroom. Ron DeSantis made a campaign ad with a female swimmer who complained that she competed against a trans woman. What she didn’t mention was that the trans woman was beaten, as was she, by three other female swimmers.

And then came the nutty claim that teachers were “grooming” students to be gay. Another smear. No evidence whatever. Reading books about gay characters would turn students gay, said the critics; but would reading about elephants make students want to be elephants?

Simultaneously, extremists raised loud alarms about books that introduced students to dangerous ideas about sexuality and racism. If they read books with gay characters, students would turn gay. If they read about racism, they would “hate America.” So school libraries had to be purged; even public libraries had to be purged. One almost expected public book burnings. So much power attributed to books, as if the Internet doesn’t exist, as if kids can’t watch porn of all kinds, as if public television does not regularly run shows about American’s shameful history of racism.

As citizens and parents, we must stand up for truth and sanity. We must defend our schools and teachers against libelous claims. We must oppose those who would ban books.

Of course, parents should meet with their children’s teachers. They should partner with them to help their children. They should ask questions about the curriculum. They should share their concerns. Learning benefits when parents, teachers, students, and communities work together.

Categories Bias, Bigotry, Censorship, Civil Rights, Corruption, Cruelty, Democracy, Disruption, Ethics, Fraud, Lies, Politics, Privatization, Propaganda, Republicans, School Choice

Josh Cowen: The False Promise That Vouchers Improve Public Schools by Competing with Them

By dianeravitch
January 12, 2023 //
12

Josh Cowen of Michigan State University is among the most experienced voucher researchers in the nation. He is a member of the inner circle of voucher researchers and has been for nearly two decades. He began the work believing that vouchers were promising. As the research accumulated over the years and converged, he realized that vouchers harm the students they are meant to help. I have invited Josh to contribute to this blog whenever he wishes.

He writes here about the claim that the offer of vouchers causes public schools to do better, known as “competitive effects.” Nonsense, he writes.

Over the last few months, as I’ve written here in this blog and elsewhere about how recent data and research show incredibly harmful school voucher impacts for kids, one question that some readers have asked me to address has been the issue of so-called “competitive effects” of vouchers and school choice.

The idea comes from economics, and basically holds that competition between two or more providers of a good or service lowers costs and ultimately provides greater value to consumers. In the economics of education world, the idea that school choice policy forces competition onto public schools to improve the “product” of education is summarized as “a rising tide lifts all boats.”

Before I give you the details, here’s the take-home point: academic research does show that the threat of school choice pressures do prompt upticks in public school test score achievements. That’s particularly true for schools that stand to lose financially from voucher enrollment.

Those tend to be the vulnerable schools with respect to both longstanding historical marginalization, and economic health.

So here’s what you should ask yourself: is that really the way we want to spend public dollars to improve academic outcomes?

Here’s what I mean.

Participant vs. Competitive Effects

First, some definitions. If you’re not in the weeds of school choice research or advocacy, it’s important to clarify the difference between participant and competitive effects because researchers and advocates point to both.

Participant effects are the impact of school vouchers on kids who use them to attend private school. Competitive effects are the impact of school vouchers on kids who stay behind in public classrooms.

It’s inarguable that school vouchers have devasting participant effects. Over the last decade, as voucher programs have gotten larger, we’ve seen impacts as high as twice the academic damage that the pandemic caused to test scores.

But as I wrote above, it’s also true that research shows modest, positive competitive impacts. That is to say: vouchers appear to genuinely pressure public schools to drive up test scores. But voucher advocates who point to that outcome rarely talk about academic drops for kids who use vouchers themselves. When they do, they use industry-funded positive research from groups like the Heritage Foundation or the Goldwater Institute to mask what independent analysts have found.

And as I’ve written both for this page and elsewhere, kids who leave public schools for vouchers tend to do so only temporarily. Their parents are what you might call “voucher curious.” They try a private school out, tend to have average academic declines that are as large as anything we’ve seen in the history of education policy research, and then go back to public schools. Thankfully their outcomes do improve after returning to public education. Studying those kids in Milwaukee, my co-authors and I called that return to academic progress “life after vouchers.”But because these are some of the most at-risk kids in our classrooms, these disruptions can cause long-term if not permanent damage.

So I never want to dismiss the children who temporarily move to voucher schools. They’re not lost to us and they need our help too. Which means it’s important not to talk about competitive effects on public schools without always remembering the horrible outcomes for kids who do leave for vouchers.

It’s “Settled:” Direct Investment in Public Education Works

But what if, despite all of that collateral damage vouchers cause, you’re still wondering about competitive impacts? Just as few voucher activists will cite harmful participant effects when advertising competition, most competition studies do not include analysis of which policy alternatives might be better.

Here’s the obvious alternative: simply spending more money on public schools in the first place.

When I was in graduate school in the early 00’s, the prevailing truism on public school spending was that additional increases in funding had limited value. This thinking was driven almost entirely by the remarkable influence of one man, the economist Eric Hanushek, who compared it to simply “throwing money” at a problem—a phrased used more recently by Betsy DeVos, among others.

Just like the research on voucher participant effects has been entirely upended by more recent evidence, that old work on school spending has been retired by more technically sophisticated statistical approaches and more finely grained data. When it comes to education, money matters—how much, and how it’s spent.

Northwestern economist and National Academy of Education member Kirabo Jackson, one of today’s leading authorities on the subject of school spending, describes the debate as “essentially settled:” direct investment in public education has had consistently large impacts on outcomes ranging from test scores, to graduation rates, to adult earnings later in life. Just a few months ago here in Michigan where I write, University of Michigan scholars released a study showing school finance improvements through our state’s equalization reforms even reduced local crime rates.

Remember that every time you see a conservative scholar point to competition as a policy lever to impact public schools. There may be some small short-term benefit on test scores, but it’s not a substitute for direct and sustained investments directly in schools, teachers and kids.

Just Because We Can, Doesn’t Mean We Should

So yes, research does tend to show that if states threaten public schools with the loss of revenue by implementing private school vouchers, public school test scores may improve somewhat.

Does that mean public schools are better off with vouchers? No. It simply means that so long as standardized tests are the coin of the realm for accountability and revenue, reasonable school leaders will have no choice but to react accordingly. It’s almost tautological: public schools need funding, and threatening to reduce their funding with vouchers is going to have some response—whether desirable or not. In states that have bans on reproductive rights for example in a post Roe v. Wade world, I’m sure we’re going to see the number of abortions drop drastically.

Does that mean eliminating Roe was good public health?

As a researcher who’s become a strong advocate for public schools by following the data and following simply the right thing to do, I put little stock in conservative arguments centered around competitive school voucher impacts simply because the same outcome—test scores—shows massive academic declines for kids who actually go to voucher schools. To me it’s the same argument as saying something like “sure this vaccine kills sick people to whom we administer it, but it doesn’t harm a perfectly healthy patient.”

That’s not public health. And it’s not public education either.

Finally a simple comment on identity and policy. I identify as a white male who is married to a woman. The vast majority of school voucher research comes from white men like me. Vouchers originated with a while male economist. I decline to accept the idea implied by school competition that there is something moral about setting low-income children and communities of color—as public schools threatened with voucher-induced funding loss often are serving—against each other to improve outcomes.

Research might show it can work, but just because we can does not mean we should.

Let’s just take the other research-supported route and spend more money on public education, period. One way or another, I don’t think a person needs to be a public school advocate to realize that threatening schools is hardly an optimal role for public policy. Not when there’s a more supportive way available simply by investing in schools as if our children’s lives and futures matter.

My thought: it’s possible to think of many policies that would lead to improved competitive effects, but would be horrible policies. As Josh says, just because you can doesn’t mean you should. Suppose your school or district threatened to horse whip children who misbehave; that would lead to better behavior, but only by inflicting inhumane punishments. Similarly, you could cut truancy by administering harsh punishments on those who are truant. There are all sorts of ways to induce competitive effects.

In the case of vouchers, it involves encouraging students to leave their public school to attend a voucher school where they will get an inferior schooling and likely return to their underfunded public school.

Categories Education Reform, Privatization, Research, School Choice, Vouchers

Jan Resseger: The Good, the Bad, the Ugly in the Ohio Legislature

By dianeravitch
January 11, 2023 //
5

Jan Resseger keeps close tabs on education in Ohio, which is constantly under attack in the legislature. In this post, she reviews what happened in the past year. The “good” consists of bad things that didn’t happen. The Republican-dominated legislature is intent on constant privatization of public funds. Ohio is rife with failing charters and ineffective vouchers. The legislature wants more failure. The chair of the House Education Committee, Andrew Brenner, calls public schools “socialism.” The Ohio legislature deserves a spot on this blog’s Wall of Shame.

Jan Resseger wrote:

In the midst of the big 2022 Christmas week storm, a frozen sprinkler-system pipe burst at the Ohio Statehouse and flooded the state senate chamber. This year in Ohio’s gerrymandered, supermajority Republican legislature, democracy itself has been so severely threatened that many of us wondered if the event was an expression of cosmic justice.

As Ohio Supreme Court Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor retired due to the state’s mandated age limit,O’Connor—herself a Republican—condemned legislators who created one gerrymandered legislative and Congressional district map after another, O’Connor told the Associated Press: “My advice to them was, please review the Constitution and maybe go back to, what is it, fourth or fifth grade and learn about our institutions… And maybe, just maybe, review what it was like in Germany when Hitler intimidated the judiciary and passed those laws that allowed for the treatment of the Jewish population… This country cannot stand if the judiciary is intimidated.” The AP reports that, “In retirement, she has pledged to champion a constitutional amendment that fixes Ohio’s redistricting process…”

BAD THINGS THAT DID NOT HAPPEN IN 2022

The 134th Ohio General Assembly did not pass Ohio Senate Bill 178 to hollow out the Ohio State Board of Education and shift its primary responsibilities (including overseeing the Department of Education itself) to a new cabinet Department of Education and the Workforce under the Governor. Politics have already to some degree invaded the Ohio State Board of Education, because the governor already appoints 8 of its 19 members. And during the past two years there have been several legislative/gubernatorial interventions to gerrymander the districts of elected members to favor Republicans, and to fire unruly members and appoint new members who would be more faithful to Ohio Republicans’ priorities.

In 2022, the Ohio Senate passed SB 178 to move the important functions of the State Board of Education under the governor’s control, to insulate the state board from the will of the people, and to remove many of the State Board’s responsibilities. In December, during the last week of the legislative session, SB 178 was heard by the House Education Committee, but the bill never came up for committee vote and never was acted on by the Ohio House. At 2:30 AM, before the the 134th General Assembly permanently adjourned at 6:30 AM, Senate President Matt Huffman inserted the entire 2,144 page SB 178 into HB 151 to ban transgender girls from sports, inserted another amendment to ban school vaccine mandates, and sent the entire package back to the Ohio House, where it failed by 6 votes. Although this problematic bill failed in the 134th General Assembly, Senate President Matt Huffman has pledged another attempt during 2023 to politicize the State Board of Education in the 135th Ohio General Assembly.

A Mass of Culture War Bills Will Die Because They Never Came Up for a Vote (For details, see Honesty for Ohio Educationor the Northeast Ohio Friends of Public Education.)

  • HB 322, HB 327, and HB 616 to ban teaching and materials about divisive concepts including racism and sexual orientation.
  • HB 529 to demand that school curricula be posted online.
  • HB 454 to ban gender affirming care for minors.
  • HB 704 to affirm that gender identity is identifiable at birth according to DNA.
  • HB 722 to ban discussion of any ‘sexually explicit’ content and establish a ‘parents bill of rights.’
  • SB 361 to enable former military troops to become teachers with relaxed credentialing.
  • SB 365 to include curriculum about free market capitalism in educational standards.

HB 290, the “Backpack” universal education savings account voucher programnever came up for a vote in the 134th General Assembly. Most people expect, however, that a similar bill will be introduced in the 135th General Assembly, perhaps as part of the FY 2024-2025 biennial budget bill. For more information see here.

GOOD THINGS THAT DID NOT HAPPEN IN 2022

The Ohio Legislature did not pass HB 497 to eliminate the Third Grade Reading Guarantee. After HB 497 passed the Ohio House by a margin of 82-10 and after the bill was unanimously endorsed by the Ohio State Board of Education, HB 497 was never considered by the Ohio Senate Primary and Secondary Education Committee and never forwarded for a vote by the full Ohio Senate. The bill died with the end of the 134th Ohio General Assembly. The bill would have eliminated mandatory retention in third grade of any student who does not reach a proficient score on the state’s third grade achievement test. Research demonstrates that holding kids back in grade damages self esteem and makes it more likely that students will drop out of school before graduating from high school. For background see here.

BAD THINGS THAT HAPPENED IN 2022…

Keep reading to learn about the “Bad Things That Happened in 2022” and the One Good Thing That Happened.

Jan concluded her post:

There is no reason to believe that in 2023 the legislative majority of Ohio’s 135th General Assembly will be supportive of Ohio’s public schools. Persistence will be required as advocates press for the full six year phase-in of adequate school funding under the Cupp-Patterson Fair School Funding Plan. And, as Ohio Public Education Partners declares, we must demand that the Legislature “rejects the school privatization agenda, which includes school voucher schemes (and) charter schools….”

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Democracy, Education Reform, Ohio, Politics, Privatization, Vouchers, Wall of Shame

Peter Greene: Charter Schools Are Not Public Schools

By dianeravitch
January 9, 2023 //
5

You may have noted, if you have followed this blog for a long time, that I am a big fan of Peter Greene. Peter is a wonderful writer, has a great sense of humor, and was a classroom teacher for 39 years in Pennsylvania. In addition to his own blog Curmudgacation, Peter is a regular columnist at Forbes, where he educates business people.

He writes so much so quickly that I sometimes miss terrific columns. This is one that I missed. It was published in 2019 in Forbes. The topic remains pertinent. Just in the past few days, I have had to defend the proposition that charter schools are not public schools. They call themselves public schools, but that doesn’t mean it is so.

Peter Greene explains here why charter schools are not public schools.

Modern charter schools prefer to attach the word “public” to their descriptions. Many of the charter advocacy groups include “public charter” in their title. And truthfully, there are no regulations attached to the term–any school can attach the word “public” to its title without having to worry about any sort of penalty.

So technically, any charter school can call itself a public school. Heck, any private or parochial school can call itself a public school if it’s so inclined. But while modern charter schools are financed by public tax dollars, they are not truly public schools for the following reasons.

Transparency

When City Paper recently reported on the salaries of DC charter teachers and administrators, it required extra digging to come up with the information because charter schools are exempt from the Freedom of Information Act. In fact, City Paper reported that a teacher employed by the charter was not even allowed to see the salary scale for her own job. In 2014, when the New York state controller wanted to audit the books of Eva Moskowitz’s Success Academy, the charter leader took him to court and won, barring the state from trying to see how public tax dollars were spent.

Public schools are required to provide a transparent look at their finances. At times, some outlets have gone so far as to publish the salaries of individual teachers, and that’s perfectly legal. Nor are public school boards allowed to meet privately or in secret. Everything that happens in a public school is paid for with public dollars, and is therefor subject to public scrutiny. Charters deliberately avoid that level of scrutiny.

Subject To State Law

The details here vary from state to state (here’s a handy chart for looking up your own state), but charter schools generally don’t have to play by the same rules as public schools. Non-discrimination, health and safety, and school year length are often (but not always) exceptions–beyond the specific exceptions, charters operate as they will, and may in some states request additional waivers. So, for instance, many states do not require charter teachers to be certified. Public schools, meanwhile, must play by all the rules laid down by the state.

Student Population

Modern charter schools have a variety of techniques for controlling which students they serve. It begins with advertising, which signals which students are most likely to feel like the school is a good fit for them. Charters are not required to provide programs that meet all special needs; they don’t necessarily turn those students down, but if a school tells you that they do not offer the program that your child needs, will you really enroll there? And while lotteries are supposed to select students randomly, lotteries themselves often require committed parents willing to work their way through the paperwork and bureaucracy, so that the system allows parents to self-select for providing the kind of support and commitment that makes students more successful.

Once the student is in the school, there are a variety of ways to nudge the child out. We’ve seen the “Got To Go” list at Success Academy; families can be nudged out with repeated suspensions and disciplinary action.

Charter supporters note that some public schools, such as magnet or special program schools, do not accept all students either, and that is true. However, even if the child is not selected for the magnet school, the district is still responsible for that child’s education and will enroll her elsewhere. If a student has severe special needs that the district cannot meet in house, the district must still assume financial responsibility for providing the child with an education at some specialized facility.

When students walk out the door of a charter school, they cease to be the charter’s responsibility. But as long as a student lives within the public school’s designated area, that student is the district’s responsibility.

Local Control

Public schools answer to the public. They are run by elected school boards who must meet and take action in public. Charter advocates have expressed frustration with this system and even suggest that school boards be done away with. Many public systems have been attacked on this front, with their school boards thrust aside by state takeover or a switch to mayoral control. Such changes make those systems less public, and often are a step toward converting public schools to charters.

Charter schools could be operated by a locally elected board, but they almost never are. Instead, charter schools are owned and operated by private individuals or boards, sometimes located far away from the school itself. Sometimes control of the charter is separated from the community by a series of managerial handoffs–Group X technically owns and operates the charter, but they hire Corporation Y to actually run the school.

When municipal assets like water systems and parking facilities are handed off to private companies to run, we call it by its name–privatization. Turning a school over to a private company to own and operate is no different.

Why Bother?

Why do charter schools and their boosters insist on using the term “public”? Here’s what Todd Ziebarth, senior vice president at the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, told Emma Brown of the Washington Post as he argued that charters are public schools.

And it’s a term that matters, he said: Americans have high regard for the importance of public education, and private schools carry connotations of exclusivity that don’t apply to charters.

In other words, “public” carries a host of connotations that are important for marketing purposes. Brown was interviewing Ziebarth in 2016 for his reaction to the National Labor Relations Board ruling that charters are private corporations.

We can talk another day about whether charter schools are helping or hurting, whether they’re good policy or bad. What we should not need to discuss is whether or not they are public.

Next time someone insists that charter schools are public schools, I can send them a link to this article.

There’s another tell that shows what charters are. When COVID began spreading, Congress passed a program for small businesses and nonprofits called the Paycheck Protection Program. The Small Business Administration gave out almost $800 billion to save jobs. Many private and religious schools applied for and received PPP grants, as did churches, synagogues, mosques, and businesses. Public schools were not allowed to apply for PPP money because there was another program specifically for public schools. Some charter schools applied for and received over a billion dollars of PPP money, while also collecting money from the public school fund. The average charter school received far more than the average public school because many of the charters double-dipped from both funds. If charter schools were public schools, they would not have been eligible for PPP money.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Education Industry, Funding, Privatization

Josh Cowen: The Extremism of the School Privatization Movement

By dianeravitch
January 8, 2023 //
17

Josh Cowen, a professor of education policy at Michigan State University, has engaged in voucher research for two decades. Recently, he realized that the people and groups funding school privatization are the same as those funding other anti-democratic, extremist causes.

He writes:

There’s an old saying that “friends are the family we choose.”

The idea is that none of us played a part in the manner in whichwe were born or raised. We can’t help which city or state or country we grew up in, or whether we had two married parents or parents who divorced, whether one or both of our parents were straight or gay or whether we were only or adopted children. We can’t help which religious tradition—if any—we were raised in although we can decide for ourselves what we believe as adults.

Eventually we come to be known—and to know ourselves—by the company we choose to keep.

I spend a substantial amount of time these days talking to reporters about education policy—not just school privatization but other issues I work on like teacher retention or issues like the dreadful “read or fail” law that Michigan adopted during its Florida-mimicry days. I have a lot of experience trying to explain complicated policy areas to lay readers and writers.

By far and away the most difficult task in that activity has been explaining just how extreme, fringe and even dangerous much of the advocacy around school privatization and school vouchers actually is.

Others have reported at length how artificial the so-called “parents’ rights” groups are, but the drum that needs to be constantly tapped is that the real goal of a voucher system or its latest incarnation of “Education Freedom” is entirely radical.

Let’s walk through it.

First, when we talk about vouchers—or “scholarships” as they’re almost universally euphemized—we’re talking about a policy that’s had catastrophic impacts on student achievement. I’ve written about this here on Diane’s page and in media outlets across the country. You have to look to the COVID-19 pandemic’s impacts on test scores, or to Hurricane Katrina, to find comparable harm to academics. Vouchers are a man-made disaster, and yet the intellectual and political drivers, from Betsy DeVos to Jay Greene, are the same people who were pushing for these policies 25 years ago.

That’s one form of extremism. DeVos herself admitted the Louisiana voucher program—where voucher test score drops were nearly double what COVID did—was “not very well-conceived.” If spending decades and millions of dollars on a policy that did that kind of harm isn’t dangerously radical, I don’t know what is.

But that kind of idolatry-level obsession with a particular public policy begins to make more sense when we look at the other forms of fanatism that voucher activists have linked up with in their organizing.

There’s election denial, for one thing. Voucher activism and research is funded by groups like the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation—a key player in the Big Lie push to undermine confidence in the 2020 presidential outcomes. That foundation’s Board Secretary Cleta Mitchell has a starring role in the recently released January 6th Committee Report.

In a way that’s fitting. Vouchers work for kids like Donald Trump won the 2020 election. You have to suspend reality to believe either.

Next, there’s the extreme level of cruelty that voucher activists are increasingly embracing to push toward their goals. The Right-wing voucher-pushing Heritage Foundation has been pumping out screed after screed on topics ranging from book bans to diversity to transgender health care in its explicit exploitation of culture war divisions, and has all-but-encouraged the framing of public school educators as enemies to parents.

So right there that’s election denialism, anti-transgender, anti-diversity and book-banning marching arm and arm with school vouchers.

Add to that Greg Abbott’s busing of migrants to frigid northern cities on Christmas Eve and Ron DeSantis’s similar human trafficking this summer. Abbott is leading the privatization push in Texas with the help of Betsy DeVos staffers, and under DeSantis’s Don’t Say Gay policies, Florida voucher schools are newly empowered to reject LGBTQ kids and parents on the taxpayer dime.

Add further an opposition to reproductive rights. In Michigan for example, the DeVos-backed voucher initiative was led by the same political operatives running the campaign against our constitutional amendment to enshrine the right to choose, and an amendment against voter rights expansions all at the same time!

None of this is an accident. The push to privatize education isfundamentally an effort to discriminate against vulnerable children and to undermine civic institutions ranging from public schools themselves to democratic elections. It’s that extreme.

But really, none of this is new. Many of the younger reporters I talk to have no idea that the voucher movement actually began as part of the South’s “massive resistance” to integration ordered by the Brown v Board of Education decision.

In that sense, it’s hardly surprising that today’s voucher backers want to expel LGBTQ children and lean into book bans all in the name of “values.” As the author William Faulkner once said, “the past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

One of the tricks that advocates for school vouchers and other forms of privatization have been able to pull over the last two decades is to make the erosion of public education seem moderate—even reasonable.

But whether clinging for decades to a voucher policy failure that’s unprecedented in modern education, clinging in the same spirit to a failed presidential candidate’s baseless claims of an electoral victory, or a steadied push to stoke cruelty toward children as a means to an end, the school privatization movement and with it the Right’s attacks on public education are some of the most extreme forces operating today in American politics.

Extreme, and ultimately very dangerous. Defending public schools is becoming increasingly a movement to defend human rights.

Categories Accountability, Censorship, Charter Schools, Corruption, Disruption, Education Industry, Elections, Extremism, Privatization, Vouchers

Arkansas: Sarah Huckabee Sanders Picks a DeSantis Aide to Run K-12 Schooling

By dianeravitch
January 2, 2023 //
10

The new Governor of Arkansas, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, has chosen Jacob Olivia, a member of Ron DeSantis’ education team to lead Arkansas’ schools.

Max Brantley of the Arkansas Times expects that the change in personnel indicates a new move to install vouchers and to copy other parts of disastrous and divisive education agenda.

Yep, the Cabinet appointment today by incoming Governor Sanders was a big one. She’ll be replacing Asa Hutchinson’s Education secretary, Johnny Key, with a veteran of the DeSantis administration in Florida, Jacob Oliva, senior chancellor at the Florida Department of Education, overseeing the Division of Public Schools.

Brantley quotes an opinion piece written in the district where Olivia was a superintendent before DeSantis brought him into a statewide position:

A quick search turned up this opinion piece on Oliva, by a writer who said he’d been a generally progressive school administrator in Flagler County but had drunk DeSantis’ “reactionary Kool-Aid.” It notes that, as a high school principal, Oliva initially moved to kill a student production of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” but relented after protests, a positive sign of his willingness to listen.

But the writer also said of Olivia:

I am trying to understand how you went from being one of the most progressive, innovative and inclusive superintendents in the history of Flagler County to a shill, as one of two Florida senior chancellors of education, for the single most regressive, reactionary and, frankly, just plain mean state departments of education in the nation. Something isn’t adding up.

This isn’t the Jacob Oliva we knew, unless you’ve placed a bet on Ron DeSantis becoming president and your next nameplate getting laminated in Washington. Even so: has your ambition become so primeval that you’re willing to make these Faustian bargains the way you have on covid safety measures, on gender identity, on sanitized civics and history, and now degrading math textbooks for something as innocuous–if not provably useful–as their social-emotional learning content?

I urge you to open the link and read the article, and please, please read the comments.

Categories Arkansas, Censorship, Corporate Reform, DeSantis, Education Industry, Extremism, Florida, Privatization, Republicans, School Choice, Vouchers

Politico: Partisan Battles Over School Boards Continue Unabated

By dianeravitch
December 20, 2022 //
15

Politico reports that there was no sweep for partisans of the culture war issues. We can expect to see more attacks on teachers, students, and school boards in the next election, based on hyped-up falsehoods about race and gender. Support from rightwing conservative foundations—the usual suspects—will keep alive the battles and the fake organizations leading them. (Expect a special report soon from the Network for Public Education on these front groups attacking school boards, written by an authority on Dark Money).

Juan Perez Jr. of Politico writes:

THE DIVIDED CLASSROOM — In case you missed it amid the advertising noise and campaign spending avalanche of November’s midterms, 2022 proved to be an incredibly busy — and contentious — year for education elections.

Fifteen states and the District of Columbia held state school board or education superintendent races this year. Roughly 1,800 local board seats across some 560 districts in 26 states were also up for grabs on Nov. 8, according to the nonpartisan nonprofit Ballotpedia.

Who came out on top? Nobody. Neither Democrats nor Republicans managed a clean sweep.

This means the state of education in the United States remains divided sharply along partisan lines — and the education wars are likely to continue unabated in 2023 and beyond.

The bitter differences between the two sides and lack of consensus between the poles of both parties — over everything from teaching about slavery and gender identity to childhood vaccinations – offer little incentive for either side to back down.

“We are stopping Critical Race Theory from being taught, stopping access to obscene pornography in our schools, and ending the tenure of radicalism and indoctrination of our kids because the left is waging a civil war in our classrooms,” newly-elected Oklahoma State Superintendent Ryan Walters recently wrote in the Daily Caller.

Candidates who supported having race and sex-related curricula or Covid-19 safety requirements in schools won about 40 percent of the roughly 1,800 local board elections tallied by Ballotpedia this year, and tended to win in counties President Joe Biden carried in the 2020 election. Candidates with opposing views won about 30 percent of their elections, often doing so in counties held by former President Donald Trump.

Nearly one-third of incumbent school board members also lost to their challengers on Nov. 8.

“People didn’t feel listened to. Parents felt they lost agency and power over their kids’ education,” Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers labor union, recently told Nightly. “My concern is that we can’t have two countries. This is one United States of America, and we have an obligation to help kids — regardless of whether they’re in South Carolina, Tennessee, New York or California — to learn how to critically think.”

As they turn toward 2023, Democrats take solace in battleground state victories for governor, successful education-related ballot measures and local school board races where moderate incumbents defeated far-right challengers in Louisville, Ky., the suburbs of Austin, Texas, and other places.

Sure, conservatives lost plenty of races. But they won more than enough to show their brand of culture-based education politics thrives in areas controlled by the party faithful. Trump seems to have this on his mind, too. The former president promised schools would lose their federal funding if they don’t get rid of critical race theory, and what he described as “radical civics and gender insanity,” when he announced his reelection bid.

No state school boards with elections this year flipped partisan control, according to the National Association of State Boards of Education. But majority parties did expand their influence on boards in Colorado, Kansas and Utah while conservative incumbents often lost primary challenges.

Candidates endorsed by two upstart GOP-aligned political committees also won roughly half of their midterm elections.

Candidates backed by Moms for Liberty, a group formed by a former Florida school board member to fight school Covid-19 mask requirements and controversial library books, won about half of their 2022 elections, according to the organization. The 1776 Project PAC, a group opposed to the critical race theory academic framework that examines how race and racism have become ingrained in American institutions, saw a similar win-loss ratio.

Open the link to read more.

Categories Bigotry, Censorship, Curriculum, Dark Money, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Elections, Fascism, Fraud, Freedom, Freedom of Speech, History, Privatization, Racism, Religion

Texas: Battle Over Vouchers Looms in Legislature

By dianeravitch
December 18, 2022 //
31

Texas Governor Greg Abbott is determined to pass a voucher bill in the upcoming legislative session, along with voucher zealot Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick. They hope to use the culture war nonsense about public schools “indoctrinating” students on race and gender issues. They pay no attention to the research showing that students who use vouchers are likely to lose ground, academically, and learn less than in public school. Does the legislature really want to harm the state’s public schools while sending kids off to religious and private schools where they are likely to get a worse education than in public schools?

Edward McKinley of the Houston Chronicle wrote recently:

Private school vouchers were within a handful of votes of becoming Texas law in May 2005. Former Rep. Carter Casteel still remembers the constituent who confronted her in her office that day.

“He kind of threatened me, not to harm me, but that I wouldn’t be reelected if I didn’t vote for the vouchers,” Casteel, a New Braunfels Republican, said in an interview. A public school teacher and school board member before she served in the Legislature, Casteel is and was a staunch opponent of private school vouchers.

“I explained to him my position, and he wasn’t very happy, I remember that,” she said. “If you want your child to go to a private school, then that’s your choice and you spend your money, but you don’t take taxpayer dollars away.”

Debate on the floor of the Texas House stretched on for hours, and the voucher bill was gutted following a series of back-and-forth, close votes. Casteel voted no, saying publicly that she was willing to lose her House seat over it.

In a dramatic capstone to the proceedings, Rep. Senfronia Thompson ran across the floor and yanked the microphone out of the bill author’s hand, yelling for attention to a procedural mistake in the bill that led to its death.

That day was the high-water mark in efforts to pass private school vouchers in Texas.

They have been blocked by a powerful coalition of Democrats and rural Republicans in the House. In fact, the House has routinely and overwhelmingly supported a statement policy that outright bans taxpayer funds from going to private schools in sessions since.

But advocates for vouchers believe that those legislative dynamics that have been frozen for the last 17 years may finally be thawing.

As Republicans for the past year have raised alarms over what they see as liberal indoctrination in the public school curriculum — especially in the way racism and LGBT issues are taught — they’ve chalked up victories in statehouses across the country. Texas parents have carried that same fight to school board meetings, their local libraries and trustee elections. Now, Gov. Greg Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick are calling for more of the same in the upcoming legislative session, with pledges to back ‘parents matter’ initiatives that include another voucher push.

“Families started to see there’s another dimension to school quality that’s arguably more important, which is whether the school’s curriculum aligns with their values,” said Corey DeAngelis, senior fellow with the American Federation for Children, which advocates for vouchers. “And I think that’s sparked a wave of support for school choice around the country.”

Abbott earlier this year announced his support for a policy that would allow public funds to follow students, regardless of whether they attend public schools or private schools. Shortly after, DeAngelis posted a photo of himself meeting with the governor, and “it’s happening, Texas,” has become a refrain on his popular Twitter account.

“With all the national momentum, I think a lot of people are looking toward Texas as the next step,” DeAngelis said. “It’s going to be all eyes on Texas coming up this session. And people are going to be watching.”

Eyes on Arizona, Virginia

The argument for vouchers has traditionally been that children, particularly in urban areas, are forced to attend struggling schools, when the state could instead subsidize them attending private schools nearby. One problem with this argument is that polling has often found that while people have critical views of public schools generally, they often like their own public schools just fine.

“In the past, they’ve tried to get vouchers by saying we’ve got to do something about kids trapped in failing schools. And so we’d say we’ve got all these failing schools. And then you’d look at the data and you have about 80 campuses out of about 8,500 or so that were ‘improvement required.’ So you’re looking at 1 percent,” said Charles Luke, head of the Coalition for Public Schools, which represents education groups opposing voucher policies.

“So when you’re talking about how horrible the public school system is, 99 percent of them are doing fine,” he said. “A kid takes a test and he gets a 99 on it, you wouldn’t say ‘he’s failing, I’m failing him, The system is failing him.’ You’d say, he’s doing great!”

But instead of school budgets or test scores, this time it’s culture war issues with spinoffs that include whether teachings on racism damage the self-esteem of white kids, and if it’s OK for young children to see a drag show or discuss gender identity.

“There’s this misalignment to what parents thought was going on in their schools and now their eyes have been opened, and now they say hey, hey lets fix this,” said Mandy Drogin, with the Texas Public Policy Foundation. “No more of this social justice warrior, whatever the teacher or administrator feels about pushing into our classrooms. I think that’s where you see so much momentum, and everybody feels and sees that momentum.”

The issue of private school vouchers has historically hewn closely to the culture war issues of the day. The modern voucher advocacy movement has roots connecting to efforts to resist racial integrationafter the Brown v Board of Education U.S. Supreme Court decision in 1954.

In the 1950s and ‘60s, supporters of vouchers wanted to leave “government schools” because they argued such schools were experimenting with “social engineering” and radical ideologies, education historian Jon Hale has noted, particularly desegregation. The debates from yesterday over leaving public schools because of their values mirror contemporary political arguments over how LGBTQ+ issues are discussed or the children who are undocumented immigrants attending American public schools.

One question legislative observers have had is whether those pushing vouchers will attempt to pass a universal program or a more limited one.

Teachers unions, Democrats and other public school advocates have traditionally opposed any voucher program, no matter how small, but voucher advocates have seen success in other states starting small and building out from there.

This year, however, Arizona passed a universal program, and advocates say that should be the goal in Texas.

Mayes Middleton, who served in the House in the 2019 and 2021 sessions and was elected this year to the state Senate, has filed one such bill. His would create education savings accounts, a form of vouchers, that could be used by anyone to send their kids to public school, private school, community college classes, virtual schools or home school.

This approach is the best way to maximize “parental empowerment,” he said in a Friday interview, and to capitalize on the momentum behind that movement that helped carry Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin to victory last year. There were also Republicans unseated in the primaries earlier this year across the state who were less supportive of voucher policies, Middleton said, which could help win additional support.

He says his bill could be particularly helpful for rural Texans who want their kids to access more flexible, hybrid home school models, as well as for people who want to send their kids to private Catholic schools but cannot afford it, many of whom he said are Hispanic. Those are groups who would need to support voucher policies for them to win passage in the Legislature.

“Look in Arizona what they did it with one-seat GOP majority in their house and senate,” DeAngelis said. “If every Republican in Arizona can show up for their platform issue, other red states should be able to follow suit as well.”

Vouchers fell far short in 2021

Public school advocates and opponents of vouchers acknowledge that the fight is going to be tighter and more intense than it has been in many years, but they feel that even with intense lobbying in support, the policies will ultimately fall short.

“These are the same issues that raised their ugly head in past sessions,” said Rep. Harold Dutton, a Houston Democrat who chaired the House Public Education Committee last session, noting that more than 100 of the 150 House members voted in favor of an amendment last year barring the state from spending public funds on private schools. “I don’t see that changing a whole lot, and certainly not being able to get a majority.”

Members of the GOP’s right wing have called for House Speaker Dade Phelan to end the practice of naming Democrats to head a limited number of committees. Some have named Dutton in particular as an obstacle last session to school choice legislation.

Dutton said he hadn’t thought about whether or not he’ll be chair again, but noted: “When vouchers failed before, the person in the chair of public education was a Republican, so what does that tell you?”

Several Republican members of Public Education, who might be in line for the chairmanship if Dutton is not selected again, have also expressed skepticism or opposition to voucher proposals. Rep. Ken King from Canadian has said, “If I have anything to say about it, it’s dead on arrival. It’s horrible for rural Texas. It’s horrible for all of Texas,” while Rep. Gary VanDeaver has said, “This sense of community is what makes Texas great, and I would hate to see anything like a voucher program destroy this community spirit.”

As promised, after Casteel’s role in the demise of the voucher bill in 2005, she lost her seat in 2006.

She noted that a prominent San Antonio businessman and GOP donor who was present in the House the day of the vote and advocated strongly for vouchers donated more than $1 million to her opponent, as the donor did for other Republicans who opposed the voucher bill that day.

“I’ve got a great family, I’ve got a great law profession, and whether I’m (there) or I go home it doesn’t make a bit of difference to me. I didn’t go there to do nothing but what’s right,” Casteel said.

“And I did. I went home. And it never came back up — until this year.”

edward.mckinley@chron.com

Categories Education Industry, Privatization, Propaganda, Religion, Separation of church and state, Texas, Vouchers
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »