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The U.S. General Accountability Office is a federal agency that reviews federal programs and informs Congress about problems and progress. The GAO is expected to be nonpartisan and highly competent.

But when the GAO was asked to report on the number of federally funded charter schools that closed or never opened, its count fell dramatically short, according to Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education. Burris was lead author of two reports that found that a large percentage of charter schools funded by the federal Charter Schools Program closed within their first five years or never opened at all. Read those reports here and here. Now she finds that the GAO is asleep at the wheel.

Burris wrote to the GAO to ask it to correct its findings. She gave specific examples of charter schools that disappeared, yet were counted by GAO as open. The agency stonewalled.

Why does this matter? The Department of Education issued new regulations for the federal Charter Schools Program (CSP), banning for-profit charters from receiving federal funding and requiring greater transparency. The charter lobby has vigorously resisted both demands. This week, friends of the charter lobby will attempt to overturn the new CSP regulations, enabling profiteers to continue to grab federal dollars and incompetent charter managers to do the same.

Carol Burris reported her efforts to correct the GAO report at Valerie Strauss’s “Answer Sheet” blog on the Washington Post.

Valerie Strauss wrote the introduction:

In October, the U.S. General Accountability Office (GAO) released a report titled “Charter Schools That Received Federal Funding to Open or Expand Were Generally Less Likely to Close Than Other Similar Charter Schools” in response to a congressional request. The report looked at data about the federal Charter School Program, which over several decades has awarded billions of dollars in grants for the expansion or opening of charters. These schools are publicly funded but privately operated, often with minimal or no oversight from a governmental agency. The GAO said in part:

“The Department of Education awards Charter Schools Program (CSP) grants to help open new charter schools or replicate and expand high-quality charter schools, among other things. While few charter schools closed overall, charter schools that received CSP awards closed at lower rates than similar charter schools that did not receive an award between fiscal years 2006 and 2020. GAO’s analysis found, for example, that within five years after receiving CSP awards, CSP-recipient charters schools were about 1.5 times less likely to close than similar non-CSP charter schools—with an estimated 1.4 percent and 2.3 percent closing, respectively. Within 12 years of receiving CSP grants, the same pattern generally held. The pattern also generally held for CSP-recipient charter schools regardless of the schools’ grade level, locale, student body racial and ethnic composition, or percentage of students receiving free or reduced-price lunch.”

This post, written by Carol Burris, an award-winning former New York high school principal and now executive director of the advocacy group called Network for Public Education, raises questions about the report, saying that the GAO “used outdated charter school status data as the basis of their descriptive analysis.” She explains below how she came to that conclusion.

Burris has written previously on the charter school program on this blog (for example, here and here), and in the following piece she takes issue with some of the GAO’s data and report results. The Network for Public Education is an alliance of organizations that advocates for the improvement of public education and sees charter schools as part of a movement to privatize public education.

The GAO denied that it used outdated data and said it stands by the report. It said that it needs “to use rigorous methodologies that are acceptable to social scientists and statisticians and can withstand scrutiny.” You can see its full response at the end of the piece.

The Department of Education was also asked for a comment and provided a short one that did not directly address the GAO report or Burris’s critique. It said in an email: “Our administration is committed to supporting high-quality public charter schools, as reflected in the president’s budget. And we’re committed to accountability, transparency and fiscal responsibility in the federal charter school program, as reflected in our regulations.”

Burris said her data shows significant undercounting by the GAO of charter schools that closed after receiving federal grants from the Charter School Program — either through state governments or from the Education Department. She said she shared her data with the GAO on numerous occasions.After repeated scandals in the charter school sector and negative fiscal impacts on public school districts from charter expansion, the Biden administration this year made changes to the Charter School Program in an effort to stop waste and fraud and bring more transparency to charter school operations.

In September, the U.S. Education Department’s Office of Inspector General released an audit of the nearly 30-year-old federal Charter School Programs that found, among other things, that charter school networks and for-profit charter management organizations did not open anywhere near the number of charters they promised to open with federal funding. Previous investigations by an education advocacy group, the Network for Public Education, which opposes the growth of charter schools, had found similar problems. (You can read my stories about their “Asleep at the Wheel” reports here and here.)

By Carol Burris

Congress last year directed the Government Accounting Office (GAO) to investigate the controversial federal Charter Schools Program (CSP), which was the subject of regulatory reform by the Biden administration this year. In a 2021 appropriations bill, the House Committee on Appropriation said:

“The Committee requests GAO to provide a report to the Committees on Appropriations on the Department’s oversight over CSP and whether the program is being implemented effectively among grantees and subgrantees. The report should include an analysis of CSP grant amounts over time that supported charter schools, with a particular focus on schools that eventually closed or received funds but never opened; the relationships between charter schools supported by CSP grants and charter management organizations; and an analysis of enrollment patterns at these schools, especially for students with disabilities. The report should examine ways to improve the Department’s oversight of CSP as well as make recommendations on potential legislative changes to the program that would reduce the potential for mismanagement and ineffective operations.”

The GAO report published in October does not address all of Congress’s mandate to, and, according to my research conducted over several months, severely undercounts the number of closed CSP schools and the federal dollars spent on them. In addition, that error has a ripple effect on findings throughout the report. What follows explains what went wrong, and the facts that back up these conclusions.

GAO’s numbers don’t add up

The published report, which covered only a small part of the congressional investigatory request, examined three programs, which they refer to as (1) the State Educational Agencies/State Entities Awards, (2) the Charter Management Organizations (CMO) Awards, and (3) the Non-State Educational Agencies/Developers (Developers) Awards. The report contains a descriptive analysis of grants to schools that closed or never opened and a comparative probability analysis of grant recipients (new schools only) closing during their first 12 years. The comparative probability analysis, which became the headline for the report, was not part of the congressional request. Its findings are misinterpreted in the headline of the report.

This post, however, focuses on the requested descriptive analysis, which reported the present status (open, closed, future, will not open) of CSP awardee schools and how much was spent on those that never opened or closed. Its source was a data set given to the GAO by the U.S. Department of Education. That data set includes program information, school names, award years and amounts, identifying details, and a status for each grantee school — open, closed, opening in the future, will not open, or undetermined (as indicated by a blank) when their grant is complete.

In 2019, the department published a detailed data set of CSP awards, which you can find on the department’s website here. Most of that data set, specifically awards from 2006 through 2018, is a subset of the data set given to the GAO. The data set provided to the GAO also includes the 2019 and 2020 awards, however, we estimate that upward of 80 percent of the grantee information is in the public data set.

Let’s begin with a few examples of awardee schools and their status in the 2019 data set to understand why the report got it wrong.

Path Academy Charter School in Connecticut was a school that received a grant directly from the department. According to the 2019 data set, it received $585,800 in a three-year grant from 2013 to 2015. The data set reports the school’s status as open, but Path Academy closed in 2018 after the state discovered that the school and its charter management organization, Our Piece of the Pie, defrauded “the state of nearly $1.6 million, billing the state for 128 phantom students, operating unauthorized schools, and tolerating excessive absenteeism.”

Spirit Prep was a proposed “blended” school powered by the for-profit K12 (now Stride) online programs. It received a grant for over $186,000 in 2011 to plan for its opening. Although K12 announced in April of 2012 that Spirit Prep would open that fall, by July, the New Jersey Department of Education decided that the school would not open and denied its charter. In 2019, the department still had it listed as a “future” school with a note that it would open in 2012.

Tallulah Charter School, a Louisiana 2013 grantee, closed in 2017 following a cheating scandal. Its status is listed in the data set as open.

Hope Academy, a 2008-2010 grantee that received more than a half-million dollars, shut down in 2014 and was later sued by the state of Missouri for $3.7 million after “an audit found inflated attendance numbers.” Again, its CSP status was listed as open in 2019.

These are not isolated examples. They are representative of the hundreds of such cases that we found. Why do there appear to be so many errors?

The answer is that once the grant is finished (most end within three or fewer years), the department says it no longer checks to see if they are open. Therefore, the status of the school is frozen in time in the data set. A school open when the grant was complete may be shuttered today. The department requires that state entity, charter management organizations and developer grantees report twice a year on the operational status of all CPS-funded schools — but only for active and open grants.

This also explains why the Department of Education cautiously reports numbers of closed CSP schools using the term “closed prematurely.”

But the GAO did not check on the current status of schools, with the exception of the 189 schools that had no status in the data set. This is explained in Appendix I on pages 22 and 23 and was communicated to me in an email on Oct. 27 from GAO Assistant Director Sherri Doughty.

Recall that the GAO’s congressional mandate was “to report on CSP grants, with a particular focus on charter schools that eventually closed or never opened” (emphasis added). By accepting the department’s status in the majority of cases, it was using data that had not been updated in years, with the exception of 189 of 6,023 awards. Yet in the report, the GAO reports closures as current as of May 2022. Footnote 11 on page 11 says that the GAO defined “open” as currently open schools.

Despite my sending extensive file after file of correct information, their response was, “we stand by our report.”

Now, I will describe what they got wrong.

Extensive under-reporting of CSP awardee closures

For the Network for Public Education’s analysis, we used the public 2019 CSP data set, which is a subset of what the GAO received. The vast majority (exceeding 80 percent) of the CSP awards from 2006 forward are in the data set, which covers 13 of the 15 years examined by the GAO.
Using the procedure outlined below, NPE’s Marla Kilfoyle and I identified the extent to which the GAO underestimated the number of closed and never opened schools, which were the categories of interest to Congress.

We isolated those awards in the 2019 data set made in 2006 and beyond, eliminating all awards made before 2006.
For all charter school awards with an NCES number (91.2 percent of all awards), we checked the school status against the 2020-2021 Common Core of Data (CCD). We marked charter schools as closed if they were no longer listed in the CCD, or if they converted to public schools while retaining the same NCES number. If a charter remained a charter with the same NCES number but changed its name, that school was marked open. In some states, including California, we double-checked with the state database. [NCES numbers are the unique 12-digit school identifier found in the Common Core of Data of the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). We used the charter school filter in the CCD database to include awards that went to charter schools that closed as a charter and became public schools and to identify public schools that took CSP money but never converted to a charter school.]
If a public school received an award to convert to a charter school but did not, we marked it as “will not open.” If schools were listed as future schools in the data set that ended in 2018 but could still not be found in the CCD, we checked outside sources and, if not found, marked it “will not open.”
For the remaining 8.8 percent of schools, we accepted the school status as reported in the 2019 data set, knowing that would result in an underreporting of closed and never opened charter schools and an inflated number of open and future schools. We, therefore, erred on the side of caution.

Grantee closure

Let’s start with the smallest of the three programs, the Non-State Educational Agencies (SEA)/Developers awards, which I will refer to as non-SEA awards. These awards are given directly to charter schools by the Department of Education.

According to the GAO, the department gave out 235 non-SEA awards between 2006 and 2020. The 2019 data set, from 2006 on, contains 178 of those awards. According to Table 5 of the GAO report, only six went to schools that have closed, and four went to schools that never opened, resulting in a closure rate of 3 percent and a never-opened rate of 2 percent.

Using the CCD and additional outside sources to determine the status of schools, we found 29 — not 6 — schools that received a CSP award between 2006 and 2018 that had closed. Here we provide the names, date of grant, dates regarding the school’s closing, news stories about the closure, and other verification of closure.

Some charters closed due to low enrollment or poor test scores. Others closed, as confirmed by linked news stories, due to fraud.
We also identified 13 — not four — non-SEA grant schools that never opened between 2006 and May 2022.

Even if all of the 57 awards given after 2018 went to schools that opened and thrived (which is highly unlikely), closure rates would be 12.3 percent, and the never opened rate would be 5.5 percent of the non-SEA awardees, not 3 percent, and 2 percent.

SEA/SE grantee award closures and never-opened schools

The underreporting was even more dramatic when it came to the oldest and largest of the three CSP programs (SEA/SE).

According to the GAO, the CSP (SEA/SE) program gave 4,616 school awards totaling nearly $2 billion between 2006 and 2020. The 2019 data set identifies 4,351 SEA awards as sub-grants between 2006 and 2018. Almost all (3,992) have an NCES number associated with the school.

Within the data set, there is some duplication of schools. To catch those duplications, we identified and reported the number of unique closed or never opened schools. If we had reported by award, the number would be substantially higher. The GAO report is fuzzy in its tables and narrative, sometimes referring to schools and at other times to awards. It is possible for schools, especially longtime open schools, to receive more than one award; therefore, if the GAO counted awards, not schools, its “open school” number is inflated by more than error.

If the charter school did not have an NCES number in the data set, we again accepted the status listed by the department in 2019. As stated above, this likely results in an underreporting of closures.

GAO states in Table 2 that 429 SEA/SE awards went to now-closed charter schools—a number quite similar to the 2019 CSP data set non-updated number (409). However, we found that more than twice as many, 951 closed charter schools, received one or more awards. In addition, while the GAO reported that 209 schools never opened, we identified 230. These numbers do not include closed and unopened schools given grants after 2018. The total number is higher than what we report; it cannot go lower.

Note that we did not analyze the closures of charter schools that received Charter Management Organizations (CMO) awards since the department only required CMOs to report their schools beginning in 2012. The report lists 37 percent of that CSP CMO-grant funding going to “future schools.”

Our complete analysis is available upon request. It was sent to the GAO and the department along with a tool developed by data expert Ryan Pfleger that allows one to examine the history of schools by enrollment and status across the years of the CCD. I received an email acknowledgment and thank you from a representative of the Department of Education. I received no response from the GAO.

The CCD can be an imperfect source and may have generated minor errors in our final numbers. Nevertheless, it would have provided a far more accurate accounting of “schools that eventually closed” than the outdated status in the data set of the department they were asked to audit.

The ripple effect

The error described above directly affects the number of charter schools listed as open, closed, future, and will not open. It also affects the calculation of the total taxpayer dollars that have been wasted on CSP charter schools. For example, if more than twice the number of charter schools that received CSP grants closed, the GAO report’s estimation of $152 million spent on closed and never opened SEA/SE schools during those years is only capturing less than half of that cost since more funds went to closed schools than schools that never opened.

The state-specific numbers set forth on pages 13-15 of the report similarly need correction. Some of the states identified as the biggest wasters in the report’s Figure 15 may not deserve that identification. Other states may earn the dubious honor of being in the chart.

What now?

It is difficult to track charter school closures. Some schools close as charters and become public schools. We have seen schools switch between charter and public several times. At other times, a school shuts, and a new management organization takes it over. Sometimes the school’s name, staff, and students are different; sometimes not. Charter schools merge. In some states, information is easy to find; in others, information is obscure. It doesn’t have to be this way; states and the federal Charter School Program can demand better record-keeping and reporting.

The GAO’s descriptive analysis needs to be checked, verifying whether a school is currently open using the CCD. Claims regarding closed and open schools in their report need to be revised so that it is clear those are only closures during the active years of the grants. The stakes are even higher, however, for families. The closure of any school, whether public, charter, or private, is a painful and disruptive event in a child’s life. Families deserve honest information regarding closure risk when they enroll their children in a charter school. It is time for the GAO to revise its report to Congress and the public.

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This is the response from the GAO:

“We need to use rigorous methodologies that are acceptable to social scientists and statisticians and can withstand scrutiny. Practically speaking, we cannot Google the status of 6,000 schools and call that proper research. When we spot checked some of what Ms. Burris cited, we came up with conflicting results. As with any methodology and any data set, ours had limitations and they were disclosed clearly in the report.

“In addition, GAO is an independent agency. We do work for Congress, but they do not dictate our research objectives, methodologies, or scope of work. GAO determined that the best way to meet Congress’s needs in this case was to conduct a descriptive analysis, which examines trends and relationships, and to pair that with a much more sophisticated model with rigorous controls in place. This was done to properly examine underlying issue at hand: the effectiveness of CSP awards. We laid out this approach to the relevant Congressional stakeholders prior to the work beginning, and they determined that it met their needs. And then it was laid out in our report as well.We know critics who do not like our message will cherry pick at different statistics. But the message is based on a sound analysis and we stand by it.”

Here is Burris’s response:

“The GAO used outdated charter school status data as the basis of their descriptive analysis. The use of that data was confirmed in an email sent to me by the GAO and in the appendix of the report. The rationale for not using the Common Core of Data rather than the data provided by the Department they were auditing was illogical, especially given that they used the Common Core of Data for what they referred to as their “more rigorous model.” The charter school status data they used is not updated once a grant is closed. This was confirmed in an email from a Department of Education spokesperson to Ms. Strauss. Therefore, when the GAO report states that its information is current as of May 2022, it is providing false information to both Congress and the public. One does not need to “google” schools. The GAO is well aware that this is not the methodology I used. If their spot check resulted in conflicting results, I invite them to send those examples to me.”

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Deregulation, Disruption, Education Industry, Fraud, Funding, Network for Public Education, Privatization, Scandals, U.S. Department of Education

Dr. John Walcott Debates DeVos’ Ideas at Her Alma Mater

By dianeravitch

December 11, 2022 //

Former Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos recently spoke at Calvin University in Michigan. As one of the university’s most prominent graduates, her remarks were received with respect.

Dr. John Walcott, a professor of education at Calvin University, wrote an article for the school newspaper in which he expressed respectful disagreement with her ideas. The full article is worth reading. It takes courage for a professor to take issue with a state and national leader such as DeVos, especially in a religion-focused university.

Be sure to open the link and read the comments.

He began:

On Nov. 17, Calvin University hosted an event with Betsy DeVos. DeVos served as Secretary of Education during the Trump administration and is a graduate of Calvin University. In making the announcement, President Boer described the event as part of efforts “to hear from people who bring diverse backgrounds and perspectives to important conversations.”

DeVos served as Secretary of Education during the Trump administration and is a graduate of Calvin University. In making the announcement, President Boer described the event as part of efforts “to hear from people who bring diverse backgrounds and perspectives to important conversations.”

I understand and respect the desire of our university to welcome to our campus a distinguished alum who has a long history of involvement at local, state and national levels. Furthermore, I agree that it is important to provide space for “diverse perspectives” and “important conversations.” We must strive to be a community willing to ask tough questions and engage deeply with important issues in our world.

I believe that an opportunity for additional engagement with these issues is especially necessary because of the problematic nature of much of what Secretary DeVos proposes when it comes to education. For example, her call to support “students and not systems” fails to recognize that student learning can be supported by teachers, curriculum, financial resources, school administrators and, yes, in many cases may even require a building conducive to learning. It is easy to demonize systems, but the use of this sort of false dichotomy is ultimately unproductive.

In that spirit, I suggest that we continue the conversation started at this event. The event used an interview format that did not provide opportunity for the sort of conversation and debate that are required to dig deeply into important issues related to educational policy and the state of education in our nation. Near the close of the event, Secretary DeVos stated her ongoing desire to “debate and advance” the policies for which she advocates. I agree that we need to debate these policies and, as a university community, think deeply about issues that relate to education and political engagement and how God calls us to seek justice and be agents of renewal in our world.

We also need to carefully consider Secretary DeVos’ focus on parental choice and individual rights as the basis of her calls to change our educational system. This perspective ignores the function of our schools as a public good, an institution at the core of our desire to promote democratic values and the flourishing of all students. We need to think carefully about the purpose of education in a democratic society and about the role of public schools that have been part of our nation’s commitment to education since before the writing of the U.S. Constitution. Our call to seek justice and be agents of renewal in our world may push us to prioritize the needs of our community and of the most vulnerable in our society over individual rights.

As an educational scholar and researcher, I recognize the need to carefully examine the impacts of policies that use the language of choice and freedom on student learning and on public schools. For example, advocates for school vouchers, which allow parents to use public education funds for tuition in private schools, argue that these policies can be the key to improving student outcomes while ignoring research that does not support these claims. For example, Dr. Christopher Lubienski (Director of the Center for Evaluation and Policy Analysis at Indiana University), summarizing research since 2015, states that “every study of the impacts of statewide voucher programs has found large, negative effects from these programs on the achievement of students using vouchers.”

A thorough discussion will explore the impact of DeVos-supported policies on school funding. Recent reports from Florida note that this year, school vouchers will divert $1.3 billion from public schools, and reports from states like Arizona, New Hampshire and Wisconsin show that the overwhelming majority (80%, 89% and 75%) of students utilizing vouchers were already in private schools before the programs began. We need to ask if public funds should be given to schools that are in some cases not required to comply with regulations related to special education, federal civil rights laws and curriculum standards. We should engage critically in questions regarding the role of teachers’ unions before dismissing out of hand their role in public education. And we should critically examine the rhetoric that is currently a part of the so-called “culture wars,” especially as it relates to education. I am concerned that Secretary DeVos has contributed to a misrepresentation of critical race theory and may be perceived as aligning with groups and individuals that have advanced a harmful narrative directed at the LGBTQ+ community.

These are just a few of the many complex and vitally important issues that need to be a part of a deeper conversation. I am not criticizing the decision to host Secretary DeVos, a distinguished graduate with years of activism in the public sphere. However, as a faculty member in the School of Education, it is important to me that the broader educational community understands that this does not signal an endorsement of her policies and perspectives by the School of Education. And I remain hopeful that we, as a community, will embrace the opportunity to not only offer diverse perspectives, but also engage deeply in important conversations of what it means to think deeply, act justly and live wholeheartedly as Christ’s agents of renewal in the world.

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Corporate Reform, Courage, Democracy, Education Industry, Equity, Funding, Privatization, Religion, School Choice, Supporting public schools, Vouchers

New Hampshire: Lawsuit Claims That Voucher Funding Violates State Constitution

By dianeravitch

December 9, 2022 //

The State Commissioner of Education, in New Hampshire, Frank Edelblut, home-schooled his 7 children. He doesn’t like public schools. He’s a big supporter of “backpack funding,” where students can use public funds for anything of an educational sort. At his urging, the legislature adopted a voucher plan.

But a lawsuit was recently filed claiming that the funding of the voucher plan violates the state constitution by drawing down money intended for public schools.

Garry Rayno of inDepthNH reports:

CONCORD — The new Education Freedom Account program violates state statutes by using funds earmarked for public education for private programs, according to a lawsuit filed Thursday against Education Commissioner Frank Edelblut.

The suit challenging the funding for what has been described as the most expansive voucher program in the country, claims money raised by the Lottery Commission, and money from the Education Trust Fund may only be used for adequate education grants to school districts, citing the law creating the fund in 1999.

The suit seeks an injunction blocking the state from using any more of the Trust Fund Money to fund the EFA program.

“If the state desires to operate an Education Freedom Account or similar program, whereby it grants public money for parents to utilize for private use, it must separately fund it through additional taxation or another source of funds,” the suit claims, noting there currently is no mechanism for doing so.

The New Hampshire Constitution states “all moneys received from a state-run lottery and all interest received on such moneys shall, after deducting the necessary costs of administration, be appropriated and used exclusively for the school districts of the state,” according to the suit, which also notes the money “shall not be transferred or diverted to any other purpose.”

The law only allows the money to be used to distribute adequate education grants to school districts and approved charter schools, the suit claims.

The complaint, brought by Deb Howes as a citizen taxpayer, who is also president of AFT (American Federation of Teachers)-New Hampshire, was filed in Merrimack County Superior Court.

The complaint also claims the state is delegating its duty to to provide an adequate education to a private entity, The Children’s Scholarship Fund, which runs the EFA program without any “meaningful oversight” by the state.

“The state specifically earmarked this money for public education. Instead, the state is stealing from public school students in plain sight to pay for its private voucher program,” Howes said. “Public school students are losing out on millions of dollars that are needed to fix leaky old buildings, purchase and maintain modern computer equipment, buy books and materials published at least in the last decade to support student learning, and provide more social and emotional assistance and other needs that will help students excel.”

“If Commissioner Edelblut wants to continue with his cherished voucher program, he needs to figure out a legal way to fund it,” she said, “but definitely not on the backs of public school students.”

The controversial EFA program was approved as part of the two-year budget package in 2021 after it stalled in the House, but the Senate resurrected it and put it in the budget.

Since it began, it has cost much more than Edelblut told lawmakers to expect, which was essentially $3.4 million over the biennium, but has cost $23 million over that period.

Sold as a program to help students find different educational environments in order to thrive, instead about 75 percent of the participants attended private and religious schools prior to the program’s launch last year, meaning less than 25 percent of the participants were in public schools the year before the program began.

Parents can use EFA grants for tuition and fees for private schools and private online learning programs, private tutoring services, textbooks, computer hardware and software, school uniforms, fees for testing, summer programs, therapies, higher education tuition and fees and transportation.

So the program is more expensive than expected, and 75% of the students it serves were already enrolled in nonpublic schools.

The single biggest beneficiary of the program thus far has been Amazon, presumably for books and hardware.

Categories Education Industry, New Hampshire, Privatization, Vouchers

Josh Cowen Offers Advice to Gov-Elect in Pennsylvania: Don’t Do Vouchers!

By dianeravitch

December 7, 2022 //

Josh Cowen has demonstrated repeatedly that vouchers are a very bad public investment. The students who use vouchers fall behind their peers in public schools. He has cited the research behind his conclusions. He maintains that facts and evidence matter. But many state officials don’t know the facts or just want to assuage the people who want the state to subsidize their private school tuition.

One elected official who should look at the facts and the evidence is Josh Shapiro, who was recently elected to be governor of Pennsylvania. During his campaign, he expressed support for a voucher program because it would provide “opportunity” for some students.

Josh wrote this article in the Philadelphia Inquirer to help Governor-Elect Shapiro understand the facts and the evidence.

Josh Cowen says the evidence is clear: Vouchers do not help students. They hurt.

He wrote:

Josh Shapiro — like Katie Hobbs in Arizona and Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan — is part of a class of Democratic candidates who this month won the key to the governor’s office for the next four years.

As a professor of education policy, I was struck by how public schools became a prominent issue in each of their campaigns, especially the debate over school vouchers — the use of tax dollars to fund tuition for private schools.

Unlike Hobbs and Whitmer, however, Shapiro has expressed some cautious support for vouchers — including (at least in principle) the “Lifeline Scholarship” bills that have already been introduced by the current legislature.

And since it appears that a Democratic majority in the Pennsylvania House is razor-thin, and Republicans will keep the Senate, Shapiro may be pressured or even encouraged by some to move forward with that support.

The governor-elect has defended his position by saying, “It’s what I believe,” and that vouchers provide students with additional avenues to “help them achieve success.”

Unfortunately, the data show exactly the opposite.

I used to be a cautious supporter, too. But I’ve been studying school vouchers for 17 years now, and I can say, without reservation, that study after study show that vouchers hurt academic achievement for children. That is especially true of the low-income students who would be eligible under the currently proposed plans in Pennsylvania to which Shapiro gave qualified support.

How bad are vouchers? Think about what the COVID-19 pandemic did to standardized test scores.

How bad are vouchers for students? Think about what the COVID-19 pandemic did to standardized test scores. Independent studies of voucher programs in Washington, D.C., Indiana, Louisiana, and Ohio have all shown catastrophic impacts on student achievement, with few-to-no offsetting gains on other measures such as educational attainment.

Some of the worst results have been found in Ohio, where voucher impacts on student learning were roughly twice the impact of the pandemic on academic outcomes.

Here’s another problem: Vouchers mostly just provide tax breaks to families whose kids are already in private school. In places such as Arizona, New Hampshire, and Wisconsin, we know that more than 75% of voucher applicants were in private schools anyway by the time they applied for state funding. Even those in low-income families.

As a practical matter, that could be fixed in Pennsylvania by tying voucher eligibility to time in public school first, as well as capping the fiscal loss public districts faced when students transferred to private schools — as one current proposal has done. But that’s a short-term strategy.

Over the long term, vouchers simply represent new budgetary obligations for Pennsylvania taxpayers. The governor-elect has said he doesn’t view vouchers and support for public schools as a choice — that these positions are not a mutually exclusive “either/or.”

That’s a false hope. As the experience in other states shows, there is no way that long-term commitments to funding public schools can be reconciled with commitments to underwriting vouchers.

And unlike the devastating impacts that vouchers have on kids, we know that major investments in public schools have sustained and positive effects on learning and nonacademic outcomes, such as reductions in crime.

Side by side, the evidence says investments in public schools pay off, while investments in vouchers push kids further behind.

Perhaps the only remaining argument for vouchers is simply faith-based: that tax dollars should support religious education, even if the evidence says those programs harm academics. The U.S. Supreme Court essentially did just that this summer with its ruling in Carson v. Makin, which found that voucher programs could not exclude religious schools. That ruling was in line with the court’s long-held position that vouchers can exist constitutionally.

But just because we can doesn’t mean we should.

Looking from outside the state at the Pennsylvania gubernatorial campaign, it was refreshing to hear someone like Josh Shapiro stand up for something he says he believes in — even if it rankles some supporters.

But at some point belief has to give way to facts. And the facts from across the country say vouchers are more of an anchor than a lifeline for kids.

Categories Disruption, Education Industry, Failure, Pennsylvania, Privatization, Vouchers

Thom Hartmann: Why the GOP Wants to Destroy Public Schools

By dianeravitch

December 6, 2022 //

Thom Hartmann is a journalist and blogger who hits the nail on the head with this post. I would add one suggestion to his post, under the heading of “what can I do?” Run for your local school board. Don’t let wacky rightwing extremists buy it.

Former Tea Party congressman and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo recently put a bulls-eye on the back of the president of the 1.7 million-member American Federation of Teachers.

“I tell the story often — I get asked ‘Who’s the most dangerous person in the world? Is it Chairman Kim, is it Xi Jinping?’” Pompeo told Semafor’s Shelby Talcott.

“The most dangerous person in the world is Randi Weingarten. It’s not a close call. If you ask, ‘Who’s the most likely to take this republic down?’ It would be the teacher’s unions, and the filth that they’re teaching our kids…”

I’ve known, respected, and admired Randi for years and she’s been a frequent guest on my program: her number one interest is providing the highest quality education to as many American children as possible. Full stop.

So why would Pompeo, pursuing the 2024 Republican nomination for president, risk triggering an American domestic terrorist to train his sites on her? Why would an educated man have such antipathy toward public school teachers?

Public schools are on the GOP’s hit list, just as they were in Chile during the Pinochet regime, and for the same reasons:

— Fascism flourishes when people are ignorant.

— Private for-profit schools are an efficient way to transfer billions from tax revenues into the coffers of “education entrepreneurs” who then recycle that money into Republican political campaigns (just like they’ve done with private for-profit prisons).

— Private schools are most likely to be segregated by race and class, which appeals to the bigoted base of the Republican party.

— While public school boards are our most basic and vigorous form of democracy, private schools are generally unaccountable to the public.

— Most public school teachers are unionized, and the GOP hates unions.

— Whitewashing America’s racial and genocidal history while ignoring the struggles of women and queer folk further empowers straight white male supremacy.

Umberto Eco, who had a ringside seat to the rise of Mussolini, noted in his “14 indicators of fascism” that dumbing down the populace by lowering educational standards was critical to producing a compliant populace.

“All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks,” he wrote, “made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.”

Ironically, this very use of public schools to promote a political agenda was the foundation David Koch cited when, in 1980, he attacked American public schools during his run for Vice President on the Libertarian Party ticket.

“We condemn compulsory education laws … and we call for the immediate repeal of such laws,” proclaimed his platform. “We advocate the complete separation of education and State. Government schools lead to the indoctrination of children and interfere with the free choice of individuals. Government ownership, operation, regulation, and subsidy of schools and colleges should be ended.”

It was a stark contrast from the founders of our nation, who well understood the importance of universal quality public education. The first law mandating public schools paid for with taxpayer dollars was passed in Massachusetts in 1647: to this day, that state is notable for its historic emphasis on education.

As Thomas Jefferson, who founded America’s first tuition-free public college (the University of Virginia), noted in a letter to Colonel Charles Yancey on January 6, 1816:

“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.”

The American president who immediately preceded him, our second, John Adams, also weighed in on the importance of public education in a letter to his old friend John Jebb when, in 1785, Adams was serving in London as America’s first Minister to Great Britain.

He’d seen the consequences of poverty and illiteracy in both the US and England and was horrified:

“The social science will never be much improved, until the people unanimously know and consider themselves as the fountain of power, and until they shall know how to manage it wisely and honestly. Reformation must begin with the body of the people, which can be done only, to effect, in their educations.

“The whole people must take upon themselves the education of the whole people, and must be willing to bear the expenses of it. There should not be a district of one mile square, without a school in it, not founded by a charitable individual, but maintained at the expense of the people themselves.”

But the United States spends almost a trillion dollars a year on primary school education, an expense category just below healthcare and even more than the Pentagon budget: there are massive profits to be made if privatized entities can skim even a few percent off the top.

Those profits, in turn, can be used — with the Supreme Court’s blessing — to legally bribe elected officials to further gut public schools and transfer even more of our tax dollars to private schools and their stockholders.

This pursuit of America’s education dollars is nothing new. The first American president to put an anti-public-schools crusader in charge of the Education Department was Ronald Reagan.

At the time, our public schools were the envy of the world and had recently raised up a generation of scientists and innovators that brought us everything from the transistor to putting men on the moon.

Reagan’s Education Secretary Bill Bennett is probably most famous for having claimed that, “You could abort every Black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down.” And then aggressively standing behind his quote in repeated media appearances.

Reagan and Bennett oversaw the gutting of Federal support for civics education, cutting the nation’s federal education budget by 18.5%.

This lead to the situation today where the group that runs national exams of eighth-graders across the country, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, determined in 2018 that only 24% of US students were “proficient in civics.” It’s gotten so bad that the Lincoln Project is launching a K-12 civics program of their own called the Franklin Project.

George W. Bush continued the tradition, proposing an 8% cut to education and welfare budgets.

After initiating the privatization of Medicare in 2003 with the Medicare Advantage scam (a model for privatizing education), his Education Secretary, Rod Paige, calledthe nation’s largest teacher’s union, the National Education Association, a “terrorist organization.”

Donald Trump and Betsy DeVos then proposed cutting 12% or $8.5 billion out of the federal education budget, while allocating over $5 billion in taxpayer dollars to flow into the money bins of their private school cronies.

I started this article with Pompeo’s essentially calling Randi Weingarten a terrorist. Unions as saboteurs is a viewpoint widely held across the Republican Party and among rightwing billionaires.

But it’s simply not true: teachers’ unions have been a primary force in improving the quality of American education for almost a century.

Eunice S. Han is an economics professor and researcher at the University of Utah, and formerly was with Wellesley College. She did exhaustive research into the impact of teachers’ unions on teacher quality and educational outcomes: it’s the single-most definitive study done on the subject to date.

Her findings were unambiguous and rebut the GOP’s talking point that teachers’ unions “protect bad teachers”:

“[T]eachers unions, by negotiating higher wages for teachers, lower the quit probability of high-ability teachers but raise the dismissal rate of underperforming teachers, as higher wages provide districts greater incentive to select better teachers.”

Looking at the most comprehensive set of national data available on teacher quality and educational outcome from “the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES): the School and Staffing Survey (SASS) for three waves (2003-2004, 2007- 2008, and 2011-2012), its supplement Teacher Follow-up Survey (TFS) for each wave of the SASS, and the School Districts Finance Survey (SDFS),” she found:

“The data confirms that, compared to districts with weak unionism, districts with strong unionism dismiss more low-quality teachers and retain more high-quality teachers. The empirical analysis shows that this dynamic of teacher turnover in highly unionized districts raises average teacher quality and improves student achievement.”

But don’t bother trying to tell that to Republicans: they know that unions are terrorists, or at least give nightmares to bad bosses and poorly run businesses that exploit their workers. As Trump’s Education Secretary Betsy DeVos told an ALEC meeting of Republican state legislators and corporate lobbyists in July, 2017:

“They’ve made it clear that they care more about a system, one created in the 1800s, than they do about individual students.”

In other words, “Don’t bother me with facts.”

John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were right about public education, and privatizing it is as much a crime against the commons and our democracy as was privatizing our prisons, over half the Pentagon budget, and Medicare.

Rightwing billionaires are now funding “Liberty” and “Freedom” groups to attack and take over public school boards, seeking to ghettoize their schools, drive out unionized teachers, and impose a gender-bigoted, white supremacist, and anti-science curriculum. (Only 40% of our schools today even teach evolution, as that’s become so “controversial” again.)

Of all our democratic institutions, from Congress to state houses to city councils, the most on-the-ground, closest-to-the-people are school boards.

They’re the most vibrant and often most important of our governmental bodies, designed to express and facilitate the will of local parents and voters. And a great springboard to other elected offices: many members of Congress began their political careers running for a school board.

Private schools, of course, don’t have school boards. They’re accountable to their shareholders and CEOs.

Steve Bannon and other rightwing personalities have, for the past several years as part of their effort to destroy public education, been aggressively encouraging their followers to run for public school boards and, where they don’t win, show up at every meeting to make their members lives miserable.

It’s an area where Democrats and progressives have dropped the ball, big time.

If you’re a parent or grandparent, or even just a concerned citizen, there is no better or more crucial time to show up at your local school board than now. And bring your friends and neighbors with you.

Categories Education Reform, Privatization, Republicans

Peter Greene: Gates Foundation Gives Reason Foundation Nearly $1 Million for Education

By dianeravitch

November 29, 2022 //

Peter Greene wrote in Forbes about the bizarre decision by the Gates Foundation to give nearly $1 million to the Reason Foundation, a libertarian foundation that doesn’t believe in public schools and seldom believes in anything the government does on behalf of its citizens. They believe, I suppose, in a feral society where there is minimal government, minimal taxes, and everyone fends for him or herself. I remembered that the Gates Foundation once gave a grant of nearly $400,000 to the far-right American Legislative Executive Council (ALEC), which opposes public schools, unions, environmental regulations, gun control, and most every other government activity.

Greene writes:

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has awarded a grant of $900,117 to the Reason Foundation. The award’s stated purpose is “to ensure that State funding adequately and equitably supports the pursuit of improved educational outcomes for low income, Black and Latinx Students.”

The Reason Foundation is a think tank whose stated purpose is to advance “a free society by developing, applying, and promoting libertarian principles, including individual liberty, free markets, and the rule of law.” They use “journalism and public policy research to influence the framework and actions of policymakers, journalists and opinion leaders.” They favor limited government and market-friendly policies.

The Gates Foundation has long pushed policies in education, including the financing of the ultimately-unsuccessful small schools initiative and widespread influence in the creation and implementation of the controversial Common Core State Standards.

According to the Gates database, they have never before given a grant to the Reason Foundation. The two are not an obvious match; in fact, Reason was highly critical of the Common Core initiative that Gates spent millions to promote.

Reason’s approach to education has emphasized choice, particularly school vouchers. Over the years they have cranked out papers to support these market-based policies, though these papers have not met with enthusiasm from education policy analysts, who have used phrases like “carefully selected examples intended to support a particular perspective,” “off the rails,” “not a credible policy document,” “little more than a polemic,” and “reckless and irresponsible.”

It is not clear what the actual project behind this grant might be. Search the Reason website for “low-income students” and it turns up many articles about how school choice and voucher programs would improve school for these students. The same for a search for “Black students.” (”Latinx students” does not appear on the website at all.)

The grant language is also interesting in that it suggests that Reason’s program is not about establishing a program, but about finding ways to influence the path of state funding. The end result of this may not simply be about spending Gates money, but about spending taxpayer dollars as well.

This is a strange grant because Reason has never showed any interest in education other than to promote vouchers.

Categories Education Industry, Extremism, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Privatization

Helen F. Ladd: How Charter Schools Disrupt Sound Educational Policymaking

By dianeravitch

November 20, 2022 //

Dr. Helen F. Ladd is one of the most eminent economists of education, possibly the most eminent. She has written important studies that document the importance of poverty in the lives of children and its impact on their educational outcomes. She has written critically about No Child Left Behind. And she has written international studies of school choice with her husband Edward Fiske, a veteran journalist.

I sponsor an annual lecture series on education at Wellesley College, my alma mater, and was delighted when Sunny Ladd, as she is known, accepted my invitation to be the first post-pandemic lecturer. She prepared this paper, which has been published by the National Education Policy Center.

She maintains that charter schools disrupt sound educational policy making.

This an overview of her important paper:

As publicly funded schools of choice operated by private entities, charter schools differ from traditional public schools in that they have more operational autonomy, their teachers are not public employees, and they are operated by nonprofit or for-profit private entities under renewable contracts. The main sense in which they are public is that they are funded by taxpayer dollars. This policy memo describes how charter schools disrupt four core goals of education policy: establishing coherent systems of schools, attending to child poverty and disadvantage, limiting racial segregation and isolation, and ensuring that public funds are spent wisely. The author recommends that policies be designed both to limit the expansion of charters and to reduce the extent to which they disrupt the making of good education policy.

Open the link and read it in full.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Equity, National Education Policy Center, Privatization, Segregation

Texas: State Board of Education Opposes Vouchers

By dianeravitch

November 17, 2022 //

A tweet by Mark Wiggins, a pro-public education lobbyist in Texas, spread the news that the Republican-dominated State Board of Education came out against vouchers.

*NO VOUCHERS*

As one of its 2023 legislative priorities, majority Republican @TXSBOE urges #txlege to reject vouchers in all their forms. #txed

@MarkWigginsTX

Categories Education Industry, Privatization, Religion, Texas, Vouchers

Josh Cowen: Vouchers Are a Disaster for Students Who Leave Public Schools

By dianeravitch

November 15, 2022 //

This post is so important that it is the only one I have scheduled today. Please read it and share it with your friends, your local newspaper, your local radio station, your elected representatives, social media, anyone who cares about the future of our society. This is not a reprint. The author, Josh Cowen, wrote this post for this blog.

Josh Cowen, a professor at Michigan State University, has been studying vouchers for more than 20 years. He has been a member of the teams conducting major studies of vouchers. When I read his article in The Hechinger Report, where he declared that he was convinced that vouchers were disastrous for students who use them, I wanted to know more about him and his experience. I wanted to ask him, “Why did you change your mind?” That’s the question that’s been asked of me hundreds of times. I have a simple answer and a complicated answer: the simple answer is “I was wrong.” The complicated answer is contained in my recent books, starting with The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education.

I invited Josh to explain his views for my blog, and he graciously accepted. I consider this piece to be one of the most important statements I have posted in the decade this blog has been live. Please note two points he makes:

One, vouchers harm the children who leave public schools to use them.

Two, most of the early voucher research was conducted by researchers who were partisan supporters of vouchers.

Josh Cowen writes:

It’ll be a few more days for the final election results to be tallied nationwide, but it seems clear that with midterm wins by voucher supporters in places like Oklahoma, Texas and even Pennsylvania—where even the Democratic gubernatorial victor is on record in cautious favor—voucher opponents are going to have to keep working hard to block public funding of private and religious schools.

School vouchers have devastating effects on student outcomes. Full stop. That’s something even the nation’s voucher advocate-in-chief Betsy DeVos has had to admit, because the data are so stark.

Large-scale independent studies in D.C.,Indiana, Louisiana, and Ohio show that for kids who left public schools, harmful voucher impacts actually meet or exceed what the pandemic did to test scores. That’s also a similar impact in Louisiana to what Hurricane Katrina did to student achievement back in 2005.

Think about that next time you hear a politician or activist claim we need taxpayer support for private schools to offset what the pandemic did to student learning. Here, their cure would in test score terms be quite literally worse than the disease.

There’s another data point you need to know up front: vouchers overwhelmingly fund children who were already in private school without them. In states that have released those numbers—Arizona, New Hampshire, and Wisconsin—we know more than 75% of voucher applicants came from private schools.

The bottom-line: most kids using vouchers didn’t need them to go to private school, and the few kids who actually did use vouchers to transfer sectors schools suffer average test score drops on par with what a once-in-a-generation pandemic did to test scores too.

If you’re a picture person, our friends at the National Coalition for Public Education were kind enough to put their considerable talents into two graphics based on these data I provided to them.

Notice the citations these graphs include. They’re the same as the hyperlinks above. These data come from independent sources and from non-partisan journalists. That’s a critically important part of this story.

And then there’s this, before we get into the details: the same people pushing vouchers are the same people working to undermine fair elections and the right to vote.

None of these are metaphors, and this is not a drill.

So how did we come to this?

1. A Quick History of Voucher Research

First let’s talk about the evidence.

I came into the school voucher research community early. It was around 2001 or so, as a young graduate student assistant for a study of privately funded vouchers led by the conservative professor Paul E. Peterson who was based at both Harvard and the conservative Hoover Institution at Stanford (never heard of Hoover? Think Condoleeza Rice.)

Peterson and his protégé Jay Greene had already done one study of Milwaukee’s publicly funded voucher program, as well as the one in Cleveland that was about to be the subject of the U.S. Supreme Court’s first favorable ruling on voucher funding. That work generally showed positive results for vouchers. As did the research of a young academic named Cecilia Rouse, who is now President Biden’s chief economist.

But they were small programs. What policymakers and researchers call a “pilot phase.” Back then when both parties cared at least nominally about evidence, you wouldn’t expand a program like vouchers without testing it. So those early tests seemed somewhat positive.

The first research I joined was Peterson and team’s next project: multi-site studies in Dayton, New York City, and Washington D.C. Those programs were also pilot-size. And the New York site in particular showed some limited evidence of voucher success. But overall the lead researchers focused as much on things like parental satisfaction and measures of civic engagement as metrics. That work resulted in a book called The Education Gap. You can find my name in the credits if you own a copy. If you don’t own one, don’t waste your money.

No one knew it at the time, but the mixed results documented in The Education Gap were to be the best vouchers were ever going to do—and ever have done since by an academic based team looking at voucher test scores.

Just a short time later in 2005, I joined a new voucher evaluation led by Patrick Wolf, another Peterson protégé and contributor to The Education Gap. Wolf was by then ensconced with Jay Greene at the University of Arkansas Department of Education Reform, a Walton Family-funded academic group that was about to train a new generation of voucher advocates. Most notably Corey DeAngelis, now at Betsy DeVos’s 501(c)4 voucher lobbying group American Federation for Children.

The Milwaukee evaluation, which was officially done for the state of Wisconsin, lasted from 2005-2010. We found no evidence in five years that voucher kids outperformed public school kids. Two exceptions: we found limited evidence that graduation rates and college enrollment were somewhat higher for the voucher kids. We also found that voucher kids improved when the state required private schools to participate in the same No Child Left Behind-style accountability systems as public schools. In particular once voucher schools knew their performance would be made public they—shockingly!—improved their outcomes.

At the same time as the Milwaukee evaluation, Patrick Wolf and other Arkansas colleagues were working on a new evaluation of Washington D.C.’s federally funded voucher program. That study showed no difference in test scores, but large positive graduate results.

That pattern of “no test score benefits, some attainment benefits” has stuck in the research narrative even among voucher skeptics. But as I recently explained in a piece for the Brookings Institution, it’s just that: a narrative. Other studies in New York, Louisiana and Florida all show no real advantages for vouchers on educational attainment.

And certainly nothing to offset the cataclysmic results that began to come out after the early-stage evaluations I just described. The newer D.C., Indiana, Louisiana, and Ohio studies that took place after 2013 and have showed pandemic and Katrina-sized harm to student test scores are all of at-scale voucher programs.

What do I mean by “at scale?” I mean that despite limited evidence in those pilot programs, vouchers have been steadily expanding across the country, and within states. So those D.C., Indiana Louisiana and Ohio studies represent our best understanding to date of what happens when you expand vouchers beyond the initial test phase. The answer: horrific impacts on student outcomes.

There are a number of reasons this could be, but I tend to argue we need not overthink this. Vouchers just don’t work. The kids who stand to gain from private schooling were and are already there. For the vast majority of kids, they’re better off in public schools. That’s what the latest voucher research shows.

As an example of what I mean: consider that in Wisconsin (which has not had a statewide study since ours ended in 2010), 41% of voucher-receiving schools have opened and then closed and failed since public funding began in the early 1990s.

That’s what happens when policymakers divert tax dollars to private schools: it’s like venture capitalism for education. It’s like Theranos but for private schooling. New providers race to gobble up new taxpayer money, but most of them have no business near kids.

Now, to fully understand why these terrible policies exist and in fact have never spread faster and further than they are today, we need to understand the politics. And to understand the politics, we need to understand the money.

On the one hand it’s pretty simple. Once you understand that the same people pushing vouchers are the same people funding groups that insist Donald Trump won the election and are now organizing a similar “Big Lie” for 2022’s results, you understand a lot. But read on.

2. Funding Vouchers, Funding Election Lies

It’s difficult to tell how much money has been spent to advocate for school vouchers over the years. But we know perhaps the biggest single funder—perhaps even larger than Betsy DeVos herself—is the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. The Bradley Foundation is a little-known group based in Wisconsin and they’ve given tens of millions of dollars to voucher activism over the years.

Bradley not only funds voucher activism, it funds voucher research too. It was a major funder of the Milwaukee evaluation I was part of and described above. I don’t think they directly influenced our results, but generally speaking you don’t want activism and research funding to mix. Think about it this way: should the Sackler family fund research on the addictive properties of oxycontin? Should Exxon fund studies about the existence of climate change?

For me though, the real problem today is that the Bradley Foundation is hardly limiting itself to supporting research and political advocacy for private schooling. As the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer has meticulously documented in her reporting on financing behind Big Lie activism sowing doubts about President Biden’s 2020 victory, the Bradley Foundation is the convening funder around those activities—the “extraordinary force”, in Mayer’s words, funding and coordinating the Big Lie and other efforts to undermine the integrity of democratic elections.

Bradley is not alone. The Heritage Foundation, a right-wing organization known for its pro-voucher advocacy is, according to Mayer, “working with the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC)—a corporate-funded nonprofit that generates model laws for state legislators—on ways to impose new voting restrictions.”

In recent months, Heritage has also distributed talking points that under the guise of objective research attack school diversity and inclusion and directly question health care support for LGBTQ children. Heritage has recently released a report-card style rubric rating state laws on a so-called “Education Freedom” index for tax-supported private tuition. That report card includes the extent to which issues like diversity or sexual preference are components of public school teaching curricula.

The author of each of these documents is a Heritage Senior Fellow named Jay P. Greene. The same Jay Greene who while a conservative scholar at the University of Arkansas was co-director of that Bradley-funded voucher project that hired me back in 2005.

Greene is not alone in the Heritage-Bradley nexus. Cleta Mitchell, a lawyer who participated in Donald Trump’s infamous phone call to the Georgia Secretary of State demanding evidence that would overturn the state’s election results, was actively training poll watchers to question voters leading up to the 2022 midterms in places like my own state of Michigan. The night before the election, the New York Times even ran a story about Mitchell’s work in Michigan. The headline read: “Fueled by Falsehoods, a Michigan Group is Ready to Challenge the Vote.”

Mitchell is a known elections conspiracy theorist, according to CNN, and figures prominently in Mayer’s New Yorker reporting on broader election-related organizing. In her spare time Mitchell is on the Board of Directors of—wait for it!—the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. She’s actually an officer on the Board too.

Michigan is important because we have a voucher proposal waiting to go to the state legislature—even though voucher opponent Gretchen Whitmer has won reelection. That proposal, backed by billionaire and privatization advocate Betsy DeVos, exploits a quirk in the state law allowing lame-duck Republicans to pass the voucher plan without the governor’s signature.

The spokesman for the DeVos voucher campaign is a man named Fred Wszolek. Wszolek is also the strategist for a group that tried unsuccessfully to prevent abortion access from becoming enshrined in the Michigan state constitution. And he heads a political action committee (PAC) called Michigan Strong, which has worked to elect now-defeated DeVos-backed GOP gubernatorial candidate Tudor Dixon.

Also working for Dixon was Kyle Olson of the Education Action Group, an entity devoted to right-wing education reform that’s received money from Charles Koch, the DeVos Family and Harry Bradley—he of the Bradley Foundation.

That’s just one example, but you get the idea: the same people working to push school vouchers are the same people working to undermine elections. And in some cases even reproductive rights.

3. So Why Now?

I’ve spent the last six months writing column after column in opinion pages across the country trying to warn ordinary readers who aren’t education lifers about the dangers of vouchers. You can read samples here or here or here or here if you like. There are more than 10 in all.

Because of my long career working in the middle of all these voucher advocates and researchers, I’ve been asked multiple times what changed my mind. Or, more specifically, why am I speaking out today?

I hope the story I’ve told you above answers some of that. But the reality is, I was also doing other things. I had a young family, other research interests, and other professional tasks like editing the country’s premier education policy journal.

Most of all I had a naïve sense that the facts would speak for themselves. Remember, those pandemic-sized voucher failures began appearing back in 2013. I was an associate professor then, newly arrived at Michigan State University after receiving tenure at the University of Kentucky.

To me, after a decade of mixed-at-best results that I outlined here, I assumed that catastrophic results like those in Louisiana—and then confirmed in Indiana, Ohio, and D.C.—would have killed vouchers a thousand times over.

It’s sort of quaint now, that assumption of mine. In my research community, which is centered in the Association for Education Finance and Policy, we talk a lot about using evidence to inform policy. It’s a nice idea, but vouchers are the big, glaring and alarming counterpoint. We have never seen such one-sided, consistently negative research results as we have for school vouchers in the education research community.

And yet they thrive.

To me, the piece to that puzzle is politics. Negative voucher results aren’t the only thing to happen since 2013.

2016 happened. Donald Trump happened. January 6th happened. Dobbs v. Jackson happened.

Voucher advocates are overwhelmingly on one side of those events. And they’ve racked up some wins.

We know voucher programs exist today not for how they might help some kids, but for how they might exclude others. We know private schools taking public money can and often do discriminate against certain children. In Florida for example, one private school barring LGBTQ kids has received $1.6 million so far in taxpayer funding. In Indiana, more than $16 million has gone to schools refusing to admit LGBTQ kids—or even kids with LGBTQ parents!—or about 1 out of every 10 private schools on the taxpayer dime.

I wish I had come around earlier to the level of alarm I’m raising today. Others have even without having to take a kind of road to Damascus like I did.

I’m a tenured full professor now. I’ve had a successful career working hard to bring evidence to public policy. I firmly believe that school vouchers are a fundamental threat not just to student learning, but also to democracy and to human rights.

So on vouchers I’ve come to the same view any number of us would if we stumbled onto a massive fraud in our workplace, or if we saw a young child being bullied simply for being who they are. None of it is okay.

And if you see something, you have to say something.

You can find Josh Cowen on Twitter

@joshcowenMSU

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Failure, Hoax, Privatization, Propaganda, Research, Vouchers, Walton Foundation

Denis Smith: Take Republicans at Their Word

By dianeravitch

November 7, 2022 //

Denis Smith is a retired educator in Ohio. He urges voters to take Republicans at their word. When they say they will cut Social Security and Medicare, believe them. When they say they will enact a national ban on abortion, believe them. When they say they will cut taxes for big corporations, believe them.

He writes:

What Are You (We) Going to Do About It? It’s Very Simple. Take Republicans at Their Word.

According to some recent polling, Americans, concerned about rising energy and consumer prices, are expected to give control to Republicans for at least one house of Congress, most likely the House of Representatives. Yet other polls show that the Democrats are on the rebound, with many House and Senate races still too close to call.
How appolling is this? Pun.

Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post framed the ambiguous forecasting this way:

“Will an issue such as abortion motivate voters who usually skip midterms, turbocharging Democratic turnout? Will unease about the economy tip the scales toward change, boosting the GOP across the board?”

“The fact that we don’t know is unnerving…”

But while the result of the midterms might be in doubt, all of us should have no doubt about what will happen if Republicans regain control of one or both houses of Congress.

In their own words, Republicans have told us what to expect if they are victorious on November 8. We should have learned to trust them by now in looking at what they’ve said as a predictor of what they will do.

Some examples:

Social Security and Medicare. The two most popular government programs may be subject to attempts to sunset them as a way to wreak havoc on the debt ceiling. How ironic that the mastermind of the sunset plan is Florida Senator Rick Scott, who famously took the Fifth Amendment 75 times in a case involving the biggest Medicare fraud in American history that occurred during his tenure as CEO at healthcare giant Columbia/HCA.

Tax Cuts for Corporations. The GOP has promised to make permanent corporate tax levels enacted five years earlier in the first months of the Trump administration, reverting to their modus operandi of starving other programs to pay for such largesse. But to be a Republican means that you are a walking contradiction, driven to revert to past bad behavior by favoring corporations and high-income taxpayers at the expense of everyone else, including seniors.

The Post’s Jeff Stein painted this picture of what to expect in a Republican victory.

“Many economists say the GOP’s plans to expand the tax cuts flies against their promises to fight inflation and reduce the federal deficit, which have emerged as central themes of their 2022 midterm campaign rhetoric.”

Defund the IRS. Republicans plan to curtail plans for increased spending at the IRS to replace 1970s systems and increase customer service levels to avoid future backlogs on processing tax returns. Some of the new funding would go toward
hiring additional auditors to “crack down on high-income and corporate tax evaders who cost the American people hundreds of billions of dollars each year.” At least 50,000 IRS staff are expected to retire soon, but the GOP has spread wild
claims that staffing levels will increase by 87,000 when in fact the funding will be needed to replace retiring staff, invest in new technology, and add more robust auditing for tax cheats, both individual and corporate.

Defund Ukraine. From the looks of it, the defense of democracy may be waning in the Republican congressional caucus. In the last month, House Leader Kevin McCarthy has warned about not giving a “blank check” in the future for more aid to
Ukraine, as have other Republicans who want more money to build a wall on the southern border. Never mind that any pullback from support for Ukraine will seriously undermine NATO, something that Donald Trump wanted to do all along by his desire back in 2018 to withdraw American membership from the North
Atlantic Alliance.

“These guys don’t get it. It’s a lot bigger than Ukraine – it’s Eastern Europe. It’s NATO. It’s real, serious, serious consequential outcomes,” said Joe Biden about GOP plans to cut support for Ukraine.

Help Big Pharma – At Your Expense. In the recently enacted Inflation Reduction
Act, you will be shocked, shocked to learn that Republicans want to help pharmaceutical companies at the expense of consumers. The Ranking Republican on the House Ways and Means Committee has vowed to roll back caps on drug
costs allowed in the IRA “because those drug provisions are so dangerous, by discouraging investment in life-saving cures.” The legislation allows Medicare to negotiate its costs for the most expensive drugs and cap out-of-pocket costs for
seniors at $2,000 per year.

Investigations Ad Nauseum. Remember Benghazi, Benghazi, Benghazi? In an interview on Fox News a full year before the 2016 presidential election, House Leader Kevin McCarthy opined that “…everybody thought Hillary Clinton was
unbeatable, right? But we put together a Benghazi Special Committee, a select committee. What are her numbers today? Her numbers are dropping.”
You can bet your bottom dollar that if Republicans take control of Congress, we won’t have to wait long to discover probes into the Departments of Justice for alleged prosecutorial activism, Homeland Security for border issues, and for the
current president for having the same surname as Hunter Biden. You can also bet that all active congressional probes related to the January 6 insurrection will be stopped as quickly as you can say stop the steal, with the effect of absolving
possible criminal behavior on the part of some members of Congress and White House staff who may have aided and abetted the aborted coup in some fashion.

And we also need to be reminded that if the Republicans take control of the
House of Representatives, the likely new chairman of the Judiciary Committee will be Jim Jordan, the less than urbane resident of Urbana who helped to give us Benghazi, Benghazi, Benghazi a decade ago. His clownish antics back then may
prove to be his dress rehearsal for wielding a gavel to create more chaos and circus-like behavior in what was in another era referred to as the people’s house. In order to drive home the strong probability of chaos in the new Congress,
consider Jordan’s new 1,000 page report, where he alleges that both the FBI and the Justice Department have been politicized. Hmm, he must have never heard of William Barr. At any rate, the “report” is filled with air, containing hundreds of
pages of letters, signature pages, and only 46 pages of narrative. As is typical with Jordan, there is nothing but hot air and bluster as he wrestles in incessant witch hunts.

And last but not least:

Impeachment. Revenge. Payback. Impeachment will be on the table if the Republicans win in November. Ask Ted Cruz. Ask Marjorie Taylor Greene. For that matter, just ask the lunatic fringe that is now in control of the Republican Party. And the reason for a new impeachment? No, not for a president pressuring the Ukrainian leader to help him with collecting dirt on a political opponent, not for violation of the Emolument Clause in charging the Secret Service more than $1,600 per night for lodging in his properties, and certainly not for being central to a conspiracy for overthrowing a democratic (small d) election that led to the January 6 coup attempt at the nation’s Capitol. And the charges? Details. Details. They’ll fabricate something later because after all, the subject is revenge. Payback. “What’s good for the goose is good for the gander,” Ted Cruz said in September.
For once, Lyin’ Ted, as Trump christened him, was being straightforward.

So if you know all of this now, what are you going to do about it? In 1871, the great cartoonist Thomas Nast posed that same question.
When it comes to the Republicans’ upcoming agenda, we should believe Ted Cruz. And Kevin McCarthy. And all the rest of an anti-democracy, anti-government, election denying lunatic cult that once was identified as a responsible, conservative political party.

But perhaps the scariest part is that what has been detailed here merely represents the short list of Republican objectives in January if they win. After all, that’s what the GOP (Great Obstructionist Party), with no plan for providing principled governance yet having a detailed plan for obstruction and mayhem, is all about.

Yes, that is the GIP.

No, that’s not a typo. The GOP is also becoming known as the GIP, the Great Insurrectionist Party. When you threaten to cut Medicare and Social Security and take funds from Ukraine, a democratic country fighting for its life against an authoritarian onslaught, the result is that we’ve been GIPped.

And never forget that the leader of the rape of Ukraine is a former KGB agent who was defended by Donald Trump in 2018 at a meeting in Helsinki against allegations by 17 American intelligence agencies that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election.

“No prior president has ever abased himself more
abjectly before a tyrant, the late Senator John McCain said at the time about
Trump’s performance in defending a brutal dictator who murders journalists and
jails those who dare to object to his tyranny.

In the end, if you now know about this agenda that the GOP is expected to unleash but you go ahead and vote for any Republican who denies the validity of elections and supports the authoritarianism personified by Donald Trump, you are guilty of aiding and abetting the dissolution of our democracy.

Election Day is at hand. What are you – and what are we – going to do about it? From the looks and sounds of it, we are running out of time.

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Elections, Privatization, Republicans

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