Archives for category: Privatization
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

The War on Public Education Hurts the Most Vulnerable Students

By dianeravitch
December 15, 2025 //
4

Garry Rayno, veteran journalist in New Hampshire, understands the war on public education. He knows that privatization is meant to diminish public education. He knows that it is sold by its propagandists as a way to help the neediest students. He knows this is a lie intended to fool people. He knows that the children who are hurt most by the war on public education are the most vulnerable students.

You might rightly conclude that the war on public education is a clever hoax.

Rayno writes:

“The true measure of any society can be found in how it treats its most vulnerable members.” 

The quote is often attributed to Mahatma Gandhi, but is also similar to words from British UN Ambassador Matthew Rycroft.

What better measure of treating the most vulnerable than the public education system open to all, not just those with the resources to send their children to private or religious schools.

Public education is often called the great equalizer providing the same learning  opportunities to a community’s poorest children to the richest in stark contrast with today’s political climate driven by culture wars and fear of diversity, equality and inclusion.

Public education has provided an educated citizenry for businesses, government and political decision making for several hundred years.

Public education is the embodiment of “the public good,” as it provides a foundation for a well-lived life that is both rewarding and useful to others.

But for the last few decades there has been a war on public education driven by propaganda, ideology and greed.

While the war has intensified in the last decade, it began with the US Supreme Court’s landmark Brown vs. the Board of Education of Topeka decision in 1954 declaring racial segregation in public schools a violation of the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause.

The decision overturned the court’s earlier Plessy vs. Ferguson decision which established the separate-but-equal provision for public education.

The Brown decision required the desegregation of public schools sending a tidal wave through the south reaching north to Boston.

The southern oligarchs who never really believed the South lost the Civil War soon colluded with others like them to develop a system to bypass their obligation to pay to educate black kids. Instead they established “segregation academies” where their children could learn in a homogeneous setting.

The system was created with the help of libertarian economist James Buchanan who touted the belief that the most efficient government is one run by the wealthy and educated (the oligarchs) because the regular folks are driven by self interest which makes government inefficient, and most importantly, costly through higher taxes.

This philosophy continues today as libertarians and other far right ideologues want to privatize public education because it takes too much of their money in taxes, and a humanities-based public education induces children to develop beliefs different from their parents, which once was the norm for American families.

It is not by happenstance we see parental bills of rights, opt outs, open enrollment and greater and greater restrictions on what may be taught, along with increased administrative work loads piled onto public education by politicians in Concord as they double down on refusing to do the one simple thing the state Supreme Court told them to do 30 years ago, provide each child with an adequate education and pay for it.

Instead they have pushed a voucher system costing state taxpayers well over $100 million this biennium, with 90 percent of it paying for private and religious school tuition and homeschooling for kids who were not in public schools when their parents applied for grants if they ever were in public schools.

Most of the voucher system expansion occurred under the Chris Sununu administration with his back-room-deal appointed Education Commissioner Frank Edelblut.

Edelblut nearly beat Sununu in the 2016 Republican primary for governor for those with short memories.

Sununu sent his children to private schools while he was governor and Edelblut homeschooled his children.

Public education during the eight years of the Sununu administration was not a priority although 90 percent of the state’s children attend public schools.

And it is not coincidence that after the Republican House resurrected House Bill 675 which would impose a statewide school budget cap, that Gov. Kelly Ayotte’s small DOGE team — led by two “successful businessmen” — issued its long awaited report and one category targeted schools following the legislature’s Free State agenda of greater transparency and efficiencies, seeking Medicaid and insurance reimbursements and reforming school audit requirements. 

HB 675 failed to find enough support last session because it violates the once sacred “local control ideal” often touted for local government.

House Majority Leader Jason Osborne, R-Auburn, issued a press release linking the report and the bill.

“HB 675 applies the findings of the report where they matter most. When dollars are committed and taxpayers are on the hook, HB 675 puts power back into the hands of the voter by requiring a higher threshold of consent,” he said.

Yes a higher threshold which means the will of the majority is nullified by a minority.

State lawmakers fail to acknowledge they provide the least state aid to public education of any state in the country. Instead local property taxpayers pay 70 percent of public education costs and should be able to set their school budget and various other realms usurped by state lawmakers without a “higher threshold of consent.”

The battlefield in the war on public education shifts over time. It began with religious and political ideology; moved into gender and sexual identification; parental rights, including who decides whether school materials and books are appropriate; school choice such as open enrollment, which will exacerbate the already great divide between property poor and wealthy school districts; and is now positioned to impact the most vulnerable of public school children, those with disabilities.

Last week special education administrators gathered for their annual meeting and to celebrate 50 years of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) to improve access to education and to integrate classrooms to include those with disabilities.

Today’s special education services and supports are lights overcoming the darkness of institutionalization or stay-at-home kids separated from their peers in public schools.

Many children with disabilities were told to stay home and not to attend school as there were no specialized services or therapies for them.

But services are expensive as federal lawmakers knew they would be, promising to pay 40 percent of the cost, but reneging on that promise and paying only about 13 percent.

In New Hampshire, most of the remainder is paid by local property taxpayers.

The state pays little until a student’s costs reach three-and-a-half times the state’s per-pupil average or about $70,000.

But state lawmakers have also failed to live up to their  obligation to pay their state of the catastrophic costs, so local school districts are reimbursed at less than 100 percent.

Last session lawmakers approved an 80 percent threshold as the low end of the reimbursement scale.

Special education costs are difficult to predict and a budget can be blown quickly if a couple students needing costly special education services move into a district.

The federal government is potentially moving the Office of Special Education from the Department of Education to the Department of Health and Human Services which local special education administrators said would change the goal from education to a health model which would imply there is a remedy or an illness.

And they said it is the first step back down the road they began traveling 50 years ago when students with disabilities were institutionalized or warehoused in one facility.

Several bills to come before the legislature this session will explore going back to centralized facilities to provide services and supports and explore if the private sector can better provide the services, which is consistent with the libertarian ideal of private education.

Great strides have been made in the last 50 years allowing people with disabilities to lead productive and rewarding lives independently, but that could change as lawmakers focus on costs and greater efficiencies, and the political climate seeks a homogenous environment without minorities, disabilities or vulnerable people.

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

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

Categories Budget Cuts, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Ethics, Extremism, Fake, Fraud, Funding, Lies, New Hampshire, Privatization, Propaganda, School Choice, Supporting public schools, Vouchers

John Thompson: A Stellar Review of AN EDUCATION

By dianeravitch
December 12, 2025 //
2

John Thompson, historian and retired teacher in Oklahoma, wrote this thoughtful review of my memoirs, An Education: How I Changed My Mind About Schools and Almost Everything Else.

He writes:

Diane Ravitch’s An Education: How I Changed My Mind About Schools and Almost Everything Else is dedicated to her wife Mary; her sons, Joe, Michael, and Steven; her grandsons Nico, Aidan, Elijah, and Asher; and her ex-husband Richard. An Education intertwines deeply emotional personal and family experiences with the history of how she became such a transformative education leader. Although Diane denies it, I believe she’s the most influential education advocate of the last century.

I’ve been reading Diane Ravitch’s work for decades, but An Education is my favorite book. And my favorite passage started with Diane’s citation of Robert Hutchins who said, “We have to learn to live with those whose opinions differ from our own. After all, they may turn out to be right.”

Then she wrote about Hutchins statement, “for three decades I didn’t realize that it was intended for me.”

Being from Oklahoma, I was captured by the first part of her book, about growing up in Texas. I especially loved her story about meeting Roy Rogers at the Rodeo when she was 9 years old. After Rogers slapped her hand, Diane said, “I determined on the spot that I would never wash that hand again!”

Diane was a tomboy who loved horses and dogs. But she experienced sexism and trauma. She said she “did not have an idyllic adolescence. No one ever does.”  But her teenage years were “destroyed by my father abusing me.” 

During the middle of her book, she recalled her complicated marriage to Richard Ravitch and, then, her wonderful wife, Mary. Mary worked with the progressive educator Deborah Meier and opened a progressive small school in New York City. 

I was especially impressed by Diane’s communication with Al Shanker. He sought to allow teachers to start schools within schools to turnaround kids “in the back of the classroom with their heads on their desks.” Back in the late 1980s, it seemed like he might be able to bring diverse factions together. But, by 1994, charters had been high-jacked by corporate reformers and their winners and losers ideology.

In the middle of An Education. Diane revealed in so much detail the inside stories of her years as a conservative.  Back then, when I was an academic historian, I learned the most about Diane when reading her 1983 book, “The Troubled Crusade: American Education, 1945 – 1980.” Although I couldn’t yet read her work through the eyes of a teacher, I was exceptionally taken by her calls for teaching background knowledge so students could develop reading comprehension skills so they could “read to learn,” and her placing education pedagogies in a broad historical context.

Diane recalls her support for meritocratic, standardized testing, and color-blind policies, when she questioned bilingual education, and even the benefit of the Equal Rights Amendment. This was the time when she made friends with Bill Bennett, President Reagan’s Secretary of Education, and Chester Finn, and Tennessee Governor Lamar Alexander. I knew she had ties to Daniel Patrick Moynihan, but I too thought that progressives’ criticism of him was too politically correct. And, until I read An Education, I knew little about the two sides of James Coleman’s research, whose earlier research had seemed persuasive to me.

Neither would I have thought that Chester Finn was like a “sibling” to Diane.

When explaining her then-conservative beliefs, I sometimes felt that Diane was too hard on herself. For instance, she was far, far from alone in failing to understand the wisdom of Gov. Ann Richards, who said, “If there ever is school choice in Texas, the hard-right Christians will get the money to indoctrinate children.”

Moreover, as An Education schooled me on the propaganda behind the so-called “Texas Miracle” it did more than foreshadow the “New York City Miracle,” the “Harlem Miracle,” and the “Mississippi Miracle.”  It brought me back to the decades-long Oklahoma reality when our curriculum and policies were based on Texas’ accountability systems.  During most of my career, our policies were informed by one Texas trick after another to jack up accountability metrics.

Diane served as member of the National Assessment Governing Board from 1997 to 2004, and she would dig deeply into the numbers and the methodologies behind NAEP. But, as she explained, few journalists read the fine print of the research and they wrote “breathlessly” about supposedly dismal results in traditional public schools. They certainly didn’t report properly about the way that students’ outcomes were linked to family income.

When serving in the Education Department, Diane took a lead in establishing national standards for every school subject. Drawing upon excellent historians, multicultural History standards were set. She hoped standards like those would remain voluntary and “unify their respective fields and establish a common ground for a curriculum without telling teachers how to teach.” 

But the conservative Lynne Cheney “published a scathing denunciation of them.” Cheney said the History standards focused too much on people like Joe McCarthy and the Ku Klux Klan, and not enough on Ulysses S. Grant, and Robert E. Lee. This launched the modern wars over curriculum that have become especially destructive under President Trump. 

Even so, in 2002, Diane hoped that Mayor Mike Bloomberg and Joel Klein (who knew nothing about education) would succeed in improving New York City Schools. Klein reorganized schools from top to bottom, with multiple schools per building drawing on funding by the Gates Foundation. (By the way, I saw the chaos Klein created when visiting dozens of hurriedly opened school, especially in Bedford–Stuyvesant. Usually, leaders of the new schools didn’t even know how many new schools were being opened in their building.)

And, even worse, Jack Welch CEO of General Electric pushed 20-70-10 “stack ranking,” meaning 70% of teachers would be in the middle in terms of effectiveness, and 10% should be “removed,” even if it took the use of invalid and unreliable metrics to evaluate all teachers.

Especially after Diane engaged in a seven-year debate with Deborah Meier, which further “broadened her perspectives,” she became an invaluable leader of the grass-roots opposition to corporate school reforms. She objected to top-down mandates on teaching reading. Diane was among the first to explicitly link in a detailed manner the reforms to the wider privatization movement. And she nailed it when identifying them as the “Billionaires Boys Club.”

Diane analyzed the public relations campaigns which sold “reforms” as the “New York City Miracle.” Drawing upon her insights from serving on the National Assessment Governing Board, she clearly explained why NYC schools flipped back and forth between A and F grades.  Then, she linked President Obama’s flawed $5 billion RTTT experiment with the problems with Common Core curriculum and tests that were years above students’ reading levels.

Diane then quotes John Maynard Keynes who said, “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?”

Today, Diane changes minds by clearly explaining the interconnections between Free Market ideology, and profits, and the mindsets of elites that push privatization. She also reports daily on the interconnected attacks on schools throughout the nation. And now she’s sharing the same wisdom when spreading the word about Trumpism and today’s attacks on democracy.

I always read Diane’s daily blog posts. And I so very much appreciate An Education, even if it briefly pulled me away from reading everything in the Diane Ravitch Blog.

Categories Accountability, Common Core, Corporate Reform, Education Industry, Equity, Extremism, Freedom to Learn, Freedom to Read, Gender, History, Klein, Joel, New York City, Privatization, Racism, Ravitch, Diane, Research, School Choice, Segregation, Texas, U.S. Department of Education

Carol Burris Interviews Me About My New Book

By dianeravitch
December 10, 2025 //
2

The Network for Public Education sponsored a conversation between me and Carol Burris about my new book: AN EDUCATION: HOW I CHANGED MY MIND ABOUT SCHOOLS AND ALMOST EVERYTHING ELSE.

I think you will enjoy it!

https://vimeo.com/1137499967

https://share.google/OUhluBgNodmED08UF

Categories Charter Schools, Disruption, Education Industry, Education Reform, Personal, Privatization, Supporting public schools, Vouchers

The 74: More Religious Charter Schools Apply for Public $$

By dianeravitch
December 9, 2025 //
4

You knew that when the U.S. Supreme Court turned down a request from Oklahoma to approve a religious charter school, there would be more requests in the pipeline. Oklahoma was rejected by a 4-4 vote only because Justice Amy Coney Barrett recused herself, because of her friendship with one of the lawyers for the online Catholic school.

Recently, as I reported, Oklahoma returned with a proposal for an online Jewish charter school, a Ben Gamla charter. The entire state of Oklahoma has a population of only 9,000 Jews. They are not requesting a Jewish school, but an entrepreneur connected to a Florida for-profit charter chain is.

Religious charter schools are a big problem for the national charter lobby. They say that charter schools are “public” schools. The advocates for religious charter schools say they are not public schools. They are specifically religious schools.

The 74 reported the latest proposal:

When the U.S. Supreme Court deadlocked this year in a case over whether charter schools can be religious, experts said it wouldn’t take long for the question to re-emerge in another lawsuit.

They were right.

In Tennessee, the nonprofit Wilberforce Academy is suing the Knox County Schools in federal court because the district refuses to allow a Christian charter school. Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti is on the school’s side. He issued an opinion last month that the state’s ban on religious charter schools likely violates the First Amendment. 

“Tennessee’s public charter schools are not government entities for constitutional purposes and may assert free exercise rights,” he wrote to Rep. Michele Carringer, the Knoxville Republican who requested the opinion. 

The legal challenge in Tennessee comes as a Florida-based charter school network prepares to submit an application to the Oklahoma Charter School Board for a Jewish virtual charter high school. Peter Deutsch, the former Democratic congressman who founded the Ben Gamla charter schools, began working on the idea long before the case over St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School even went to court. The 4-4 tie in May means that an Oklahoma Supreme Court decision blocking the school from receiving state funds still stands. 

The National Ben Gamla Jewish Charter School Foundation runs a network of Hebrew language charter schools in Florida. Now it wants to open a virtual religious charter school in Oklahoma. (Ben Gamla)

“The prior decision shows that there’s an open question here that needs to be resolved,” said Eric Baxter, vice president and senior counsel at Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, a law firm representing the National Ben Gamla Jewish Charter School Foundation. “We hope the court will get it right this time. We hope the federal courts get it right without having to go to the Supreme Court.”

Idaho also confronted the issue earlier this year. The state’s first charter, Brabeion Academy, initially promoted the school as Christian. But it was approved in August as a nonreligious school and will open as such next fall. Related‘A Day to Exhale’: Supreme Court Deadlocks on Religious Charter Schools — For Now

Deutsch, Skrmetti and other supporters of faith-based charter schools base their argument on three earlier Supreme Court rulings allowing public funds to support sectarian schools. They say that excluding religious organizations from operating faith-based charter schools is discrimination and violates the Constitution. But leaders of the charter sector and public school advocates argue that classifying charter schools as private would threaten funding and civil rights protections for 3.7 million students nationwide…

To Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond, the debate is settled, for now. In November, he said his office would “oppose any attempts to undermine the rule of law.” 

Americans United, which advocates for maintaining church-state separation, has also issued a warning over the new school. The organization represented parents and advocates in a separate case over the school. 

“Religious extremists once again are trying to undermine our country’s promise of church-state separation by forcing Oklahoma taxpayers to fund a religious public school. Not on our watch,” Rachel Laser, president and CEO, said in a press release….

The demand for a Jewish charter school would be much higher in Florida, which has an estimated Jewish population of nearly 762,000, compared with about 9,000 in Oklahoma. 

Please open the link to continue reading the article.

Categories Charter Schools, Ethics, For-Profit, Oklahoma, Privatization, Religion, Separation of church and state, Virtual Charter Schools

Peter Greene: Trump Is Not Sending Education Back to the States

By dianeravitch
December 4, 2025 //
4

Republicans opposed the creation of the U.S. Department of Education. In 1979, President Jimmy Carter promised the NEA that he would push it through. Republicans fought it but he had the votes, and it was created. While NEA wanted the Department, Albert Shanker of the AFT was against it. He feared that the federal government would exert too much control over schools and that education might be politicized, with each party pushing its agenda. He preferred a department of education, labor, and social services.

Now, the Trump administration is dismantling the U.S. Department of Education. They have not sought Congressional approval, which is necessary to eliminate an authorized Department. Instead, they are eliminating it by layoffs and shifting programs to other departments. There may be a “Departnent of Education,” but the building will be empty. No one will be enforcing laws protecting the rights of children with disabilities. The Office of Civil Rights will likely go to the Justice Departnent, where it will not enforce the civil rights of women and racial minorities, but will make sure that schools stamp out DEI and deny any protections to transgender students.

Peter Greene writes:

The continued dismantling of the federal Department of Education is both a con and a lie, one more piece of a quilt of patchwork policies all built around a simple idea– some people are better than others, and the uppity lessers really ought to learn their place. And the rhetoric being used to sell the dismantling is a lie.

The over-simplified version of the department’s origin comes in two parts. First, Congress created some major funding streams meant to level the playing field for students and families, and with those funding streams, some civil rights laws to make sure states leveled their own playing fields for schooling and education. Second, Jimmy Carter, who had promised a cabinet-level ed department (and who wanted to be re-elected) proposed the department as a way to collect, organize, and administer the various policies.

The department’s job was never supposed to be to determine what an excellent education should be. It was supposed to make sure that whatever a good education was presumed to be in your state, everybody got one. So even if a child was presumed to be a poor Lesser, a future meat widget, a child whose special needs made them harder to educate– no matter what, the district and state were supposed to have the resources to meet the challenge. The quality of a child’s education was not supposed to depend on their zip code. 

This does not fit well with the current regime’s conception of civil rights, a conception rooted in the notion that the only oppressed group in this country is white guys, or their conception of democracy, a conception rooted in the notion that some people really are better than others and therefor deserve more power and privilege. (Nor does the regime love the idea of loaning people money for college and not collecting it).

So they’ve undone the second step of the department’s creation, and parceled out a bunch of programs to other departments, a move that philosophically advances the idea that education has no point or purpose in and of itself, but exists only to serve other interests.

For example, as Jennifer Berkshire points out, now that the Department of Labor exists to serve the interests of bosses, its interest in education centers on producing more compliant meat widgets to serve boss’s interests. Meanwhile, the ed programs now farmed over to the Department of Health and Human Services can be reorganized around RFK Jr.’s interest in eugenics and identifying those lessers whose proper place in society is, apparently, on a slab. 

That unbundling of education programs from the department only undoes the second phase of the department’s origin. But Secretary Linda McMahon’s assertion that these interagency agreement will “cut through layers of red tape” or “return education to the states” is thinly sliced baloney. It’s a lie.

“Instead of dealing with this government department, you will deal with this other government department” does not even remotely equal “You will now have less red tape.” In fact, given that you may have to track down the correct department and then deal with people who don’t have actual expertise and knowledge in education may spell even more red tape.

“We moved this from one government department to another government department” is definitely not the same as “we sent this back to the states.” 

Some programs may be sent back to the states in the sense that the feds would like to zero out the budget entirely which means the states that want to continue those programs will have to create and fund the programns on their own. If you tell your kids, “I’m not making you supper tonight,” I guess that’s kind of like saying “I’m sending the supper program to you.”

But the big ticket items, like IDEA and Title I will still be operating out of DC until such day as Congress decides to rewrite them. And given Dear Leader’s shrinking political capitol, I’m not sure that gutting IDEA is high on his To Do list right now. 

Matt Barnum suggests that gutting the department is largely symbolic and that actual schools won’t feel that much of a difference. On the one hand, that’s true-ish. “What is less clear,” Barnum writes, “is the Trump administration’s longer-term ambitions.” I’m not sure that’s all that mysterious. The far right’s goal, often in tandem with the modernn ed reform movement, is to get government entirely out of the education business while turning education into a get-it-yourself commodity. If government is involved in education at all, it would be 1) to provide a school-shaped holding tank for the difficult students that private schools don’t want and 2) to provide taxpayer funding for schools that deliver the “correct” ideological indoctrination. 

The parcelling-out of the department may only be a small step in that direction, but its long-seething right wing critics can see it as a means of shushing those annoying voices that keep bringing up rules and civil rights and stuff.

The best hope at this point is for a chance to build a new version of the department under a new administration (in an imaginary world in which the Democrats don’t face plant in 2028). But one of the worst things about the department has been the irresistable urge to use those massive grants to force DC-based education ideas on states, and this attack on the department doesn’t really address that problem at all. 

What this latest move clearly does not do is send education back to the states, which is, after all, where education responsibility already rested. The regime may be trying to hamstring and privatize education, but they aren’t sending it anywhere. It’s an unserious lie from unserious people. Stay tuned. 

Categories Education Industry, Funding, Privatization, School Choice, Trump, U.S. Department of Education

New Hampshire: Parents Complain that Voucher Program is a Scam

By dianeravitch
December 2, 2025 //
2

Parents in New Hampshire are outraged by the state’s new voucher law. It is siphoning money from public schools, which are attended by 90% of the state’s students, and 95% of those with disabilities. When the state legislature debated vouchers, parents overwhelmingly opposed them. But the legislature ignored the public and parent opposition and approved a modest voucher plan. The original plan was based on the claim that vouchers would “save poor kids from failing schools,”

That plan has since expanded dramatically; no longer modest, it now supplies vouchers to any student, regardless of family income. Currently, 80% of the vouchers are claimed by kids who never attended public schools. Now that the legislature has lifted income limits for those who seek vouchers, the program has become a subsidy for families that can afford to pay the tuition.

Garry Rayno of InDepthNH has the story:

CONCORD — Public education advocates said the state’s universal voucher program is putting students, taxpayers and education professionals at risk as more and more taxpayer money is diverted to the unaccountable program.

At a press conference celebrating American Education Week, Megan Tuttle, president NEA — NH, said the program takes money away from public schools as the state now funds two school systems, one public and the other private.

“As we celebrate American Education Week, let’s recommit to strengthening, not destabilizing public schools,” Tuttle said. “Public dollars belong in public schools. Our students deserve fully funded public schools, not policies that erode them. And our state’s future depends on getting this right.”

She noted private schools do not have to follow the same guidelines as public schools who have to accept all children no matter how expensive their education or their educational needs.

Nor are private schools bound by federal civil rights provisions, she said, such as the Disabilities Education Act, the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Every Student Succeeds Act.

“The only choice in a voucher system,” Tuttle said, “is that private and religious schools get to pick their students, not the other way around.”

The state voucher program, Education Freedom Account, was initially sold as providing opportunities to low-income parents to find the best educational environment for their students if they do not do well in the public school environment.

Initially the program was limited to students whose parents earned 300 percent of the federal poverty level or less, but earlier this year the program was opened to any parent whose child is eligible to attend public school in the state regardless of earnings.

The change doubled the number of students in the program from 5,204 last school year to 10,510 this school year and the cost increased from $28 million to $52 million this year to date.

While the program was sold as an alternative to public education, more than 80 percent of the students to date were in religious or private schools, or homeschooled when they joined the EFA program as is the case in other states with universal vouchers.

Public schools in New Hampshire educate 90 percent of the state’s students and 95 percent of those with disabilities.

Rep. Hope Damon, D-Croydon, who is the deputy ranking member of the House Education Funding Committee, said her party is fighting every day to ensure every child regardless of income or zip code has access to a high quality education, while the governor and Republican lawmakers have doubled down on their reckless school voucher scheme.

“A few years ago, we were promised that vouchers, these so-called EFAs, would serve families in need,” Damon said,  “but it’s clear that was just a ploy for Republican lawmakers in Concord to open up the floodgates and push through an over-budget, universal school voucher program.” 

Now some of the wealthiest families receive taxpayer-funded handouts that pay for private schools, she said, while just 19 percent of the students in the EFA program are from low-income families.

“Our most vulnerable families are being left behind,” Damon said. “Our public schools are already punching above their weight, scoring very well nationally despite extremely limited resources from the state. Vouchers just make their job harder.”

She said the program strains taxpayer dollars and increases property taxes, while it is already $12.3 million over budget at a time when the Republican controlled legislature voted to significantly cut funding for University of New Hampshire.

“This universal voucher scheme is expensive. It flies in the face of fiscal responsibility,” she said. “There’s very little accountability and oversight on how vouchers are used.”

New Hampshire’s future depends on its students having a high quality public education, she said.

Republicans have long argued parents should decide how best to educate their children and are in the best position to determine whether their child is receiving an adequate education.

Longtime school choice advocate, former Rep. Glenn Cordelli, R-Tuftonboro, argued repeatedly that if parents do not like the education their child receives in one EFA educational setting, they are free to move their child to a new one.

“Education freedom is not theory. It is accountability that begins at the kitchen table, where a mother or father can say this is not working and choose what does,” Cordelli said after he received an award earlier this year from the Children’s Fund of NH, the organization that administers the program for the state. 

During the press conference David Trumble of Weare, a business owner, educator and former State Senate candidate, said the state has to invest more in its students just as a business has to invest to grow. 

Republicans focus their efforts on diverting tens of millions of taxpayer dollars to fund private school education, he said, expanding the voucher program to cover wealthy families who can use these funds to pay for tuition or skiing lessons.

“The Republican voucher scheme is dangerous because public schools continue to go underfunded and students lose out on the resources they need to ensure long-term success,” Trumble said. “The state is long overdue in living up to its constitutional mandate to fund the public schools.”
He noted the current situation in Claremont where the school district faces a $5 million deficit building up over the past three school years due to fiscal mismanagement at the Supervisory Administrative Unit level.

He said the city would probably not be in this situation if the state had been meeting its constitutional obligation to fund public education.

Earlier this week, the Senate Education Committee approved a revolving loan program for the city to meet its cash flow needs this school year and into the future by allowing early borrowing from the state adequacy grants it will receive in the future.

That plan included a provision allowing the parents of students to apply for EFA grants mid year to remove their children from the school district, due to the uncertainty.

The plan also requires the city to place a school budget cap warrant article on its next annual school district meeting, both pet projects of GOP lawmakers.

“Claremont’s the canary in the coal mine,” Damon said. “It is not the only district that is in significant financial distress, but attaching even more unlimited vouchers to that bill is a further way to defund public schools. It’s a very, I think, inappropriate attachment.”

When asked what lawmakers could do to bring more transparency, accountability and fiscal constraints to the program, Damon said “the Free State-influenced Republican Party does not want vouchers to be diminished at all, but we’re not going to stop trying.”

Tuttle suggested voters make a change in the composition of the legislature. 

“We know the majority of voters in New Hampshire, they believe public funds belong in public schools,” Tuttle said. “And looking ahead to 2026, we need to be electing leaders in the state of New Hampshire who are going to . . . put in some new policies.” 

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

Categories Budget Cuts, Education Industry, Ethics, Failure, Funding, New Hampshire, Privatization, Vouchers

Carol Burris: Another Religious Charter School Applies for Public Funding in Oklahoma, Backed by For-Profit Corporation

By dianeravitch
December 1, 2025 //
13

In this post, Carol Burris reviews the latest challenge to separation of church and state. A religious school has applied for public funding as an online charter school. But that’s not all: the religious school is a tentacle in the vast for-profit empire of the Florida-based Academia charter chain.

Carol Burris is the executive director of the Network for Public Education (NPE). She was a teacher and principal in New York State and was designated as Principal of the Year. She is an expert on the charter school sector. She follows the money, studying federal records, state records, and financial reports. She has posted numerous reports, which can be found on the website of NPE.

Burris writes:

After the first bid for an online religious charter failed in Oklahoma, we were told it would not be the last. True to that promise, the National Ben Gamla Jewish Charter Foundation has informed Oklahoma’s statewide charter board that it plans to seek public funding for an online high school serving roughly 40 students to start. According to Peter Deutch, who filed the letter of intent, a complete application is expected to be submitted before the end of the year. While owning a residence in Florida, Deutsch has lived in Israel for more than a decade.  

Ben Gamla Charter Schools were founded in 2007 by Deutsch under the nonprofit umbrella of the National Ben Gamla Charterschool Foundation Inc. Students receive instruction in Hebrew language and learn about Israeli culture and Jewish history during school hours. Religious teachings (such as prayers or Torah study) are offered as optional programs after school hours. According to this 2013 article in the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA),

About 150 students mill around for a few minutes before heading back to the classrooms. They are followed by Orthodox rabbis with dangling tzitzit fringes and black-velvet yarmulkes pushing carts laden with prayer books and snacks.

Within a few minutes, the kids are chanting morning prayers — even though it’s afternoon and until a few minutes earlier, the classrooms had belonged to a taxpayer-funded public school.

That’s because Ben Gamla’s lease on the building lapses at about 2:15 p.m. Mondays through Thursdays. For the next two hours, the classrooms are taken over by a religious Jewish after-school program.

From the beginning, it was widely understood that Peter Deutsch’s goal in launching Ben Gamla was to create a publicly funded alternative to Jewish day schools, which charge tuition and are often financially out of reach for many families. Deutch is not shy about using his charters to promote Jewish communal purposes. He made it clear to the Times of Israel that, “He wants to give Jewish kids who otherwise would attend public school an opportunity to be in a Jewish environment and develop a Jewish identity — at taxpayer expense. The Hebrew curriculum includes Israel education and Jewish history, and most of the schools are located on Jewish community campuses. Some 85 percent of the students are Jewish. Supplementary after-school religious programs take place onsite or nearby.”

Now, Deutsch appears to be abandoning even the pretense of maintaining a secular framework, creating a new nonprofit that includes “Jewish” in the foundation name. His new vision would effectively erase the boundary between public education and religious instruction, pushing the model well beyond the constitutional line that Ben Gamla once claimed to walk carefully around.

But Ben Gamla’s story is even more complicated than above. Since its beginning, Ben Gamla charter schools have been run by a for-profit corporation—the largest for-profit charter management corporation in the United States—Academica.

Ben Gamla and the For-Profit Academica

To understand how deeply Academica’s involvement with Ben Gamla reaches, one need only examine the network’s earliest tax filings. The first available IRS Form 990—filed in 2009 for the 2008 school year, when the original Hollywood, Florida campus was the only Ben Gamla school open—lists the organization’s address as 6361 Sunset Drive in Miami, the location of Academica’s offices at the time. By the 2011 submission, Academica had moved to 6340 Sunset Drive, Miami. That address then appears as the Ben Gamla address on the Foundation’s subsequent 990s.

The overlap goes beyond shared office space. Those early tax forms were signed and submitted by Academica’s longtime Chief Financial Officer, underscoring that from the very beginning, Academica was not merely a vendor or service provider—it functioned as the operational and administrative engine behind the Ben Gamla charter school network.

The Ben Gamla Foundation’s address at 6340 Sunset Drive is still listed on the latest public 990.According to the latest Foundation audit, Academica provides both “academic and administrative services, including, but not limited to, facility design, staffing recommendations, human resource coordination, regulatory compliance, legal and corporate upkeep, maintenance of the books and records, bookkeeping, budgeting, financial reporting, and virtual education services.” Personnel in the school work for another for-profit ADP, which appears as the personnel vendor for many Academica-run schools. 

But that is not all. The audit lists the following Academica-related corporations as having received finance lease agreements and lease liability payments for its Hollywood and North campuses in 2023: North Miami Lakes Campus, LLC, Van Buren Facility, LLC, and Hollywood Educational Annex, LLC. These corporations, located at the same address as Ben Gamla and Academica companies and affiliated charter chains, are three of scores of real estate arms of the for-profit. 

During the 2023-24 school year alone, the Ben Gamla Charterschool Foundation, Inc. paid Academica and what the audit terms as “its affiliates” $3,413,317.00.

The relationship between the for-profit Academica and charter schools is repeated across the nation: Academica’s “brands” are nonprofits that hold charters and get taxpayer funds, including federal CSP grants, while Academica, for all intents and purposes, runs the schools. 

Other Academica-affiliated charter brands beyond Ben Gamla include:

• Somerset Academy, Inc. – A large charter school network (founded 1997) that partners with Academica. It encompasses roughly 80 schools across Florida, Nevada, Texas, and Arizona, with a small international presence inSpain.

• Mater Academy, Inc. – A Florida-based chain (founded 1998) supported by Academica, and started by Academica’s owner, Francisco Zulueta. Mater Academy has grown to 44 charter schools in 3 states (primarily Florida and Nevada, with recent expansion to Texas). 

• Doral Academy, Inc. – A charter school network (founded 1999) affiliated with Academica and originating in Doral, FL. It operates 16 schools across six states – Florida, Nevada, Colorado, Idaho, North Carolina, and Texas. 

• Pinecrest Academy, Inc. – A charter network under Academica’s umbrella, founded in 2000. Pinecrest Academy operates 26 schools in Florida, Nevada, and Idaho.

• Sports Leadership & Management (SLAM) – A specialized charter school network focusing on sports-themed academics, co-founded by artist Pitbull in partnership with Academica. Since the first SLAM opened in Miami (2013), the network has expanded to multiple campuses. SLAM schools are located in Florida, Georgia, Nevada, and Texas. 

• CIVICA – A newer Academica-affiliated charter network focused on career and civic leadership academies. It began with the City of Hialeah Educational Academy (COHEA) in Florida and has grown into the CIVICA Network operating schools in Florida, Nevada, and Colorado.

• International Studies Charter Schools, Inc. – A boutique network of multilingual college-prep charters in South Florida supported by Academica in Florida. 

• Independence Classical Academy: Academica’s latest brand of classical virtuous charter schools, with schools opening in Colorado and Nevada.

Nearly all of these chains have an Academica-supported online school. In addition, Academica provides both national and international for-profit virtual education. And it operates colleges associated with its charter chains in Florida. All of this is tied together neatly by the for-profit here.

Implications for Religious Charter Schools

To believe that Peter Deutsch—who resides in Israel—and the National Ben Gamla Jewish Charter Foundation, which he created, are seeking approval to open a virtual religious charter school in Oklahoma without the quiet support and coordination of Academica is simply naïve. Fewer than 0.1% of Oklahomans identify as Jewish. No one launches a niche virtual religious charter in that context unless a far more powerful operator is standing behind it. 

And Academica is nothing if not opportunistic. When CTE schools became trendy, Academica created the Civica chain. When “classical education” surged in conservative states, it launched the Independence charter network. Whenever a new market emerges—no matter how small, remote, or ideologically charged—Academica is there to plant a flag.

Academica likely brings in billions each year through its vast ecosystem of charter schools, real-estate deals, management fees, and related-party businesses. But for Academica, enough is never enough. The possibility of religious charter schools—publicly funded, lightly regulated, and ideologically branded—is not just appealing. It’s a gold mine. 

Some will insist this new online religious charter will be “independent.” It will not be. The pattern is already documented. As far back as 2013, the Fordham Institute—itself a charter school authorizer—admitted as much. When a Ben Gamla governing board attempted to fulfill its legal duty to operate independently from the Foundation and Academica, it was swiftly shut down. The Institute’s candor in its commentary confirmed what insiders already knew: independence is tolerated only until it interferes with the chain and its operator’s control. From that report:

“But it seems this local board took its job too seriously. Peter Deutsch, the founder of the Ben Gamla network and a former Congressman from South Florida, told the Tampa Bay Times that the local board ended up making all the decisions about the school. The foundation, he said, wanted more control.”

If the Oklahoma Virtual Charter Board approves this application when filed and the case ultimately reaches the U.S. Supreme Court, the challengers won’t just be arguing before a bench that includes Amy Coney Barrett. They will also confront the power behind an established charter chain whose own governance and for-profit entanglements make the point more clearly than any brief could: charter schools—despite what their advocates claim—are not truly public schools in most states at all.

Categories Charter Schools, Education Industry, For-Profit, Oklahoma, Privatization, Religion, School Choice, Separation of church and state

Tennessee: Parents’ Lawsuit Challenges Vouchers

By dianeravitch
November 24, 2025 //
1

Andy Spears of the Tennessee Education Report writes that a lawsuit has been filed in state courts challenging the Tennessee voucher plan. Not only does it violate the state constitution, the plaintiffs say, but the cost will bankrupt the public schools.

Spears writes:

Tennessee’s expanded, universal school voucher scheme violates a state requirement to maintain a system of free public schools, a new lawsuit says. 

The Education Law Center, on behalf of a group of Tennessee parents, filed the suit in Davidson County Chancery Court. 

“I taught for 12 years, and I fought to get my children into Rutherford County Schools because I knew the quality of education here,” said Jill Smiley, Rutherford County parent and former teacher. “Now the state is systematically defunding the very schools families like mine depend on. You can’t expect excellent schools on a shrinking budget.” 

The suit cites the requirement in the Tennessee Constitution that the state establish and support a system of free public schools. 

According to the plaintiffs: 

The lawsuit argues the voucher law violates the Education Clause of the Tennessee Constitution in two ways: 

  • The Education Clause’s adequacy requirement: By diverting public funds away from already underfunded public schools, the law prevents Tennessee from providing students with the adequate education guaranteed by the state constitution. 
  • The Education Clause’s mandate of a single system of public schools: By funding schools outside the system of free public schools, the voucher law violates this Education Clause mandate. 

Estimates by state analysts suggest the program will cost more than $140 million this year alone and may cost over $1 billion a year within 5 years. 

Additionally, an issue advocacy group calling itself Tennessee Leads says it will fight to expand the school voucher program as well as the state’s charter schools so that as many as 450,000 students are removed from the state’s public school system by 2031.

Categories Budget Cuts, Education Industry, Funding, Privatization, Tennessee, Vouchers

Jan Resseger: Trump’s Rush to Dismantle the Federal Government

By dianeravitch
November 19, 2025 //
3

Department after department, agency after agency, in the Federal government has been killed or destroyed by the Trump administration. Foreign aid, which had decades of bipartisan support, was virtually eliminated, meaning certain death for hundreds of thousand of children and families who count on the U.S. for food and medicine. The Department of Defense is now called the Department of War, without Congressional approval. The Consumer Financial Board is gone. The Department of Education has been eviscerated. Civil rights enforcement has been turned upside down, to exclude vulnerable groups for which it was intended.

Jan Resseger is a brilliant, thoughtful analyst of education. I encourage you to sign up for her blog. Here she takes a deep dive into what this chaos means for public schools and students:

Despite that the federal government shutdown has ended, SNAP funds are being distributed, and airplanes are returning to their expected schedules, many of us are feeling disoriented and troubled by the way the federal government seems to be operating under Donald Trump’s leadership. We have been observing the Trump administration violating core principles we learned in civics class are at the heart of our democratic society. And we thought the Constitution was supposed to protect every one of us. In today’s post, I’ll try to name and explore some of the principles that President Trump seems to be violating as he attempts to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education. On Thursday, in Part 2, I’ll explore three serious constitutional violations. All of this is undermining the well-being of our nation’s massive institution of K-12 public schools, the leaders of 13,000 public school districts, over three million public school teachers, and more than 50 million students enrolled.

NY Times economic reporter Tony Romm reflects on the deeper meaning of the recent federal government shutdown: “(T)he president has frequently bent the rules of (the) budget, primarily to reap political benefits or exact retribution. He has found new and untested ways to spare certain Americans, like the military, from the pain of the government closure, while claiming he has no power to help others, including low-income individuals who rely on benefits like SNAP. The result is a shutdown unlike any other, one that has posed disparate and debilitating risks for those unlucky enough to depend on the many functions of government that Mr. Trump has long aspired to cut… At the heart of Mr. Trump’s actions is a belief that the president possesses vast power over the nation’s spending, even though the Constitution vests that authority with Congress. Mr. Trump and his budget director, Russell T. Vought have dismantled entire agencies, fired thousands of workers and canceled or halted billions of dollars in federal spending—all without the express permission of lawmakers.” Romm is not writing about public education, but you will recognize that his concerns apply to public schools and all the rest of our society’s primary institutions.

Trump Seizes the Power of the Purse

The NY Times Editorial Board enumerates three ways the President has grabbed power from Congress  by violating “the power of the purse” granted to Congress in the Constitution: “First, he has refused to spend money that Congress allocated… Second, Mr. Trump has spent money that Congress has not allocated… Third, the president has taken steps that effectively overturn Congress’s spending decisions. In these cases, he has not added or subtracted federal funds, but he has taken other steps that make it so an agency cannot carry out the mission that Congress envisioned for it.”

All year, and at a new and radical level during the recent federal shutdown, President Trump has ordered Education Secretary Linda McMahon and his other appointees in the Department of Education to usurp the power of the purse primarily by slashing the expenditure of Congressionally appropriated funds to staff the department, along with announcing the goal of eliminating the department and its federal role altogether.  The administration’s imposition of permanent layoffs during the federal shutdown focused on firing the professionals responsible for carrying out the very reason a U.S. Department of Education was established back in the fall of 1979, during President Jimmy Carter’s administration: to gather together and administer programs that equalize opportunity for students across the states, where there had historically been unequal protection of students’ rights depending on children’s family income, race, primary language, immigrant status, sexuality or disability.  Huge grant programs like Title I and IDEA and myriad smaller programs ensure that public schools, no matter where a student lives, meet the specific learning needs of all students including those whose primary language is not English and students with disabilities.

During the shutdown, the Trump administration appeared intent on violating the power of the purse at the U.S. Department of Education by radically reducing the staff who do the work—impounding funds congressionally appropriated for paying the staff who enable the Department of Education to fulfill its primary mission.  For example, Education Week‘s Brooke Schultz examines the implication of the shutdown staff cuts for the Office for Civil Rights, on top of massive staff cuts last spring: “Though the latest layoffs are on hold, an enforcement staff that had 560 members spread across 12 offices… will shrink by more than 70% if they go through… Experts worry that without federal enforcement, a fractured interpretation of civil rights laws and protections could take shape across the country—leading to conflicting and politicized handling of cases depending on where students live and what laws are on the books. They worry students in one state might not have the same protections at school as students in another… (S)ome state lawmakers are worried about civil rights complaints not being handled at all.”

During the shutdown, the Trump administration also eliminated most of the remaining staff in the Office for Elementary and Secondary Education who administer the huge and essential Title I grants for school districts serving concentrations of students living in poverty. Trump and McMahon also reduced staff in the Office of Special Education Programs, which oversees IDEA grants, from around 200 to five.  Everyone has understood those proposed shutdown layoffs as the Trump administration’s threat to move special education programming from the Department of Education to the Department of Health and Human Services, despite that the mission of that department emphasizes treatment instead of education. During the shutdown, Federal District Court Judge for the Northern District of California, Susan Illston temporarily blocked the proposed permanent staff layoffs and their implications for undermining the mission of the U.S. Department of Education, though, of course her pause on the staff firings had no effect while the shutdown continued.

The end of the shutdown did temporarily end all the shutdown layoffs. We shall have to wait a couple of months to see what happens. K-12 Dive‘s Kara Arundel explains: “The continuing resolution signed into law Wednesday funds federal education programs at fiscal year 2025 levels. This temporary spending plan expires Jan. 30, unless Congress agrees to a more permanent budget before that deadline.  The deal nullifies the reduction-in-force notices sent to 465 agency employees on Oct. 10. The Education Department is also prohibited from issuing additional RIFs through the end of January and must provide back pay to all employees who did not receive compensation during the shutdown.” Clearly Trump and Vought’s power grab to eliminate much of the staff in a department established and funded by Congress has been blocked only temporarily.

Education Week‘s Mark Lieberman addsthat prior to the shutdown, “The Government Accountability Office, a nonpartisan federal watchdog funded by Congress, had been investigating more than 40 instances of the Trump administration potentially violating the Nixon-era federal law that prohibits the executive branch from impounding… funds appropriated by Congress… The GAO had already published decisions before Oct. 1 finding that the administration broke the law by withholding funding from programs supporting school infrastructure upgrades, library and museum services, Head Start, and disaster preparation.”

Supreme Court Gives Trump Power through the Shadow Docket

We have also watched all year as Federal District Court judges have temporarily blocked Trump’s executive orders, but lacked the power to declare them permanently unconstitutional or in violation of federal law. Only the U.S. Supreme Court can do that. These cases then become part of “the shadow docket”— cases decided temporarily on an emergency basis but awaiting a full hearing and final decision. The number of these cases derailed to “the shadow docket” has grown rapidly in this first year of Trump’s second term.

In March, the Department of Education fired nearly 2,200 of its 4,133 staff.  After a Federal District Court judge blocked the layoffs temporarily, the case was subsequently appealed. On July 15, Diane Ravitch reported in her blog: “Yesterday, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that the President could continue to lay off the employees of the Department of Education while leaving aside the legal question of his power to destroy a Department created by Congress 45 years ago… If the Supreme Court ever gets around to deciding whether Trump has the legal authority to abolish the Department of Education, it will already be gone.”

After a Federal District Court case is appealed, the Supreme Court releases a temporary, emergency decision, putting off a formal hearing, oral arguments, and what the NY Times‘ Adam Liptak calls, “an explanation of the court’s rationale” until some future time when the case could be scheduled for hearings on what Liptak calls the Supreme Court’s “merits docket.” Liptak explains: “The question of whether the nation’s highest court owes the public an explanation for its actions has grown along with the rise of the ’emergency docket,’ which uses truncated procedures to produce terse, provisional orders meant to remain in effect only while the courts consider the lawfulness of the challenged actions. In practice, the orders often effectively resolve the case.” His implication here is what Diane Ravitch worries about. By the time the Supreme Court fully considers and decides the case, perhaps years from now, it may be too late.

The shutdown has ended, but it is not clear what will happen to the U.S. Department of Education and the many federal programs that support public school equity across our nation.  Part 2 of this post on Thursday will explore what appear to be serious constitutional violations as they impact children and public schools.

Categories Budget Cuts, Cruelty, Democracy, Disruption, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Lies, Privatization, School Choice, Trump, U.S. Department of Education, Vouchers

Stephen Dyer: How the Ohio Legislature Cheats the Majority of Students, Who Are Enrolled in PUBLIC Schools

By dianeravitch
November 17, 2025 //
1

Stephen Dyer is a former legislator who keeps watch on the ways that Ohio Republicans have cheated public school students. Ohio Republicans love charters and vouchers, even though taxpayers have been ripped off repeatedly for years by grifters.

He writes on his blog Tenth Period:

Look, I like Greg Lawson as a guy. We’ve been on panels together and fought over things on the radio and in other places. 

But man, he really, really thinks y’all are stupid.

In an op-ed he had published in the Columbus Dispatch yesterday where he argued that public school districts whine too much about money, he made the following claim:

“State K-12 spending in 2023 was 39.5% higher than in 2010 — and school spending in 2024 and 2025 shows no sign of cooling off: “State funding for primary and secondary education totaled $11.64 billion in FY 23; was $13 billion in FY 24 (a $1.36 billion or 11.7% increase); and is estimated at $13.42 billion in FY 25, the second year of the state budget (a $415.8 million or 3.2% increase).”

See, Greg wants you to conclude something from these numbers: that public school districts are swimming in money and their griping over vouchers and his budget-sucking agenda is bullshit. It’s those greedy bastards in your local school districts that are causing your property taxes to skyrocket.

What he leaves out is that the numbers he’s using to make the districts-swimming-in-money claim include money for charter schools and vouchers. 

That’s right. 

He’s writing an entire article complaining that school districts whine too much about vouchers taking away money from public school kids by citing K-12 expenditure data that … includes money going to vouchers and charter schools.

Can’t make it up.

I’ll break down his ridiculous claim in two parts. 

Part I — Overall K-12 Funding

First, let’s look at the overall claim — massive increases to K-12 spending. Forget about the fact that the voucher and charter money need to be deducted out of that number. 

Let’s just look at Greg’s topline claim — the state’s spending tons more now than 15 years ago on K-12 education, so quit whining! 

Yes. Spending is up. But you know what else is up? 

Inflation. 

See, in the 2009-2010 school year, the state spent a total of $7.9 billion on K-12 education. In the 2024-2025 school year, that number was $11.5 billion. 

Big jump, right?

Well, if you adjust for 2025 dollars, that $7.9 billion spent on K-12 education in 2009-2010 is the equivalent of $11.9 billion, or about $400 million less than what the state spent on K-12 education last school year.

Let me repeat that.

The state is spending the equivalent of $400 million less on K-12 education than they did 15 years ago, adjusted for inflation.

Funny Greg didn’t mention that.

Part II — Privatizers Force Property Tax Increases

Now let’s look at charters and vouchers. Let’s just set aside how poorly charters prepare kids, or how the EdChoice program is an unconstitutional scheme that provides not a single dollar to a parent or child and voucher test scores aren’t great either, compared with school district counterparts.

Let’s just look at the money.

In the 2009-2010 school year, Ohio sent $768 million to charter schools and vouchers. 

Last school year, that number was $2.3 billion. 

For those of you scoring at home, that’s a more than 100% increase in funding for these privatization efforts … above inflation!

So while in 2009-2010 the state spent about same percentage of their K-12 spend on the percentage of kids who attended public schools at the time, last year the state spent 77% of their K-12 spend on the 84% of kids who attended public schools.

This cut in the share of state funding going to public school students can be directly tied to the state more than doubling the inflationary increase on charter schools and vouchers over the last 15 years.

Bottom line: What has this meant in funding for Ohio’s public school kids?

Well, in 2009-2010, the state, after deducting charter school and voucher funding, provided $7.1 billion for Ohio’s public school students. 

Adjusted for inflation, that’s $10.7 billion in today’s dollars. 

(I would also like to add that the 2009-2010 school year was the first year of the Evidence Based model of school funding that I shaped as the Chairman of the Primary and Secondary Education Subcommittee on the Ohio House Finance Committee. We pulled off this investment — greater than last school year’s investment, adjusted for inflation — in the middle of the Great Recession. So it’s not like we had shit tons of money lying around the way lawmakers do now. Which should tell you about the priorities back then vs. today.)

I digress.

Last school year, Ohio’s public school students received $9.1 billion.

That means that Ohio’s public school students are receiving $1.6 billion less, adjusted for inflation, than they did 15 years ago.

Should I mention here that not a single penny of the more than $1 billion going to vouchers is publicly audited to ensure the money goes to educate kids rather than Lambos for Administrators?

Anyway.

Put another way: If Ohio lawmakers and governors had simply kept the same commitment to charter schools and vouchers that they did 15 years ago and kept pace with inflation on their K-12 spend, Ohio’s public school students would have received $1.6 billion more last year than they actually did. 

In other words, we’d have a fully funded Fair School Funding Plan.

I’m not asking the legislature or Governor to do anything crazy here. No elimination of vouchers and charters. 

This is simply doing inflationary increases and making sure the percentage of state funding going to each sector (public, charter and voucher) matched the percentage of kids attending each sector. 

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, if the state had actually let “money follow the child”, Ohio’s public school students would have a fully funded Fair School Funding Plan and there would stillhave a $1.2 billion charter and voucher program!

Instead, state leaders have so overvalued private school vouchers and charter schools that now we have an unconstitutional EdChoice voucher program that doesn’t send a single dollar to a parent or student, charter schools that spend about double the amount per pupil on administration that public schools spend while tragically failing to graduate students, and a school funding formula that’s severely underfunded for the 84% of students who attend public school districts. 

While Greg might tell school districts, “Quit your bitching!”, I might humbly suggest that school districts haven’t bitched enough.

So when people complain about property taxes, directly point fingers at the Ohio legislature and Governor because they’re doing what they’ve always done — force you to fund the only thing — public schools — the Ohio Constitution requires them to fund. 

It’s governmental malpractice. And our kids are the ones who suffer.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corruption, Cruelty, Democracy, Education Industry, Ethics, Evil, For-Profit, Ohio, Privatization, Vouchers
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »