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Alaska: Ignore the Lies and Boasts: Charter Schools Are No Better Than Public Schools

By dianeravitch
February 7, 2025 //
6

The Walton Family Foundation, which is the second largest funder of privately-run charter schools (first is the U.S. Department of Education, which dispenses $400 million a year to charters), wanted to create positive press about charter schools in Alaska. So they commissioned a study by two charter advocates, who produced the positive results Walton wanted.

Beth Zirbes teaches math and statistics in a high school in Fairbanks, Alaska. With her friend Mike Bronson, she reviewed the data in the state records and reached a different conclusion: charter schools are no better than neighborhood public schools, even though the charter students are more advantaged. Their article, with a link to their study, was published by the Anchorage Daily News.

What’s impressive about this study is that a high school math teacher bested a Harvard professor of political science. It just goes to show: Don’t be overly impressed by the author’s academic credentials. And, never believe any charter or voucher research funded by foundations that fund charters and vouchers.

Would you believe a study claiming that cigarettes do not cause cancer if the study was funded by Philip Morris or some other tobacco vendor?

Zirbes and Bronson wrote:

The governor has claimed in several newspaper pieces that Alaska charter schools are more effective than neighborhood schools, and that the charters should be modeled more widely. He’d seen reports by Paul E. Peterson and M. Danish Shakeel, sponsored by the Walton Family Foundation, showing that Alaska charter schools held top rank academically among other states on a federal test.

We value the good performance of many charter school students, but we were skeptical that charter schools were necessarily more effective at lifting students up. So we looked at state data to find out how much of the charter schools’ better scores might be attributed to the schools themselves versus what the students bring to the schools. Read our full report here.

The state’s data showed the governor’s takeaway was incorrect. He was wrong that Peterson’s study showed the superior effectiveness of Alaskan charter schools over neighborhood schools. First, Peterson’s study did not even look at neighborhood schools. Second, after we accounted for numbers of students poor enough to be eligible for reduced-price or free lunches, we found that charter schools and neighborhood schools did not statistically differ in their English language proficiency scores. Instead, the percentage of proficient students in both charter and neighborhood schools was closely related to family income.

Alaska charter schools, on average, are distinguished by high proportions of white students, higher family income and fewer English language learners. Alaska charter school student bodies, in general, don’t even resemble Lower 48 charter schools, let alone Alaskan neighborhood schools. Unfortunately, Alaskan charter students do resemble other Alaskan public schools in that a majority of them score below the state standards in reading and math.

The graph shows a decline in percentages of third to ninth-grade participating students who scored proficient or better on the state’s 2019 PEAKS assessment of English language arts with increasing school percentages of students poor enough to be eligible for free or reduced-priced lunch, in other words economically disadvantaged. Each point shows a public school in Alaska school districts having charter schools. Neighborhood schools are considered non-charter, brick-and-mortar schools including alternative and lottery schools managed by a school district. Data are from the Department of Education and Early Development.

Categories Alaska, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Disruption, Education Industry, Propaganda, Research, Walton Foundation

New Regime Is Dropping CDC Data into Memory Hole

By dianeravitch
February 1, 2025 //
9

One of the sure signs of an authoritarian regime is a passion to censor unwanted information, research, ideas, and history. The Trump administration is busy deleting scientific research at the Centers for Disease Control. Any studies that include data about LGBT+ people, women, or others whose existence is anathema to Trump and his Merry Band of Bigots is being purged. During the first Trump term, research about climate change was given the heave-ho, and scientists rushed to archive their work. Again, climate change is being buried in the archives of the EPA. Now the new Enemy of the State is DEI.

The Washington Post wrote about the censorship at the CDC here:

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention removed or edited references to transgender people, gender identity and equity from its website Friday, racing to meet a late-afternoon deadline imposed by the federal Office of Personnel Management.

Whole pages about HIV testing for transgender people, guidelines for use of HIV medication and information on supporting LGBTQ+ youth health were no longer available late Friday.
The material removed or edited includes extensive sets of data collected and used by researchers around the world, according to two employees who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation. The data’s removal will have implications for researchers who have relied for decades on the comprehensive material collected by the vaunted public health agency.

One example of a set of data taken down was a survey by the Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System, conducted every two years to assess the health behaviors of high school students. The landing page for data about the survey was dark Friday afternoon and read: “The page you’re looking for was not found…”

Agency staff members were given a list of about 20 words and phrases to be used as a “guide,” according to a screenshot shared by one employee. The words include: gender, transgender, pregnant person, pregnant people, LGBT, transsexual, nonbinary, assigned male at birth, biologically male, biologically female, he/she/they/them. All references to DEI and inclusion are also to be removed.

The new regime is moving fast to obliterate inconvenient science writes TCinLA at his Substack blog, which is called “That’s Another Fine Mess.”

There is a scene toward the end of Act Two in “Rollerball” (the first release, starring James Caan, the one worth watching) in which “Jonathan E” is allowed to go to Geneva, where the computer that runs the world is housed, to ask questions of it. He finds that the computer is systematically “losing” history and data. The Librarian tells him that “He’s already lost the entire Twelfth Century.” Jonathan E realizes that there will never be a way to rebel against the corporate overlords who run the world in which he lives, because the people will never know any other alternative.

Or as George Orwell put it in “1984″: “Who controls the past, controls the future; who controls the present, controls the past.” In that novel – which it seems some people are adapting now as a user’s manual – the information Big Brother’s government didn’t want people to access ended up in “the memory hole.”

As bad as we thought things would be with the second coming of Cletus J. Dumbass’s Maladministration, the reality is far worse. We are only at day 12 of this maladministration, and the assault on historical knowledge and information is well underway.

The Theocrats who created Project 2025 know what Orwell knew, what the screenwriter of Rollerball knew, what those who study authoritarian movements know: if people do not have access to information, they have no way to separate lies from truth. They can then be ruled without fear of revolt.

Information at the Centers for Disease Control is disappearing as you read this. The agency has already removed all scientific data from public view.

On Thursday night, word began to spread through the scientific community that researchers should go to the CDC website and download their data immediately, because such data was about to disappear from the website, or be altered to comply with Maladministration II’s ongoing plan to remove from federal agencies any mention of gender, DEI, or accessibility. Scientists were up throughout the night, working to download information they needed for their continued work on such crucial issues as tracking viral outbreaks. (Remember back in 2020, at the outbreak of the pandemic, when Cletus said he wished they would stop testing people and reporting the results because “It doesn’t look so good for me”?)

Already, the data from the CDC’s Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System has disappeared. The data from the Agency for Toxic Substances and the Disease Registry’s Social Vulnerability Index and the Environmental Justice Index are gone. The landing page for HIV data has vanished. The AtlasPlus tool, which holds 20 years of CDC surveillance data on HIV, hepatitis, sexually transmitted infections, and tuberculosis, is no longer available. The new “leaders” at the CDC have directed employees to scrub any mention of “gender” from the data it shares at the website, replacing it with “sex.”

The purge’s full scope is still unclear. The Atlantic obtained a document that revealed the government – as of Thursday evening – planned to target and replace several “suggested keywords” – including “pregnant people,” “transgender,” “binary,” “non-binary,” “gender,” “assigned at birth,” “cisgender,” “queer,” “gender identity,” “gender minority,” and “anything with pronouns” These terms represent demographic variables researchers collect when tracking the ebb and flow of diseases and health conditions across populations. If they are reworded, or even removed entirely from data sets to comply with the Executive Order issued the night of Enshittification Day, researchers and health-care providers will have a much harder time figuring out how diseases affect specific communities.

The legislative “explicit purpose” of CDC data is to guide researchers to places and people who most need attention. It is hard to understand how this decision benefits health, but it does benefit an ideological decision to delete the entire topic of transgender.

When questioned about this today, an HHS spokesperson said that “all changes to the HHS website and HHS division websites are in accordance with President Trump’s January 20 Executive Orders” on gender and DEI.

The government understands these changes could have scientific implications since the document directing a review of CDC content suggests some work could be altered without “changing the meaning or scientific integrity of the content;” any such changes should be considered “routine.” Changing other content, would require review by an expert since any alterations would risk scientific integrity.

However, the document does not specify how data would be sorted into the two categories, or who would make such decisions.

The fear among researchers is that entire data sets could be taken down, reappearing with demographic variables removed or altered to conform with the DEI restrictions, losing entire sections of data. Since the Executive Order defines sex as binary, this means transgender people and nonbinary people could be erased. Such data could include facts such as gay men have higher rates of STIs, but lower rates of obesity and that transgender women have higher rates of HIV, but lower rates of prostate cancer, or how various demographic subsets of Americans are most at risk from conditions including adolescent depression, STIs, and sex-specific cancers

At this time, groups of researchers are rushing to archive the CDC website in full.
An example of what is at stake: Mpox – popularly known as “Monkey Pox” – affects people differently, with men who have sex with men being the primary group likely to be infected with the disease. Possessing that knowledge allowed medical authorities to more efficiently allocate resources, including vaccines, bringing the epidemic under control before it affected Americans more widely.

Scrubbing data such as this would change how the government allocates funds for long-standing threats to public health; this will widen health-equity gaps, or reverse progress in combating such diseases. The rates of STIs have recently started to plateau in the U.S., after decades of steady increase. Altering data that focus interventions on transgender populations, or men who have sex with men, would undo those gains. If there is no data to prove a health issue is concentrated in a particular community, that gives the government justification to cut funding.
Since much of the data on the CDC website comes from states, once it becomes known this data-scrubbing is happening, some states (blue states) may become reluctant to share information with the federal government while other states (red states) might not collect that important information at all. This would make what information the government does have unreliable, creating a skewed picture of reality.

It is shocking to realize how Project 2025 amounts to a war against modern society. Those reading this who are older than 75 can remember what life was like without the polio vaccine, without the measles and mumps vaccines. I escaped polio, but I came down with both measles and mumps before age 5, and I can still remember how difficult dealing with those was. The only thing I can compare those events to was coming down with COVID two years ago, which I survived only because I immediately obtained Paclovid for early treatment. Knowing to do that was because information about the disease and its effect on older people was made public by the CDC. Without that information, I and a lot of other older people who came down with COVID then would literally not be here now.

Maladministration II has to be seen as the all-out attack on modern society that it is. It has to be opposed by all means available. These Enemies of America are a minority. Every poll shows that significant majorities – over 66% – of Americans oppose every single action Project 2025 plans to take in this assault.

I admit that in my wildest nightmares of this coming to pass, I didn’t think of such things as an all-out attack on modern science, as is happening now. But this clearly demonstrates the nature of the threat we face. They are The Enemy. In all things, in all ways.

Winston Churchill warned his people in a speech given on June 18, 1940 that they were threatened by “a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.” We actually face that situation now.

The one fortunate thing is that, so far, the enemy has proven themselves largely incompetent to carry out successfully their plans to destroy modern civilization. That doesn’t make them less dangerous, but we can resist them.

We have to.

Categories Censorship, Democracy, Ethics, Extremism, Fascism, Health, Research, Science, Trump

NYCPSP: The Anti-Vaxxer Appointed by Trump to Lead NIH

By dianeravitch
November 27, 2024 //
25

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is one of the premiere government agencies responsible for research in medicine and public health. NIH is the largest biomedical research institution in the world. Maintaining its scientific integrity is important for the U.S. and the world.

Trump appointed a leading opponent of vaccines to lead the NIH. Others in the medical profession have considered his views to be “fringe,” “extreme,” “out of the mainstream.” Of course, Trump’s choice of Robert Kennedy Jr. to be Secretary of Health and Human Services, which oversees NIH, has garnered many critics, who refer to him as an unqualified and dangerous quack. And then there is Dr. Oz, the hawker of vitamins on TV, as director of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. He is said to be a proponent of privatizing Medicare by pushing Medicare Advantage plans owned by private companies.

Why is Trump unleashing his fury on the nation’s public health services? If you know, please share.

Our esteemed reader, who posts under the name, “New York City Public School Parent,” has researched Trump’s nominee to lead the NIH.

She wrote:

Bhattacharya, like Bondi, like William Barr, gets a pass by a liberal media that ignores the worst of their political hackery and their history of dishonesty. Instead of characterizing their actions as corrupt, or demonstrating the utter lack of integrity these folks have, the so-called liberal media instead normalizes their worst actions and mischaracterizes those worst actions as simply “something that rabid partisans on the other side don’t like.” 

When the so-called liberal media was helping the right wing media amplify Bhattacharya’s hyped “evidence-based findings” – that covid was no more deadly than the flu, in spring of 2020, a real journalist, Stephanie M. Lee at Buzzfeed, was reporting on this “evidence” – the very problematic Santa Clara antibody study – financially supported by an airline owner who wanted the public flying again – where Bhattacharya’s doctor wife was caught lying to recruit affluent parents at her kids’ school to participate in a “random” study. Unlike the rest of the journalistic establishment, Lee did more than act as a stenographer, and in 2022 won the Victor Cohn Prize for Excellence in Medical Science Reporting. From their press release:

“She investigated a study by John Ioannidis and his colleagues [Bhattacharya and another hack] at Stanford that made a splash early in the coronavirus pandemic when it claimed to show COVID-19 was no more dangerous than the flu. Lee uncovered serious flaws in the study; her stories also showed that Ioannidis had organized an effort to lobby the White House against pandemic lockdowns before collecting any data and that the study had been secretly funded by David Neeleman, the founder of JetBlue and a vocal lockdown opponent.”

Bhattacharya is so lacking in integrity that he made Lee’s life hell for daring to report the truth — he accused her of going after his family (directly causing her to be threatened) because she told the truth – that his doctor wife had improperly solicited parents at her kids’ affluent school to be part of her husband’s “random” antibody study to help prove that covid was no more dangerous than the flu.

He also has a lot in common with Emily Oster – two economists guilty of unprofessionally hyping their very flawed data and getting lots of publicity because they were willing to use that flawed data to make claims that just coincidentally happened to support a dishonest Republican narrative. In both cases, far more credible researchers were correctly pointing out how problematic their “evidence” was – but the media ignored critics and amplified these two folks who were more than happy to hype the lie that indisputable evidence and data supported the Republican narrative about covid being no big danger. 

Later, quietly, these political hacks would make revisions to their data, because their critics were correct that they had hyped flawed data that supported right wing narratives.

Despite the fact that no credible researcher would have ever made the claims of certainty (their “data” proves it!), these two never lost an ounce of credibility despite their errors. 

Typical double standard – if you are helping the Republican narrative, your improper actions are barely mentioned and always spun as irrelevant, thus your reputation as a widely respected truth-teller remains intact in the liberal media. If you are telling the truth and the truth doesn’t support the right wing narrative, the so-called liberal media (in the interest of “balance”) will scrutinize your actions to find some misstep they amplify into a major scandal that suggests you should never be trusted.

Lee now writes for the Chronicle of Higher Education. Bhattacharya is still disparaging her for not acting like the more prominent reporters in the so-called liberal media who specialize in uncritically rewriting press releases amplifying the undisputed “data” and “evidence” supporting right wing narratives.

The media also hyped the Great Barrington Declaration, which had very few credible researchers in epidemology, medicine or science among their signees, but included fake doctors and doctors who were also dead serial killers.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/09/herd-immunity-letter-signed-fake-experts-dr-johnny-bananas-covid

Categories Elections, Extremism, Fraud, Health, Research, Science, Trump

Why Charter Schools Fail: An Analysis of Charter Closures from 1998-2022 by the Network for Public Education

By dianeravitch
October 15, 2024 //
6

This morning the Network for Public Education released a new study called “Doomed to Fail” that examines charter school closures from 1998-2022. This is the first time that anyone has performed a comprehensive study of charter school failures.

The charter lobby has created a mythology that charter schools are more successful than public schools. As the study shows, the mythology is not true. What parent would choose a school that is likely to close in a few years?

Parents want to know if they can depend on a school being there not only when their children start but also when they finish. Based on a marketplace model with fewer regulations, the charter school sector is far more unstable than local public schools. 

While the fate of each school cannot be predicted, we can show trends.

Doomed to Fail: An analysis of charter school closures from 1998-2022 uses data from the Common Core of Data, the primary database on non-private elementary and secondary education in the United States, to determine charter school closure rates and the number of students affected when closures occur. The report analyzes charter school closures from 2022 to 2024 to determine the reasons why schools close and how much notice families receive. 

Charter schools come with no guarantees. And, as this report shows, in far too many cases, these schools were doomed to fail from the very start.

Here are some of the key findings of the report:

       -By year five, 26% of charter schools have closed

       -By year ten, nearly four in ten charters fail, rising to 55% by year twenty.

       -More than one million students have now been stranded by charter closures

       -Eight states have closure rates that exceed 45%. 

        -The inability to attract and retain students is the primary reason for failures.

     -The second most frequent reason is fraud and gross mismanagement.

     -Forty percent of closures are abrupt, giving insufficient warning.

      -School operators, not authorizers, initiate the majority of closures (blowing a hole in the “accountability” myth.. 

The report includes some pretty startling examples of charter shutdowns during the last two years, exposing corruption, mismanagment, and operators who did not bother to tell parents the school would be closing until just before it happened. There is also a section written by Gary Rubenstein on the failure of the Tennessee Achievement District. The report can be found here and the Executive Summary here.  

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Closing schools, Education Industry, Ethics, Failure, Network for Public Education, Privatization, Research

New Study: Increased School Spending Reduces Child Mortality

By dianeravitch
August 4, 2024 //
13

Scholars at Brown University and Stanford University recently released a study concluding that spending more on schools reduces child mortality.

The paper is titled “Priceless Benefits: Effects of School Spending on Child Mortality.”

The authors are: Emily Rauscher of Brown University; Greer Mellon, Postdoctoral Research Associate, Brown University; Susanna Loeb, Stanford University.

The authors’ summary:


The academic and economic benefits of school spending are well-established, but focusing on these outcomes may underestimate the full social benefits of school spending. Recent increases in U.S. child mortality are driven by injuries and raise questions about what types of social investments could reduce child deaths. We use
close school district tax elections and negative binomial regression models to estimate effects of a quasi-random increase in school spending on county child mortality. We find consistent evidence that increased school spending from passing a tax election reduces child mortality.

Districts that narrowly passed a proposed tax increase spent an additional $243 per pupil, mostly on instruction and salaries, and had 4% lower child mortality after spending increased (6-10 years after the election). This increased spending also reduced child deaths of despair (due to drugs, alcohol, or suicide) by 5% and child deaths due to accidents or motor vehicle accidents by 7%. Estimates predicting potential mechanisms suggest that lower child mortality could partly reflect increases in the number of teachers and counselors, higher teacher salaries, and improved student engagement.

Suggested citation: Rauscher, Emily, Greer Mellon, and Susanna Loeb. (2024). Priceless Benefits: Effects of School Spending on
Child Mortality. (EdWorkingPaper: 24-1008). Retrieved from Annenberg Institute at Brown University:
https://doi.org/10.26300/s7t7-j992

Emily Rauscher
Professor of Sociology
Brown University
Box 1916
Providence, RI 02912
emily_rauscher@brown.edu


Greer Mellon
Postdoctoral Research Associate
Population Studies and Training Center and Annenberg Institute
Brown University
greer_mellon@brown.edu


Susanna Loeb
Professor of Education
Stanford University
482 Galvez Mall
Stanford, CA 94305
sloeb@stanford.edu

Categories Budget Cuts, Childhood, Education Reform, Funding, Health, Research

Brookings Institution: Beware Voucher Advocacy Disguised as Research

By dianeravitch
June 17, 2024 //
5

Jon Valant and Nicolas Zerbino of the prestigious nonpartisan Brookings Institution examined the Arizona voucher program and were surprised to find that it was a giveaway to the richest families in the state.

Voucher advocates did not like their findings and tried to discredit their analysis.

They responded here.

In May, we released a short Brookings report showing which families are most likely to get voucher funding through Arizona’s now-universal Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA) program. The analysis isn’t complicated, and the results couldn’t be much clearer. A highly disproportionate share of Arizona’s ESA recipients come from the state’s wealthiest and most educated areas. That’s an important finding, even beyond Arizona, since this program is at the forefront of a wave of universal voucher initiatives that’s currently sweeping across red states (and some purple states). What happens with Arizona’s program could foreshadow what’s to come in many parts of the country.  

These universal (or near-universal) programs are much more threatening to public education systems than the smaller, more targeted voucher programs that preceded them. They raise concerns about fundamental issues such as civil rights protections and the separation of church and state. Early research and reporting points to ballooning state budgets, wasteful spending, and tuition increases from opportunistic private schools. Meanwhile, hardly anything in the academic literature suggests that universal ESA programs will improve student performance. And yet, the push to remake the U.S. education system in the form of universal school voucher programs continues.  

Having entered the fray with our own analysis of a universal ESA program, we’ve gotten a close look at the information environment surrounding these recent initiatives. Suffice to say, it isn’t healthy, at least if we hope for a functional policymaking process. A network of pro-voucher interest groups, think tanks, funders, and politicians are filling an information vacuum with misleading data, faulty or disingenuous arguments, and advocacy that masquerades as research.  

Here, we’ll respond to four critiques we’ve heard from that crowd. Part of our goal is to show why their specific critiques of our work are baseless, misleading, or just kind of odd. In doing so, we also hope to illuminate how dangerous the information environment surrounding universal ESAs has become now that many state leaders are dragging their education systems into uncharted territory based on little more than ideology, political calculation, and a fingers-crossed hope that the voucher advocates aren’t leading them astray.  

Here are the critiques: 

Critique 1: We got our analysis wrong because someone else found something different  

Our main results are probably best summarized by Figure 1, below, which appeared in our original post. 

FIGURE 1

The Arizona ZCTAs (ZIP codes, basically) with the lowest poverty rates have the highest share of school-age children who received an ESA. The ZCTAs with the highest poverty rates have the lowest rates of ESA take-up. It’s an extremely straightforward analysis, and we provide a detailed description of what we did in the piece. 

Before we published our post, an organization called the Common Sense Institute (CSI) of Arizona—a “non-partisan research organization” with several staff members from former governor Doug Ducey’s administration—looked into a similar question. CSI’s chart, below, tells a completely different story from our chart. 

A misleading chart on ESA particicpation

CSI makes it look like relatively few wealthy families in Arizona get ESAs. So, why the discrepancy?  

It’s because CSI presented an apples-to-oranges comparison that’s bound to tell that story. The data issue is subtle, but they present ZIP code-level data for ESA recipients (blue bars, on the left) and household-level data for families (red bars, on the right). Many households in Arizona make $150,000 or more, so the far-right, red bar is quite tall. However, few ZIP codes have enough households earning more than $150,000 that the median household income rises above that threshold. As a result, many ESA recipients who earn more than $150,000 aren’t included in the $150,000+ category in this chart. Instead, these households—which earn more than $150,000 themselves but live in ZIP codes where the median income is below $150,000—are included in one of the other blue bars.  

Maybe that’s an innocent mistake, but it’s certainly not an accurate representation of which Arizona residents are getting ESAs. 

Critique 2: We didn’t place Arizona’s ESA program in the proper context of its other school choice programs 

Education Next published an article from Jason Bedrick of the Heritage Foundation that accuses us of omitting key context that, if presented, would markedly change the takeaways from our analysis. Bedrick points out that Arizona’s universal ESA program exists alongside several tax-credit scholarship programs (true) and that families are prohibited from participating in the ESA and tax-credit scholarships simultaneously (also true). He then shares a few numbers, does some hand-waving, and concludes that our “fatally flawed” analysis is deeply misleading because of this omission. 

Curiously, Bedrick doesn’t show the relative size of the ESA and tax-credit scholarship programs in Arizona. Here’s the obvious chart to illustrate that comparison—one that EdNext maybe could have requested before publishing yet another round of Heritage Foundation talking points on ESAs:  

FIGURE 3

These tax-credit scholarship (TCS) programs are small relative to a large-and-growing universal ESA program that’s projected to exceed $900 million this year. On top of that, most TCS dollars are going to recipients above 185% of the federal poverty level—the threshold for reduced-price lunch eligibility. (One note: the most recent numbers available for the ESA program come from FY24, while the most recent numbers available for TCS programs come from FY23.)   

In other words, this critique—which really isn’t about the universal ESA program we analyzed in the first place—doesn’t even point to context that meaningfully changes the interpretation of our data.  

It’s important to emphasize, too, that our analysis was primarily about the high-income households that are obtaining a disproportionate share of Arizona’s ESAs. In that post, we tried to present data in the most straightforward, defensible way possible. If our goal had been to present the most damning data possible, there’s more we’d have said.  

Here’s a doozy of an example. According to U.S. Census Bureau data, Arizona has 300 ZCTAs with at least 250 children under age 18. (The other 60 ZCTAs are smaller, which makes them difficult to analyze.) Of those 300 ZCTAs, the one with the single-highest take-up rate for ESAs (236 of every 1,000 children) is the one with the single-highest median household income (about $173,000).  

Critique 3: Arizona’s ESA program is too new to assess who will participate 

Maybe the most peculiar response we’ve seen is from Mike McShane of EdChoice, who published an op-ed in Forbes.  

McShane appeals to Everett M. Rogers’ “diffusion of innovation” theory, which suggests that new technologies and ideas are adopted sequentially by different groups (from early adopters to laggards). McShane asserts that we should expect wealthier and more educated families to be the early adopters of a universal ESA program. He implores us to “think of the first people to own a personal computer, or a cell phone. They started with tech nerds and the wealthy, and eventually worked their way to everyone else.”  

Let’s play a game of “one of these things is not like the others” with personal computers, cell phones, and a universal ESA program. Yes, we’d expect wealthier families to be the first to buy computers and cell phones. Those things cost a lot of money. A universal ESA program gives you money. We might expect poorer families—with fewer resources and potentially worse public-school options—to jump first at that opportunity. Even the usual dynamic of uneven information diffusion is complicated in this context, as the ESA program was available to families with children in low-rated schools long before it became universal.  

Regardless, there’s reason for concern that vouchers will be more exclusively adopted by the wealthy over time. Jason Fontana and Jennifer Jennings studied the early implementation of a universal ESA account in Iowa. They found that private schools responded to ESA eligibility by increasing their tuition. If this response continues to play out, we might see desirable private schools becoming unaffordable to low-income families that cannot cover a growing gap between the value of their voucher and cost of enrollment. In the long term, this creates a risk of extreme stratification across the public and private sectors.  

Chile may provide a glimpse of that potential future. In a 2006 paper in the “Journal of Public Economics”, Chang-Tai Hsieh and Miguel Urquiola analyzed a universal voucher program in Chile. They found suggestive evidence that “the main effect of unrestricted school choice was an exodus of ‘middle-class’ students from the public sector… [which] had a major effect on academic outcomes in the public sector.” These patterns, along with widening achievement gaps between rich and poor, led Chile to drastically modify that program.   

Critique 4: We’re targeting ESA programs when the real villains are public schools 

A fourth set of critiques presents more conceptual arguments about education reform. Perhaps the most data-infused of these comes from The Goldwater Institute, which notes that Arizona spends a great deal of money to “subsidize public school instruction” for wealthy families. It accuses us (and/or others) of a double standard in how we object to using government funds to pay for wealthy students’ private schooling but not public schooling.  

We think this critique reveals just how far the rhetoric surrounding universal ESAs has drifted from Americans’ traditionally held views about education. Americans have long accepted—in fact, embraced—a double standard for public and private schools. Our public education system, with all its flaws, has been a foundational institution for supporting the country’s economic, social, and democratic well-being. Americans have found a rough consensus on how to approach K-12 education: provide free public schooling to everyone (including the wealthy!), allow families to pay for private education if they’d like to opt out of the public system, and maybe create a few opt-out opportunities via school choice policy for those unable to pay. 

We’ve entered a period in which conservative lawmakers are confronted with legacy-defining decisions about whether to abandon that long tradition and embrace universal vouchers at the risk of kneecapping their states’ public education systems. Worse, they’re doing it in a polluted information environment that has plenty of loud voices but hardly any credible research to guide or support their decision-making. Now that a few states—including Arizona—have taken that risky leap of faith, the least we can ask of other state leaders is to wait and see what happens

Categories Arizona, Budget Cuts, Education Industry, Failure, Research, Vouchers

Alaska: A Teacher Critiques the Harvard Charter School Study

By dianeravitch
June 10, 2024 //
23

Researcher Beth Zirbes, a teacher of advanced mathematics, used her skills to dissect a charter school study produced at Harvard. The study was reported by Paul Peterson in The Journal of School Choice; Peterson, like the Journal, is an outspoken advocate for charters and vouchers. The study claimed that charter schools outperform public schools, and that the charter schools in Alaska were best among all states.

The governor of Alaska cited the study as a reason to increase the number of charter schools.

Zirbes doubted that this was true and decided to do her own analysis. What she found, amazingly, was that the Harvard study ignored vital demographic factors.

She wrote:

When I first saw the results of the Harvard study concerning charter schools I was simultaneously unsurprised and skeptical. I was unsurprised as I have seen many very bright young students in my AP classes come from charter schools. I was skeptical as I suspected much of this performance could be attributed to the type of student who attends Alaska’s charter schools. As a comparative analysis of Alaska’s charter schools and neighborhood schools had not been done, I set out to do one myself.

To determine whether charter schools outperform neighborhood schools I looked at the performance of all schools on the 2018-2019 PEAKS ELA (English Language Arts) assessment from the Alaska Department of Early Childhood Education and Development’s (DEED) report card to the public, as this year was within the same time frame as the data from the Harvard study. The performance of each school is given under the “2018-2019 Performance Evaluation for Alaska’s Schools (PEAKS)” tab. I used the data on this page for every school in the state which allowed me to analyze test scores and demographic characteristics such as the proportion of the school who are economically disadvantaged, English language learners (ELL), and special education (SPED). Demographic characteristics are only given for the set of test-takers and thus all summaries and analyses are for students in grades 3-9 during the 2018-2019 school year. I also removed all correspondence schools from my dataset as these students were not included in the Harvard study, do not take NAEPs tests, and have very low participation rates on state tests. For my analysis on performance, I also restricted my dataset to include schools only in districts where charters are an option to ensure that the student populations were as similar as possible.

At first glance, it appears that charter schools are more successful than neighborhood schools. At charter schools 52.5% (1,866 out of 3,554) of students were proficient on the ELA assessment versus 40.1% (18,655 out of 46,574) of students at neighborhood schools. However, these differences could be explained by the differences in demographics of the student bodies at these schools. To rule this out as a potential issue, statisticians control for these variables in their mathematical models. We can then ask, do the charter schools outperform neighborhood schools that have similar characteristics? Or do charter schools do any better than we would expect, given their student populations? In short, the answer is no, they do not. When I fit a model which controlled for socioeconomic status alone, the type of school (charter versus neighborhood) was not significant. (For anyone who knows statistics, the p-value associated with type of school was 0.57. It wasn’t even close.) In summary, there is no evidence that charter schools outperform neighborhood schools in terms of ELA proficiency once we consider their socioeconomic make-up.

During my data exploration, I discovered that charter schools, on average, have very different student bodies than neighborhood schools. Charter schools have far fewer economically disadvantaged students, far fewer ELL students, and are comparable to neighborhood schools in terms of SPED populations. Here is a summary of how these populations differ for all Alaskan students in the relevant grades in all of Alaska’s brick and mortar schools for the 2018-2019 school year:

  •  Neighborhood schools were 52.2% economically disadvantaged (30,780 out of 58,929 students) compared to 31.3% in charter schools (1,219 out of 3895 students).
  • Neighborhood schools were 15.5% ELL (9,150 out of 58,929 students) compared to 9.3% in charter schools (363 out of 3895 students).
  • Neighborhood schools were 16.3% SPED (9,162 out of 58,929 students) compared to 13.7% in charter schools (532 out of 3895 students).

However, these summaries are highly influenced by a few outliers and obscure some large discrepancies, especially in terms of the economically disadvantaged and ELL students.

  • Of the charter schools, 46.4% (13 out of 28) have economically disadvantaged rates below 20%, compared to just 3.5% of neighborhood schools (15 out of 426).
  • Only 10.7% of charter schools (3 out of 28) have ELL percentages above 10%, compared to 36.9% of neighborhood schools (157 out of 426).

Even if we did a comparison of charter schools and neighborhood schools and found that charter schools did better, we still cannot conclude charter schools are causing the performance difference we observe. A comparative study like this is an example of an observational study and because it is impossible to control for all confounding factors, such as parental involvement, we can’t conclude success is caused by the school type. To definitively conclude that charter schools were causing the observed difference in success compared to neighborhood schools we would have to randomly assign some students to go to a charter school and some students to go to neighborhood schools. After some time, we would then compare the results. Obviously, this is impractical as many charter schools do not have busing, require volunteer hours, can remove students for poor attendance, and some do not even have lunch services.

Before the state uses the results of the Harvard study to change the approval process for charter schools we need to understand if charters are better and, if so, why. So far, I have not seen convincing evidence that charter schools outperform neighborhood schools when we control for various student characteristics. I have an idea for further study which I believe should be completed before any changes to policy are made. We can examine the performance of students who got admitted to charter schools via the lottery to those who applied but did not get in and attended their neighborhood schools instead. The group who was admitted is likely similar to those who applied but were not. This would be as close to a randomized experiment as one could hope to have. From this one could determine whether various factors were causing differences in performance, such as class size and teaching methodology. Additionally, we could use results of such a study to determine which factors correlate with success and apply these strategies in all our schools. As more than 90% of the students at our in-person schools are in neighborhood schools, such reforms will be more wide-reaching than simply adding a few more charter schools.

 2018-2019 PEAKS ELA, Beth Zirbes, economically disadvantaged, ELL, Guest Column, Harvard Charter School Study, NAEP, SPED

Categories Alaska, Charter Schools, Education Reform, Research

Center on Budget and Policy Priorities: Vouchers Are a Disaster

By dianeravitch
June 6, 2024 //
4

The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities is a nonpartisan, nonprofit research organization in D.C. Its reports are widely respected. Earlier this week it released a scathing report about the damage that vouchers do to American education. Vouchers subsidize the tuition of 10% or less of students, mostly in religious schools, while defunding the schools that enroll nearly 90% of all students.

Joanna Lefebvre wrote for the Center:

During this year’s legislative sessions, at least one in three states are considering or have enacted school voucher expansions alongside broad, untargeted property tax cuts. Over half of states have already enacted deep personal and corporate income tax cuts in the last three years. These policies will result in under-resourced public schools, worse student outcomes, and, over time, weaker communities.

Research suggests property tax cuts result in disproportionately less funding for districts serving large numbers of students of color and that school funding matters more for these students’ life outcomes because of historical and systemic racial discrimination. States wishing to ensure a quality education for all children should instead invest in public schools, reject K-12 voucher programs, and pursue only targeted property tax relief.

Property tax cuts reduce funding for public education at its source. Revenue from local property taxes accounted for over 36 percent of public education funding in the 2020-2021 school year, the most recent year for which national data are available. States have a long history of weaponizing this policy design, using their property tax codes to limit education funding for Black and brown students. For example, California’s infamous 1978 Proposition 13, which limited property taxes to 1 percent of a home’s purchase price, passed with primary support from white property owners amid a campaign of thinly veiled racism and xenophobia about paying for “other” people’s children to go to school.

Vouchers Divert Money from Public Schools and Get Worse Academic Outcomes

K-12 vouchers also siphon funding away from public schools. Voucher programs can take many forms, but all use public dollars to subsidize private school tuition. Some voucher programs defund public education directly by siphoning off funding that otherwise would have gone to public schools. Others do so indirectly by reducing revenue available for all public services, including education.

Modern school vouchers have their roots in similar programs created after Brown v. Board of Education to perpetuate segregation and exacerbate inequities. This vision can be seen in today’s programs, where most vouchers go to families with high incomes. Although data on the race and ethnicity of voucher recipients themselves is scarce, white students make up 65 percent of private school enrollment in the U.S. but only 45 percent of public school enrollment. Defunding public schools through vouchers and property tax cuts exacerbates inequities in educational outcomes, which often fall along lines of race and class due to the persisting effects of slavery and segregation.

A trend has emerged of states proposing or enacting school voucher programs while simultaneously cutting, limiting, or proposing to eliminate property taxes.Florida, Texas, and Idaho are leading examples of this trend.

  • Florida: This year, a Republican representative introduced a bill to study eliminating Florida’s property tax system. Property taxes generated $14 billion in the 2020-2021 school year (the most recent for which data are available), equivalent to almost 40 percent of Florida’s K-12 education funding. Meanwhile, the legislature passed a budget in early March that includes about $4 billion for private school vouchers, a significant portion of the $29 billion appropriated for K-12 education.
  • Texas: Last year, Governor Greg Abbott called two special legislative sessions and spent seven months lobbying lawmakers to pass a school voucher system without success. The voucher proposal would have cost Texas school districts up to $2.28 billion. However, the legislature approved over $18 billion worth of property tax cuts, with 66 percent of benefits accruing to families making more than $100,000, putting pressure on future education budgets.
  • Idaho: Last year, Idaho’s legislature passed property tax cuts totaling $355 million, equivalent to over half of property tax revenue for schools. Although some of this funding was replaced with general fund revenue to repair the state’s abysmal school facilities, the overall reduction in revenue jeopardizes the state’s long-term ability to fund education. Meanwhile, this year, the legislature tried and failed to pass a school voucher bill that would have cost the state over $170 million.

Other states where both school vouchers and property tax cuts are being considered this year include Alabama, Colorado, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Missouri, Nebraska, Ohio, Oregon, South Dakota, Tennessee, and Wyoming.

Broad property tax cuts and caps will not address housing affordability. Property values have risen by about 37 percent since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, and some proponents of property tax cuts argue they will help make housing more affordable. However, most of the proposals being debated would do little to help while stripping resources from public education. Instead of broad property tax cuts or caps, states should adopt “circuit breaker” policies that respond to residents’ ability to pay without limiting revenue-raising capacity.

States should raise revenue equitably and invest in robust public schools. Research suggests the education attainment gap between children from low-income families and those from higher-income families can be eliminated with increased funding for public schools. Raising revenue to invest in public education and resisting calls to dismantle it through school vouchers and property tax cuts is critical to enabling thriving communities with broadly shared opportunity.

States are defunding public education by reducing revenue available for schools through property taxes and by diverting public dollars to private schools.

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Cruelty, Disruption, Education Industry, Elections, Privatization, Research, U.S. education, Vouchers

Dr. Peter Offit: What Is “Gain-of-Function” Research? Why Republicans Are Wrong to Harass Dr. Fauci

By dianeravitch
June 4, 2024 //
18

Since the beginning of the COVID pandemic in early 2020, there has been intense interest in how the pandemic started. Was it started by a leak of the virus from a dirty seafood market stall in China? Did it begin because the virus leaked from a research laboratory in Wuhan, China?

Republican elected officials in Washington became convinced that it began because the virus escaped from a lab in Wuhan, China, that researching dangerous viruses; that the lab was involved in gain-of-function research; that the research was funded by the United States; and that Dr. Anthony Fauci knew and must be held accountable.

In other words, a worldwide pandemic that caused millions of deaths was Dr. Fauci’s fault. They launched hearings yesterday at which Dr. Fauci was grilled.

Dr. Paul Offit is an infectious diseases specialist. He blogs at “Beyond the Noise” and recently wrote a book about COVID. He wrote the following post to explain what scientists know about these issues.

He wrote:

On February 13, 2024, National Geographic published a book I wrote called, TELL ME WHEN IT’S OVER: AN INSIDER’S GUIDE TO DECIPHERING COVID MYTHS AND NAVIGATING OUR POST-PANDEMIC WORLD. For the past few months, I have been writing about various issues discussed in that book.

In the wake of some emails that recently came to light, the question of whether the United States government knowingly funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology has resurfaced. Does this new information prove the lab-leak theory?

First, what is “gain-of-function” research? Second, did gain-of-function research give birth to SARS-CoV-2 virus? One way to understand gain-of-function research is through the prism of rabies virus. People get rabies when they are bitten by a rabid animal. Once under the skin, the virus travels up the nerves and enters the brain, where it causes delirium, seizures, coma, and invariably death. Rabies is without question the deadliest infection of humans.

Now, imagine that a scientist engineers rabies virus so that, instead of being transmitted by animal bites, it is transmitted by small droplets from the nose and mouth, like the common cold. This new virus would be highly contagious and uniformly fatal. In the absence of an effective vaccine, it could eliminate humans from the face of the earth. The good news is that no one has tried to make rabies virus more contagious. But that doesn’t mean that it’s not possible or that no one would be willing to try. Indeed, in 2011, one experiment so frightened U.S. public health officials that within two years federal regulators made gain-of-function research illegal.

The worrisome experiment took place at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Researchers took a strain of influenza virus found in birds and altered it to grow in ferrets (which, like humans, are mammals). In other words, these researchers had taken a strain of influenza virus that was limited to birds—to which no one in the world had immunity—and altered it so that it might cause disease in people. They had created a potential pandemic virus.

In 2016, three years before SARS-CoV-2 virus entered the human population, the lead researcher studying coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology was Dr. Zheng-Li Shi. Her studies were funded in part by the United States government through EcoHealth. Dr. Shi was studying a coronavirus strain called WIV1 (Wuhan Institute of Virology-1): a bat coronavirus that could grow in monkey cells in the laboratory but didn’t cause disease in people. The WIV1 strain bears no resemblance to SARS-CoV-2. Dr. Shi wanted to see what would happen if she combined WIV1 with each of eight different bat coronaviruses that had been found in caves in and around Wuhan. None of the combination viruses that she created, however, were more dangerous than the strain she had started with (WIV1). None of them, like WIV1, could cause disease in people. Although Dr. Shi had performed gain-of-function studies that would have been illegal in the United States, she didn’t create a coronavirus strain that was dangerous to people.

So, while it was true that the United States government funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, no function was gained. The recent seemingly endless posting of hidden emails and secret communications by government officials—all breathlessly claiming conspiracy and coverup—has, in the final analysis, been much to do about nothing.

Indeed, overwhelming evidence continues to support an animal-to-human spillover event that occurred in the western section of the Huanan Wholesale Seafood Market at the end of 2019. This is consistent with many other animal-to-human spillover events in history. Influenza virus (birds), human immunodeficiency virus (chimps), Ebola virus (bats), mpox (rodents), and the coronaviruses SARS-1 (bats) and MERS (bats) were all originally animal viruses. Indeed, about 60 percent of human viruses and bacteria have their origins in animals.

For a lengthy but complete discussion about why it is now clear that SARS-CoV-2 was an animal-to-human spillover event, you might want to check out a podcast called Decoding the Gurus, which features evolutionary biologists Michael Worobey, Kristian Anderson, and Eddie Holmes.

Categories Extremism, Research, Science

Nick Covington: What the “Science of Reading” Overlooks

By dianeravitch
May 9, 2024 //
32

Nick Covington taught social studies for a decade. He recently decided to delve into the mystique of “the science of reading.” He concluded that we have been “sold a story.”

He begins:

Literacy doesn’t come in a box, we’ll never find our kids at the bottom of a curriculum package, and there can be no broad support for systemic change that excludes input from and support for teachers implementing these programs in classrooms with students. 

(Two hands pull apart a book)

Exactly one year after the final episode of the podcast series that launched a thousand hot takes and opened the latest front of the post-pandemic Reading Wars, I finally dug into Emily Hanford’s Sold A Story from American Public Media. Six episodes later, I’m left with the ironic feeling that the podcast, and the narrative it tells, missed the point. My goal with this piece is to capture the questions and criticisms that I have not just about the narrative of Sold A Story but of the broader movement toward “The Science of Reading,” and bring in other evidence and perspectives that inform my own. I hope to make the case that “The Science of Reading” is not a useful label to describe the multiple goals of literacy; that investment in teacher professionalization is inoculation against being Sold A Story; and that the unproductive and divisive Reading Wars actually make it more difficult for us to think about how to cultivate literate kids. The podcast, and the Reading Wars it launched, disseminate an incomplete and oversimplified picture of a complex process that plasters over the gaps with feverish insistence.

Sold a Story is a podcast that investigates the ongoing Reading Wars between phonics, whole language, balanced literacy, and “The Science of Reading.” Throughout the series, listeners hear from teachers who felt betrayed by what school leaders, education celebrities, and publishers told them was the right way to teach, only to later learn they had been teaching in ways deemed ineffective. The story, as I heard it, was that teachers did their jobs to the best of their personal ability in exactly the ways incentivized by the system itself.  In a disempowered profession, the approaches criticized in the series offered teachers a sense of aspirational community, opportunities for training and professional development, and the prestige of working with Ivy League researchers. Further, they came with material assets – massive classroom libraries and flexible seating options for students, for example – that did transform classroom spaces. 

Without the critical toolkit and systemic support to evaluate claims of effectiveness, and lacking collective power to challenge the dictates of million dollar curriculum packages, teachers taught how they were instructed to teach using the resources they were required to use. And given the scarcity of educational resources at the disposal of most individual teachers, it’s easy to see why they embraced such a visible investment in reading instruction. Instead of seeing teachers in their relation to systemic forces – in their diminished roles as curriculum custodians – Hanford instead frames teachers who participated in these methods as having willingly bought into a cult of personality, singing songs and marching under the banners of Calkins and Clay; however, Hanford also comes up short in offering ways this story could have gone differently or will go differently in the future.

‍A key objective of Sold A Story is to communicate to listeners that “The Science of Reading” is the only valid, evidence-based way to teach kids to read and borders on calling other approaches a form of educational malpractice, inducing a unique pedagogical injury. In the wake of Sold A Story, “The Science of Reading” itself has been co-opted as a marketing and branding label. States and cities have passed laws requiring “The Science of Reading,” sending school leaders scrambling to purchase new programs and train teachers to comply with the new prescription. 

In May 2023, the mayor of New York City announced “a tectonic shift” in reading instruction for NYC schools. The change required school leaders to choose from one of three pre-approved curriculum packages provided by three different publishing companies. First-year training for the new curriculum was estimated to cost $35 million, but “city officials declined to provide an estimate of the effort’s overall price tag, including the cost of purchasing materials.” NYC Schools also disbanded their in-house literacy coaching program over the summer to contract instead with outside companies to provide coaching. It’s hard not to conclude that the same publishing ecosystem that sold school leaders and policy-makers on the previous evidence-based reading curriculum – and that Hanford condemns in the podcast – is happy to meet their current needs in the marketplace. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. 

Now, months into the new school year and just weeks before Winter Break, how is the hurried rollout of the new reading curriculum going for NYC schools and teachers? One Brooklyn teacher told Chalkbeat they still hadn’t received the necessary training to use the new materials, “The general sentiment at my school is we’re being asked to start something without really knowing what it should look like, I feel like I’m improvising — and not based on the science of reading.” A third-grade teacher said phonics had not been the norm for her class, and that she hasn’t “received much training on how to deliver the highly regimented lessons.”  Other teachers echo the sentiment of feeling rushed, hurried, and unprepared. One 30+ year veteran classroom teacher mentioned that she has “turned to Facebook groups when she has questions.” The chaotic back-and-forth was also recognized by many veteran teachers responding to the Chalkbeat piece on social media. One education and literacy coach commented, “I sometimes wonder how many curriculum variations I’ve seen in the last 3 decades – ’Here teachers [drops off boxed curriculum],  now teach this way’ –  hasn’t changed student outcomes across systems.” 

Open the post to read Covington’s review of the research on phonics-based programs. No miracle. No impressive rise in test scores.

Most of my professional career has been devoted to debunking “miracles“ in education. Whole language was not a miracle cure. Neither is phonics.

Why not take the sensible route? Make sure that teachers know a variety of methods when they enter the profession. Let them do what they think is best for their students. Not following the fad of the day, but using their professional knowledge.

Categories Education Industry, Education Reform, Literacy, Research
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