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Arizona: The Governor’s Race Is Crucial for the Future of Education

By dianeravitch
October 26, 2022 //
7

Two women are competing to be Governor of Arizona. Katie Hobbs, the current Secretary of State, is the Democratic candidate. Kari Lake, a former talk show host, is the Republican candidate, endorsed by Trump.

The differences between them on education are stark. Hobbs would roll back the recently passed universal voucher plan. Lake is an enthusiastic supporter of charters and vouchers.

Both pledged to raise teacher pay, but Lake would tie raises to test scores.

If Lake is elected, she would impose extremist ideas that would undermine education in the state. She promises privatization and censorship. If she is elected, she will destroy public schools.

The Arizona Republic described their views:

In the coming year, Arizona schools face key challenges.

A newly minted school voucher program will steer millions of taxpayer dollars to lightly regulated private schools. A major staff shortage has left schools across the state scrambling for teachers, bus drivers and kitchen staff. Total public school spending is nearing a limit that could force massive budget cuts if the Legislature doesn’t act.

The governor has significant sway in shaping the future of education in Arizona. They can propose priorities for legislative action, choose bills to sign, call special legislative sessions, appoint members to the State Board of Education and issue executive orders.

Arizona’s candidates for governor offer voters a stark choice on education policy.

Democrat Katie Hobbs supports repealing the new universal school voucher program and putting more public dollars into public schools. Republican Kari Lake wants all education funding tied to students, not schools, which could send even more public money to private schools.

Here’s what else we know about where they would try to lead Arizona’s education system if elected.

Funding schools, public and private

At the core of Lake’s education plan is a proposal to allow families to decide where state money allocated for their children’s education will go. The funding that would typically go to their local district public school to support their children’s education could be spent at a public district school, a public charter school, a private school, or for “alternative learning arrangements, such as neighborhood pods.”

“Parents and students can mix and match the best educational opportunities available to them,” Lake said on her campaign website. “As parents, you decide where you want your kid to go to school, send them there, and their state funding will follow them. No waitlists, no applications, no hurdles or hoops to jump through, period.”

While district schools usually are expected to welcome any student zoned to the school, some charter schools reach capacity and institute waitlists. Private schools routinely require families to apply for a spot.

That “backpack funding” approach would significantly shift how public school funding works in Arizona. Currently, public schools get a mix of funding from federal, state, and local sources. State funding depends on the number of students in a school and students’ specific needs. High-performing schools can also get additional funding, and many schools qualify for grant funding or other special financial support.

The recently expanded education voucher program shifted the funding dynamic by allowing any family with a school-age child in Arizona — regardless of whether they previously attended a public school — to apply for about $7,000 in public education funding to put toward education-related endeavors, including private schools, tutors and homeschooling.

If elected, Hobbs said she would work to roll back universal vouchers.

On school funding, Hobbs said she wants to direct more of Arizona’s budget surplus, $5 billion in fiscal year 2023, to education. Right now, Arizona ranks near the bottom nationally in per-pupil spending, which educators said accounts for crumbling classrooms, outdated books and low-paid staff.

Hobbs also wants to ensure Arizona schools receive matching federal dollars for early childhood education. “To say that increased funding of schools does not result in better student success is willful ignorance of the needs of Arizona children and families,” said Hobbs’ plan.https://www.usatodaynetworkservice.com/tangstatic/html/pphx/sf-q1a2z37a5af424.min.html

Both would increase teacher pay

Both Lake and Hobbs said they want to increase the number of new teachers and retain current teachers by boosting pay. But they have different ideas about how to go about it.

Hobbs’ promises to support educators and tackle the teacher shortage are at the forefront of her platform. Among her positions are increasing educator annual salaries by an average of $14,000, expanding a state program that subsidizes tuition for college students studying education, promoting mentorship programs and ensuring teachers can access affordable healthcare.

Much of Hobbs’ plan relies on existing systems for low-cost teacher training, including the Arizona Teacher Residency at Northern Arizona University and the Arizona Teachers Academy, a scholarship program that subsidizes tuition at public, in-state higher education institutions. Hobbs said she would also work to convince the Legislature that more base funding for schools is needed.

Lake challenged the connection between more money for schools and higher student achievement. She said Arizona teachers deserve better pay, but any raises should be performance-based. She blamed stagnating teacher salaries on administrators taking ever-larger earnings. “Government-run school leaders appear to be deliberately keeping teacher pay low so they can be used as sympathetic figureheads in a quest for additional funds,” Lake said.

An Arizona Auditor General analysis of instructional spending in the 2021 fiscal year found that the percentage of money spent on instructional spending had fallen to 55.3% from its peak of 58.6% in 2004. While administrative spending is part of what districts spend their non-classroom dollars on, those costs also include food service and transportation.

Instead, Lake said she would provide bonuses for educators whose students perform well and show improvement. She would fund that through Proposition 301, an education sales tax first approved in 2000 and renewed in 2018. “We cannot trust school districts to direct allocated funds to teachers,” she said, explaining her support for performance-related raises. “I want our best teachers to be recognized and to be the highest paid in the country.”

Differences on school spending cap

The aggregate expenditure limit is a constitutional cap put in place in the 1980s on how much all Arizona district-run schools can spend. Last year, schools hit the limit, and the Legislature temporarily lifted the cap. This year, schools are on track to hit it again, and if lawmakers don’t act, school districts will collectively have to cut billions from their budgets.

Hobbs wants to eliminate the constitutional limit. “Each year our school districts are held hostage by political gamesmanship,” she said.

A constitutional fix could take various forms. The Legislature could increase the spending ceiling or exempt from the limit the money that comes in from the Proposition 301 sales tax. An end to the limit altogether would require a public referendum.

Lake did not respond to The Republic’s questions about her education plan, including a question about her position on the spending limit. In a social media statement earlier this year, Lake was critical of efforts to lift the cap. In a February tweet, as lawmakers voted on a bill to temporarily lift the spending cap, Lake encouraged her followers to vote in favor of legislators who did not support raising the aggregate expenditure limit….

Banning ideas, how to teach U.S. history

Lake wants to prohibit several ideas from being discussed in schools.

She’d like to strengthen Arizona’s ban on a college-level theory that teaches people of different races experience aspects of U.S. society differently, restrict teaching systems that aim to improve interpersonal skills and decision-making, and eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion programs. Lake said on the campaign trail that she would consider putting cameras into classrooms to keep these programs from being taught.

Lake also said she would align state standards to the Hillsdale 1776 curriculum, a history and civics program of study created by a conservative private college in Michigan that has been criticized as taking a too rosy view of the U.S. past.

In response to a question from The Republic, Hobbs’ campaign said she opposed using the Hillsdale 1776 curriculum in Arizona schools because it did not offer a comprehensive understanding of civics and history. It would “ultimately be a disservice to Arizona children,” the campaign statement said.

Hobbs’ education plan doesn’t take an explicit position on the teaching of race and history or other political questions that have riled both the Legislature and some Arizona school boards.

Lake pledged to replace the Arizona state test with the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a federal test that is not available for use by schools or states.

Categories Accountability, Arizona, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Elections, Extremism, Privatization, School Choice, Vouchers

Texas: Inside the Secret Plan to Bring Private School Vouchers to Texas

By dianeravitch
October 22, 2022 //
8

Forest Wilder writes in the Texas Monthly about a scheme hatched by charter operators and voucher zealots to launch private school vouchers, which have been stalled in the legislature for years. Vouchers were originally intended to allow white students to escape racially integrated school. Now they are falsely sold as a means of helping poor kids “escape failing schools,” but in fact they are almost always used to subsidize the private school tuition of affluent families.

The article shows how a charter chain—ResponsiveEd—is trying to sneak vouchers into the state. Responsive Ed was called out in Slate in 2014 for teaching creationism. Slate wrote: “Responsive Ed has a secular veneer and is funded by public money, but it has been connected from its inception to the creationist movement and to far-right fundamentalists who seek to undermine the separation of church and state.”

Today, ResponsiveEd has two charters in Texas which operate 91 different charter schools, including an online school. When Betsy DeVos was Secretary of Education, she gave ResponsiveEd a five-year grant for $40.8 million to expand. The CEO of ResponsiveEd is Board Chair of the Texas Charter School Association. State Commissioner Mike Morath approved 13 new campuses for the chain in 2022.

Wilder writes:

The proposal landed on Greg Bonewald’s desk like a pipe bomb. Bonewald, a soft-spoken career educator, had served as a teacher, coach, and principal in the fast-growing Hill Country town of Wimberley for fifteen years. In 2014, he took a bigger job as an assistant superintendent in Victoria, about two hours to the southeast. But he maintained an affection for Wimberley, and when its school board sought to bring him back as superintendent this year, he was thrilled. His honeymoon would be short.

In a document obtained by Texas Monthly, stamped “Confidential” and dated May 3—the day after Bonewald was named the sole finalist for the job—a Republican political operative and a politically connected charter-school executive laid out an explosive proposal for “Wimberly [sic] ISD.” (Out-of-towners frequently misspell “Wimberley,” much to the annoyance of locals.) Apparently, the plan had been in the works for months and had been vetted by the outgoing superintendent. But Bonewald said no one had bothered to mention it to him.

One of the authors of the plan was Aaron Harris, a Fort Worth–based GOP consultant who has made a name for himself by stoking—with scant evidence—fears of widespread voter fraud. In June, he cofounded a nonprofit called Texans for Education Rights Institute, along with Monty Bennett, a wealthy Dallas hotelier who dabbles in what he regards as education reform. The other author was Kalese Whitehurst, an executive with the charter school chain Responsive Education Solutions, based in Lewisville, a half hour north of Dallas.

Their confidential proposal went like this: Wimberley would partner with Harris and Bennett’s Texans for Education Rights Institute to create a charter school tentatively dubbed the Texas Achievement Campus. But “campus” was a misnomer, because there would be none. The school would exist only on paper. Texans for Education Rights would then work with ResponsiveEd, Whitehurst’s group, to place K–12 students from around the state into private schools of their choice at “no cost to their families.”

The scheme was complex but it pursued a simple goal: turning taxpayer dollars intended for public education into funds for private schools. The kids would be counted as Wimberley ISD students enrolled at the Achievement Campus, thus drawing significant money to the district. (In Texas, public schools receive funding based in large part on how many students attend school each day.) But the tax dollars their “attendance” brought to the district would be redirected to private institutions across the state.

The plan was backed not only by an out-of-town Republican operative and a charter-school chain with links to Governor Greg Abbott, but by a Wimberley-based right-wing provocateur who bills himself as a “systemic disruption consultant.” Texas education commissioner Mike Morath—an Abbott appointee—also seemed to support the deal.

Its proponents have called the scheme pioneering and innovative. Though the effort ultimately failed in Wimberley, one of its backers says he is shopping the plan around to other districts. Critics have raised all manner of alarms.

“I’m not accusing anyone of laundering money, by the legal definition, but there sure are a lot of hands touching a lot of money in this,” said H.D. Chambers, the superintendent of Alief ISD, a district in the Houston area that serves 47,000 students. He also pointed to another, more sweeping, concern: “It’s a Trojan horse for vouchers.”

Please open the link and read the rest of the story.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Funding, Hoax, Scandal, School Choice, Texas, Vouchers

Steven Singer: Why Even the Best Charter Schools Are Fundamentally Inequitable

By dianeravitch
October 7, 2022 //
17

Steven Singer is a teacher in Pennsylvania and a blogger. In this post, he contends with the argument that some charter schools are really very good and not at all like those charters mired in scandal, unaccountable, inequitable, greedy, and a drain on public school resources.

Singer writes:

Not MY charter school!

That’s the usual reaction from charter school fansto any criticism of the industry.

I say many of these institutions lack accountabilityabout how tax dollars are spent…

Not MY charter school!

I say they waste millions of taxpayer dollars to duplicate services already in existence….

Not MY charter school!

I talk about frequent scandals where unscrupulous charter school operators use copious loopholes in state law to enrich themselves without providing services to parents, students and the community…

Not MY charter school!

I mention charter school lotteries, cherry-picking students, not providing adequate special education services, zero tolerance discipline policies, teaching to standardized tests, targeting black and brown kids for profit and feeding the school to prison pipeline….

Not MY charter school! Not MY charter school! Not MY…

Really!?

If the industry is subject to this much malfeasance and corruption, doesn’t that reflect badly on the entire educational model – even the examples that avoid the worst of it?

One model has daily scandals. The other – authentic public schools – is far from perfect but relatively tame by comparison. You can’t blame people for generalizing.

Not My….

Okay. We get it!

But sadly this defensiveness against any criticism hides an enormous ignorance of exactly what charter schools are and how they operate at the most basic level.

Yes, there is a difference between how the best and worst charter schools act.

Yes, there are some charter schools that are run much better, more humanely and responsibly than others.

But that doesn’t mean the very concept of a charter school isn’t rotten to the core.

It’s like colonialism.

Yes, there were colonies where the invaders treated the conquered with more respect and dignity than others.

But not a single colony was a good thing. Not a single colonial enterprise avoided subjugating people who should have been free to determine their own destinies.

The same goes with charter schools.

When I discuss the industry, it’s surprising how many people – especially supporters of the enterprise – don’t understand what charter schools really are.

Let’s start with a simple definition.

A charter school is a school with a charter.

Get it?

And a charter is a contract – a special agreement with the state or some other governmental entity that this school can exist.

Why is that necessary?

Because there are rules laid out by each state in their school codes detailing what schools must do in order to qualify for taxpayer funding.

For example, under normal circumstances they must have an elected school board made up of members from the community where the school is located.

All authentic public schools must follow these rules. But not Charter schools.

Instead, they get to follow whatever rules are set down in their charter.

So without even examining exactly which special rules are stipulated in that charter, these schools are founded on the very concept of privilege.

They get to abide by their own rules tailor-made just for them.

Why does that matter? Because they get public funding.

And, yes, ALL charter schools are publicly funded – they get at least part of their money from taxpayers, usually all or the majority of their funding.

That opens a huge divide in accountability between types of schools….

OPEN THE LINK AND READ ON.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Deregulation, Discipline, Disruption, Education Industry, School Choice

Federal Audit of Federal Charter Schools Program Finds Waste, Fraud, and Abuse

By dianeravitch
September 28, 2022 //
11

The U.S. Department of Education’s Office of the Inspector General conducted an in-depth audit of the federal Charter Schools Program, which was initiated in 1994 with a few million dollars by the Clinton administration. Thanks to astute lobbying by the charter industry, the modest program grew to $440 million a year with little or no accountability. Betsy DeVos pushed it aggressively to large charter chains, including for-profit chains.

You will be interested in this account of the audit, written by Valerie Strauss on her blog “The Answer Sheet” in the Washington Post, introducing an analysis by Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education.

This audit demonstrates the power and persistence of the Network for Public Education, a small but smart advocate for public schools. NPE operates with one full-time employee and a small number of part-time employees. Our work is motivated not by greed but by idealism and a passionate commitment to the common good. We believe in well-funded schools with experienced teachers for all children.

The introduction by by Strauss and the analysis by Burris has many links, but none transferred when I copied it. I copied some, but not all of them. I urge you to open the original and find the links.

Strauss begins:

The U.S. Education Department’s Office of Inspector General has released a new audit of the federal Charter School Program that found some alarming results about how charter school networks have used millions of dollars in funding. Among other things, the audit found that charter school networks and for-profit charter management organizations did not open anywhere near the number of charters they promised to open with federal funding. This piece looks at the new audit and what it tells us.


The reason this is not surprising is that investigations into the Charter School Programs by the Network for Public Education, an advocacy group that opposes the growth of charter schools, found that same problem, as well as others and reported it a few years ago. You can read my stories about their “Asleep at the Wheel” here and here. (The second report noted that the state with the most charter schools that never opened was Michigan, home to former education secretary Betsy DeVos, who has pushed to expand charter schools for decades.)


Charter schools are publicly funded but privately managed. The federal charter program, which began in 1994 with the aim of expanding high-quality charters, had bipartisan support for years, but many Democrats have pulled back from the movement, citing the fiscal impact on school districts and repeated scandals in the sector. The Biden administration is making some changes to the program in an effort to stop waste and fraud and provide more transparency to the operation of charters.


This piece was written by Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education and a former award-winning principal in New York. She has been chronicling the charter school movement and the standardized-test-based accountability movement on this blog for years. The Network for Public Education is an alliance of organizations that advocates for the improvement of public education and sees charter schools as part of a movement to privatize public education.


By Carol Burris


A new report issued by the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) entitled “The Effectiveness of Charter School Programs in Increasing the Number of Charter Schools” documents how states, charter management organizations, and charter developers often make wildly exaggerated claims regarding the number of charter schools they will open or expand to secure large grants.

The OIG, an independent watchdog of the U.S. Department of Education (the Department), found that for grants issued between 2013 and 2016, only 51 percent of the schools promised by Charter School Programs (CSP) recipients opened or expanded.


The OIG audit also exposed the sloppy record keeping and weak oversight that characterize CSP operations. Since 2006, the department has paid a private corporation, WestEd, millions of dollars to compile, check and update CSP records. WestEd’s present CSP contract exceeds $12 million. In total, WestEd has active contracts with the U.S. Department of Education worth more than $27.6 million. Yet an alarming number of grant records could not be found when requested by the OIG auditors. And while the Biden administration is attempting to clean up and reform the CSP, according to the independent OIG, more work needs to be done.


What did the Office of the Inspector General audit?
The audit had three goals. The first was to describe how the department’s Office of Elementary and Secondary Education tracked and reported the number of charter schools that opened and expanded using Charter School Program funds. A second goal was to determine whether CSP grant recipients actually delivered the number of charter schools they promised when they applied for their often multimillion dollar awards. Finally, the audit sought to determine how many schools were still open two years after CSP funding ended.


As its title stated, the audit was an attempt to measure the program’s effectiveness in fulfilling its mission. To conduct the audit, the OIG examined 2013 through 2016 CSP grant records. During that period, the department awarded 103 CSP grants to states, charter management organizations, or individual charter developers. Ninety-four were closely investigated by the OIG. The likely reason these years were chosen was that most grants are for five years. The auditors also found that the department often extends them further when grantees have not spent all of their money. Therefore, more recent grants were excluded because records were likely to be incomplete.

Incomplete and inaccurate records

The auditors noted that while the department, through WestEd, tracked spending and schools while grants were open, the tracking stopped as soon as the grant was complete. Therefore, the department had no way of knowing whether schools remained open beyond the years federal funds propped them up. This speaks to the purpose of the program — to open and expand high-quality charter schools.


When auditors asked the department to define the term high-quality, the department responded that the “CSP office does not determine whether a charter school is high-quality because state rules for determining high quality vary.”


“Additionally,” it said, “the determination of whether a charter school is a high quality is often the responsibility of charter school authorizers.” The department also told auditors that tracking a school’s existence after all money was doled out was not its job.


Even if the department wanted to do a quality check of schools as they were funding and expanding, the OIG found that there was no accurate base of information that they could rely on to determine whether they should continue what was often a multimillion-dollar grant. From the audit:


Although the CSP office created processes for tracking and reporting on charter schools that opened and expanded and charter schools that remained open through the grant performance period end date, those processes did not result in CSP grant recipients reporting precise, reliable, and timely information in their FPRs [final performance reports], APRs [annual performance reports], and data collection forms. The processes also did not result in the CSP office receiving all the necessary information to assess grant recipients’ performance or evaluate the overall effectiveness of the CSP.


Specifically, the department could not produce 13 percent of the required final reports from grantees and 43 percent of the required final data collection sheets. Auditors noted that grantees would report different numbers of schools opened or expanded among required collection forms and final reports. The accuracy of the final documents prepared by WestEd for the department was beyond the scope of the audit.

During our research for our second “Asleep at the Wheel” report, we found that the data collection sheets produced by WestEd and published in 2019 by then Education Secretary Betsy De Vos were replete with errors. Schools that had closed or never opened were reported as open or future. We also noted inaccuracies in recently submitted sheets we received from a Freedom of Information Act request, especially relating to the for-profit management status of the awardee.


But the OIG discovered a far worse problem yet. More than half of the schools that grantees committed to opening or expanding did not open or expand at all.

CSP grantees failed to meet commitments
Grant applicants asked for and received millions of dollars based on their promises to open and expand charter schools. However, when the auditors examined 94 grantee applications, they found that many grantees fell far short of their commitments.

The OIG determined that based on the commitments made in the 94 applications, state education agencies, CMOs, and developers promised to open or expand 1,570 charter schools using CSP funds.


As of July 2021, approximately 75 percent of the grant funding had been spent, yet grantees had only opened or expanded 51 percent of the charters they had promised.


This begs the question, where did millions of tax dollars go? I identified grantees by matching applications on the department website along with numbers in the data set with grant codes in the OIG report.


In its 2016 CSP application, the Florida Department of Education put forth what it called a “bold and ambitious plan to … develop a high-impact system to dramatically improve the opportunities of educationally disadvantaged students. The department said that it would use the grant to “support the creation of 200 new high-quality charter schools over the next five years.”

Florida received $70.7 million to achieve its “bold and ambitious” plan. According to the OIG report, it had only opened 33 percent — or 66 — of the schools it promised to open as of July 2021, although it had spent over 51 percent of the CSP funds.


Colorado’s 2015 application promised that it would open 72 charter schools with its over 24.2 million dollar grant. In the end, it opened fewer than half — just 33 — and expanded three schools. Nevertheless, it spent 87.5 percent of its funds.

Tennessee ambitiously promised to open 114 charter schools. It opened just 16, though it managed to spend 63 percent of its grant. These states are not outliers. The report shows a pattern.

And CMOs also failed to deliver. The KIPP charter network promised 65 schools for its jumbo $48,750,000 grant, one that well exceeded most states. It delivered 34 schools and expanded one.

Finally, there are grants to developers that the department directly provides. The Innovation Development Corporation received a $405,730 CSP grant to open The Delaware Met. It was open for just a few months before it was shut down. It also received and spent $72,000 to open DE Stem. That school was shut down before it even opened. Willow Public School, a Washington charter school, took and spent a $602,875 grant, opened, ran into trouble, changed its name, and then shut down.


The department and the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools attribute the problem to authorizer reluctance and state caps on the number of schools that can open. Really? Every state that got a grant has a state board that can override local rejections of applications. State applicants and the department are also well aware of caps. Take the case of the 2018 $78,888,888 CSP grant to the New York State Department of Education, which was outside the scope of the OIG audit.

In the New York State application review, which you can find here, raters acknowledge that New York State had not even used up its previous grant which was open beyond its terms and that charter expansion would be limited by the state cap on the number of charters. Yet they gave the application high scores, and it was approved. Where did that 2018 money go? Over $10 million went to provide staff development in technology for charter schools.

Jumbo grants

Why do states and charter management organizations ask for jumbo grants knowing they cannot deliver? Because they want the money to fund their charter school operations.


States and charter management organizations get to keep 10 percent of the cut for grant administration and technical assistance to charter schools. The bigger the grant, the bigger the cut.

Therefore, KIPP was allowed to keep nearly $5 million for its charter management organization, even though it fell way short of its commitment. The Florida Department of Education secured over $7 million for administrative services on its grant.
Second, there are no guidelines about how much an individual charter school can get. We have seen grants as low as $250,000 and grants to schools of $1.5 million. When a state realizes it cannot or will not meet its commitment, it just doles out larger amounts.


Third, until President Biden, no prior administration did anything about it over the Charter School Program’s existence. Therefore, states, CMOs, and individual schools realized pretty quickly that they could create grandiose applications, sometimes including falsehoods, and there would be no real consequences if commitments were never met.

The present department has taken a terrible beating for creating modest CSP reform regulations which are still being fought by the charter trade organizations and their proxies, including the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a charter school authorizer. Challenges include both a lawsuit and a Republican-sponsored bill to overturn the new rules.

But as the OIG audit shows, reforms are desperately needed.

.

Categories Accountability, Biden, Charter Schools, Closing schools, Corporate Reform, Corruption, Disruption, Education Industry, Failure, For-Profit, Fraud, Funding, Lies, Privatization, Propaganda, Scandals, School Choice

Kathryn Joyce of Salon: Florida Ranked #1 by Group That Wants to Eliminate Public Schools

By dianeravitch
September 21, 2022 //
14

Kathryn Joyce of Salon has written one dynamite article after another about the movement to destroy public education. In this post, she writes that Florida was ranked # 1 in “educational freedom” by the far-right Heritage Foundation, which wants to privatize all schools. This is a brilliant, must-read article!

Arizona, which has pushed hard to expand charters and vouchers, came in a close second.

That claim, along with the fact that the list’s top 20 states are mostly deep “red” and its bottom 10 are almost all dark “blue,” might come as a surprise to education watchers who are familiar with more traditional assessments of education performance. But in the Heritage Foundation’s inaugural “Education Freedom Report Card,” the think tank is grading according to a different metric entirely: not things like average student funding, teacher salary or classroom size, but how easily state legislatures enable students to leave public schools; how lightly private schools and homeschooling are regulated; how active and welcome conservative parent-advocacy groups are; and how frequently or loudly those groups claim that schools are indoctrinating students….

In the category of education choice, Heritage’s primary focus is on education savings accounts(ESAs), a form of school voucher that allows parents to opt out of public schools and use a set amount of state funding (sometimes delivered via debit card) on almost any educational expenses they see fit. ESAs can be used towards charter schools, private schools, parochial schools and low-cost (and typically low-quality) “voucher schools,” as well as online schools, homeschooling expenses, unregulated “microschools” (where a group of parents pool resources to hire a private teacher) or tutoring. The report’s methodology also notes that the percentage of children in a state who attend these alternatives to public schools figures into its rankings, implying that families who choose traditional public schools are not considered examples of educational “freedom.” The “choice” category also awards points based on how non-public schools are regulated, docking states that require accreditation or the same level of testing mandated for public schools.

States can lose points if they have credentialed teachers and gain points if they let anyone without any credentials teach. They also lose points if they have good pension plans and unions. They gain points by having strong bans on “critical race theory” and gain points for teaching patriotic history.

What’s especially noteworthy about this report — which Heritage says it will release on an annual basis — is how closely most of its ranking criteria track with the right’s broader education agenda. Over the last few months, almost all the issues addressed in this report have been highlighted as key action items for conservative education reformers, from the promotion of ESAs, as a preferred pathway to universal school vouchers, to alternative teacher credentialing to the expansion of the anti-CRT movement, which now encompasses anything related to “diversity, equity and inclusion…”

Framing the report by invoking the libertarian economist [Milton] Friedman — who, over the course of his controversial career, proposed eliminating Social Security, the Food and Drug Administration, the licensing of doctors and more — is a telling choice. In a foundational 1955 essay, as Heritage notes, Friedman famously argued that “government-administered schooling” was incompatible with a freedom-loving society, and that public funding of education should be severed from public administration of it — which would end public education as the country had known it for generations…

“Friedman may have been an accomplished number-cruncher, but when it came to social issues, he was a crackpot,” said Carol Corbett Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education. He claimed that “vouchers ‘would solve all of the critical problems’ faced by schools,” from discipline, to busing to segregation, Burris continued. “He presented no evidence, just claims based on his disdain for any government regulation….”

By 1980, Friedman was declaring that vouchers were merely a useful waypoint on the road to true education freedom, which would include revoking compulsory education laws. In 2006, shortly before his death, Friedman told an ALEC audience that it would be “ideal” to “abolish the public school system and eliminate all the taxes that pay for it.”

For Heritage to use Friedman as its ideological lodestar, public education advocates observe, makes clear what the report values most in the state education systems it’s ranking….

“The fact that the Heritage Foundation ranks Arizona second in the country, when our schools are funded nearly last in the nation, only underscores the depraved lens with which they view the world,” said Beth Lewis, director of the advocacy group Save Our Schools Arizona, which is currently leading a citizen ballot referendumagainst the state’s new universal ESA law. “Heritage boasting about realizing Milton Friedman’s dream reveals the agenda — to abolish public schools and put every child on a voucher in segregated schools….”

“With this report,” added Burris, “the Heritage Foundation puts its values front and forward — that schooling should be a free-for-all marketplace where states spend the least possible on educating the future generation of Americans, with no regulations to preserve quality.” It’s no accident, Burris added, that Heritage’s top two states, Florida and Arizona, were ranked as the worst on the Network for Public Education’s own report card this year.

Categories Billionaires, Bush, Jeb, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Corruption, DeSantis, Disruption, Education Industry, Privatization, School Choice, Vouchers

Pennsylvania: Democratic Gubernatorial Candidate Endorses Republican School Agenda

By dianeravitch
September 20, 2022 //
18

In a shocking development, Josh Shapiro, the Democratic candidate for Governor, has endorsed a school choice bill that was barely passed by the Republican House.

Shapiro is currently the state’s attorney general. He is running against an extreme Trumper who participated in the January 6 insurrection.

On Saturday, Shapiro told supporters that he favors the “Lifeline Scholarship Program,” which passed the Republican House in April by a vote of 104-98. That was the first time that a voucher bill ever passed the State House. It also was passed by the Senate Education Committee in June.

The bill is supported by the Trump-endorsed Republican candidate and puts Shapiro in the same boat with Betsy DeVos and Charles Koch. Shapiro joins the tiny number of Democrats, like Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey, who supports school choice.

You can bet that many parent advocates and teachers are shocked. The research is clear that school choice does not improve student’s educational outcomes. What’s up?

Categories Democrats, Education Industry, Pennsylvania, Privatization, Republicans, School Choice, Vouchers

Arizona: Vouchers Will Harm Our Children

By dianeravitch
September 16, 2022 //
11

Beth Lewis, the director of Save Our Schools Arizona, thought that vouchers were a dead issue after 2/3 of voters rejected them in 2018.

But the Republican legislature, egged on by the usual billionaires, came back with a voucher plan even worse than the one that was defeated. They probably figured that the volunteers couldn’t muster the energy and resources to fight another round.

Beth Lewis writes:

This June, hours before adjourning their legislative session, Republican majority lawmakers delivered a massive blow to Arizonans by passing a universal voucher program that will siphon public dollars away from public schools to private schools with zero accountability to the public. Even worse, this program is significantly larger than a similar voucher program that was rejected by voters in 2018 by a margin of more than 2-1.

Make no mistake, lawmakers did not pass this bill at the urging of their constituents — who overwhelmingly support and rely on local public schools — but at the behest of special interest groups like Betsy DeVos’ American Federation for Children who aim to dismantle the public education system.

Lawmakers tried to sell these expanded vouchers as “school choice,” but we all know it has nothing to do with school choice and in fact harms the choice of the 1 million students who choose AZ’s public schools.

Republican lawmakers have long argued that universal vouchers would “free children from a broken school system.” But that argument was utterly destroyed recently when the Arizona Department of Education reportedthat 75% of families seeking new Empowerment Scholarship Accounts, which is what this voucher program is called, have never stepped foot in a public school.

And that’s just the start. Approximately 85,000 students already in private school and homeschool will become eligible for ESA vouchers overnight, potentially diverting another $600 million in funding away from public schools every year. This amounts to a 20% blow to local public schools across the board – a blow they cannot withstand. But of course, Governor Doug Ducey, DeVos and their cronies know that.

These deep dips into the school funding bucket drain the funding of the choice of 1 million AZ students who choose public schools. That’s not school choice— it’s highway robbery.

The only goal this disastrous bill accomplishes is fattening the bank accounts of special interests and for-profit operators at the expense of Arizona kids. Universal vouchers leave our taxpayer dollars ripe for fraud and abuse at the hands of extremist charlatans like Charlie Kirk and his radical Turning Point Academies (founded the same month as passage of Ducey’s voucher expansion). Using taxpayer dollars to indoctrinate children on bigotry and intolerance is not school choice – it’s dangerous.

Public funds belong in public schools where there is oversight and transparency, not in privately operated businesses with no accountability to taxpayers. There is nothing in this voucher expansion that would stop a bad actor from opening up a “private school” in a strip mall, lying to the parents, taking $7000 per child and closing up shop. Ducey’s expansion gives the state no mechanism to recover misspent or fraudulently used funds. There is zero oversight of academics, performance, curriculum, safety, or teacher credentials. And there is nothing to stop voucher schools from discriminating against students who don’t “fit” their ideology or mold. That’s not school choice – it’s indoctrination and segregation.

The entire program is a walking permission slip for future scandal, segregation, fraud and abuse. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of Arizona kids sit in overcrowded school classrooms with outdated textbooks, leaking roofs, and under-resourced teachers.

Save Our Schools Arizona is working to stop this law by turning in 118,823 valid signatures on Sept. 23, so that AZ voters will have the final say on the 2024 ballot. Find locations to sign the petition at teamsosarizona.com.

Beth Lewis is a mom, public education advocate, and K-12 policy expert who fights for a fully and equitably funded school for every Arizona child. As Director of Save Our Schools Arizona, Beth works to bring parents, educators, elected officials, business leaders, and community members together in support of Arizona’s public schools, which strengthen our communities and our great state. Beth has taught elementary and middle school in Arizona for 12 years. She holds a BA from the University of Notre Dame and a Master’s in Education from ASU. Reach out to her at beth@sosarizona.org

Categories Accountability, Arizona, Betsy DeVos, Billionaires, Corruption, Democracy, Education Industry, Privatization, Resistance, School Choice, Vouchers

“Dear Sweden: Let Me Tell You What a School Is”—It is Not a Business

By dianeravitch
August 25, 2022 //
22

Filippa Mannerheim is a Swedish high school teacher and a critic of Sweden’s experiment in school privatization.

She writes.

Dear Sweden, let me tell you what a school is.

A school educates and dares and can demand effort. Sweden has forgotten what a school is. High school teacher Filippa Mannerheim gives a lesson to a country that has lost its grip.

Dear Sweden, since you seem to have completely lost your composure, here is a short, educational guide to help you along in your confused state.

Sweden, let me tell you what school is: A school is an academic place for knowledge and learning. A school is the nation’s most important educational institution with the aim of equipping the country’s young citizens with knowledge and abilities, so that they can develop into free and independent individuals, protect the country’s democratic foundations and with knowledge and skills contribute to the country’s continued prosperity – in times of peace as well as in troubled times .

A school is not a joint-stock company with profit as the main incentive. A school is a joint community building. A school has educated, subject-knowledgeable, qualified teachers with high status, good working conditions and great professional freedom. These teachers teach the country’s children in the country’s language.

A school has employed – not hired – resource staff: special teachers, school nurse, study and vocational guidance counselors, IT staff, janitors. A school does not have non-qualified persons behind the chair.

A school gives children who are falling behind extra support from trained special teachers. A school does not hand out digital tools or ineffective adaptations as substandard substitutes for extra support, just because it is cheaper.

A school has appropriate premises: adequately sized classrooms, an auditorium, a sports hall, a music hall, a home economics room with a kitchenette, crafts and lab rooms. A school has adequate equipment for theoretical and practical teaching, such as musical instruments, craft tools, laboratory equipment, teaching aids, working IT equipment and large amounts of fiction in class sets.

A school has a school library with trained librarians who keep an eye on the world, buy books, hold book talks and contribute with unique expertise in fiction and non-fiction, information search and source criticism. A school does not have a repository of some randomly selected books donated by parents and call this a “school library”. A school library is not “access to a public library”.

A school has a large school yard where children can jump rope, jump fence, play football, play marbles, play ghost ball, King and run around. A school yard is not a paved patch outside an apartment building.

A school is an architectural building – a proud landmark – adapted to a unique activity, namely teaching the country’s children. A school is not a bicycle cellar or an industrial premises where students get “theoretical skills” or a gym card at Sats, which is called “sports education” because it is cheaper.

A school is not a private playground for calculating corporate groups and corrupt ex-politicians who want to make a career in business. If you think so, you have seriously misunderstood what school is.

A school sells nothing because knowledge cannot be sold or bought. A school has a canteen that serves a well-planned lunch based on the Swedish Food Agency’s guidelines for a good and nutritious meal. A school does not send teenagers out to buy their daily lunch at a hamburger chain using a food stamp.

A school does not compete with other schools for school fees or easily taught students. A school has no incentive to set satisfaction ratings, as rating is a pressure-free exercise of authority – not a means of competition and a way to fish for new school customers.

A school educates and dares and can demand effort. A school is a community foundation, not a sandwich board for demanding parental customers. A school has an obvious consensus on what knowledge is and how it is taught using methods that rest on a scientific basis.

A school has teachers who conduct well-planned teaching, not teachers who send students home with work that parents are expected to help with in order for the school’s profit to be greater. A school has teachers who see themselves as academics and public servants, not marketers and influencers who hawk vacuum cleaners with the help of their students via Instagram accounts.

A school is an area where politicians strive for cooperation, long-termism, stability and the best interests of the citizens. A school is not allowed to become a bat in national political debates about cap issues or grades from year 4. The word “school” and “lobbyism” are never used in the same sense. A school system without a market is not a “communist government”.

We live in a country that has lost all understanding of what school is. We live in a country where the politicians have let go of the country’s own school system and are selling it off, piece by piece, to international companies.

We live in a country where students and parents get an image that school can be anything, however, anywhere and an image of themselves as school customers instead of parents and students. This is dangerous for the individual but even more dangerous for the nation at large.

Sweden, now you know what school is. What do you do with that knowledge?

By Filippa Mannerheim

Filippa Mannerheim is a high school teacher in Swedish and history, as well as a school debater. She attracted a lot of attention in the winter of 2020 with her open letter to Sweden’s Riksdag politicians on Expressen’s culture page, “Swedish school is a shame – you politicians have failed”.

Categories Accountability, Citizenship, Community Schools, Competition, Corporate Reform, Democracy, Education Industry, Ethics, For-Profit, Funding, International, Privatization, School Choice

Texas: What You Need to Know About the Lt. Governor Race Today!

By dianeravitch
August 24, 2022 //
7

Pastors for Texas Kids is sponsoring two discussions TODAY about public schools, in Lubbock and Amarillo.

PUBLIC EDUCATION
AND YOU


Front Runners for Texas
Lt. Governor Q&A

Amarillo registration here: https://bit.ly/3QjZDyi
Lubbock registration here: https://bit.ly/3AcGTdb

Mike Collier is confirmed for both cities. No response from Dan Patrick after multiple messages to his staff.

Categories Education Industry, Education Reform, Parents, School Choice, Students, Supporting public schools, Texas

Peter Greene Explains the Hoax of the “School Choice” Fervor

By dianeravitch
August 24, 2022 //
17

Peter Greene, retired teacher and brilliant writer, explains the real goals of the school choice movement, and how its rhetoric has shifted over the years from “saving children” to destroying public schools.

He writes:

A quick summary of the history, so far, of pro-choice arguments. Because if it seems like they keep shifting, well, there’s a reason.

If you’re old enough, you may remember a time when the argument in favor of school choice was that students needed to be able to escape their failing public school.

There was a period way back when in which the argument was for vouchers, but vouchers tested poorly with the electorate, so choicers threw their weight behind charter schools, with a continued and frequent emphasis on the notion that charter schools were just another type of public school, because generally speaking, people liked and trusted public schools. Charters will just add to a robust public educational ecosystem, they said.

The “public schools are failing” trope (first given some heft in A Nation at Risk, a report commissioned to make exactly that point) needed some back-up, and at just that opportune moment, we got the rise of the Big Standardized Test, a high stakes system that would provide solid data proving that public schools were Failing Our Children.

Then school choice was adopted by folks on the Left and the Right (and by people from the Right pretending to be on the Left) so we had a tag team argument. Students should not have their educational quality determined by their zip codes. The pro-choice argument was two-pronged:

1) Public schools are failing academically (look at these test scores) but unleashing the power of the free market will competitionize them into excellence.

2) Public schools are failing poor and minority students, and in the pursuit of equity, those students should be given a school choicey path out.

This two prong period lasted roughly most of the Obama administration, because the movement benefited from the neo-liberal Democrat support of choice. But it was at times a tense partnership. Free marketeers chafed at the social justice wing’s ideas about regulating choice schools to suck less, and the social justice wing tried hard not to notice that free marketeers didn’t really care that much about how choice affected their children.

And then Obama was out and Hillary tanked and the free marketeers didn’t need the social justice wing any more, and detente was over.

The choice argument was also suffering from another problem. Charter schools weren’t any better than public schools, and voucher systems were maybe even a little worse. Some new arguments were tried out, like “choice gives strivers a chance to get away from those other kids.” Some free marketeers and libertarians started saying more loudly that it didn’t really matter if choice improved outcomes or not–it was a virtue in its own right.

Trump knew nothing about education policy except that backing choice got him support from the Catholic Church. And Betsy DeVos was patiently waiting for the rest of the movement to catch up to where she has been for years.

Her moment was almost coming, but first we had a few years of just replaying the hits– escape failing schools, improve outcomes, let’s push vouchers under some other name, etc.

Then the pandemic hit, leaving local schools to wrestle with the question “How do we navigate this unprecedented crisis” while on the national level, everyone was more focused on “How do we leverage this unprecedented crisis for maximum political benefit.”

To their credit, many choicers initially resisted the call to blame public schools for schools being closed, but that moment passed, someone decided it would be good strategy to blame school closures on the unions, and then people lost their damned minds over masking. When Christopher Rufo decided to elevate critical race theory to the level of a McCarthy-style Red Scare, a whole network of anti-maskers was already in place to spread the word (Moms For Liberty is a fine example of a group that started out anti-mask and quickly pivoted).

The many waves of complaints and controversies may seem large and complex, but they really aren’t. They all connect through one simple idea, the new choicer pitch, summed up in this quote from Rufo speaking at Hillsdale College:To get universal school choice, you really need to operate from a place of universal school distrust.

The current choice pitch is that parents need the power of choice because public schools can’t be trusted. Jay Greene, who I always thought of as intellectually honest, has moved to the heritage foundation and now publishes pieces like “Who will raise children? Their parents or the bureaucratic experts?” He signaled this new approach explicitly with February’s “Time for the school choice movement to embrace the culture war” aka “We can use this current noise to further our cause.” My state of Pennsylvania is facing a viable candidate for governor whose idea is to end property taxes, replace them with nothing, and give every parent a voucher good for half of the current per-pupil spending amount in the state.

Do not be distracted by the arguments about LGBTQ students and trans athletes and teacher gag laws; these all matter, and certainly many hard right folks will be happy if they win these fights, but for the pro choice crowd, the point is that public schools can’t be trusted and we need to scrap the whole system and replace it with vouchers (or, as DeVos called it, “educational freedom”). If the right drags victory out of any of these many erupting pockets of chaos, that’s gravy, but for many choicers, the chaos is the whole point, because it adds to the claims of a failing public system.

The end game, for those on the far right DeVos-style wing is as it has always been–get the government out of education. Take back the schools for religious education. Slash the tax-based funding because that’s just the government stealing our hard-earned dollars to pay for more services for Those Peoples’ Children. And while all that’s happening, if we could break the back of the teachers unions, which just prop up the democratic Party, and, hey–also let some entrepreneurs make a buck selling education flavored products.

At every stage of the choicer evolution, you will find people who sincerely believe their talking point du jour. But at this point, it’s hard not to notice that some choicers will adopt whatever argument will get them closer to the dismantling and privatization of public education.

Like many other movements, the school choice movement has room for both true believers and grifters, but in both cases, the school choice debates are marked by a refusal to talk about what we’re really talking about–changing education from a universally provided public good into a privately owned and operated commodity delivered however and to whomever the market deems worthy.

There’s another paragraph. Open the link and read it.

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Education Industry, Extremism, Hoax, Privatization, Propaganda, School Choice, Vouchers
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