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National Education Policy Center: How School Choice Paves the Way for Discrimination

By dianeravitch
December 6, 2018 //
3

The National Education Policy Center released a report showing how school choice facilitates discrimination that is prohibited in public schools. There should be a basic principle for all publicly-funded schools, whether they are public schools, charter schools, or voucher schools: Where public money goes, public accountability must follow. Public money should not tolerate bigotry against students or staff of any kind.

When Publicly Funded Schools Exclude Segments of the Public

Key Takeaway: Policy brief analyzes discriminatory practices and possible legal protections in an era of education privatization.

NEPC Publication: http://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/privatization

Contact:
William J. Mathis: (802) 383-0058, wmathis@sover.net Julie F. Mead: (608) 263-3405, jmead@education.wisc.edu

In Indiana, a private religious school receiving over $6.5 million in public funds via the state’s voucher program placed an LGBT counselor on leave because she had married her same-sex partner.

In Milwaukee, where students with disabilities constitute 12-20% of public school enrollments, they constitute only 2% of enrollments in private schools participating in the city’s voucher program. Similarly, charter schools enroll a lower percentage of students with disabilities (particularly more severe disabilities) when compared to traditional public schools. In response to these and other issues of access and discrimination, some defenders of these schools have argued that the schools have broken no laws—and they are often
correct. How can this be?

To answer that question, professors Julie F. Mead of the University of Wisconsin and Suzanne E. Eckes of Indiana University authored a policy brief, titled How School Privatization Opens the Door for Discrimination, which analyzes discrimination in an era of education privatization.

The brief’s review of relevant laws reveals that voucher and charter school programs open the
door to discrimination because of three phenomena.

First, federal law defines discrimination differently in public and private spaces.

Second, state legislatures have largely neglected issues of discrimination while constructing voucher laws; charter laws are better, but they fail to comprehensively address these issues.

Third, because private and charter schools are free to determine what programs to offer, they can attract some populations while excluding others.

After briefly examining the history of discrimination in schools, the brief analyzes each of these
three enabling factors and then outlines recent developments.

Finally, based on its analyses, the brief offers the following recommendations to help address the issue of publicly funded programs currently failing to serve all segments of the public:

1. Congress should amend federal anti-discrimination laws to clarify that states supporting charter schools and states directly or indirectly channeling public funds to private schools must ensure that those programs operate in non-discriminatory ways.

2. Federal agencies should explore whether governmental benefits should be withheld from private schools failing to meet non-discrimination standards.

3. State legislatures should include explicit anti-discrimination language in their state voucher laws to ensure that participating private schools do not discriminate against students and staff on the basis of race, color, sex, race, class, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, disability, ethnicity, national origin, or primary language.

4. State legislatures should adopt or amend charter school laws to ensure that policies and practices are reviewed throughout the process of approval and renewal. Schools failing to attract and retain reasonably heterogeneous student populations should be directed to address the problem and should be considered for non-renewal if the problem is not corrected.

Find How School Privatization Opens the Door for Discrimination, by Julie F. Mead and Suzanne E. Eckes, at:
http://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/privatization

This policy brief was made possible in part by the support of the Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice (greatlakescenter.org).

The National Education Policy Center (NEPC), housed at the University of Colorado Boulder School of Education, produces and disseminates high-quality, peer-reviewed research to inform education policy discussions. Visit us at: http://nepc.colorado.edu

Categories Accountability, Bias, Bigotry, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Privatization, School Choice, Vouchers

Florida: Richard Corcoran Likely to be Next Commissioner of Education

By dianeravitch
December 5, 2018 //
9

Richard Corcoran, speaker of the House of Representatives, is likely to be selected as the next Commissioner of Education. Corcoran is a huge supporter of vouchers and charters. His wife runs a charter school. In Florida, conflicts of interest don’t matter. The Legislature frequently passes legislation to benefit members and their family members, especially in education.

He is also author of a much-ridiculed plan called “Best and Brightest,” in which Florida pays a bonus to teachers based on their high school SAT scores, the test usually taken when they were high school juniors or seniors.

As noted in the previous post, Florida is a citadel of school choice but is a model of mediocrity on national tests.

Categories Administrators, superintendents, Charter Schools, Florida, School Choice, Vouchers

Florida: New Chair of House Education Committee Was Home-Schooled, Dropped Out of College

By dianeravitch
December 5, 2018 //
32

The new chair of the Florida House Education Committee is Jennifer Sullivan, a fervent supporter of vouchers, charters, and home schooling.
She herself was home-schooled. She apparently attended a private Christian college and dropped out without a degree.

She has no experience in education.

Florida is not a model for anything to do with education.

Under Jeb Bush’s leadership and with millions of dollars in donations from the DeVos family and the Walton family, the state has plunged into privatization, with large amounts of money diverted from public schools to support for-profit charters (half the charters in the state are “for-profit”) and vouchers for religious schools (even though the State Constitution forbids sending public money to religious schools and the voters rejected doing so).

On NAEP, Florida fourth-graders do relatively well only because the state holds back low-performing third graders, thus falsely inflating fourth grade scores.

On NAEP for eighth grade, Florida shows its true colors:

In eighth grade math, Florida is below the national average, scoring #35 out of 50 states plus DC and the Department of Defense schools.

In eighth grade reading, Florida scores at the national average. Nothing to brag about.

Florida is a model of mediocrity.

And with education policy now controlled by a home-schooler, the race to the bottom will continue.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Florida, For-Profit, Privatization, Religion, School Choice, Vouchers

Linda Lyon: “Redistributing Wealth”—from Public Schools to Private Schools

By dianeravitch
December 3, 2018 //
12

Linda Lyon is a retired U.S. Air Force officer who now lives in Arizona, where she was elected president of the Arizona School Boards Association. Her blog “Restore Reason” is not only reasonable but insightful and brilliant.

Her latest post dissects the claim that people who are concerned about poverty are somehow way out there as “socialists.”

She writes, and I quote in part,

I was recently in a public forum on education when a school board member asked me whether my call to address inequities in our schools was a call for the “redistribution of wealth”. I told him local control dictates that our Governing Boards, representing the communities in which they live, are best positioned to decide how to allocate district resources for the maximum benefit of all their students. I hoped, I said, they would do that.

His question though, caused me to think about this term, and why it seems to be a lightning rod for conservatives. Social scientist researcher Brené Brown believes it is because of the “scarcity” worldview held by Republicans/conservatives. “The opposite of scarcity is not abundance” she writes, “It’s enough.” Basically, “they believe that the more people they exclude from “having”, the more is available to them.” And, in this binary way of thinking, the world is very black and white (pun sort of intended), e.g., if you aren’t a success, you’re a failure, and should be excluded. Of course, this sort of mindset is a gold mine for those who fear-monger to garner support for their exclusionary agendas. “We’ve got to stop the illegal hoards from coming across the border” the narrative goes, or “they’ll be stealing our jobs and elections.”

I offer that the redistribution of wealth can also flow the other way as with the privatization of our public schools. Those who already “have” are redistributing the “wealth” of those who “have not”. They do this by encouraging the siphoning of taxpayer monies from our district public schools, for charters, home and private schools. Once slated for the education of all, our hard-earned tax dollars are now increasingly available to offset costs for those already more advantaged.

In Arizona, approximately 60% of our one million public K-12 students qualify for the free and reduced price lunch program, with over 1,000 schools having over 50% of their students qualifying. As you might guess, schools with the highest number of students qualifying for “free and reduced” are located in higher poverty areas and with few exceptions, have lower school letter grades. Zip code it turns out, is an excellent predictor (irrespective of other factors) of school letter grade. According to a study by the Arizona Partnership for Healthy Communities, “Your ZIP code is more important to your health than your genetic code” and a life-expectancy map for Phoenix released three years ago, “found life expectancy gaps as high as 14 years among ZIP codes.”

Clearly, when it comes to inequities in our public schools, the “public” part of the equation is at least as important as the “schools” part. In other words, the problem is bigger than our schools and must be dealt with more holistically if it is to be solved. Poverty is obviously a big part of the problem and is nothing new. What is relatively new, is the purposeful devaluation of concern for the common good and the marketing of privatization as the solution to all our problems.

Privatization has not however, proven itself to be the panacea for fixing our “failing schools”, rather, it is exacerbating their problems. In Arizona, all forms of education privatization (vouchers, tax credits, home schooling, for-profit charters) are taking valuable resources out of the public district school system while delivering mixed results. We’ve also seen countless examples of shameless self-enrichment and outright fraud with taxpayer dollars. Meanwhile, some 80% of Arizona students are left in underresourced district schools, many of which are seeing (not by accident), their highest level of segregation since the 1960s.

Noliwe M. Rooks, director of American studies at Cornell University and author of “Cutting School: Privatization, Segregation, and the End of Public Education, coined the term “segrenomics” to define the business of profiting from high levels of this segregation. In an interview with Valerie Strauss of the Washington Post, Rooks said that, “Children who live in segregated communities and are Native American, black or Latino are more likely to have severely limited educational options. In the last 30 years, government, philanthropy, business and financial sectors have heavily invested in efforts to privatize certain segments of public education; stock schools with inexperienced, less highly paid teachers whose hiring often provides companies with a “finder’s fee”; outsource the running of schools to management organizations; and propose virtual schools as a literal replacement for — not just a supplement to — the brick and mortar educational experience. “ She went on to say that, “The attraction, of course, is the large pot of education dollars that’s been increasingly available to private corporate financial interests. The public education budget funded by taxpayers is roughly $500 billion to $600 billion per year. Each successful effort that shifts those funds from public to private hands — and there has been a growing number of such efforts since the 1980s — escalates corporate earnings.”

This shift of taxpayer dollars from public to private hands is clearly a redistribution of wealth. Worst of all, in Arizona, it is a redistribution of wealth with little to no accountability nor transparency. Private, parochial and home schools are not required to provide the public information on their return on investment. And make no mistake, this investment is significant and continues to grow. In 2017 alone, taxpayer dollars diverted from district schools to private school options, amounted to close to $300 million. About $160 million of this, from corporate and personal tax credits with the other $130 million from vouchers. All told, according to the Payson Roundup, “vouchers have diverted more than $1 billion in taxpayer money to private schools. These dollars could have instead, gone into the general fund to ensure the vast majority of Arizona students were better served.

Categories Accountability, Arizona, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization, School Choice, Vouchers

Jeb Bush’s Ed Reform Summit: Where School Choice Reigns

By dianeravitch
December 1, 2018 //
14

Jeb Bush, the puppet-master of corporate reform, is convening his annual “summit” of people who support his love of charters and vouchers. The queen of school choice is the superstar of the event: Eva Moskowitz.

Peruse the agenda to see who supports Jeb Bush’s efforts to privatize public education.

The registration fee is $649, enough to keep out the riffraff.

Categories Accountability, Bush, Jeb, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Privatization, School Choice, Testing, Virtual Charter Schools, Vouchers

Noliwe Rooks: What Senator Hyde-Smith is Teaching Us About Segregation Academies

By dianeravitch
December 1, 2018 //
12

Noliwe Rooks published an article in the New York Times about the lessons that Mississippi Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith Teachers is about schools, segregation, our past and our present. The Senator gained a certain notoriety by joking about “a public hanging,” which in Mississippi means a lynching. Sadly, her open racism did not prevent her re-election.

Professor Rooks is a historian. She understands that the past is always with us.

She writes:

Racist violence, segregation and voter suppression are not shared historical jokes. They are our present. Unless we change course, they will define our future. Ms. Hyde-Smith claims not to have realized there was anything wrong with what she said. She has steadfastly refused to apologize. Perhaps most important, since her comments came to light, she has yet to publicly engage in conversation with constituents of hers for whom hanging is not a joke and voting is a hard-fought, continually challenged right. During the campaign, she did not acknowledge there was even a dialogue worth having. Perhaps this is because for much of her life she has been hearing only one side of an argument and doesn’t know or care that there is a larger conversation to be had. If this is the case, it may have something to do with where Ms. Hyde-Smith went to school and where she chose to send her daughter to school.

It was only a few days ago that we learned not only that Ms. Hyde-Smith had attended and graduated from a now closed, whites-only segregation academy called the Lawrence County Academy but also that she had chosen to send her daughter to Brookhaven Academy, which shared the same founding history. And as late as 2016, it had managed to maintain a strikingly white racial makeup, with one black child and five Latino children attending a school with 386 pupils in a town that is 54 percent black.

The most notable thing about the South’s segregation academies isn’t that they were racially segregated. Racially and economically segregated schools remain across all parts of the United States. What is notable is that taxpayer dollars financed these all-white schools at the cost of simultaneously creating poorly funded all-black public-school systems in the South. To put it simply, as the financial drain of taxpayer dollars from whites attending segregation academies decimated school systems educating black children, black communities, students and teachers paid a terribly high price to ensure that whites were educated with other whites.

Sometimes referred to as “freedom of choice schools,” segregation academies were a private school concept adopted in Mississippi and found across the South in the decade following the Brown v. Board of Education decision. They were conceived as a way to permit white parents to avoid sending their children to schools with black students and a legal way to work around the Brown decision, which did not apply to private schools. Throughout the 1960s and ’70s they flourished in large part because Southern state legislatures allowed white parents to use taxpayer dollars to finance their children’s education. The schools that Senator Hyde-Smith and her daughter attended were both founded in 1970. That was the first year that Mississippi public schools were forced to integrate statewide and not just take token measures.

Segregation academies were privately owned and run but largely financed by tax dollars, at least initially. As happened in other Southern states in the decades following the Brown decision, lawmakers in Mississippi authorized the use of vouchers to allow parents to pay for a percentage of the tuition at these schools. The practice was found unconstitutional in 1970 and, once various appeals were exhausted, banned in 1971. Up until that point, this money allowed white parents to receive up to $240 dollars per year. In Mississippi, depending on the school and the tuition charged there, that amount covered between 50 percent and 90 percent of the total tuition cost. By 1969, of the 49 schools receiving state-provided tuition vouchers in Mississippi, 48 were white-only segregation academies.

Professor Rooks makes the important point that segregation is pervasive. She reminds us that the segregation academies were the first examples of “school choice.”

Despite lots of winking, every one in the South is well aware why school choice was created. Nothing has changed.

For the first time in memory, we have a Secretary of Education and an administration prepared to abandon even a pretense of supporting school integration.

And Mississippi has a Senator who is a true believer in the Confederacy.

Segregation and school choice go together like a horse and carriage.

Noliwe Rooks (@nrookie) is the director of American studies at Cornell and the author, most recently, of “Cutting School: Privatization, Segregation, and the End of Public Education.”

Categories Mississippi, School Choice, Segregation

No, Robert Pondiscio, School Choice is Not a “Moral Agenda”

By dianeravitch
November 30, 2018 //
152

Yesterday, I participated in a panel discussion at the Washington Post about national issues in education with Robert Pondiscio of the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute and Dean Bridget Terry Long of the Harvard Graduate School of Education. This followed a few other panels, including one in which Mayor Rahm Emanuel and his chosen school superintendent Janice Jackson lavished praise on their successful efforts to transform the public schools of Chicago, with nary a dissent.

Our panel did include dissent, since I was critical of school choice and the other two panelists supported it. I was critical of standardized testing, and Dean Long supported it.

Valerie Strauss did a great job moderating and keeping us on track.

In my opening statement, I argued that the key education issue of our time was the defunding of public schools by the federal and state governments. NCLB and Race to the Top had failed, because they emphasized testing and choice. But at the same time that the federal government disrupted schools and misdirected them with mandates, most states pursued a policy of cutting taxes, cutting school funding, and substituting “school choice” for adequate funding. I cited the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities report showing that 29 states spent less on education in the decade after the 2008 recession.

In our discussion of school choice, I said that school choice is the rightwing agenda that has been funded by Betsy DeVos, the Koch brothers, and the Walton family for decades. It was unfortunate that some Democrats joined their crusade to privatize education. I cited the blistering report about charter schools by Integrity Florida, which showed that rightwing money had promoted charters and vouchers and insulated them from any accountability. Furthermore, the money directed to charter schools had undermined the fiscal stability of public schools.

Robert Pondiscio retorted that school choice was not a “rightwing agenda,” it was a “moral agenda.”

In other words, he echoed the religious/moral rhetoric of Betsy DeVos.

He snidely said that both he and I had sent our children to private schools, so why shouldn’t poor families have the same choices?

This, I thought, was a low blow, because my husband and I didn’t ask for public funds to send our children to private schools 50 years ago. In retrospect, I think it was a mistake not to send them to public schools; it would have benefited them. But that is one of many mistakes I have made in my life.

Today, we know that charter and voucher schools do the choosing more often than parents. If you are the parent of a child with special needs, the odds are high that he/she will not be accepted by any charter school unless the disability is very mild and remediable. Furthermore, the public money available for vouchers will NOT enable poor parents to have the same choices as rich parents, since most voucher payments are in the range of $5,000-7,000 and elite private schools are usually $40,000-60,000. So, no, a voucher will not be enough to send your child to the Hill School, where the Trump children went.

He implied that it was “moral” to take money away from underfunded public schools so that a small percentage of students could choose to go to a charter school or religious school. If it was the former, it might close in a few months or it might kick the student out because of his or her behavior or disability; if it was the latter, the children might have an uncertified teacher or be exposed to textbooks that justify slavery and teach creation science.

He did not suggest that states and the federal government should appropriate more money to pay for choice. If there is not more money, then the schools that enroll 95% of the community’s children lose funding, cut teachers, have larger-sized classes, and lose electives and the arts.

It would be easier to argue that underfunding the public schools that most children attend is immoral. And that paying professional teachers so little that they have to work two or three extra jobs to make ends meet is immoral. And that denying the nation’s public school children the resources they need to have reasonable class sizes, professional teachers, the arts, and time for physical activity is immoral.

I offered the examples of Detroit and Milwaukee as school districts awash in school choice where students have not benefited. They are both among the lowest performing districts in the nation. No response from my fellow panelists.

I contend that it is immoral, unjust, and inequitable to advocate for policies that hurt 95% of students so that 5% can go to a private school. It is even more unjust to destabilize an entire school district by introducing a welter of confusing choices, including schools that open and close like day lilies.

Why don’t the advocates of school choice also advocate for funding to replace the money removed from the public schools?

PS: Thanks to Mike Petrilli for sending me the link to our panel.

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Charter Schools, Funding, School Choice, Vouchers

Jeanne Kaplan: The Cabal in Charge of The Denver School Board Strikes Again

By dianeravitch
November 30, 2018 //
5

In this post, Jeanne Kaplan tells the 15-year story of “reform” in Denver, which has recently been lauded by Betsy Devos and the Learning Policy Institute at Stanford University as a stellar example of school choice.

She describes how the board was persuaded to choose an insider when Michael Bennett stepped aside to join the U.S. Senate, in order to cover up a shady financial transaction. Kaplan was a member of the school board at the time that Tom Boasberg replaced Michael Bennett.

Now, she says, the board has only one candidate–an insider–to keep the shell game of choice going without asking questions about outcomes for students.

Categories Accountability, Denver, School Choice

Jan Resseger: Bruce Baker’s New Book is a Must-Read! “Educational Inequality and School Finance: Why Money Matters for America’s Students”

By dianeravitch
November 28, 2018 //
12

Most people, even educators, don’t pay close attention to school finance because the aid formulas get arcane quickly and the eyes glaze over. But nothing is more important to providing good schooling than having the resources to take care of students, teachers, and facilities. In the past two decades, many states have ignored equitable school funding and have chosen to offer “school choice” instead of paying teachers a living wage. As we learned from the widely circulated report of the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, a large number of states are spending less on their schools today than they did a decade ago. The states that have starved public schools of adequate funding are the same states that have provided choice. It’s a sort of “Let them eat cake” response when people don’t have bread.

Jan Resseger recently reviewed Bruce Baker’s book on school finance and found it to be important and accessible to lay readers. Baker writes clearly and he knows school finance.

Rutgers University school finance professor, Bruce Baker’s new book, Educational Inequality and School Finance: Why Money Matters for America’s Students, covers the basics—how school finance formulas are supposed to work to ensure that funding for schools is adequate, equitable, and stable.

Baker also carefully refutes some persistent myths—Eric Hanushek’s claim that money doesn’t really make a difference when it comes to raising student achievement, for example, and the contention that public schools’ expenditures have skyrocketed over the decades while achievement as measured by test scores has remained flat.

Baker does an excellent job of demonstrating that far more will be needed for our society appropriately to support school districts segregated not only by race, but also by poverty. The final sections of the book are a little technical. They explain the construction of a more equitable system that would drive enough funding to come closer to what is really needed in school districts serving concentrations of children in poverty.

Baker’s book is especially important for updating a discussion of basic school finance theory to account for today’s realities. He shows, for example, how the Great Recession undermined adequate and equitable funding of public schools despite that states had formulas in place that were supposed to have protected children and their teachers: “The sharp economic downturn following the collapse of the housing market in 2007-08, and persisting through about 2011, provided state and federal elected officials a pulpit from which to argue that our public school systems must learn how to do more with less… Meanwhile, governors on both sides of the aisle, facing tight budgets and the end of federal aid that had been distributed to temporarily plug state budget holes, ramped up their rhetoric for even deeper cuts to education spending… Notably, the attack on public school funding was driven largely by preferences for conservative tax policies at a time when state budgets experienced unprecedented drops in income and sales tax revenue.” (p. 4)

And for the first time in a school finance book, Baker explores the impact of two decades of charter school expansion on the funding of public schools. Although the conventional wisdom promoted by the corporate reformers has said that competition from independent charter school operators would introduce innovation and thereby stimulate academic improvement in public schools, not enough people have seriously considered the fiscal implications of slicing a fixed school funding pie into more pieces. Baker examines these fiscal implications of charter school expansion from many perspectives.

Charters are, first, one of those “false promises of cost-free solutions”: “The theory of action guiding these remedies and elixirs is that public, government-run schooling can be forced to operate more productively and efficiently if it can be reshaped and reformed to operate more like privately run, profit-driven corporations/businesses… Broadly, popular reforms have been built on the beliefs that the private sector is necessarily more efficient; that competition spurs innovation (and that there may be technological solutions to human capital costs); that data driven human capital policies can increase efficiency/productivity by improving the overall quality of the teacher workforce. One core element of such reform posits that US schools need market competition to spur innovation and that market competition should include government-operated schools, government-sanctioned (charter) privately operated schools, and private schools…. (T)here is little reason to believe that these magic elixirs will significantly change the productivity/efficiency equation or address issues of equity, adequacy, and equal opportunity.” (pp. 6-7)

Baker also speaks to the philosophical justification frequently offered to justify the rapid expansion of school choice—that justice can be defined by offering more choices for those who have few: “Liberty and equality are desirable policy outcomes. Thus, it would be convenient if policies simultaneously advanced both. But it’s never that simple. A large body of literature on political theory explains that liberty and equality are preferences that most often operate in tension with one another. While not mutually exclusive, they are certainly not one and the same. Preferences for and expansion of liberties often lead to greater inequality and division among members of society, whereas preferences for equality moderate those divisions. The only way expanded liberty can lead to greater equality is if available choices are substantively equal, conforming to a common set of societal standards. But if available choices are substantively equal, then why choose one over another. Systems of choice and competition rely on differentiation, inequality, and both winners and losers.” (p. 28)

Baker addresses Betsy DeVos’s contention that, “Choice in education is good politics because it’s good policy. It’s good policy because it comes from good parents who want better for their children. Families are on the front lines of this fight; let’s stand with them…This isn’t about school ‘systems.’ This is about individual students, parents, and families. Schools are at the service of students. Not the other way around.” Here is Baker’s answer: “The ‘money belongs to the child’ claim also falsely assumes that the only expenses associated with each individual’s education choices are the current annual expenses of educating that individual…. It ignores entirely marginal costs and economies of scale, foundational elements of origins of public institutions. We collect tax dollars and provide public goods and services because it allows us to do so at an efficient scale of operations… Public spending does not matter only to those using it here and now. These dollars don’t just belong to parents of children presently attending the schools, and the assets acquired with public funding… do not belong exclusively to those parents.” (p. 30)

Are charter schools more efficient at improving school achievement measured by test scores and are they fiscally efficient? “(A) close look at high-profile charters in New York City indicates that their success reflects their access to additional resources and a fairly traditional approach to leveraging them… For each of these major operators… the share of low-income (those who qualified for free or reduced-price lunch ), English language learners, and children with disabilities is lower than for district schools, in some cases quite substantially. On average, these schools are serving far less needy and thus less costly student populations than are the district schools.” Baker provides details of major New York City charter networks’ expenditure patterns; what he finds is that the best-funded allocate their instructional expenses in a similar way to traditional public schools: “Collectively, these figures tell a story of high-profile, well-funded CMOs in New York City leveraging their additional resources in three logical and rather traditional ways by hiring more staff per pupil… by paying their teachers more at any given level of experience and degree; and… by paying them more to work longer school hours, days, and years. In other words, they pay more people for more time.” He concludes: “Researchers, policy makers, pundits, pontificators, and even self-proclaimed thought leaders have yet to conjure some new ‘secret sauce’ or technological innovation that will greatly improve equity, adequacy, and efficiency. Human resources matter, and equitable and adequate financial resources are necessary for hiring and retaining the teachers and other school staff necessary to achieve equal educational opportunity for all children.” (pp. 68-79)

Resseger has more to say about Baker’s analysis of the inadequacy of charter schools as a means to promote equity or even innovation (unless that you think that strict discipline and harsh punishment is innovative).

Based on her incisive review, I am ordering Bruce Baker’s book now. I hope you will do the same.

The name of the game in education is money, and we can’t allow the Reformers to give us the Old Razzle-Dazzle to distract us from what matters most, the money to reduce class sizes, the money to pay teachers a professional salary, the money to have a robust arts program, the money to have up-to-date technology, the money to have a librarian, a school nurse, a social worker, and a psychologist. Money matters. Don’t be fooled into thinking that choice is a substitute!

Those who say that “money doesn’t matter” are always people who already have plenty of money. Bruce Baker explains why it does matter and why we must not be fooled anymore. Every child in this nation should get a good education and that requires money.

Categories Equity, Funding, School Choice

Carol Burris: Indiana’s Scandalous Voucher Program

By dianeravitch
November 25, 2018 //
7

Carol Burris describes in this post how Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels and Governor Mi,e Pence created the most expansive voucher program in the nation.

“Last year, the taxpayers of Indiana paid out $146.1 million to voucher schools, with most of it going to families who would have sent their children to private school anyway.”

The program was launched by Go Error Daniels in 2011.

Indiana’s 2011 voucher program began literally with a kiss when then Gov. Mitch Daniels picked up the bill and brought it to his lips. Daniels and his allies did more than just begin the nation’s largest voucher program. As the bill made its way through the statehouse, a $1,000 tax deduction for homeschoolers and private school families was also added. This allowed private school parents and homeschoolers to deduct costs above tuition, such as school supplies.

Daniels also expanded the already existing Scholarship Tax Credit Program that gives tax credits to companies and individuals who make donations to “scholarship” organizations that, in turn, provide vouchers. Those taking the credit get 50 percent of what they donate back.

The passage of the voucher bills and tax write-offs were hailed then by Betsy DeVos, then a school choice advocate and now U.S. education secretary, who said, “We thank Governor Daniels and the Indiana Legislature for working so hard to make widespread school choice a reality across the state.”

Since 2011, the political action committees (PACs) of the American Federation for Children, which she co- founded, have contributed $1,040,540 to Republican pro-voucher Hoosiers and PACs. DeVos family members, including Betsy and her husband Dick, have personally contributed $1,525,000 to Indiana candidates or PACs since the voucher law was put in place. Their prior contributions (1998 to 2010) in that state totaled only $62,000.

The passage of the voucher bill was also praised by Robert Enlow, president and chief executive officer of the Milton and Rose Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, which changed its name in 2016 to EdChoice. The chairman of the EdChoice board is the CEO of Overstock.com., Patrick M. Byrne. A Utah resident, Byrne contributed $465,000 to Indiana candidates and PACs beginning with Mitch Daniels’s campaign. He and his family financed over $4 million of the $5 million raised by Families for Choice, a PAC formed to support vouchers in a 2007 Utah referendum. Upon realizing that vouchers were rejected by 62 percent of voters, Byrne referred to the referendum as a “statewide IQ test that Utah voters failed…

Pence, as governor, did everything he could to expand school choice. He grew the number of charter schools by creating a $50 million, low-interest loan program for technology and transportation as well as a $500 per student charter increase, which the legislature had scaled back from his original $1,500 ask.

The greatest growth, however, was in the state’s voucher program. Pence, who describes his religious beliefs as evangelical, removed the cap on the number of students who could qualify for a voucher to a private school, increased the limits on qualifying family income, and removed Daniel’s stipulation that the student had to try the public school first.

No longer was money being saved as a small number of students transferred from public to private schools. Now middle-income families already using private schools were having their tuition paid for, at least partially, by the state.

Nearly all of the 300-plus Indiana private schools that receive vouchers are religious schools. Although they may not discriminate in admissions based race, color, national origin or disability, they can require attendance in a designated church, mosque or synagogue and they may select students based on other factors such as test scores, discipline records and the lifestyle of their parents…

Voucher schools with grades of ‘D’ or ‘F’ for two years in a row are prohibited from taking on new voucher students until they raise performance. This law cost private schools with poor test scores considerable funding. To keep the voucher money flowing, last summer the legislature passed a new law that allows voucher schools to appeal to the State Board of Education, whose members are appointed by the governor. As soon as the law was passed, four religious schools applied for a waiver and all four were approved to take on new voucher students despite their failing grades.

The Indiana voucher program has also been an escape hatch for failing charter schools. The Padua Academy, a charter school in Indianapolis, had two years of consecutive failing ratings. Instead of shutting down, Padua became St. Anthony’s Catholic School. The same principal who led the failing charter stayed on as the leader of the replacement voucher school, which received $1.2 million in tax dollars.

Failing charters flipping to voucher schools is not limited to Padua. Imagine Schools is the largest charter management corporation in the United States. Imagine was founded and operated by Dennis Bakke, the former CEO of an energy company, AES, which merged with the Indianapolis Power and Light Company (IPALCO) in 2001. That merger would quickly become a disaster for IPALCO stockholders and workers. Stock price plummeted and many lost their jobs and their retirement savings.

When Bakke was ousted from AES in 2002 after its stock crashed, he moved into the charter management business. Imagine quickly expanded and became notorious for the real estate deals of its subsidiary company, SchoolHouse Finance. SchoolHouse Finance buys properties, often selling them for twice or three times the purchase to a buyer, and then leases them back from the buyer in order to then lease them to Imagine charter schools at exorbitant rates. Investigations of Imagine Charters in Ohio and Florida found charters paying leases that amounted, in some cases, to half of the schools’ revenue from tax dollars. Imagine was fined $1 million by Missouri for self-dealing.

We are reminded yet again that the allocation of public money without strict accountability is a invitation to commit fraud and self-dealing.

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Education Reform, Indiana, Pence, Privatization, School Choice, Vouchers
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