Archives for category: School Choice
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Libertarians: Cory Booker is the Champion of Charters and Vouchers

By dianeravitch
March 3, 2019 //
21

 

In this article, a writer for the libertarian Reason magazine–which supports free-market solutions to all government problems–praises Cory Booker for his advocacy on behalf of charters and vouchers, and even dares to mention that he worked closely with Betsy DeVos, his ideological ally on education issues.

Booker is proud of his record as an advocate of privatization and a supporter of non-union schools.

Real Democrats don’t support charters and vouchers. These are Republican issues.

Public schools belong to the public, not to entrepreneurs or privatizers or profiteers or corporate chains or foreign entities.

Categories Charter Schools, Education Industry, Privatization, School Choice, Vouchers

DeVos Proposes $5 Billion for Federal School Choice Program

By dianeravitch
March 2, 2019 //
21

 

In a large waste of paper, time, and energy, Betsy DeVos proposed a new $5 billion federal program of tax credits for charter schools, vouchers, cybercharters, and home schooling.

https://www.usnews.com/news/education-news/articles/2019-02-28/devos-makes-5-billion-school-choice-pitch

This is a big decrease in her ambitions. Two years ago, when Republicans controlled both houses of Congress, DeVos wanted to shift $20 billion from Title 1 and other programs to fund school choice.

Her fellow Republicans didn’t pass it.

With Democrats now in charge of the House, her proposal is Dead Before Arrival.

Categories Betsy DeVos, Education Reform, School Choice

Peter Greene: Republicans Plan to Eliminate Public Schools in Florida

By dianeravitch
March 1, 2019 //
35

Peter Greene paints an ugly picture of the dominant forces of privatization in Florida and their plans to destroy public education and share the spoils.

He begins by asking these questions:

Here are two not-entirely-academic questions:

Is it possible to end public education in an entire state?

Can Florida become any more hostile to public education than it already is?

Newly-minted Governor Ron DeSantis and a wild cast of privatization cronies seem to answer a resounding “yes” to both questions.

The trick they play is to say that anything funded by the public, no matter who owns it, runs it, or uses it, is “public,” by definition.

Florida has become a playground for for-profit entrepreneurs and religious zealots, and the new governor Ron DeSantis is on their team.

He describes the leaders of a group that calls itself the “School Choice Movement,” and they are people who never give a moment’s thought to the public interest or the common good.

There is a lot of dirty politics in the Sunshine State, and a good deal of money to line someone’s pockets. Up until now, the courts have blocked the goals of the privatizers, which directly violate the state constitution. But Governor DeSantis just replaced some of those pesky judges to get the courts out of his way.

Greene writes:

Calling charter schools public creates a nice batch of smoke and mirrors, allowing DeSantis and his cronies to privatize giant chunks of Florida’s school system while still proclaiming, “No need to worry. You still have public schools!” You could completely shift the education system to privately owned and operated schools while still reassuring parents, taxpayers, and, perhaps, courts, that you haven’t done a thing because it’s still all public schools.

It’s not just marketing. It’s stealing the Mona Lisa and hanging up a Polaroid picture of the painting in its place. It’s kidnapping your spouse and replacing them with an inflatable doll. It is a gaslighting of epic proportions.

In the meantime, Florida taxpayers, you probably should not try to just stroll into the public governor’s mansion you paid for or borrow one of those public vehicles that you bought for officials to drive around in (especially don’t try to commandeer a public army tank). Instead, I would keep a close eye on your public schools while you’ve still got them. And if it’s already too late in your county, don’t be sad– your loss of public education has at least made some of your leaders really wealthy.

And the rest of us need to pay attention, too. Remember– Betsy DeVos is among the many people who think Florida is an educational exemplar.

 

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

Wisconsin: Governor Evers Seeks to Freeze Voucher Enrollments and Charter Expansion

By dianeravitch
February 25, 2019 //
10

 

Recently elected Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers has proposed freezing voucher enrollments and charter expansion. 

Neither charters nor vouchers have been more successful than public schools. Milwaukee, which has both, is one of the nation’s lowest performing school districts on the NAEP.

Republicans in the legislature have vowed to protect privatization of public funding. They are determined to eliminate local control of public schools, whichused to be a bedrock tenet of Republican thinking.

The Journal-Sentinel reports:

MADISON – Gov. Tony Evers in his first state budget is seeking to undo expansions of private voucher schools and independent charter schools passed by Republicans over the last decade.

Aides say the proposals are an attempt to reduce property taxes and stabilize what the Democratic governor sees as two parallel systems of education in Wisconsin.

But Republicans who control the Legislature are likely to block many, if not all, of the measures Evers wants.

Evers, the former chief of the state’s education agency, is seeking to freeze the number of students who may enroll in private voucher schools across the state, including in Milwaukee where the nation’s first voucher program began nearly 30 years ago.

The governor’s budget also proposes to suspend the creation of new independent charter schools until 2023 and eliminates a program aimed at Milwaukee that requires county officials to turn persistently poor-performing schools into charter schools without district officials’ approval.

“I’ve said all along that addressing the pressing issues facing our state starts with education,” Evers said in a statement Sunday. “We have to fully fund our public schools, and we have to make sure voucher schools are accountable and transparent, not just for kids and parents, but for Wisconsin taxpayers, too.”

Advocates for private school vouchers see the proposals much differently:

“Evers’ budget would end school choice as Wisconsin knows it,” said C.J. Szafir, executive vice president of the conservative law firm Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty.

Aides to Evers provided the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel with an overview of proposed changes to the state’s four private voucher programs and its charter schools, some of which were proposed by Evers in September through the Department of Public Instruction’s budget request.

Evers as state schools superintendent oversaw the state’s 422 school districts and its private schools from 2009 until being sworn in as governor earlier this year.

In that time, Evers repeatedly argued the state could not properly fund its public schools while also expanding taxpayer-funded private voucher and charter school options without a funding increase for public schools.

Republicans under former Gov. Scott Walker backed aggressive growth in taxpayer-funded subsidies for students living in middle and low-income households who want to attend private schools, arguing students who lack the financial means to move to a higher-performing school should be able to enroll in them anyway.

Walker and Republicans also implemented new ways to create independent charter schools in liberal-leaning school districts that have long blocked them — like Madison and Milwaukee.

Democrats, teachers unions and public school advocates have opposed the expansions of alternatives to traditional public schools, which coincided with budget proposals that for the most part either cut funding or held funding flat for public schools.

Evers’ budget proposal seeks to pump the brakes on those expansions, following heavy criticism of the statewide voucher programs subsidizing large groups of students already attending private schools without taxpayer-funded help.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Funding, Milwaukee, Privatization, School Choice

The West Virginia Strike Is Not About Pay: It’s About Charters and Vouchers and the Fight for Public Education

By dianeravitch
February 20, 2019 //
19

 

Valerie Strauss sums up why the teachers’ renewed strike in West Virginia is different. It is not about pay. It’s about a fight for the future of public education. The teachers were fighting not only the local supporters of privatization. They were fighting the Koch brothers and ALEC.

Strauss writes:

This time, it wasn’t about pay.

West Virginia teachers walked off the job across the state Tuesday to protest the privatization of public education and to fight for resources for their own struggling schools.

It was the second time in a year that West Virginia teachers left their classrooms in protest. In 2018, they went on strike for nine days to demand a pay increase, help with high health-care costs and more school funding — and they won a 5 percent pay hike. On Tuesday, union leaders said that, if necessary, they would give up the pay hike as part of their protest. They are fighting legislation that would take public money from resource-starved traditional districts and use it for charter schools and for private and religious school tuition.

“Teachers are willing to forsake their raises for the proposition that public education must be protected and that their voices must be protected,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, who went to Charleston, W.Va., for the strike Tuesday. “This was absolutely an effort to defund public education, and teachers fought it.”

Barely four hours into the strike, with hundreds of teachers packed into the statehouse, the Republican-led House of Delegates voted down the state Senate’s version of the omnibus education bill — despite pressure to pass it from conservative and libertarian groups, including some connected to the Koch network funded by billionaire Charles Koch.

It was not clear whether the House vote would put the bill to rest for good, but the episode underscored a growing determination among teachers around the country to fight for their public schools.

“I am DONE being disrespected,” Jessica Maunz Salfia, who teaches at Spring Mills High School in Berkeley County, W.Va., wrote in an open letter (see below) on Monday about why she was going to protest Tuesday.

West Virginia teachers remain at the forefront of a rebellion by educators throughout the country who began striking last year over meat-and-potatoes issues such as pay and health-care costs. But that movement has morphed into something broader: a fight in support of the U.S. public education system that Education Secretary Betsy DeVos once called “a dead end.”

In state after state, teachers are saying the same things: Pay matters, but the future of public education matters more. Privatization is intolerable, whether by charters or vouchers.

No compromise with privatization!

 

Categories ALEC, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Privatization, School Choice, Teacher Pay, Vouchers, West Virginia

The Failure of Market Reforms in Sweden

By dianeravitch
February 14, 2019 //
6

German Bender writes here about the failure of market-based school reform in Sweden.

Privatized schools that get public money, for-profit schools that get public money, the gamut of school privatization has degraded the education system of Sweden.

The main results of privatization: education inequality, falling test scores, and segregation.

Please take note, Center for American Progress, Ann O’Leary (the new chief of staff to California Governor Gavin Newsom, former chief of staff for the Hillary Clinton campaign), and other devotees of school choice (Betsy DeVos, the Koch brothers, the Walton Family Foundation, Arne Duncan, Bill Gates, the Dell Foundation, John Arnold, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, etc.).

Categories Inequality, International, School Choice, Segregation

Henry Levin: Want Lower Test Scores and More Segregation? Try School Choice!

By dianeravitch
February 10, 2019 //
6

In this article, published in 2017, Economist Henry Levin explains the international failure of school choice.

The main effect of school choice is to privilege the advantaged and harm the have-nots.

Categories Inequality, Injustice, International, School Choice, Segregation

New York Magazine: Cory Booker Has a School Choice Problem

By dianeravitch
February 9, 2019 //
43

 

The Democratic party is discovering that unions–which have greatly shrunken due to the attacks by right-wingers like Scott Walker and Rick Snyder–are part of their base. They are also discovering that school privatization is not an issue that belongs in the Democratic toolkit.

The 2020 candidate with the biggest school choice problem, writes Ed Kilgore at New York magazine, is Cory Booker. 

Kilgore writes that Booker

might be able to explain away his reputation for being a reliable friend of Wall Street as a matter of virtual constituent services given the financial industry’s importance to New Jersey and to the city of Newark where he served as mayor for seven years. But a more concrete problem involves his long history of support for any and every kind of school choice, including not just the charter public schools the Clinton and Obama administrations supported, but the private-school vouchers that most Democrats stridently oppose. What makes this history a fresh concern is the fact that Booker was once a close ally of the DeVos family, the Michigan gazillionaires and education privatization champions who gave the world Donald Trump’s secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos. Kara Voght has the story:

In 1999, when he was still a city councilman, Booker worked with a conservative financier and a New Jersey Republican mayor to co-found Excellent Education for Everyone, a group dedicated to establishing a school voucher program in the Garden State. The following year, Dick DeVos—the Republican megadonor, school choice evangelist, and husband to the nation’s 11th education secretary—invited the 31-year-old Newark councilman up to his home base of Grand Rapids, Michigan, to speak in defense of a ballot measure that would lift the state’s ban on school voucher programs …

Booker’s association with the DeVos couple continued as he progressed from City Council to Newark’s mayoral seat in 2006 to the US Senate in 2013. In the mid-2000s, Booker and DeVos served together on the board of directors of Alliance for School Choice (AFC), the precursor to the American Federation for Children, which DeVos eventually chaired. Booker twice spoke at the AFC’s annual School Choice Policy Summit: once in 2012 as a mayor and again in 2016 as a senator.

Let me be clear. If Booker is the Democratic candidate against Trump, I will vote for him. I will vote for anyone on the Democratic line against Trump. I will not vote for Booker in the Democratic primary. His support for charters and vouchers is unacceptable to me. I am an education voter. I am also a voter who wants to see higher taxes on the 1%, both a wealth tax (as Elizabeth Warren proposes) and a higher marginal tax rate for those who receive more than $10 million a year (as Alexandria Ocasio Cortez proposes). Booker is unacceptable to me because he will protect Wall Street and the billionaires while supporting school choice, like Trump, DeVos, the Waltons, and the Koch brothers.

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization, School Choice, Vouchers

Cory Booker and Rahm Emanuel: Two Tigers Trying to Change Their History

By dianeravitch
February 7, 2019 //
70

By chance, two articles came to my attention today about two leading figures in the Reform movement who don’t want to be seen as Reformers any more. Have they really changed? Frankly, I am waiting for each of them to call a press conference and declare their support for public schools and renounce their past error in supporting charters (and in Booker’s case) vouchers. Even then, I would be dubious because both of them have motives that are politically expedient.

Cory Booker, as we know, was closely associated with Betsy DeVos. He was on school choice boards with her, attended her events, was feted as keynote speaker at the conservative Manhattan Institute, and has a long history demeaning public schools and unions. Just days ago, he attended a charter school rally in New Orleans. Just a few days ago is past history, right? But an article in Mother Jones suggests he may have changed his mind. What really burns me is that the writer compares Booker’s possible (but not sure) change of mind to my own change. I would like to point out that I had nothing to gain and everything to lose by publicly changing my views. I gave up a cushy position at the Hoover Institution and lost a lot of friends, as well as income, when I changed sides. I left the gravy train and took a stand with no assurance of any reward. Booker, on the other hand, has to change his views or face the wrath of the teachers, the unions, and parents who prefer public schools to corporate chains. You can’t run for president with the support of the parents of the 6% of kids in charter schools and expect to win.

Did Booker support vouchers? Of course he did. Education Week wrote an article on February 1, 2019, describing him thus:

Cory Booker, School Choice Fan and Ex-DeVos Ally, Is Running for President

By Andrew Ujifusa on February 1, 2019 8:43 AM
A politician with a long track record of supporting vouchers and other forms of school choice will seek the White House in 2020—on the Democratic ticket.

U.S. Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., announced Friday that he will seek the presidency. When it comes to education policy, Booker has an interesting and perhaps unique track record among the Democrats who will fight to take on President Donald Trump. Although much of that record was established before he was elected to the Senate in 2013, how he talks about that record, and how teachers’ unions react to his candidacy, will be worth watching.

Before coming to Congress, Booker was the mayor of Newark, N.J., from 2006 to 2013. During that time, he made his support for various forms of choice one of the key issues of his administration. In 2012, for example, we highlighted Booker as an example of how vouchers had gained a political foothold among Democrats at the state and local level. That year, he gave a speech to the American Federation for Children, a group formerly led by Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos (more on her in a moment) that supports vouchers, in which he said that many children “by law are locked into schools that fail their genius.” And he co-founded a group, Excellent Education for Everyone, that backed charters and vouchers in New Jersey but fell short of its goals.

During his early political career, Booker also garnered support from Wall Street donors who took an interest in education policy. That group of donors eventually helped start Democrats for Education Reform, a group that supports charters and other forms of public school choice—Booker has served on its advisory board. However, some in the education community are suspicious of Booker’s Wall Street ties.

Then there is Rahm Emanuel. He says he used to prefer charters. But then he became Mayor of Chicago and learned that charters don’t hold all the answers. Now he says he likes all high-quality schools. Can we take the word of a man who says he has learned his lesson, that he now likes any kind of school as long as it produces high test scores? Why did he forget to mention that he closed 50 schools in one day? He was Mayor in 2013 when he did that. I imagine his tombstone: Rahm Emanuel, the mayor of Chicago who closed 50 schools in a day, a historic and shameful legacy. Maybe he is running for Secretary of Education in the next Democratic administration. Then he can revive Race to the Top and close even more schools in search of those “high-quality seats.”

Color me skeptical.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Chicago, Education Industry, Newark, Privatization, School Choice

Denis Smith Warns West Virginia: Avoid Charter Schools!

By dianeravitch
February 6, 2019 //
2

 

Teachers across the state of West Virginia walked out last spring. Every school in the state was closed until the teachers got a 5% pay raise and other concessions. Among them, the governor promised to block charter legislation.

Now the Republican dominated legislature is moving forward with legislation for charters, vouchers, and cybercharters. One assumes this is punishment for last year’s actions.

Denis Smith warns the legislators and people of West Virginia that the legislation is an invitation to waste, fraud, abuse, theft, and grifters. 

He writes:

In the last several days, I took some time to examine Senate Bill 451 and its provisions for establishing charter schools in West Virginia. My interest in doing so was based on my previous service as a school administrator in the state, as well as 11 years of experience in Ohio as an administrator for a charter school authorizer and as a consultant in the charter school office of the Ohio Department of Education.

It is this experience in both public education and the charter school environment that allows me to urge West Virginia citizens to do everything possible to halt this odious legislation.

After more than 20 years of growth nationally, it is noteworthy that some of the trend lines for charters are on the decline. This experiment with deregulation has resulted in massive corruption, fraud and diminished learning opportunities for young people.

As a state monitor, I observed a number of incompetent people serve as charter school administrators because Ohio state law has no minimum educational requirements nor any professional licensing prerequisites for school leaders.

In addition, numerous conflicts-of-interest, including a board member serving as landlord and management companies charging exorbitant rents for properties conveniently used for charter schools, are only part of the problem of the charter experiment.

In Ohio, where charters have operated for 20 years, the trend line is down significantly. From a high point of more than 400 schools, 340 are operating today. Moreover, there is a junk pile of failed charters that have closed. The Ohio Department of Education website lists 292 schools that are shuttered, with some closing in mid-year, disrupting the lives of students and their families. Moreover, total charter school enrollment in the state is down by more than 16,000 students since 2013, the peak year of charter operations in the Buckeye State.

The West Virginia omnibus measure allows online schools to operate, as does Ohio and other states. But last year, Ohio’s Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow, one of the largest e-schools in the country, closed amid scandal, where the owner and his administrators funneled millions of dollars in donations to friendly state legislators while padding enrollment numbers to gain state education payments.

In my home state of Pennsylvania, there is also a growing scandal involving an online school. The West Virginia Legislature has not heeded these lessons to be learned from its neighboring states that have been in the troubled charter school business for decades.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, For-Profit, Fraud, Ohio, Privatization, School Choice, Virtual Charter Schools, West Virginia
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