Archives for category: School Choice
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Michigan: Education Funding Declined More Than Any Other State in 25 Years

By dianeravitch
February 1, 2019 //
24

 

 

The DeVos Plan is working!

Education funding in Michigan declined more in the past 25 years than in any other state.

Charters and choice were a substitute for funding.

Michigan’s NAEP scores dropped from the middle of the pack to the bottom 10.

DeVos and the Koch brothers will destroy American education if allowed to continue, and they do so with the help of Bill Gates, Eli Broad, Arne Duncan, AndrewCuomo, Jonathan Sackler, the Carnegie Corporation, and many more enablers who fight for choice, but not for funding.

 

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Failure, Funding, Michigan, School Choice

West Virginia: Governor Refuses to Add Charter Schools to Pay Increases

By dianeravitch
January 31, 2019 //
9

 

 

Republican legislators in West Virginia want to tie pay increases for teachers—which they were promised when they went on strike last year—to the introduction of charter schools and vouchers. They think that school choice will raise test scores, which it won’t.

Governor Justice said he won’t support charter schools. The state can’t afford it. Presumably he won’t support vouchers either, which not only reduce revenues but lower test scores.

Governor Justice comes out against one W.Va. big education bill

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization, School Choice, Teachers, West Virginia

Koch Brothers Plan to Disrupt Public Education, the “Lowest Hanging Fruit”

By dianeravitch
January 29, 2019 //
116

 

This is a shocking development: The infamous billionaire Koch brothers have a plan to disrupt American education, beginning with five states.

Their goal is to break up the public education system and enable public funding to flow to every kind of school, whether religious, private, homeschooling, for-profit, anything and everything. They call it “educational pluralism.” At the Koch Conference last year (700 people who paid $100,000 to attend), they declared that K-12 schooling was “the lowest hanging fruit,” and they planned to enter the field to disrupt public schools. Their ally Betsy DeVos paved the way.

The Koch brothers are living proof that this country needs a new tax structure to disrupt their billions, which they use to destroy whatever belongs to the public.

The Washington Post reports:

INDIAN WELLS, Calif. — The donor network led by billionaire industrialist Charles Koch will launch a new organization next month to focus on changing K-12 education as we know it.

The effort will begin as a pilot project focused on five states with a combined school-age population of 16 million kids, but officials said Monday that they aren’t ready to identify them yet because they’re still finalizing partnerships with some of the country’s leading educational organizations.

The still-unnamed entity purportedly plans to focus on three buckets: changing public policy to address “the root causes” of failing schools, developing new technologies to promote individualized learning, and investing in teachers and classrooms.

The announcement came Monday at the end of a three-day seminar where 634 donors who have each committed to contribute at least $100,000 annually to Koch-linked groups gathered under palm trees at a luxury resort in the Coachella Valley.

The Koch team is modeling its amped-up education efforts on its successful overhaul of the criminal justice system, which began in friendly states before moving to the federal level. In that case, Koch World sought out unlikely allies and played the long game for years before any big legislation passed.

In the past, most conversations about education at these twice-annual Koch confabs have quickly turned into bashing teachers unions. So it was notable when Brian Hooks, the chairman of the Koch network, went out of his way to praise teachers and acknowledge that many have been picketing recently.

“For too long, this issue has been framed unnecessarily as us vs. them, public vs. private, teacher vs. student, parent vs. administrator,” Hooks told a ballroom of donors. “The teachers who have expressed frustration in the past several months are good people. I mean, they’re teachers. We all remember the positive impact that a teacher or several teachers have had on our lives. They’re expressing legitimate concerns. But the current approach means that nobody wins, so they need better options.”

Hooks recognizes that many will question their motives, but he said the goal is to “really shake things up” by “coming alongside concerned teachers” to “find a better way.” Teachers union leaders, who are closely aligned with the Democratic Party, have accused the Koch groups of trying to undermine traditional public schools. Koch and his allies say the system is broken and requires wholesale changes. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has been a longtime ally of the network.

“This is a tough one, no doubt,” Hooks said. “It’s a challenge that a whole lot of people look at and say is impossible. But we see a tremendous opportunity to unite people to help ensure that every kid has the opportunity to succeed.”

Philanthropist Stacy Hock of Austin, a major Koch donor who has been funding education efforts at the state level in Texas for years, says that traditional forms of classroom instruction encourage “soul-crushing” conformity, and she has emerged as an outspoken advocate of “personalized learning.”

“Families are getting more and more comfortable with experimenting and taking risks,” she said on the sidelines of the meeting. “Education should be getting way, way better and way, way cheaper, but the opposite is happening.”

Hock said the new Koch initiative, as it ramps up, will identify what’s working at the local level and push for those things to be replicated elsewhere. “What we’re seeing all across the country are little flames,” she said. “What I don’t yet know is how to throw gasoline on all those flames….

— Previewing their K-12 push, Koch strategists pointed to research being conducted with their financial support by Ashley Berner at Johns Hopkins University’s Institute for Education Policy. Her main interest is expanding what she calls “educational pluralism,” which is when the government funds all types of schools, including explicitly religious ones, but does not necessarily run them.

“Berner points to examples such as the Netherlands, which funds 36 different types of schools, from Islamic to Jewish Orthodox to socialist,” the Charles Koch Foundation notes in a summary of her work. “Alberta, Canada, funds homeschooling along with Inuit, Jewish, and secular schools. In Australia, the central government is the nation’s top funder of independent schools. Other countries with plural school systems include Denmark, Finland, Germany, and Sweden.”

“It’s the democratic norm around the world. In pluralism, choice and accountability are two sides of the same coin,” said Berner, who wrote a book in 2017 called “Pluralism and American Public Education: No One Way to School.” “We’ve got to start supporting politicians who are willing to make compromises. Americans are tired of the battles between charters and district schools; these take up too much energy and resources. A pluralistic system doesn’t pit entire sectors against one another.”

 

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Disruption, Education Industry, School Choice

Carol Burris: The Rightwing Billionaire Money Behind School Choice Week

By dianeravitch
January 24, 2019 //
22

Carol Burris writes here about “National School Choice Week” and who pays for it.

She writes:

Planning and managing National School Choice Week is a year-long endeavor. National School Choice Week is an organization, yet it has no donate button, nonprofit status statement, nor 990 income tax form that I can find. It does have a president who used to work for Education Secretary Betsy DeVos at the American Federation for Children, a 501(c)(4) lobbying and advocacy group founded by her billionaire family.

The week has an official dance and on its website is a “happiness blog” on which representatives of an online charter chain, connected to the for-profit K-12, encourage everyone to paint a rock to show their love for “choice.”

It also has lots of right-wing billionaire bucks behind it. In 2016, Media Matters, a progressive nonprofit that researches conservative groups, did a masterful job of exposing where the money comes from to fund National School Choice Week. The week was started by the right-wing Gleason Family Foundation that also funds the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), Uncommon Charter Schools, the libertarian Cato Institute and anti-union organizations that promote “right to work.”

The peculiar issue about school choice is how the right-wingers were clever enough to hoax Obama and Duncan, Cory Booker and Hakim Jeffries.

Categories Billionaires, School Choice

Network for Public Education: Tell Congress to Choose Public Schools, Not Privatization!

By dianeravitch
January 22, 2019 //
9

This week is National School Choice Week.

The Network for Public Education urges you to contact your member of Congress and let them know that you choose public schools, not charters or vouchers.

Since 1994, Congress has allocated billions of dollars to expand and launch charter schools.

This year, Congress will award nearly $500 million to charter schools that are already supported by billionaires.

Stop the School Choice Scam! Congress should allocate money to underfunded public schools, instead of wasting money on charters and vouchers chosen by fewer than 10% of students across the nation.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Funding, Privatization, School Choice, Supporting public schools, Vouchers

Walton Gives $1 Million to St. Louis University

By dianeravitch
January 20, 2019 //
27

The Walton Family Foundation gave a grant of nearly $1 million to St. Louis University, “To develop education policy.”

As is well established, the Waltons have certain goals: privatization of public schools and elimination of teachers unions.

There are legislative proposals currently for vouchers in the House and Senate.

Here come the Waltons, Missouri!

Categories Missouri, School Choice, Walton Foundation

Mercedes Schneider: Bye, Bye, John Engler (LINK ADDED)

By dianeravitch
January 16, 2019 //
8

John Engler was the promoter of school choice inMichigan. As governor, he worked double time to break up public school districts and promote private choice.

Recently he was interim president of Michigan State.

No longer.

As Mercedes Schneider reports, Engler made some dumb, insulting comments about the young female athletes who were victimized by the university’s sports doctor Larry Nasser.

Engler is out.

Categories Accountability, Education Reform, Michigan, School Choice

Sue Legg: Florida Supreme Court Rules Against Public Schools, 4-3

By dianeravitch
January 6, 2019 //
12

Sue Legg, former education director of the Florida League of Women Voters and a newly elected member of the board of the Network for Public Education, writes here about a decision rendered by the Florida Supreme Court on January 4. This decision bodes ill for the children and public schools of Florida.

Sue Legg writes:

Article IX of Florida’s constitution, ratified by the state’s voters in 1998, called for the state to make adequate provision for the education of all children to have a uniform, efficient, safe, secure, and high quality system of free public schools…. In 2009, the Citizens for Strong Schools lawsuit began its arduous journey to the Florida Supreme Court. The plaintiffs had argued that Florida’s choice system failed its constitutional mandate. In one example, the plaintiffs cited data showing “one million Florida minority students (1/2 of all students), moreover, do not read at grade level”.

The defense defined educational quality as ‘continuous progress’. Thus, in the state’s view, if test scores go up, the system is working. NAEP was the standard used to show improvement. There has been improvement in Florida’s NAEP scores over the past twenty years. The state claimed that the improvement in achievement was attributed to the quality of teachers and administrators and the pressure from school choice. The plaintiffs argued that improvement is fine, but the achievement is still low. Moreover, a high quality system gives access to all children, not just some.

At its core, the lawsuit was about adequate funding to meet children’s needs. If the plaintiffs had won the lawsuit, they would have asked for a cost study so that requirements would be aligned with resources. In the current choice system, funding to support charter and private schools drains needed resources from public schools. Florida’s per student funding is one of the lowest in the nation.

In January 2019, the Court in a contentious 4/3 split decision, rejected the claims of the plaintiff. The majority opinion of the court was that the terms ‘high quality’ and ‘efficient’ are ambiguous and do not create judiciable standards. Education policy and funding are in the domain of the legislature, not the judicial system. Chief Justice Canady said: the plaintiffs “failed to provide any manageable standard by which to avoid judicial intrusion into other branches of government”. The minority opinions stated that the majority opinion “eviscerates the 1998 opinion…only time will truly reveal the depth of the injury inflicted upon Florida’s children”.

What is the correct basis for the legal argument? is it a rational basis or must the state comply with specific requirements to provide a high quality education? A Wikipedia explanation stated that it is easier to define a rational basis by what it is not. It is not a genuine effort…to inquire whether a statute does in fact further a legitimate end of government. I found a quote attributed to Thurgood Marshall…the constitution does not prohibit legislatures from enacting stupid laws. The case may may have hinged on the interpretation of the legal basis of the case. It reminds me of a saying I have heard often: Is it close enough for government work or do we have to get it right?

Where do Florida citizenss go next to garner support for the education of its children?

Categories Accountability, Florida, School Choice

Florida: Government Watchdog Agency Reports on Charter Corruption, Cronyism, Lack of Accountability

By dianeravitch
January 5, 2019 //
16

Betsy DeVos often says that Florida is a national model of choice. You will understand why she says this when you read the report from a government watchdog agency called Integrity Florida. This group, which is not focused on education but on government ethics, reveals in detail what happens when government money is handed out freely to entrepreneurs without any oversight or accountability.

Corruption and malfeasance run rampant.

The biggest money to finance the privatization of Florida’s schools came from Betsy DeVos and the Walton Family and a gaggle of rightwing out-of-state elites.

Betsy and the Waltons and their rightwing allies bought the privatization of Florida’s schools.

Here is the executive summary:

Underfunding, coupled with the continual adoption of tax cuts that make adequate public-school spending harder and harder to attain, prompts a look into the future. How much further growth in the number of charter schools is likely? How will that growth affect traditional schools and the public education system?

The answer to the first question appears to be that growth will continue unabated as long as private charter companies consider public schools a profit-making opportunity and they find receptive audiences in the legislature. If current trends continue, a 2015 national report concluded, “Charter schools will educate 20-40 percent of all U.S. public-school students by 2035.”1 Reaching those percentages in Florida would require doubling to quadrupling charters’ current 10 percent share of all public school students.

Some charter and school choice advocates are clear about their goal. Charters already have “created an entire new sector of public education” and they ultimately may “become the predominant system of schools,” the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools has said.2 And the ultimate hope of many, as Milton Friedman wrote (see Page 8), is to bring about a transfer of government to private enterprise, in part by “enabling a private, for-profit industry to develop” in education.

Continued growth in the charter sector will exacerbate a problem that seemingly runs against the Florida Constitution’s decree that the state must provide “a uniform system” of high-quality education. As the number of charters has grown, with different rules than in traditional schools, some question whether a uniform system actually exists today. If Amendment 8 had remained on the November ballot and passed, a state charter authorizer could have approved new charter schools without the consent of the school district. In that case, the school district would not “operate, control and supervise all free public schools within the school district,” as another provision of the Constitution requires.

As the Miami Herald has said during a charter school investigation,
“Charter schools have become a parallel school system unto themselves, a system controlled largely by for-profit management companies and private landlords – one and the same, in many cases – and rife with insider deals and potential conflicts of interest.”

Key Findings

• Charter school enrollment continues to grow in Florida and nationwide, although at a slower rate than in previous years.

• The number of charter schools managed by for-profit companies in Florida continues to grow at a rapid pace and now makes up nearly half of all charter schools in the state.

• Although many charter schools in Florida are high performing, research has found no significant difference in academic performance between charter schools and traditional public schools.

• Numerous studies have found that charter schools strain traditional schools and school districts financially.

• Charter schools were originally proposed as teacher-run schools that would use innovative techniques to be shared with traditional schools. Over time, the concept changed to set up a competitive relationship between charters and traditional schools rather than a cooperative one.

• Charter schools have largely failed to deliver the education innovation that was originally promised and envisioned.

• Some charter advocates have explicitly said their goal is to privatize education by encouraging a for-profit K-12 industry. Today some charter proponents see charter schools, rather than traditional ones, as the “predominant system of schools.”

• Since 1998, at least 373 charter schools have closed their doors in Florida.

• Local school boards have seen reduced ability to manage charter schools in their
districts.

• The Florida Supreme Court removed Constitutional Amendment 8 from the November 2018 ballot that would have created a statewide charter school authorizer. However, future attempts by the legislature to establish a statewide charter authorizer may occur and should be opposed. A state charter authorizer would preempt voters’ rights to local control of education through their elected school boards, even though local tax dollars would pay for charter expansion.

• The charter school industry has spent more than $13 million since 1998 to influence state education policy through contributions to political campaigns.

• The charter school industry has spent more than $8 million in legislative lobbying expenditures since 2007 to influence education policy.

• The legislature has modified the original Florida charter school law significantly over the years to encourage creation of new charters, increase the number of students in charter schools and enhance funding of charters, sometimes at the expense of traditional schools.

• Some public officials who decide education policy and their families are profiting personally from ownership and employment with the charter school industry, creating the appearance of a conflict of interest.

• Lax regulation of charter schools has created opportunities for financial mismanagement and criminal corruption.

Policy Options to Consider

• Inasmuch as charter schools can be an inefficient and wasteful option for “school choice,” the legislature should evaluate the appropriate amount of funding the state can afford to offer in educational choices to parents and students.

• Require for-profit companies associated with charter schools to report their expenditures and profits for each school they operate.

• Require charter schools to post on their website their original application and charter contract along with their annual report, audit and school grade.

• Charter school websites should include lease agreements, including terms and conditions and who profits from the lease payments.

• Companies managing charter schools in more than one school district should have annual audits ensuring local tax revenue is being spent locally.

• Add additional criteria for school boards to consider when reviewing and deciding on a charter school application.

• Give local school boards more tools to manage the charter schools in their districts, including greater contractual oversight and the ability to negotiate charter contracts.

• Increase education funding to sufficiently fund all public schools to eliminate competition between traditional schools and charter schools for inadequate public education dollars.

• Prohibit charter schools from using public education funds for advertising to attract new students.

• Limit the amount of public funds that can be used for charter school facility leases to a certain percentage of the school’s operating budget.

• Require charter schools to report annually the number of dropouts, the number of withdrawals and the number of expulsions.

Go to pages 26-30 to see where the money came from to finance this plunder and privatization of Florida’s public schools. You will see familiar names.

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

When “School Choice” Means “Schools Choose”

By dianeravitch
December 28, 2018 //
11

Two scholars demonstrated what we already knew: many charter schools are skimming and choosing the students they want while excluding the ones they don’t want, the ones likely to cost too much or pull down their test scores.

Peter Bergman and Isaac McFarlin Jr. tested the hypothesis.

Here is the abstract of their paper.

School choice may allow schools to “cream skim” students perceived as easier to educate. To test this, we sent emails from fictitious parents to 6,452 schools in 29 states and Washington, D.C. The fictitious parent asked whether any student is eligible to apply to the school and how to apply. Each email signaled a randomly assigned attribute of the child. We find that schools are less likely to respond to inquiries from students with poor behavior, low achievement, or a special need. Lower response rates to students with a potentially significant special need are driven by charter schools. Otherwise, these results hold for traditional public schools in areas of school choice and high-value added schools.

An excerpt from the study:

We find that, overall, traditional public schools’ response rates are similar to the response rates from charter schools across treatment messages. However, there is a different response rate to messages that signal a child has a significant special need. Traditional public schools exhibit no differential response rate to these messages, but charter schools are 7 percentage points less likely to respond to them than to the baseline message. This result is important because students with disabilities are twice as expensive to educate than the typical student without a disability (Moore et al., 1988; Chambers, 1998; Collins and Zirkel, 1992), and students with the severe disabilities can cost 8-to-14
times to educate compared to the typical non-disabled student (Griffith, 2008).

Here are commentaries.

From the Atlantic:

Parents of students who are “harder to educate” may have a hard time getting schools to reply to their emails about how to apply.

From U.S. News:

Students with behavior problems, low achievement or special needs are sometimes not encouraged to apply to charter schools…

Charter schools and public schools of choice – those in school districts that allow students to choose from any number of schools instead of zoning them to just one – are less likely to encourage students with a history of poor behavior, low academic achievement or special needs to apply.

Charter schools, in particular, were less likely to encourage students with a potentially significant special need to apply.

That’s the latest research published Thursday by Peter Bergman, an assistant professor at Columbia University’s Teachers College, and Isaac McFarlin Jr., assistant professor at University of Florida’s College of Education.

The researchers sent emails from fictitious parents to nearly 6,500 schools in 29 states and the District of Columbia, asking whether any student is eligible to apply to the school and how to do so. Each email signaled either a disability status, poor behavior, high or low prior academic achievement, or no characteristic at all. The researchers also varied students’ implied race, household structure and gender.

“We find that schools respond less often to messages regarding students whom schools may perceive as more challenging to educate,” the researchers concluded.

The baseline response rate was 53 percent. But emails signaling a student with a potentially restrictive special need were 5 percentage points less likely to receive a response; emails signaling a behavior problem were 7 percentage points less likely to receive a response; and emails signaling prior low academic achievement were 2 percentage points less likely to receive a response.

Notably, emails indicating good grades and attendance were neither more nor less likely to receive a response.

In one sub-analysis, the researchers compared the responses of charter schools directly to the nearby traditional public schools. Overall, they found the response rates similar with one major exception: If an email signaled a child had a significant special need, charter schools were 7 percentage points less likely to respond while traditional public schools were not more or less likely to respond.

“This is one of the most striking findings of the study,” McFarlin said, “because it raises the question of whether high-performing charter schools are successful in part because they screen out the costliest-to-educate students from their applicant pools.”

Categories Accountability, Bias, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Privatization, School Choice, Special Education
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