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What We Learned from the NPE-Schott Foundation Report on Privatization of Public Funds

By dianeravitch
June 23, 2018 //
15

The Network for Public Education and the Schott Foundation for Public Education released a report grading the states on their support for public education and documenting the extent to which states are allowing the privatization of public funds.

The report can be found here.It will be regularly updated to reflect changing events.

The livestream of the press briefing, featuring John Jackson, president of the Schott Foundation, Carol Burris of the Network for Public Education, and me is on the Schott Foundation Facebook page.

Here is my perspective on what we learned.

Currently, 9% of American students attend private and religious schools; 6% attend charter schools; and 85% attend public schools.

The public does not realize that every dollar spent for a charter or a voucher is a dollar subtracted from public schools. No state has added extra dollars for charters or vouchers. They simply take money away from public schools, which most students attend

Charters and vouchers are a substitute for fully funding our public schools.

As we saw in the dramatic wave of teacher strikes this past spring, our public schools, which educate 85% of all students, are being systematically underfunded.

Privatization is diverting money from public schools.

Take Indiana, for example. There are more than 1 million students in Indiana. Of that number, 35,000 use vouchers. This is 3.5% of the students in the state. Vouchers cost the state $153 million this past year, which causes budget cuts in every district. The Fort Wayne Community Schools alone lost $20 million. Nearly 60% of the voucher students never attended a public school. The voucher program is an explicit way for the state to fund religious schools. In addition, Indiana has 4% of its students in charter schools, another loss to district budgets. Please note that despite the rhetoric of the politicians, the overwhelming majority of students are choosing public schools, not using vouchers or enrolling in charters. This is the case even though more than half the students in the state are eligible for a voucher.

Consider Florida. Its state constitution explicitly bans the spending of public dollars in religious schools. In 2012, Jeb Bush pressed for a constitutional amendment that would remove that explicit ban (he called his amendment, Proposition 8, the “Religious Liberty Amendment”). Despite the appealing name, the voters decided by a margin of 55-45% NOT to repeal the ban on funding religious schools with public dollars. Nonetheless, Florida now has four different voucher programs. Their total cost, according to calculations done by Carol Burris, the executive director of NPE, is nearly $1 billion annually. Florida has 2.7 million school-age children. About 250,000 (10%) are in privately managed charter schools; another 140,000 (5%) use vouchers. Despite the widespread availability of charters and vouchers, despite the Legislature’s love affair with school choice, the overwhelming majority of students in Florida enroll in public schools.

While writing this privatization report, Burris calculated that about $2.4 billion is diverted from public schools to voucher schools, which are not accountable and are often evangelical schools that do not teach modern science or history and are not subject to civil rights protections.

Add to that the likely cost of charters. There are 3 million students currently enrolled in charters, out of a total student enrollment in the U.S. of 50 million. States vary in the amount they allot to charters. If the average state allotment is $5,000–and it could be higher–then that is another $15 billion subtracted from public schools to pay for privately managed charters.

That’s $17 Billion withdrawn from the public schools that enroll 85% of students.

In other words, the great majority of students are losing funding for their public school to support the choices of a very small minority.

Even in states where public officials are under the thumb of the choice lobbyists, there is no stampede for vouchers or charters. A small minority in every state are choosing to attend a charter or voucher, even in a state like Florida.

The vast majority are enrolled in public schools, and their public schools are cutting budgets, laying off teachers, increasing class sizes, and losing programs like the arts, so that a tiny minority can use public dollars to attend charter schools or voucher schools, where teachers are less qualified and less experienced.

This diversion of public dollars is hurting public schools whose doors are open to all.

The real cost of privatization is paid by the 47 million children who choose public schools.

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

NPE and Schott Foundation Release Report Card for the States on Privatization of Public School Funds

By dianeravitch
June 21, 2018 //
21

Today, the Network for Public Education and the Schott Foundation for Public Education released the first ever state-by-state report card on privatization of public funds intended for public schools.

It is titled: “Grading the States: A Report Card on Our Nation’s Commitment to Public Schools.”

Where does your state rank?

Is your state diverting public funds for privately managed charter schools?

Does your state offer vouchers for unregulated, unaccountable religious and private schools?

Does your state have neovoucher schools that encourage corporations and wealthy individuals to underwrite the cost of religious and private education instead of paying taxes to support public schools?

Billions of dollars are being diverted from public schools to pay for tuition in nonpublic schools, some of which hire uncertified teachers and some of which enroll students who were previously enrolled in private schools.

The big takeaway from this report is that every dollar that goes to a charter school or a religious or private school is a dollar taken away from public schools whose doors are open to all, regardless of race, religion, gender, language. Disability, or LGBT status.

In reading the report, you will notice that the overwhelming majority of parents choose public schools in every state.

No matter how many programs are created to promote private alternatives, the public chooses their democratically controlled public schools.

This is a landmark report that identifies the states that fully support their public schools. Inform yourself so you are prepared to fight privatization and defend public education—of, by, and for the people. Not the billionaires. Not the hedge fund managers. Not the entrepreneurs. Not the religious zealots. Not the profiteers. Not Betsy DeVos.

For the people.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Funding, Network for Public Education, Privatization, School Choice, Vouchers

HECHINGER Report: Charters and the New Segregation

By dianeravitch
June 17, 2018 //
14

Don’t miss this story in the HECHINGER Report and on Lester Holt on NBC tonight.

Nearly 750 charter schools are whiter than the nearby district schools

Wake up! Get woke! Don’t let them steal our public schools.

Categories Charter Schools, Education Reform, School Choice, Segregation

North Carolina: NAACP Threatens to Sue to Block New Charter Law and Voter ID Law

By dianeravitch
June 13, 2018 //
36

The rabid rightwing General Assembly passed a law to allow expansion of charters, that would predictably encourage more segregation. The NAACP has threatened a lawsuit to block the charter law, as well as a voter ID requirement, which they believe is intended to suppress the black vote.

The NAACP is warning companies like Apple and Amazon not to locate in NC.

Read Jeff Bryant on the charter law. Racism. Segregation. The Old South is back.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Reform, North Carolina, School Choice, Segregation

John Hechinger: Are America’s Most Segregated Charter Schools in Minneapolis?

By dianeravitch
June 4, 2018 //
28

Minnesota passed the nation’s first charter school law in 1991 and opened the first charter school in 1992.

Seven years ago, Bloomberg News reporter John Hechinger (son of the eminent education writer Fred Hechinger, for whom The Hechinger Institute at Teachers College is named) went to see what had happened in Minneapolis 20 years later. What he discovered stunned him. Since charter cheerleaders care about test scores, but not racial segregation, it is not likely that much has changed.

“At Dugsi Academy, a public school in St. Paul, Minnesota, girls wearing traditional Muslim headscarves and flowing ankle-length skirts study Arabic and Somali. The charter school educates “East African children in the Twin Cities,” its website says. Every student is black.

“At Twin Cities German Immersion School, another St. Paul charter, children gather under a map of “Deutschland,” study with interns from Germany, Austria and Switzerland and learn to dance the waltz. Ninety percent of its students are white.

“Six decades after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down “separate but equal” schools for blacks and whites, segregation is growing because of charter schools, privately run public schools that educate 1.8 million U.S. children. While charter-school leaders say programs targeting ethnic groups enrich education, they are isolating low-achievers and damaging diversity, said Myron Orfield, a lawyer and demographer.

“It feels like the Deep South in the days of Jim Crow segregation,” said Orfield, who directs the University of Minnesota Law School’s Institute on Race & Poverty. “When you see an all-white school and an all-black school in the same neighborhood in this day and age, it’s shocking.”

“Charter schools are more segregated than traditional public schools, according to a 2010 report by the Civil Rights Project at the University of California, Los Angeles. Researchers studied 40 states, the District of Columbia, and 39 metropolitan areas. In particular, higher percentages of charter-school students attend what the report called “racially isolated” schools, where 90 percent or more students are from disadvantaged minority groups.

“Charter-School Birthplace

“In Minnesota, the birthplace of the U.S. charter-school movement, the divide is more than black and white.

St. Paul’s Hmong College Prep Academy, 99 percent Asian-American in the past school year, immerses students “in the rich heritage that defines Hmong culture.” Its Academia Cesar Chavez School — 93 percent Hispanic — promises bilingual education “by advocating Latino cultural values in an environment of familia and community.” Minneapolis’s Four Directions Charter School, 94 percent Native American, black and Hispanic, promotes “lifelong learning for American Indian students.”

“Charter schools, which select children through lotteries, are open to all who apply, said Abdulkadir Osman, Dugsi’s executive director.

“Some people call it segregation,” Osman said. “This is the parent’s choice. They can go anywhere they want. We are offering families something unique.”

“Nobody ‘Forced’

That’s a “significant difference” between Minnesota charters and segregated schools in the 1950s South, said Joe Nathan, director of the Center for School Change at Macalester College in St. Paul.

“Nobody is being forced to go to these schools,” said Nathan, who helped write Minnesota’s 1991 charter-school law.”

That’s the way segregation and choice work together. This is why Southern governors were champions of school choice in the decades after the Brown decision.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Privatization, School Choice, Segregation

Breaking News! Trump Administration Abandons Bill to Turn Imact Aid into Vouchers

By dianeravitch
May 17, 2018 //
27

The Network for Public Education Action Fund worked closely with other advocacy groups to Block a proposal to convert Impact Aid for public schools into vouchers. The Trump administration just announced that it would not support the legislation, which was opposed by groups representing military families.

“The Trump administration does not support a proposal to use a portion of Impact Aid program funding to help expand school choice to military-connected children, an administration official told Education Week.

“Sources within the administration say they want to give military families more choices. But they don’t think robbing impact aid is the way to do it. Impact aid dollars are used to help school districts make up for a federal presence, such as Native American reservation or military base. Under Banks’ proposal, which is based on a paper written by the conservative Heritage Foundation, part of the funding would instead flow directly to families in the form of Education Savings Accounts or ESAs. These accounts can be used for a range of services, including private school tuition, dual enrollment courses, or tutoring.

“Banks had planned to introduce the bill as an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act, which is up for debate in Congress soon. Supporters, including the Heritage Foundation, say the legislation would expand education options to an important population of students and would help military retention rates.

“But detractors, including the National Association of Federally Impacted Schools, worry that the proposal could divert as much as $450 million from impact aid.

“That would create “unprecedented uncertainty” for federally impacted school, wrote NAFIS in a recent report. “The potential for such a significant funding reduction would severely hinder a school district’s ability to maintain the staff, programs, services, and infrastructure necessary to support military connected students, a vast majority of whom are educated in public school districts.”

Categories Education Reform, Networkfor Public Education Action Fund, School Choice

A Bizarre Report from The Century Foundation about Those Exceedingly Rare “Diverse” Charter Schools

By dianeravitch
May 16, 2018 //
18

The Century Foundation is a liberal think tank in New York City that is on the wrong side of the charter school debate. For years, it has issued reports claiming that charter schools would lead the way on racial integration. It’s not true, but TCF thinks that if it keeps saying it, it might someday be true.

Yesterday, TCF had a press conference to congratulate charter schools that were diverse by design. It identified 125 charter schools out of a sector of more than 6,000 charters.

To assert that charters are promoting diversity and integration requires cherry picking and willful blindness.

Last December, the AP reported that charter schools were among the nation’s most segregated schools. The AP said: “National enrollment data shows that charters are vastly over-represented among schools where minorities study in the most extreme racial isolation. As of school year 2014-2015, more than 1,000 of the nation’s 6,747 charter schools had minority enrollment of at least 99 percent, and the number has been rising steadily….

““Desegregation works. Nothing else does,” said Daniel Shulman, a Minnesota civil rights attorney. “There is no amount of money you can put into a segregated school that is going to make it equal.”

“Shulman singled out charter schools for blame in a lawsuit that accuses the state of Minnesota of allowing racially segregated schools to proliferate, along with achievement gaps for minority students. Minority-owned charters have been allowed wrongly to recruit only minorities, he said, as others wrongly have focused on attracting whites.”

Andre Perry, a one-time charter leader in New Orleans, has called out charter advocates for their indifference to segregation. See his article for Brookings here, where charter leaders say they really don’t care about integration. Perry was even more blunt in an article posted on The Hechinger Report, where he said that any educational reform that ignores segregation is doomed to fail.” And he included charter schools on his doomed-to-fail list of reforms.

If charters were doing such a terrific job promoting integration, which they most definitely are not, why would the National NAACP have passed a resolution calling for a moratorium on new charters?

The UCLA Civil Rights Project has repeatedly called out charter schools for causing more segregation. Look what they said about the role of charters in promoting segregation in the once well-integrated Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools in North Carolina. (January, 2018)

“Charter Schools in Charlotte and Mecklenburg County are directly and indirectly undermining school district efforts to desegregate public schools, according to a new study released today by the Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles at UCLA with researchers at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

“Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools were once the nation’s bellwether for successful desegregation. Today, the district exemplifies how charter schools can impede districts’ efforts to resist re-segregation,” said Roslyn Arlin Mickelson, UNC Charlotte’s Chancellor’s Professor and professor of Sociology, Public Policy and Women’s and Gender Studies at UNC Charlotte. “This research has important implications not only for schools and communities in the Charlotte Mecklenburg region, but for the national debate over the growth and role of charter schools in our nation’s education system.”

In its 2017 study of segregation in Washington, D.C., the UCLA team concluded that the city’s charter schools “have the most extreme segregation in the city.”

Given that the overwhelming evidence from reputable sources—nationally and internationally—says that charter schools and choice are drivers of segregation, why is The Century Foundation supporting the agenda of Betsy DeVos and the Trump administration?

Perhaps this explains The Century Foundation’s charter love: “This case study is part of The Century Foundation’s project on charter school diversity, funded by The Walton Family Foundation.” The Walton Family Foundation is the rightwing, anti-union, anti-public school foundation of the family made billionaires by the non-union Walmart empire. The Walton Family Foundation is spending $200 million a year to expand charter schools. Ninety percent of charter schools are non- union. Walton has given tens of millions to Teach for America to create a ready supply of inexperienced, non-union, non-career teachers for charter schools.

Categories Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization, School Choice, Segregation , Racial Isolation and Integration

Teachers of the Year Confront DeVos about Choice

By dianeravitch
May 1, 2018 //
85

 

Betsy DeVos has spent decades advocating for school choice.

What a shock for her when she met the teachers of the year and they told her that charters and vouchers were defunding their schools.

Categories Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Courage, School Choice, Teachers, Vouchers

Florida Teachers: Dont Give Governor Scott Credit for Our Hard Work

By dianeravitch
April 10, 2018 //
5

 

The Florida Education Association decries Governor Scott’s efforts to take credit for Florida’s test scores on NAEP. He and his allies in the Legislature have been consistently hostile to public schools and their teachers. Don’t believe the myth of the Florida success story. It is not a model for the nation. The state is consistently in the middle of the pack nationally, as I showed here.

 

April 10, 2018 CONTACT: Joni Branch, (850) 201-3223 or (850) 544-7055

FEA: Scott doesn’t get the credit for Florida students’ achievements

TALLAHASSEE — Gov. Rick Scott is crowing today about Florida’s results on the just-released 2017 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).

Indeed, Florida showed improvement from 2015 to 2017 in fourth-grade math and eighth-grade reading and math. In a larger context, a look at past NAEP reports shows that Florida has just been holding steady since Rick Scott took office, with ups and downs along the way.

Whatever achievements Florida’s students make are no thanks to Rick Scott. The FEA would congratulate instead the people who do the work – teachers, education staff professionals and students – despite all the obstacles put in their path.

To Rick Scott and the Legislature, thanks for:

An ever-worsening shortage of qualified teachers

Teacher pay that lags the national average by $9,000, making it difficult to attract and keep new teachers

Education funding that hasn’t kept pace with inflation, and is still $1,000 below 2007 per-student levels (inflation adjusted)

An increase of just 47 cents per student in the new state budget

Working to weaken public education by channeling tax dollars to unaccountable private schools and charters

“Gov. Scott is trying to spin political gold from assessment results that, over the long term, don’t back him up,” said FEA President Joanne McCall. “But we’re happy to give credit where credit is due, to the teachers, education staff professionals and students who continue to achieve no matter how many roadblocks this administration has put in their way.”

# # #

The Florida Education Association is the state’s largest association of professional employees, with more than 140,000 members. FEA represents pre K-12 teachers, higher education faculty, educational staff professionals, students at our colleges and universities preparing to become teachers and retired education employees.

Only the individual sender is responsible for the content of the message, and the message does not necessarily reflect the position or policy of the Florida Education Association or its affiliates. This e-mail, including attachments, may contain information that is confidential, and is only intended for the use of the individual or entity to which it is addressed.

FEA | 213 S. Adams St. Tallahassee, FL 32301 | 850.201.2800 | Fax 850.222.1840 Send an email to unsubscribe@floridaea.org to opt-out from receiving future messages. ­­

Categories Florida, Funding, School Choice

Center for American Progress: The Highly Negative Effects of Vouchers

By dianeravitch
March 22, 2018 //
48

 

The Center for American Progress published a useful review of voucher research, which concludes that going to a voucher school is equivalent to losing 1/3 of a year of schooling. Over the past year or so, I have posted the individual studies of vouchers as they appeared, and it is helpful to have them summarized in one place.

The authors of this research review—Ulrich Boser, Meg Bender, and Erin Roth—are senior analysts at CAP. They have done a good job in pulling together the many studies and analyzing the negative effects of vouchers on children. Researchers do not agree on the wisdom of converting test score gains or losses into “days of learning,” a strategy invented by researchers at CREDO, but the authors here use the device against the choice advocates who use it to bash public schools.

CAP is a puzzle to me. Throughout the Obama years, it was a safe haven and cheerleading squad for everything associated with the Obama administration, including the failed, odious, and ineffective Race to the Top.

As this carefully researched paper makes clear, CAP opposes vouchers. But where is CAP on charters? Is it still defending the Obama-Duncan line that school choice is good and traditional public schools are not? Is it willing to do the same research-based review of charters that it did of vouchers?

Does CAP still believe in school choice? Does it support half of the Trump-DeVos agenda? Or will it help return the Democratic Party to its roots by acknowledging the importance of strong public schools, democratically governed, subject to state and federal laws, doors open to all?

 

 

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Democrats, Privatization, Race to the Top, School Choice, Supporting public schools, Vouchers
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