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Steve Suitts: The New Segregation Looks Like the Old Segregation

By dianeravitch
May 17, 2024 //
3

Steve Suitts wrote an important essay on the continuity between the “school choice” movement of today and its roots in the fight against the Brown decision in the 1950s.

Charter schools and vouchers are not innovative. Their most predictable outcome is not “better education,” but segregated schools.

Suitts’ essay delves into the issue, state by state. I encourage you to open the link and read it in full. I skipped over large and important sections. Read them.

He begins:

Overview

On the seventieth anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education—the US Supreme Court decision outlawing racial segregation in the nation’s public schools—Steve Suitts reveals an emerging, seismic shift in how southern states in the United States are leading the nation in adopting universal private school vouchers. Suitts warns that this new “school choice” movement will reestablish a dual school system not unlike the racially separate, unequal schools which segregationists attempted to preserve in the 1960s using vouchers.

INTRODUCTION

On the seventieth anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, which outlawed racial segregation in the nation’s public schools, the states of the southern US are pushing to reestablish publicly financed, dual school systems—one primarily for higher-income and white children and the other primarily for lower-income and minority children. This seismic shift in how states fund K–12 education through universal vouchers isn’t confined to the South. But it is centered among the states that once mandated racially separate, unequal schools and where segregationists in the 1960s attempted to use private school vouchers to evade the watershed US Supreme Court decision.

More than thirty-five states have created voucher programs to send public dollars to private schools. At least nineteen, including most in the South, have adopted or are on a path to enact legislation making state-funded “Educational Savings Accounts” (ESAs)—the newest type of voucher approach—available to all or most families who forego public schools. These families can use the funds to send their children to almost any K–12 private school, including home-schooling, or purchase a wide range of educational materials and services, such as tutoring, summer camps, and counseling. 

In recent times, private school vouchers were pitched to the public for the purpose of giving a targeted group of disadvantaged children new educational options, but legislatures are now expanding eligibility and funding for vouchers to include advantaged students. By adopting universal or near universal eligibility for ESAs, states will be obligating tens of billions of tax dollars to finance private schooling while creating a voucher system for use by affluent families with children already attending or planning to attend private school.

States are rushing to enact ESAs while they still have the last of huge federal COVID appropriations to distribute among public schools. This timing allows ESAs’ sponsors—Republican legislative leaders and governors—to entice once-reluctant, rural legislators to support vouchers. It also camouflages the severe fiscal impact this scheme will have on routinely underfunded public schools after the special federal funds run out.

The states adopting ESAs are also structuring this emerging, publicly funded, dual system so that private schools and homeschooling remain free of almost all regulations, academic standards, accountability, and oversight. These sorts of rules and regulations are always imposed by state legislatures on public schools and are understood as essential to protect students and to advance learning. Even as legislatures are adding restrictive laws on how local public schools teach topics involving race, sex, ethnicity, and gender they are providing new state funding for private schools and home-schooling that will enable racist, sexist, and other bigoted teaching.

If state legislatures succeed in establishing and broadening this dual, tax-funded system of schools, the tremors will transform the landscape of US elementary and secondary education for decades to come. Calling for “freedom of choice,” a battle cry first voiced by segregationists who fought to overturn the Brown decision,1 predominantly white Republicans will take states back to a future of separate and unequal education.

THE UNIVERSAL VOUCHER SYSTEM

By the seventieth anniversary of Brown, five states (Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, and North Carolina) have enacted ESA programs that allow all or a vast majority of families with school-age children to send their children to private schools with state funds that equal or closely match the states’ per pupil expenditures for public schools. South Carolina adopted a “pilot” ESA last year, and a bill making its program permanent has already passed one chamber. The lower house of the Louisiana legislature passed a bill for a statewide universal ESA program to start next year, but the state senate is likely to delay adoption for another year to confirm estimated costs. Both states have governors who are likely to push adoption again next year.2

The Tennessee legislature adjourned in April without passing either of two pending universal ESA bills—only because Governor Bill Lee and legislative leaders failed to agree on which voucher bill to enact. They vow to pass legislation next session. In Texas, Governor Greg Abbott used campaign funds from a Pennsylvania billionaire in the state’s Republican primary to defeat a handful of legislators who blocked his ESA bill last year. Abbott expects to defeat the two remaining state house members who failed to vote for his legislation—giving him the number he needs to pass his bill, while sending a political message that will keep his supporters in line…3

The historical context is shameful. Five of the southern states that now have universal vouchers also enacted open-ended vouchers in the 1960s—attempting to defeat Brown’s mandate for school desegregation. All but three of the states that have already embraced publicly financed ESAs were the only states authorizing segregated public schools on the eve of the Supreme Court’s decision.9

The fiscal impact of this rush to fund private schooling will be devastating to public schools. In 2018, all fifty states allocated $2.6 billion to finance private school vouchers. In 2021, legislatures increased the total amount to $3.3 billion and more recently to over $6 billion. If the eleven southern states enact the bills currently adopted or pending in their legislatures, their total funding for vouchers will be as much as $6.8 billion in 2025–26 and, according to independent estimates, as much as $20 billion for private schooling in 2030. This sum would equal the total state funds to public schools among six southern states in 2021.10

In 1950, about 400,000 students in the South attended private schools. By 2021-22, the number of private school students was about 1.8 million.

In 2021-22, 38.9% of white students attended public schools, and 63% enrolled in private schools.

AS VOUCHERS SPREAD, BROWN’S PROMISE DIES

During the last seventy years, the nation’s public schools have struggled in meeting the promise of Brown, despite clear proof that racially integrated, well-funded schools improve outcomes for Black children.39 This promise has been especially important to the South, where the states’ first education laws prohibited Black persons from being taught to read or write; where racially segregated schools offered children of color an inferior education across more than a half century. Due to stubborn, racially defined housing patterns, increasing class disparities, adverse, even hostile Supreme Court decisions, a lack of local, interracial community support, and, as recent research confirms, the growth of school choice, public schools continue to face far too many hurdles in providing all children with a good education.40

Mural by Michael Young celebrating the Brown v. Topeka Board of Education Supreme Court decision, in the Kansas State Capitol, Topeka, Kansa, May 23, 2019. Photograph by Flickr user Joe Shlabotnik. Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

The South’s new dual school system renounces and annuls the mandates and hopes of Brown v. Board of Education. As universal vouchers spread, Brown’s promise dies. By their design, vouchers are an abandonment of Brown’s goal of equality of educational opportunity.

Reestablishing a dual school system will damage the prospects of a good education for all who attend public schools—not just low-income and minority children. The southern states were not able to finance two separate school systems during the era of segregation, even though Black students received a pittance of funding. Today that inability remains. The South continues to be far behind the rest of the nation in state and local funding of public schools. The new schemes of universal Education Savings Account vouchers will exacerbate the lack of sufficient funds for all except those higher-income families whose school-age children can attend private schools or home-schools and enjoy the enhancements and enriching experience that vouchers will subsidize.

Parents, grandparents, and others who support public schools and the democratic promise of public education must raise our voices against this reactionary movement and in furtherance of the importance of public schools. Like democracy itself, public schools may be the worst system for delivering all children an equal opportunity for a good education—except for all the others. We must not betray or abandon public education if we are committed to the democratic goal of a more perfect union and a good society for all. 

Categories Bigotry, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Democracy, Education Industry, Equity, Ethics, Extremism, Fake, Fraud, Funding, Racism, Segregation, Separation of church and state

New York City: Appeals Court Orders Desegregation Plan

By dianeravitch
May 9, 2024 //
29

The Center for Educational Equity at Teachers College, Columbia University, reported on a major court decision affecting New York City’s public schools. The battles over segregation began in the nation’s largest city in the 1960s. Until the mid-1960s, the city’s public schools had a white majority. From that point forward, the white enrollment steadily declined and is now slightly less than 15% of one million students. While racial balance in every school would be impractical, given the great distances that students would have to travel, demands for desegregation have been replaced by demands for equitable access to the city’s elite high schools. Admission to these schools is based on one test given on one day. Despite perennial protests against the selection process, it can only be changed by the state legislature. There, alumni of the selective high schools oppose any changes. The greatest beneficiaries of the test-based admissions system are Asian students; they are 16.5% of the enrollment, but win 54% of the offers to the elite high schools.

These are the latest demographic data from the NYC Departnent of Education:

In 2022-23, there were 1,047,895 students in the NYC school system, the largest school district in the United States. Of those students:

  • 14.1 percent of students were English Language Learners
  • 20.9 percent were students with disabilities
  • 72.8 percent were economically disadvantaged
  • Race or ethnicity:
    • 41.1 percent Hispanic
    • 23.7 percent black
    • 16.5 percent Asian
    • 14.7 percent white
  • 140,918 were in charter schools

The Center for Educational Equity at Teachers College, Columbia University, issued the following press release:

Last week, the Appellate Division, First Department, issued a striking school desegregation decision. The Appellate Division unanimously reversed the lower court’s dismissal of the case IntegrateNYC v. State of New York , ruling that plaintiffs could proceed to trial to prove their claim. The plaintiffs allege that New York City’s examination system for selecting students for its elite high schools and its systems for choosing students for gifted and talented programs (beginning as early as age four), deny Black and Latinx students their right to the opportunity for a sound basic education.

IntegrateNYC, Inc., is a youth-led organization “for racial integration and equity in New York City schools.” They are joined as plaintiffs in this case by two parent organizations and current and former public-school students. The defendants are the state and city government entities that oversee New York City’s public education system: the State of New York, the governor, the New York State Board of Regents, the New York State Education Department, the New York State Commissioner of Education, the mayor of the City of New York, the New York City Department of Education, and its chancellor.

The defendants are expected to appeal this decision to the Court of Appeals, New York’s highest court. If the Appellate Division decision is upheld by the Court of Appeals, this case will be the first legal challenge to the selective high schools examination system established by state statute in 1971. In 2021, Black and Latinx students comprised nearly 70% of the New York City school system, yet they received, respectively, only 3.6% and 5.4% of the specialized high school offers, while white and Asian students received, respectively, 28% and 54% of the offers.

The Appellate Division decision, written by Justice Peter Moulton, also established an important new precedent in holding that claims of racial segregation, if proven, would constitute a denial of students’ rights under Article XI of the New York State Constitution to the opportunity for a sound basic education. That right was established by the Court of Appeals in Campaign for Fiscal Equity (CFE) v. State of New York in 2003. That case held that a denial of adequate funding for students in the New York City Public Schools constituted a constitutional violation. Subsequent court rulings that have relied on CFE seemed to indicate that claims of a denial of the opportunity for a sound basic education would be limited to allegations of inadequate school funding. Justice Moulton’s decision in IntegrateNYCnow shows that such claims can also be based on allegations of intentional segregation.

New York is now the second state in which a state court has held that school segregation may constitute a denial of an adequate education under the state constitution. Earlier this year, the Minnesota Supreme Court held in Cruz-Guzman v. State of Minnesota that the racial imbalance in the Minneapolis and St. Paul school systems would constitute a violation of the state constitution’s “thorough and efficient” education clause if plaintiffs can show at trial there is a causal link between such racial imbalance and inadequate education.

These state court developments in New York and Minnesota may constitute significant precedents for school desegregation reforms. They could open opportunities for advocates throughout the country to promote school desegregation claims that have been stymied in recent years by decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court that have substantially restricted the scope of desegregation claims under federal law.

Categories Education Reform, New York City, Segregation

Watch Julian Vasquez Heilig Testify About Charter Schools to Congressional Committee

By dianeravitch
April 24, 2024 //
9

Dr. Julian Vasquez Heilig is a noted scholar of charter schools, with experience as a parent of a charter school student and board member of a charter school. He is Provost and Vice-President for Academic Affairs at Western Michigan University. And, he is a founding board member of the Network for public Education!

Recently, Dr. Heilig testified before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce. He explained that the research on charters shows that they are no more successful than public schools, they close frequently, they have high teacher turnover, and they promote segregation. In addition, they exacerbate the problems of the public schools by choosing the students they want and diverting resources.

Dr. Heilig called for more accountability for charters and the need for democratic oversight.

The Republican majority of the Committee called three witnesses. The Democrats were allowed only one, and they chose Dr. Heilig.

They chose well. His testimony is succinct and excellent.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Education Industry, Network for Public Education, Privatization, Research, School Choice, Segregation

Bob Shepherd: A Review of a Review of “Slaying Goliath”

By dianeravitch
April 9, 2024 //
16

Forgive me for posting two reviews of my last book, which was published on January 20, 2020.

As I explained in the previous post, I did not see either of these reviews until long after they appeared in print. Slaying Goliath appeared just as COVID was beginning to make its mark, only a few weeks before it was recognized as a global pandemic. In writing the book, I wanted to celebrate the individuals and groups that demonstrated bravery in standing up to the powerful, richly endowed forces that were determined to privatize their public schools through charters or vouchers.

America’s public schools had educated generations of young people who created the most powerful, most culturally creative, most dynamic nation on earth. Yet there arose a cabal of billionaires and their functionaries who were determined to destroy public schools and turn them into privately-managed schools and to turn their funding over to private and religious schools.

Having worked for many years inside the conservative movement, I knew what was happening. I saw where the money was coming from, and I knew that politicians had been won over (bought) by campaign contributions.

Publishing a book at the same time as a global pandemic terrifies the world and endangers millions of people is bad timing, for sure.

But the most hurtful blow to me and the book was a mean-spirited review in The New York Times Book Review. The NYTBR is unquestionably the most important review that a book is likely to get. Its readership is huge. A bad review is a death knell. That’s the review I got. The reviewer, not an educator or education journalist, hated the book. Hated it. I found her review hard to read because she seemed to reviewing a different book.

I was completely unaware that Bob Shepherd reviewed the review. I didn’t see it until two or three years after it appeared. He wrote what I felt, but I, as the author, knew that it was very bad form to complain, and I did not.

So I happily post Bob Shepherd’s review of the review here.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Common Core, Corporate Reform, Corruption, Curriculum, Dark Money, Democracy, DFER, Disruption, Education Industry, Failure, History, Hoax, Lies, Network for Public Education, Parent Groups, Privatization, Propaganda, Race to the Top, Racism, Religion, Segregation, Unions, Virtual Charter Schools, Vouchers, Walton Foundation

Jan Resseger: The Stupidity of Ranking and Rating Schools by Test Scores

By dianeravitch
March 13, 2024 //
17

Jan Resseger writes here about the failure of ranking and rating schools by test scores and other metrics. These rankings cause parents to flee low-rated schools, making them even more segregated by income and race. If “reformers” intended to help struggling schools, they didn’t. They made it harder for those schools to improve.

She writes:

Here is the lead in a story in the Washington City Paper (Washington, D.C.) that describes not only  how public school ratings and rankings work in the nation’s capital but also their impact in every public school district in the United States.  Read this carefully:

“Before the pandemic shut down D.C. schools, each public school, like each student, got a report card. Every fall the school report card included a STAR rating, from one through five. The rating was based on a formula designed and used by the Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE), D.C.’s education agency. Federal law requires OSSE to identify the ‘bottom 5 percent’ of District schools, so that they can receive additional funding. In effect, OSSE’s STAR Framework ratings used a measurement of need to indicate a measurement of quality.  And as a measurement of quality, the formula failed.” (Emphasis is mine.)

The author of the commentary is Ruth Wattenberg, who formerly served on the Washington, D.C. State Board of Education (SBOE). She explains that the 2015 federal education law, the Every Student Succeeds Act—the version that replaced the 2002, No Child Left Behind Act—requires all states to assign school ratings which are said to be a measure of need for the bottom 5 percent of “struggling” schools. However, in a place like Washington, D.C. with universal school choice, while ESSA requires states to rate schools to target the bottom scorers for improvement, parents use the ratings as an advertisement for the best schools in the system—perhaps the only evidence some parents consider as they choose a school for their children.

The ratings are always understood by the general public as a measure of school quality.

In a large city school district, when parents choose a school according to the ratings, these measures help resegregate the school district by income and race. Wattenberg explains: “In D.C., where families can choose to send their kids to any public school in the district, this flawed rating system is especially consequential. ‘Many kids have left their neighborhood schools’ because of the ratings, says Sheila Carr… grandparent of current D.C. students… A small exodus can trigger budget, staffing, and program cuts that have the potential to drive more families away from a particular school, triggering yet more cuts.  A decade ago Carr remembers, this meant multiple school closings. Although DCPS (D.C. Public Schools) has avoided more closures recently, enrollments at some schools are way down. Anacostia High School enrolls just 287 students.”

Across metropolitan areas where numerous suburban school districts surround the central city, the ratings redline the poorer and most segregated school districts and encourage anybody who can afford it to seek the the school districts with the highest ratings: the homogeneously white and wealthy exurban school districts.

Across the states, legislatures and departments of education have developed their own rating systems to comply with the federal mandate, but these systems almost always feature each district’s aggregate standardized test scores, which have been documented to reflect primarily family income.  Wattenberg explains the research she and her colleagues explored as they set out to redesign their rating system: “One expert showed us how high-poverty schools disproportionately got low ratings, even when test scores reported that their students had learned more than average. Education researcher and D.C. public school parent Betsy Wolf concluded that ‘our accountability system measures family income more than it measures school quality.’ Based on these findings, the SBOE resolved in 2022 that the rating system was ‘fundamentally flawed’ and recommended eliminating it… Education and poverty expert Sean Reardon says that average test scores ‘are the results of all the opportunities kids have had to learn their whole lives, at home, in the neighborhood, in preschool and in the school year.  So it’s misleading to attribute average test scores solely to the school where they take the test.’”

Apparently in Washington, D.C. the board came up with a new system that is not likely to be much better: “At the SBOE’s early January meeting, some parents’ hopes of pushing to revamp the report cards faded. OSSE surfaced its new report card, and, instead of labeling schools with stars, the new proposal assigns each school a number, one to 100, called an ‘accountability score.’ The number will still be highlighted on each school’s online profile and on the central School Report Card, where it will be among the first and primary impressions of a school that parents will see.  The formula that produces the new accountability score, while slightly revised and less toxic, is still biased against low-income schools. It is still the same formula OSSE uses to identify the neediest schools for the U.S. Department of Education.”

Wattenberg adds: “Less biased data on school quality measures educational practices and conditions known to promote student learning, such as teacher retention and the extent to which a school offers instruction on a variety of subjects, including social studies, science, and the arts, rather than an overly narrow focus on math and reading (which is what end-of-year tests focus on). Survey data showing student perceptions, such as the extent to which students feel academically challenged and supported is also an effective metric.”

From a parent’s point of view, the new summative grade tells no more about the teachers or the curriculum or students’ experiences at school.  It is really no different than the five star rating system Wattenberg remembers in Washington, D.C.’s previous system.  Here in Ohio, where I live, we have a five star system, which is no better than the A, B, C, D, F system we had before we got the new five stars.  In Washington, DC,  the new 1-100 rating number Wattenberg describes being earned by each school will only cue up competative parents to go for the highest rated schools in a giant competition. Most people choosing a school on the basis of the ratings will not be able to discern how the metric balances all the variables in each school or whether the rating really say anything about what is happening at the school.

Having attended school in a small Montana town, where we all went to the same middle school and high school, and having parented two children who attended our neighborhood elementary and middle school and came together at our community’s only high school here in a Cleveland, Ohio inner suburb, I prefer the old and more radical solution to the whole problem of school choice driven by metrics published in the newspaper or school report cards. In fact, for the majority of families in the United States, neighborhood schools are still the norm. A system of neighborhood schools embodies the idea that parents’ responsibility is to help their children embrace the opportunities at the school where they are assigned.

As parents when my children were in elementary school, we used the PTA meetings as places to strategize about how we could better support innovations and special programs to make school more fun and challenging for all the students.  A district-wide school support agency in our community provides a tutoring program for students who need extra help, and there is a community supported, district-wide music camp for a week in June when the high school orchestra director and his staff, along with a raft of graduates from the high school music program, help students from across the middle schools to prepare for joining the high school band and orchestra.  People from across the school district turn out for the concert that culminates the summer music camp.

This kind of community involvement connects parents with the community’s public schools in a qualitative way.  When people engage personally with a school, the teachers and the students, parents can learn so much more about a school than any metric can expose.

At the very least, it is time for the U.S. Department of Education to stop demanding that states rate and rank their public schools.  Wattenberg is correct that the ratings—a measurement of need—are misinterpreted by the press and misunderstood by the public as a measurement of quality.

Categories Accountability, Competition, Disruption, District of Columbia, Duncan, Arne, Education Industry, Equity, Ethics, Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Obama, School Choice, Segregation

South Carolina: Moms for Liberty Will Open Their Own Charter School in Affluent Neighborhood

By dianeravitch
January 2, 2024 //
107

Steve Bailey, an opinion writer for the Charleston Post and Courier, wrote recently about the new charter school that will open in an affluent neighborhood in Charleston. It will use the Hillsdale College curriculum. The Moms predict it will be the highest performing school in the area. With the freedom to choose its students and to oust the ones who are problematic, it’s sure to get high gest scores.

He writes:

The leaders of Moms for Liberty, who have made a fine mess of the Charleston County School District, have a new project: starting a “classical” — read conservative — kindergarten through 12th grade charter school, preferably in Mount Pleasant. And the Moms’ kids will be at the front of the line for seats in their new school.

Ashley River Classical Academy has partnered with Hillsdale College, a tiny Michigan school that has become the go-to provider for conservatives like Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis looking to overhaul curriculums to counter “leftist academies.” The Christian college has helped open 23 charter schools in 14 states — and many more are on the way. Ashley River would be its first in South Carolina.

Hillsdale, with about 1,570 students, has expanded its influence by providing and helping implement a free, off-the-shelf product for conservatives. Its 1776 Curriculum focuses on Western civilization and American exceptionalism, phonics, Latin, classic literature and traditional teaching methods, not “shiny and new” technology and instruction. It emphasizes “moral character and civic virtue,” Ashley River said in its charter school application.

“ARA is poised to become one of the highest achieving schools in South Carolina,” it predicts.

The school started accepting pre-enrollment applications this month and is scheduled to begin kindergarten through fifth grade classes in August. The six-member board of directors includes Tara Wood, the chair of the Charleston Moms for Liberty chapter; Janine Nagrodsky, the treasurer; and Nicole McCarthy, who heads the Moms’ education committee. The all-white board has hired an African American principal, Alexandria Spry, who previously ran a Hillsdale school in Jacksonville, Fla.

The student body “will be diverse in every way,” the charter application promises. “We want all kids to come to the school,” says Spry.

Charter schools, which are publicly funded but privately run, are often promoted as offering parents an alternative to low-performing schools in urban areas. That hardly describes this school’s preferred home: affluent Mount Pleasant, where the town’s explosive growth has been fueled in part by some of the best public schools in the region. The $104 million Lucy Beckham High School opened there three years ago.

But that is where the founders would like to open Ashley River Classical Academy. Coincidentally or not, Mount Pleasant is also ground zero of the Charleston chapter of Moms for Liberty. Half the school’s board lives there. Their kids, and those of school employees, will get preference in admissions, according to the school website.

“The school is not a political project,” Spry tells me. “We are just trying to provide the best education we can.”

Finding a site has been a struggle. Ashley River Classical is looking for a 10-acre campus to build a 50,000-square-foot school that eventually could accommodate 690 students, kindergarten through 12th grade. The school originally looked at five sites in Mount Pleasant, none of which panned out. It’s now looking at a temporary site in North Charleston, near Daniel Island, with plans to eventually build in Mount Pleasant, according to the school’s website.

A location is expected to be announced this month, Spry said. But both she and Tom Drummond, the board chairman, declined to comment further on a site.

Ashley River is one of more than two dozen South Carolina charters sponsored by Erskine College, a small Christian school in Due West. Nashville-based American Classical Education Foundation has committed to help finance the school’s start-up costs.

It was just a year ago that Moms-backed candidates won a majority on the Charleston County School Board, kicking off a chaotic year that included the hiring and departure of a superintendent in a matter of months. Now the Moms and their like-minded supporters will have a chance to implement their own ideas in their own school for their own kids. Tuition-free, thanks to taxpayers.

Categories Charter Schools, Disruption, Education Industry, Funding, Segregation, South Carolina

Swedish Expert: The Market System Is a Disaster for Students and for Sweden

By dianeravitch
November 16, 2023 //
19

Over the years, I have made friends on Twitter with educators and scholars in Sweden, who have generously provided me with analyses of Sweden’s free market of schooling. My friends, not surprisingly, agree that the introduction of “choice” and for-profit providers has been a disaster for schooling in Sweden. The outcome has been more socioeconomic segregation and an impoverishment of public schools. The following post was written by Linnea Lindquist, experienced educator and journalist.

THE SWEDISH SCHOOL SYSTEM

By Linnea Lindquist


I believe many in Sweden choked on their coffee when Lotta Edholm, the school minister from the Liberal Party, critically spoke about the school system in an interview with The Guardian. She stated, “It’s not just a problem that it is a number of schools, but it becomes a system failure of everything.”

I have been a part of the school debate for several years and there has been a change in how politicians talk about the school system itself. I will return to this later in the text.

Sweden has one of the most extreme school systems in the world. Whether schools are run by municipalities, the state, or as independent entities, they are funded entirely by taxpayer money. It is the combination of per-student funding, free school choice, and unlimited profit extraction that makes Sweden’s school system unique (in a bad way) in the world. However, this is not enough. We also have free establishment rights for independent schools, meaning that anyone can apply to start a school. The state School Inspection Authority grants permission, but it is the municipalities that finance the schools. This means that municipalities have no control over the number of schools in their area. As a result, municipalities are forced to maintain many empty school places, diverting funds that could have been used for teaching to finance these empty spots. The problem is not that the municipalities have empty classrooms, the problem is a few empty chairs in each classroom.

Sweden has significant performance disparities between schools. While parents in neighboring Finland feel confident that the nearest school is among the world’s best, Swedish parents lie awake at night wondering which school to choose for their children. When students fail in school, the blame is placed on parents for making the wrong school choice.

Sweden has major problems with its school system, and in this text, I will try to explain the reasons for these issues and what needs to be done to solve them. Let’s start with how the school system is structured.

Market-Driven Schools


In most of Sweden’s 290 municipalities, schools are financed with a per-student funding model. This funding is not the student’s money to shop for education; it is merely a model for distributing money between schools. Legislation states that the funding should be equal for municipal and private schools. Private schools in Sweden are free of charge as they are financed by taxes. This means that if a municipality compensates its own schools with 100,000 SEK per student, it should also compensate independent schools with the same amount per student. One might think this is reasonable since all schools provide education.

However, in Sweden, we have a supply responsibility. What is the problem with that? I’ll try to explain.

We have compulsory schooling, meaning all students in primary education (ages 6-16) must attend school. The state has given municipalities the responsibility to ensure that all students have a school placement. This is known as supply responsibility. In turn, this means that municipalities must always be prepared to accommodate students who do not wish to continue studying in independent schools or if the independent school decides to cease operations. Independent schools are businesses and can shut down whenever they want. Municipalities must also have schools in all geographical areas since all citizens of a municipality do not live in the same geographical location. All this costs money, and since we have a principle of equal treatment, the municipalities receive zero compensation for these additional costs.

When independent schools are established in a municipality, it often results in a budget deficit for the municipality as it creates more empty school places. When they have a deficit, they have to spend more money than budgeted for at the beginning of the year. Then the per-student funding increases as independent schools must receive the same funding as the municipality’s schools. This results in what’s called the “independent school penalty.” Municipalities must compensate independent schools with the same amount per student that they have in deficit for all students attending independent schools. This creates new deficits and the negative spiral begins.

It is the principle of equal treatment in the School ordinance that leads to significant problems in the school market. In Sweden, we pay independent schools for a responsibility they do not have. Yes, I know you won’t believe me, but this is the foolish system we have in Sweden.

For an independent school to make a profit, they must operate at a lower cost per student compared to the municipality’s average. How do you cut costs easily? By employing fewer qualified teachers, serving cheaper food, and providing less teaching resources. Most importantly, one must have students that mainly come from academic homes. When you have students from academic homes, you can have larger group sizes and every additional student in a group, compared to the municipality’s average, is pure profit. It costs the same to educate a group of 20 and 25 students. The income is obviously much higher if you have 25 students per teacher as we have per-student funding. The cost of schools is 90 percent fixed since the largest expenses are rent and salaries. However, revenues are 100 percent variable because each student generates a per-student funding for the principal’s annual budget.

The per-student funding that municipalities pay to independent schools is something that a municipality can not control. It is up to the independent school what they use the money for and if it is a private company there is no demand for publicity due to competition legislation. The Swedish school system is entirely unregulated, meaning there are no requirements on the proportion of teachers, size of groups, or whether a school must have a cafeteria, library, or gymnasium.

I wrote initially that we have free establishment rights in Sweden. This means that schools are started even when there is no need for more schools. The state’s School Inspection Authority overrides the municipalities all the time. Municipalities express their views and describe to the School Inspection Authority that granting permission leads to cuts in the municipal education. The municipalities state that there are no needs for more schools and that school segregation will increase. Unfortunately, the state’s extended arm does not listen to those who are close to the schools runned by municipalities. Those who advocate the current school system argue that it is important for freedom of choice that we have free establishment rights. Anyone who knows anything about schools has by now understood that it’s not about freedom of choice. It has never been about freedom of choice.

The free establishment right, and what we will now come to – the free school choice, has never been about freedom of choice. The so-called freedom of choice reforms, implemented in the early 90s, were meant to legitimize school segregation. It’s not about choosing to – it’s about choosing not to. System-savvy and quick-footed parents were given the opportunity to avoid poor schools. Today, school choice is used to avoid schools where students have less-educated parents. Regardless of where in the school system the students are, a significantly higher proportion of students from academic homes attend independent schools. There are no independent schools that have a student base that matches that of the municipalities. I have not found any examples of this, and I have read 1,400 municipal school budgets and reviewed the statistics of hundreds of schools in cities with vulnerable areas.

Opinion


I initially wrote that public opinion has turned when it comes to market-driven schools. When I entered the school debate over five years ago, I was called a free school hater, an opponent of freedom of choice, and a communist every time I wrote about the problems with the school system. Now, politicians on the right side of the political spectrum have started using the words and concepts that I, and other critics of the school system, use when we describe the system’s flaws. It’s not the politicians who have changed the opinion; they have been forced to change their view of the school system due to public opinion. In Sweden, it is now political suicide to defend the current system. However, I don’t believe the politicians have changed their opinions, but they are forced to make changes in the system if they want to be re-elected in the next parliamentary elections in 2026.

Marcus Larsson and Åsa Plesner, who run the think tank Balans, have mapped the prevalence of lobbying in the welfare sector, especially in education. They have shown many examples of politicians being lobbyists in the independent school sector while holding political positions of trust. Sweden stands out when it comes to allowing politicians to sit on double or triple chairs. Several of those who created the market-driven school in the early 90s now own school corporations with high profitability.

If one wonders why the market-driven school remains, despite the majority of the Swedish population wanting change, one should look at the politician’s school-business. When politicians own school corporations and sit on boards for school companies, it is not hard to understand that they want to maintain the system. Lotta Edholm, the schoolminister, sat on the board of a school corporation until the day she took office as a minister. There are many examples of politicians having fingers in several pies.

The freeschool system is a threat to national security


The Swedish Defence Research Agency, FOI has released a report titled “Foreign Investments and Ownership in Swedish Primary and Secondary Schools – A Study of Risks”. It’s authored by Maria Refors Legge, Alma Dahl, Michal Budryk, Helene Lackenbauer, and Jens Lusua. There are numerous ways an antagonist could influence the democratic education and rights of Swedish students, one being the acquisition of existing school authorities. This allows for rapid establishment across the country. If one aims to influence Sweden, reaching a large number of students is easier, but it also increases the risk of detection. The report offers several examples of how foreign owners or Swedish school owners who do not wish to operate schools based on democratic principles can function. They describe how schools can be used to counteract the integration of students and parents in vulnerable areas, maintaining and reproducing norms and values that are anti-democratic.

The report explains how the free choice of teaching materials can influence student values and support school ownership. The risk of being detected is relatively low, and if detected, one can continue operating a school, even if deemed unsuitable, by having all paperwork in order.

The report outlines various risks and our vulnerability in Sweden to foreign influence through our school system. There are risks in the free school system that could be exploited by a foreign owner with antagonistic intentions, such as influence operations undermining democratic values. The authors emphasize that the security risk is not due to foreign ownership of schools but rather how the Swedish free school system is structured.

Since it’s impossible to trace how school funding is used, authorities can’t intervene against an antagonist. School owners can use the school funding as they wish, and thus neither municipalities nor the state can control whether it’s used for anti-democratic purposes. The authors argue that the School Inspectorate and other supervisory authorities lull us into a false sense of security, having few tools to detect antagonists in the school system. This makes Sweden particularly vulnerable.

I shouldn’t say – I told you so, but I’m saying it anyway.

What’s stated in the report should not be news. We’ve known for many years that the school system is open to corruption and to foreign and anti-democratic forces. It’s astonishing that the security risk doesn’t come from foreign ownership of independent schools but from how we’ve structured the Swedish freeschool system. For 30 years, we’ve had an education system structure that’s a potential threat to national security. Swedish politicians should let this sink in.

Every time an antagonist is exposed, politicians scream for a more powerful School Inspectorate. It doesn’t matter how much the School Inspectorate, the Security Police, and other authorities check the independent schools. When we have a free-school system closed to scrutiny yet wide open to corruption, anti-democratic forces will use it for their own gain.

Believing that free school choice and freedom of choice would protect against corruption and anti-democratic school owners is naively lawful. Parents choose schools that match the values and norms they want to pass on to their children. Parents with children in schools run by anti-democrats think it’s good, otherwise, they wouldn’t have placed their children there. Rather, parents uphold and reproduce anti-democratic values through free school choice.

We have foreign owners of schools in Sweden that we probably don’t know about. Long chains of ownership, subsidiaries, and funds, combined with a lack of transparency, make us extremely vulnerable.

The worst thing in all this is that we have politicians who on one hand say that they are concerned about the terror threat, and on the other hand, they defend a free-school system which itself is a threat to national security.

In conclusion


When the Education Minister expresses herself in The Guardian with the words – “It’s not just a problem that it is a number of schools, but it becomes a system failure of everything,” it is proof that she has been influenced by public opinion.

I don’t have high hopes for any system changing reforms. The government wants to limit profits, but anyone who knows anything about business economics knows there are many ways to circumvent profit restrictions.

The government wants independent schools to be more tightly controlled. Anyone who knows anything about the school system knows that you can’t control systemic errors. It’s the incentives that must be removed. This means that if we want independent schools to compete with quality, we must stop paying them for a responsibility they don’t have. Municipalities must be allowed to decide how many schools there should be in a municipality.

If we want freedom of choice in the school system, we must have admission rules that are common to all schools, regardless of who runs them. Therefore, the queues for charter schools must be abolished.

If the government wants order in the school system, they must open up those schools for scrutiny under the same principles as municipal schools. They must regulate lobbying and forbid politicians from sitting on multiple chairs at the same time.

I have worked as a principal in Sweden’s toughest areas for the past 12 years. Before that, I was a teacher in a particularly vulnerable area. I see segregation with my own eyes daily.

The consequences of the school market for students is clear.

I have a dream.


A dream that politicians will start making decisions based on what’s best for the children. I wish they would do more of what we expect of them, not the least they can get away with in the next election.

Björn Dahlman, a well-known teacher, author and school debater in Sweden, wrote a wise thing on Twitter, currently X ,a while ago. – “In Sweden, municipalities are punished for educating the students that privately owned schools can not make money on.”

I couldn’t have said it better myself.

To address the problems in the Swedish school system, we must:
– Rework the school funding system so that municipal schools are compensated for their supply responsibility.
– Abolish the free establishment right.
– Make school choices collectively. No queues.
– We should not allow foreign owners to Swedish schools. 
….to begin with. 

Why should we make these reforms? The answer is: for the sake of the students. It’s also for the sake of national security, future democracy and freedom of speech. If we want an education with high quality for all children and competence provision in the future, we need a school system without principles of market. 

To politicians in other countries, I have one thing to say to you: Don’t copy our school system. It’s a true disaster and a failure for the nation. Don’t go that way, please!

Thank you for reading this far.


Linnea Lindquist

If you want to read more from me, please visit my blog at www.rektorlinnea.com

Linnea Lindquist: @rektor_linnea

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Ethics, International, Segregation

Dan Rather and Elliott Kirschner: An Important Anniversary Today

By dianeravitch
July 29, 2023 //
21

Dan Rather and Elliott Kirschner publish a blog called “Steady,” which has a consistently steady tone while reflecting on our times. Only minutes ago, they called attention to an important event that occurred 75 years ago, when President Harry S Truman made history.

They write:

At Steady, we sometimes pause from the news of the day to look back and reflect on the journey our nation has taken. With this in mind, we want to acknowledge an anniversary that took place this past week that didn’t get enough notice, even if its importance is as relevant as ever.
On July 26, 1948 — 75 years ago — President Harry Truman signed Executive Order 9981. Its statement was simple but profound:

“It is hereby declared to be the policy of the President that there shall be equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed services without regard to race, color, religion or national origin. …”

Black people had fought in every war in the country’s history, with great courage and sacrifice. They fought for a nation that violently denied their human rights. During World War II, more than a million Black men and women served in the armed forces, fighting fascism around the world only to return to a country infused with systemic and often bloody racism.

This stark dichotomy became appallingly apparent with the tragic story of Sgt. Isaac Woodard Jr. He had enlisted in the Army in 1942 and served in the Pacific. After being honorably discharged from Camp Gordon in Augusta, Georgia, on February 12, 1946, Woodard boarded a Greyhound bus to see his family in North Carolina. He was wearing his uniform. En route in South Carolina, he was pulled off the bus and beaten by local police, then arrested, then beaten some more. The assault was so violent it left Woodard blind for life.

Woodard’s story soon became a defining moment in post-war race relations. Orson Welles called for justice on his ABC radio program. There was a benefit concert in Harlem headlined by Billie Holiday, Woody Guthrie, and boxer Joe Louis. President Truman ordered a federal investigation, and in 1947 he became the first president to address the NAACP. He said in his speech:

It is my deep conviction that we have reached a turning point in the long history of our country’s efforts to guarantee freedom and equality to all our citizens. Recent events in the United States and abroad have made us realize that it is more important today than ever before to ensure that all Americans enjoy these rights. And when I say all Americans — I mean all Americans.

A year later, Truman ordered the desegregation of the military and the federal workforce. There was, of course, tremendous pushback, and racism persisted in the recruitment and deployment of service members generally, and in the promotion of officers specifically.

(The act very nearly cost Truman his presidency. He almost lost his reelection bid in 1948 because some southern states — previously known as the Democratic Party’s “Solid South” — voted for a third-party “Dixiecrat” ticket. The ramifications of this series of events reverberate today.)

While the Air Force integrated quickly after 1948, the Army didn’t fully integrate until 1954, spurred on by a need to fill its ranks during the carnage of the Korean War. The Marines and Navy took much longer. It is shocking to consider, but it wasn’t until the early 1970s, under the leadership of Admiral Elmo R. Zumwalt Jr., then chief of naval operations, that the Navy was finally forced to fully confront its systemic racism.

In the ensuing decades, the U.S. military, while not entirely free from racism, has become a potent example for the nation of how our diversity is our strength. The military arguably has become the best meritocracy of any American institution. Seeing young men and women from different races, nationalities, cultures, religions, sexual identities, and geographic regions serve alongside each other sparks pride in what our country can and should be. They are beacons of hope.

Yet today, we are once again at a crossroads in the nation’s reckoning with its history. Right-wing extremists seek to downplay our legacies of injustice. We see this effort in distorted school curricula and banned books. We see it in politicians who use divisiveness as a tool to rally votes. The truth is, we still have a long way to go to make sure that the corridors of American power reflect the country as a whole. It should be noted that when the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action recently, they exempted military academies. What is one to make of that?

It is vital that we confront what our nation truly was, and is. Surely it is just that we recognize the tremendous service of those who were denied full rights. White supremacy is on the rise, including among elements of the armed forces. Surely we should agree that this is a great danger needing to be rooted out.

Truman’s executive order was an important step toward our country’s making good on its founding ideals. Much hard work preceded that moment 75 years ago, and much has taken place after it. The journey continues, with new challenges in our present time. We can’t hope for continued progress if we don’t acknowledge the past, honor moments of justice, and vow to do the hard work to build upon them.

We can also find hope in President Truman’s own life story. He was a descendant of slave owners and Confederate sympathizers, and he grew up in a segregated town in Missouri. As a younger man, he himself identified as a segregationist and racist, but he was able to grow to become a champion for civil rights, at least by the standards of his time.

In Truman’s journey, we can find a mirror for the country at large. We have come a long way but still remain very much a work in progress. And the gains we have made are fragile without continued care and effort.

Categories Bigotry, Civil Rights, Courage, Cruelty, Democracy, Freedom, Race, Racism, Segregation

Indiana: Vouchers Expanded to Almost All Students

By dianeravitch
July 28, 2023 //
7

https://www.axios.com/local/indianapolis/2023/07/24/indiana-private-school-vouchers

Categories Bigotry, Deregulation, Disruption, Education Industry, Extremism, Indiana, Religion, Republicans, School Choice, Segregation, Separation of church and state, Vouchers

Heather Cox Richardson: The GOP Wants to Turn Back the Clock to 1931

By dianeravitch
June 16, 2023 //
96

Historian Heather Cox Richardson brilliantly contrasts the views of Republicans and Democrats on the role of government. Republicans want it to be as minimal as possible. Democrats want it to use its powers and resources to improve people’s lives. Understanding this difference helps illuminate why Republicans want to get rid of public schools and why billionaires like Charles Koch and Betsy DeVos support vouchers and libertarianism in a society where everyone is on their own.

Yesterday, the Republican Study Committee, a 175-member group of far-right House members, released their 2024 “Blueprint to Save America” budget plan. It calls for slashing the federal budget by raising the age at which retirees can start claiming Social Security benefits from 67 to 69, privatizing Medicare, and enacting dramatic tax cuts that will starve the federal government.

I’m actually not going to rehash the 122-page plan. Let’s take a look at the larger picture.

This budget dismisses the plans of “President Joe Biden and the left” as a “march toward socialism.” It says that “[t]he left’s calls to increase taxes to close the deficit would be…catastrophic for our nation.” Asserting that “the path to prosperity does not come from the Democrats’ approach of expanding government,” it claims that “[o]ver the past year and a half, the American people have seen that experiment fail firsthand.”

Instead, it says, “the key to growth, innovation, and flourishing communities” is “[i]ndividuals, free from the burdens of a burdensome government.” 

It is?

Our history actually tells us how these two contrasting visions of the government play out.

Grover Norquist, one of the key architects of the Republican argument that the solution to societal ills is tax cuts, in 2010 described to Rebecca Elliott of the Harvard Crimson how he sees the role of government. “Government should enforce [the] rule of law,” he said. “It should enforce contracts, it should protect people bodily from being attacked by criminals. And when the government does those things, it is facilitating liberty. When it goes beyond those things, it becomes destructive to both human happiness and human liberty.”

Norquist vehemently opposed taxation, saying that “it’s not any of the government’s business who earns what, as long as they earn it legitimately,” and proposed cutting government spending down to 8% of gross national product, or GDP, the value of the final goods and services produced in the United States. 

The last time the level of government spending was at that 8% of GDP was 1933, before the New Deal. In that year, after years of extraordinary corporate profits, the banking system had collapsed, the unemployment rate was nearly 25%, prices and productivity were plummeting, wages were cratering, factories had shut down, farmers were losing their land to foreclosure. Children worked in the fields and factories, elderly and disabled people ate from garbage cans, unregulated banks gambled away people’s money, business owners treated their workers as they wished. Within a year the Great Plains would be blowing away as extensive deep plowing had damaged the land, making it vulnerable to drought. Republican leaders insisted the primary solution to the crisis was individual enterprise and private charity. 

When he accepted the Democratic nomination for president in July 1932, New York governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt vowed to steer between the radical extremes of fascism and communism to deliver a “New Deal” to the American people. 

The so-called alphabet soup of the New Deal gave us the regulation of banks and businesses, protections for workers, an end to child labor in factories, repair of the damage to the Great Plains, new municipal buildings and roads and airports, rural electrification, investment in painters and writers, and Social Security for workers who were injured or unemployed. Government outlays as a percentage of GDP began to rise. World War II shot them off the charts, to more than 40% of GDP, as the United States helped the world fight fascism. 

That number dropped again after the war, and in 1975, federal expenditures settled in at about 20% of GDP. Except for short-term spikes after financial crises (spending shot up to 24% after the 2008 crash, for example, and to 31% during the 2020 pandemic, a high from which it is still coming down), the spending-to-GDP ratio has remained at about that set point.

So why is there a growing debt?

Because tax revenues have plummeted. Tax cuts under the George W. Bush and Trump administrations are responsible for 57% of the increase in the ratio of the debt to the economy, 90% if you exclude the emergency expenditures of the pandemic. The United States is nowhere close to the average tax burden of the 38 other nations in the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), all of which are market-oriented democracies. And those cuts have gone primarily to the wealthy and corporations. 

Republicans who backed those tax cuts now insist that the only way to deal with the growing debt is to get rid of the government that regulated business, provided a basic social safety net, promoted infrastructure, and eventually promoted civil rights, all elements that stabilized the nation after the older system gave us the Depression. Indeed, the Republican Study Committee calls for making the Trump tax cuts, scheduled to expire in 2025, permanent. 

“There are two ways of viewing the government’s duty in matters affecting economic and social life,” FDR said in his acceptance speech. “The first sees to it that a favored few are helped and hopes that some of their prosperity will leak through, sift through, to labor, to the farmer, to the small businessman.” The other “is based upon the simple moral principle: the welfare and the soundness of a nation depend first upon what the great mass of the people wish and need; and second, whether or not they are getting it.”

When the Republican Study Committee calls Biden’s policies—which have led to record employment, a booming economy, and a narrowing gap between rich and poor— “leftist,” they have lost the thread of our history. The system that restored the nation after 1933 and held the nation stable until 1981 is not socialism or radicalism; it is one of the strongest parts of our American tradition.

—

Notes:

Click to access rsc_2023_budget_final_version.pdf

https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2010/11/18/nbsp-government-percent-fm/
https://www.fdrlibrary.org/great-depression-facts
https://publicpolicy.pepperdine.edu/academics/research/faculty-research/new-deal/roosevelt-speeches/fr070232.htm
Tax Cuts Are Primarily Responsible for the Increasing Debt Ratio
https://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/historical-tables/
https://rollcall.com/2023/06/14/conservatives-budget-plan-renews-battle-over-seniors-benefits/
Categories Biden, Citizenship, Civil Rights, Cruelty, Democracy, Democrats, Deregulation, Economy, Education Industry, Elections, For-Profit, Freedom, Guns, History, Hope, Inequality, Inequity, Injustice, Koch Brothers, Pensions, Propaganda, Racism, Segregation, U.S. education, Unions, Vouchers
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