Archives for category: Vouchers

Jan Resseger writes today about Matt Huffman, Speaker of the House in Ohio and his determination to undermine the funding of the state’s public schools. If you read the previous post about the voucher movement in Ohio, you will recall that Huffman led the battle to enact vouchers for all families, including affluent families.

He is Catholic, he graduated from Catholic schools, and he has long been determined to get public funds to subsidize religious school tuition.

After the state was ordered to enact a plan to fund its schools fairly, relying less on property taxes, the legislature enacted the Cupp-Patterson Fair School Funding Plan in 2021, which was supposed to be phased in over six years. Huffman recently declared that the plan was “unsustainable.”

Ohio has 1.75 million students in public schools. There are 173,156 students in the state’s non-public schools.

Using public dollars to pay the tuition of rich students who were already enrolled in private and religious schools is “sustainable” for the religious zealots in the legislature.

Ohio’s commitment to fair funding for public schools has been undermined by two Republican priorities:

The universal voucher program now costs $1 billion a year.
Republicans are determined to cut taxes and to reduce funding for public schools.

Those are Matt Huffman’s priorities, not adequate and fair funding for public schools.

Categories Accountability, Catholic Schools, Education Industry, Elections, Extremism, Funding, Ohio, Religion, Separation of church and state, Vouchers

ProPublica: Secret Papers Reveal How Ohio Politicians Worked with Religious Allies to Get Vouchers for All

By dianeravitch

January 14, 2025 //

Alec MacGillis wrote a story for ProPublica titled “On a Mission from God: Inside the Movement to Redirect Billions of Taxpayer Dollars to Private Religious Schools.”

ProPublica gained access to a large trove of communications among the Governor of Ohio, George Voinovich, and prominent religious figures, planning how to pass legislation to send public money to religious schools. This, despite explicit language in the Ohio state constitution prohibiting state payments to religious schools.

Here is ProPublica’s overview of the article:

Reporting Highlights

The Ohio Model: Rarely seen letters show how the voucher movement started in the 1990s as a concealed effort to finance urban parochial schools and expanded to a much broader push.
Helping the Affluent: An initiative promoted as a civil rights cause — helping poor kids — is increasingly funneling money to families who already easily afford private school tuition.
The Voucher Deficit: Expanding programs threaten funding for public schools and put pressure on state budgets, as many religious-based schools enjoy new largesse.

The article begins thus:

On a Thursday morning last May, about a hundred people gathered in the atrium of the Ohio Capitol building to join in Christian worship. The “Prayer at the Statehouse” was organized by an advocacy group called the Center for Christian Virtue, whose growing influence was symbolized by its new headquarters, directly across from the capitol. It was also manifest in the officials who came to take part in the event: three state legislators and the ambitious lieutenant governor, Jon Husted.

After some prayer and singing, the center’s Christian Engagement Ambassador introduced Husted, asking him to “share with us about faith and intersecting faith with government.” Husted, a youthful 57-year-old, spoke intently about the prayer meetings that he leads in the governor’s office each month. “We bring appointed officials and elected officials together to talk about our faith in our work, in our service, and how it can strengthen us and make us better,” he said. The power of prayer, Husted suggested, could even supply political victories: “When we do that, great things happen — like advancing school choice so that every child in Ohio has a chance to go to the school of their choice.” The audience started applauding before he finished his sentence.

The center had played a key role in bringing about one of the most dramatic expansions of private school vouchers in the country, making it possible for all Ohio families — even the richest among them — to receive public money to pay for their children’s tuition. In the mid-1990s, Ohio became the second state to offer vouchers, but in those days they were available only in Cleveland and were billed as a way for disadvantaged children to escape struggling schools. Now the benefits extend to more than 150,000 students across the state, costing taxpayers nearly $1 billion, the vast majority of which goes to the Catholic and evangelical institutions that dominate the private school landscape there.

What happened in Ohio was a stark illustration of a development that has often gone unnoticed, perhaps because it is largely taking place away from blue state media hubs. In the past few years, school vouchers have become universal in a dozen states, including Florida, Arizona and North Carolina. Proponents are pushing to add Texas, Pennsylvania, Tennessee and others — and, with Donald Trump returning to the White House, they will likely have federal support.

The risks of universal vouchers are quickly coming to light. An initiative that was promoted for years as a civil rights cause — helping poor kids in troubled schools — is threatening to become a nationwide money grab. Many private schools are raising tuition rates to take advantage of the new funding, and new schools are being founded to capitalize on it. With private schools urging all their students’ families to apply, the money is flowing mostly to parents who are already able to afford tuition and to kids who are already enrolled in private schools. When vouchers do draw students away from public districts, they threaten to exacerbate declining enrollment, forcing underpopulated schools to close. More immediately, the cost of the programs is soaring, putting pressure on public school finances even as private schools prosper. In Arizona, voucher expenditures are hundreds of millions of dollars more than predicted, leaving an enormous shortfall in the state budget. States that provide funds to families for homeschooling or education-related expenses are contending with reports that the money is being used to cover such unusual purchases as kayaks, video game consoles and horseback-riding lessons.

The voucher movement has been aided by a handful of billionaire advocates; it was also enabled, during the pandemic, by the backlash to extended school closures. (Private schools often reopened considerably faster than public schools.) Yet much of the public, even in conservative states, remains ambivalent about vouchers: Voters in Nebraska and Kentucky just rejected them in ballot referendums.

How, then, has the movement managed to triumph? The campaign in Ohio provides an object lesson — a model that voucher advocates have deployed elsewhere. Its details are recorded in a trove of private correspondence, much of it previously unpublished, that the movement’s leaders in Ohio sent to one another. The letters reveal a strategy to start with targeted programs that placed needy kids in parochial schools, then fight to expand the benefits to far richer families — a decadeslong effort by a network of politicians, church officials and activists, all united by a conviction that the separation of church and state is illegitimate. As one of the movement’s progenitors put it, “Government does a lousy job of substituting for religion.”

Please open the link to read this important article.

Thanks to ProPublica for its excellent reporting about the effort to privatize and defund American schools.

Categories Catholic Schools, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Democracy, Disruption, Education Reform, Ethics, Extremism, Funding, Ohio, Religion, Separation of church and state, Vouchers

Peter Greene: Arizona Squanders Taxpayer $$ By Funding Failure

By dianeravitch

January 7, 2025 //

The preceding post was reported by ProPublica, an absolutely essential journalistic enterprise that serves the public interest.

Please read Peter Greene’s take on the same story. He adds additional research and his professional experience as a veteran teacher.

Greene writes:

Call it a zombie school, one more piece of predictable detritus washed up on the wave of voucher laws. Here’s an instructive tale.

ARCHES Academy was a charter school operating in Apache Junction, Arizona. But in March of 2024, the state board that oversees Arizona charters voted unanimously to shut the place down. Mind you, the board in Arizona is pretty charter friendly, but ARCHES had so many problems. Under 50 students were left at a K-8 school dinged for soooo many problems.

Chartered in 2020, promising a “holistic” approach that grouped students by ability rather than age, then put on an Assessment Consent Agreement in 2023. Financial mismanagement. Poor record-keeping. IRS violations. Violations of state and federal law. Academic results in the basement. State rating of D. Founder and principal Michelle Edwards told the board “Mistakes were made and compounded over time.” So, general incompetence rather than active fraudster work.

So ARCHES the charter school was shut down, because charters still have to answer to the state for their performance and competence.

But you know who doesn’t have any oversight at all in Arizona?

Private schools that accept taxpayer-funded vouchers.

So Edwards simply re-launched her school as the Title of Liberty (a name taken from a verse in the Book of Mormon). Some of her pitch was visible in a piece in The Arizona Beehive, a Mormon-flavored newsmagazine, in the summer of 2024.

As changes happen in the public education system, many families who belong to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have become more concerned about the potential influence of conflicting ideologies expressed in their children’s classrooms.

In the article, Edwards addresses her own concerns.

Principal Michelle Edwards, an early childhood specialist, has been in the education system for many years. The academy is a culmination of a dream of hers. “I recently had one student who was really struggling,” says Michelle, “and I couldn’t tell her about her divine abilities, that she’s a child of God, or who her father in heaven is.”

The article promises a Personal Learning Plan and notes that if tuition is an issue, the school will help parents apply for the Arizona ESA voucher to cover costs.

What the article doesn’t mention is that Edwards just had the school, under another name and as a charter, shut down by the state. But then, nobody, not even the state itself, told anyone.

Edwards’s new school went heavily with the religious pitch, with the website announcing “Christ-centered, constitutionally-based, education for all….”

Why doesn’t Arizona have anything in place to help apparently well-meaning folks like Edwards get into the education biz? Why doesn’t it exert even the slightest bit of oversight of the vendors cashing in on taxpayer-funded vouchers? I suspect it hints at what programs like Arizona’s voucher extravaganza are really about– and it’s not about a robust, choice-filled education environment. It’s about defunding and dismantling public education (and the tax burdens that go with it). But you can’t just tell folks, “We’re going to end public education.” So instead, hand them a pittance of a voucher and announce that you’re giving them freedom! And after that, you’ve washed your hands of them. The wealthy can still afford a top-notch education for their kids, and if Those People end up wasting their kids time in sub-prime, fraudulent, or incompetent pop up schools, well, that’s their problem.

If folks like the Arizona voucher crowd were serious about choice, they would provide transparency and oversight, rather than letting any shmoe rent a storefront and call it a school. But Arizona isn’t serious about choice. It’s serious about dismantling public education. It’s serious about getting public tax dollars into private hands and funding religious groups. And people like the families at Title of Liberty and even Edwards herself will just keep paying the price.

Categories Accountability, Arizona, Charter Schools, Deregulation, Disruption, Education Industry, Ethics, Failure, Funding, Privatization, Religion, Separation of church and state, Vouchers

ProPublica: If the Future of Education is Arizona, It Is Dreadful

By dianeravitch

January 7, 2025 //

The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 holds up Arizona as a shining exemplar of what education should be in every state. Vouchers for all, rich and poor alike. Everyone choosing the kind of school or home school they like. Happiness reigns. Or so they claim.

In several articles, ProPublica has taken a close look at what’s happening in Arizona. It’s not a pretty picture. Open the link to read this article in full. It was written by Eli Hager of ProPublica, published there and on the Raw Story website.

The reality is ugly. Arizona does have universal vouchers, but most are used by well-to-do families whose children were already enrolled in private schools. About 60,000 of Arizona’s 1.3 million students use vouchers. Clearly, the vast majority of the state’s students attend public schools. Meanwhile, Arizona’s state budget has exploded because of the added cost of paying everyone’s tuition at private schools. And the public schools are underfunded, ranked 48th in the nation for per-pupil spending.

One afternoon in September, parents started arriving for pickup at Title of Liberty Academy, a private Mormon K-8 school in Mesa, Arizona, on the eastern outskirts of Phoenix.

Individually, the moms and dads were called in to speak to the principal. That’s when they were told that the school, still just a few months old, was closing due to financial problems.

There would be no more school at Title of Liberty.

Over the course of that week, more parents were given the news, as well as their options for the remainder of the school year: They could transfer their children to another private or charter school, or they could put them in a microschool that the principal said she’d soon be setting up in her living room. Or there was always homeschooling. Or even public school.

These families had, until this moment, embodied Arizona’s “school choice” ideal. Many of them had been disappointed by their local public schools, which some felt were indoctrinating kids in subjects like race and sex and, of course, were lacking in religious instruction. So they’d shopped for other educational options on the free market, eventually leading them to Title of Liberty.

One mom had even discovered the school by window shopping: It was in the same strip mall as her orthodontist’s office, next to a ChinaPalace, and she’d noticed the flags outside with Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints imagery. (The school was not formally affiliated with the church.)

An LDS member herself, she was soon ready to start paying tuition to the school from her son’s Empowerment Scholarship Account — a type of school voucher pioneered in Arizona and now spreading in various forms to more than a dozen other states. ESAs give parents an average of over $7,000 a year in taxpayer funds, per child, to spend on any private school, tutoring service or other educational expense of their choice.

Yet Arizona’s ESA program provides zero transparency as to private schools’ financial sustainability or academic performance to help parents make informed school choices.

For instance, the state never informed parents who were new to Title of Liberty and were planning to spend their voucher money there that it had previously been a charter school called ARCHES Academy — which had had its charter revoked last school year due to severe financial issues. Nor that, as a charter, it had a record of dismal academic performance, with just 13% of its students proficient in English and 0% in math in 2023.

When it was a charter (which is a type of public school), these things could be known. There was some oversight. The Arizona State Board for Charter Schools had monitored the school’s finances and academics, unanimously coming to the conclusion that it should be shut down.

Yet just a month after the board’s decision, ARCHES was re-creating itself as a renamed, newly religious private school, simply by pivoting to accept voucher dollars.

In other words, it was closed down by a public governing body but found a way to keep existing and being funded by the public anyway, just without the standards and accountability that would normally come with taxpayer money.

Arizona does no vetting of new voucher schools. Not even if the school or the online school “provider” has already failed, or was founded yesterday, or is operating out of a strip mall or a living room or a garage, or offers just a half hour of instruction per morning. (If you’re an individual tutor in Arizona, all you need in order to register to start accepting voucher cash is a high school diploma.)

There is “nothing” required, said Michelle Edwards, the founder and principal of ARCHES and then of Title of Liberty, in an interview with ProPublica. It was “shocking how little oversight” the state was going to provide of her ESA-funded private school, Edwards said.

According to charter board members as well as parents and family members of her former students, Edwards is a well-intentioned career educator who cares deeply about children. But she has repeatedly struggled to effectively or sustainably run a school.

She said that when she first transformed her charter school into a private school, she and her team called up “every agency under the sun” asking what standards the new school would have to meet, including in order to accept voucher funds. For example, what about special education students and other vulnerable children — would there be any oversight of how her school taught those kids? Or instructional time — any required number of minutes to spend on reading, writing, math, science?

State agencies, she said, each responded with versions of a question: “Why are you asking us? We don’t do that for private schools.”

“If you’re gonna call yourself a school,” Edwards told ProPublica, “there should be at least some reporting that has to be done about your numbers, about how you’re achieving. … You love the freedom of it, but it was scary.”

This school year, ProPublica has been examining Arizona’s first-of-its-kind “universal” education savings account program. We are doing so both because other states have been modeling their own new ESA initiatives after this one, and also because President-elect Donald Trump has prioritized the issue, most recently by nominating for secretary of education someone whose top priority appears to be expanding school choice efforts nationwide. (And Betsy DeVos, his first education secretary, was and remains a leading school voucher proponent.)

These programs are where the U.S. education system is headed.

In our stories, we’ve reported that Arizona making vouchers available even to the wealthiest parents — many of whom were already paying tuition for their kids to go to private school and didn’t need the government assistance — helped contribute to a state budget meltdown. We’ve also reported that low-income families in the Phoenix area, by contrast, are largely not being helped by vouchers, in part because high-quality private schools don’t exist in their neighborhoods.

But the lack of any transparency or accountability measures in Arizona’s ESA model is perhaps the most important issue for other states to consider as they follow this one’s path, even some school choice supporters say.

Categories Accountability, Arizona, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Ethics, Extremism, Failure, Vouchers

Carol Burris: The End Goal of “School Choice” Is the Death of Public Schools

By dianeravitch

January 6, 2025 //

Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education, writes in The Progressive about the hidden purpose of “school choice.” It’s not to educate children better; it’s not to save money. It’s to destroy your child’s right to a free public education.

She begins:

In 2017, PBS released School Inc., a rightwing billionaire-funded documentary created by the late Andrew Coulson, a conservative author and former director of the libertarian Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom. School Inc. showcased Coulson’s theory that for-profit schooling, funded by parents without government involvement, is the best delivery model for education. In a review for the long-running Answer Sheet blog in The Washington Post, the education historian Diane Ravitch and I criticized Coulson’s romanticization of the era of American schooling before public education, during which children were homeschooled, church-schooled, or taught by private tutors—except for the poor, who, if they were lucky, were trained in charity schools.

The “school choice movement,” which Coulson’s documentary promoted, has always been a classic bait-and-switch swindle: Charter schools were the bait for vouchers, and vouchers the lure for public acceptance of market-based schooling. While narrow debates about accountability, taxpayer costs, and the public funding of religious schools raise important concerns, the gravest threat posed by the school choice movement is its ultimate objective: putting an end to public responsibility for education.

This goal is not a secret. The libertarian right has openly dreamed of ending public education for the past seventy years—the economist Milton Friedman advocated for school choice as early as 1955, and his acolytes have continued to do so ever since.

And they have made extraordinary progress. During the past few years, the traditional voucher model championed by the right has morphed into the Education Savings Account (ESA). In exchange for promising not to enroll their child in public schools, parents receive funds to “shop” for services, including private school tuition, tutoring, and luxury purchases, including trips to Disney World, televisions, and waterskiing lessons. Nearly all recent state ESA programs have either no or high-income caps, and few have sensible protections.

The libertarian right embraces this flagrant waste because it helps them achieve their ultimate objective of shifting all of the responsibility and costs to families. By approving universal ESA programs, they are creating a vested interest among middle and upper-income families in pay-as-you-go education. Frivolous spending is tolerated because it aligns with Friedman and Coulson’s objective of putting parents in charge of education without government responsibility or concern.

The America First Policy Institute, where Trump’s Secretary of Education nominee Linda McMahonserves as board chair, states in its recent policy agenda that “the authority for educating children rests with parents.” As public responsibility for schooling shifts to parents, educational subsidies will be gradually reduced until Friedman and Coulson’s dream of a fully for-profit marketplace that competes for students is achieved.

Please open the link to finish reading this important article.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Democracy, Education Industry, Extremism, For-Profit, Fraud, Hoax, Vouchers

NPE Announces Winners of “Coal in the Stocking Award” for 2024!!

By dianeravitch

December 23, 2024 //

The Network for Public Education announces the winners of the non-prestigious “Coal in the Stocking” Award for 2024.

This is an award given to those who have done the most damage to our public schools.

They should feel ashamed and humiliated for gaining this recognition of their odious and undemocratic behavior.

They hurt children and communities. They hurt the future of our great nation.

Open the link to see the names of the winners.

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Billionaires, Censorship, Charter Schools, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Separation of church and state, Vouchers, Wall of Shame

Carol Burris: West Virginia Starves Its Public Schools

By dianeravitch

December 19, 2024 //

Carol Burris, executive director of the Betwork for Public Education, describes the devastating advance of privatization in West Virginia. In 2019, the teachers of West Virginia banded together and went on strike, closing down every school in the state.

Burris writes:

West Virginia is closing its public schools. Seven schools will close in the next few years due to declining enrollment. These schools will join the 53 that closed in the past five years, and there are an additional 25 that counties have proposed or approved to close.

These numbers are not small in the context of West Virginia. The National Center for Education Statistics reported only 643 public schools with enrollment in the state in 2023-2024.

West Virginia’s population and student enrollment were in decline. In 2015, there were 277,452 students in West Virginia public schools. By 2020, enrollment was down to 253,930. In 2021, however, the drop seemed to level off—the public schools lost only 1,100 students the next year.

And then school privatization began.

In 2019, the legislature passed a charter law. It was cautious. Three charter schools were allowed to open as pilot schools under the control of districts, but none opened.

And then greed kicked in. The for-profit operators wanted to open schools in the state. In 2021, the legislature expanded the number of charters to ten a year, not including online schools, which they then approved. The authority to approve them was given to a politically appointed state board.

Six charter schools were rapidly approved, five of which are open.

Three of those five are run by for-profit corporations. In 2023-2024, those three for-profit-run charters enrolled 87% of the charter school students in the state.

Charter schools in West Virginia operate on the “money follows the child” system, depleting school district budgets. That money accounts for a whopping 99% of state per-pupil funding, even though most charter students (70%) attend low-cost, low-quality online schools run by for-profits.

To add insult to injury to the state’s public schools, the U.S. Department of Education, under Secretary Cardona, awarded $12.2 million to the state’s charter board to open new charter schools or expand existing ones in West Virginia.

Over $905,000 was given to open a “classical” academy run by the notorious for-profit ACCEL. ACCEL already operates two of the state’s five charter schools. The new school will be operated on a sweeps contract, violating 2022 CSP regulations. Three of the existing five charter schools would be given funds to expand.

I registered a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education regarding West Virginia’s violation of its own regulations. I have not received a response.

If that were not enough, this fall, the West Virginia legislature passed a law allowing charter schools to access the state building fund—giving them their own privileged funding stream.

In 2022, the same year that the law to expand charter schools was enacted, the state passed a voucher law called the Hope Scholarship, heralded by Ed Choice as one of the most expansive voucher laws in the country. That law gives vouchers to fund homeschooling, private schooling, tutoring, and “enrichment” activities for students who do not attend a public or charter school.

The scholarship is worth 100% of the average per-pupil state funding. There are no income limits. Beginning in 2026, any student, including a private school student or home-schooled student who has never attended public school, can apply.

In 2023-2024, West Virginians used a voucher. In 2024-2025, the number jumped to 10,000.

Let’s do the math.

During the 2021-2022 school year, there were 252,830 students in public schools. That was the year before charters and the voucher law. In 2023-2024, that number dropped to 243,560.

Just when West Virginia enrollment had begun to stabilize, 2,277 students were siphoned off along with funding to charter schools, and 6,000 students received vouchers. In West Virginia, privatization through charter schools and vouchers is now the primary source of public school enrollment and funding decline.

As charter schools continue to expand, thanks in part to the federal Charter School Program, and vouchers become accessible to 100% of students in the state, school closings will accelerate.

For the right-wing Libertarians who run education policy for the Republican Party, this is not a bug; this is the main feature.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Closing schools, Corporate Reform, Cruelty, Disruption, Education Industry, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, For-Profit, Funding, Privatization, Republicans, School Choice, Teachers, Vouchers, West Virginia

Texas: Dan Patrick Wants to Replace Public Schools with Christian Schools

By dianeravitch

December 18, 2024 //

Dan Patrick is the Lieutenant Governor of Texas, a powerful position in the state. He used to be a rightwing radio talk show host, a little Rush Limbaugh. Now he’s in a position to do real damage, not just blow off steam. He recently told the superintendents of rural schools that the state couldn’t afford to give them any new money, although not long ago Governor Greg Abbott bragged about a $30 billion surplus and about cutting property taxes.

Chris Tomlinson, opinion writer for The Houston Chronicle, eviscerated Dan Patrick’s homegrown bull in this article.

Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick has laid out his plan for dismantling public schools, even if it means failing to produce a workforce that will keep Texas’ economy going.

The man who calls himself a Christian first, a conservative second and a Republican third exercises an iron fist over the Texas Senate. He recently told the Texas Association of Rural Schools & Texas Association of Midsize Schools not to expect a significant increase in state funding, which has been unchanged since 2019 despite rampant inflation.

Instead, Patrick has promised to divert taxpayer money to private, mostly Christian schools backed by his billionaire benefactors.

Texas Republicans are heading into the 89^thLegislature in honey-badger mode, heedlessly pursuing ideological goals regardless of public opinion. Because just like the honey badger that has become an Internet meme, Patrick “don’t care.”

“We’re not underfunding you in our view,” Patrick told school superintendents on Dec. 6, my colleague Jeremy Wallace reported in his newsletter. “We are funding you the most we can.”

Correction: it’s the most he’s willing to do.

The state provides a basic allotment of $6,160 per student, which is $4,000 less than the national average. School districts are slashing budgets and laying off staff due to inflation. Advocates have asked for another $1,000 per student to keep providing essential services.

“I’m just being honest with you; there is no way we can increase the student allotment by $1,000,” Patrick said.

That’s a lie. The state left $30 billion unspent in 2023 when Patrick refused to increase school funding until lawmakers approved taxpayer funding for religious private schools. An extra $1,000 per student would cost $14 billion, well within the budget.

Patrick frequently claims he supports public schools, but actions speak louder than words. He criticizes teachers, prioritizes tax cuts and praises religious education, falling back on a clichéd conservative playbook.

Step One: Underfund and hamstring a government service, in this case, public schools, until it starts falling apart. Step Two: Blame underpaid, under-resourced public servants for the failure and proclaim only the private sector can help. Step Three: Send taxpayer money to your cronies to provide the service, with a significant markup, and make the public pay more for it.

The biggest campaign donors to Texas’s Republican leaders in recent years have loudly demanded an end to public education as we know it. They believe government-run schools indoctrinate students with the wrong ideas about justice, equality and tolerance. They want private schools to teach their values with taxpayer subsidies.

Oil billionaires Tim Dunn and Ferris Wilks have spent tens of millions backing Christian nationalist activists and candidates to pass a school voucher bill. Patrick is one of the largest beneficiaries of their largesse and has backed taxpayer money for Christian schools since he was a senator.

A Pennsylvania billionaire who hates public schools, Jeff Yass, gave Gov. Greg Abbott $6 million, the largest campaign donation in state history, to punish rural Republican lawmakers who opposed school vouchers in 2023. Most of those lawmakers either retired or lost their seats in the GOP primary.

Abbott and Patrick say they have the votes necessary to pass a school voucher bill next year. Past promises to boost funding for public schools now appear off the table.

Public schools are much more than a benefit for parents; they create Texas’s workforce. Future success at work is directly tied to quality pre-kindergarten and good schools.

Private schools do not face the same regulation or scrutiny as public schools. Private schools are free to teach whatever the sponsoring group wants outside of a few minimum requirements. Private school students are not required to take the state’s standardized STAAR Test.

Polls show most Texans support public schools and want the state to spend more. But with a handful of donors writing multimillion-dollar checks, Patrick has entered the honey-badger stage of one-party rule.

Most Texans and major corporations think women should have more reproductive rights. Patrick don’t care.

Most Texans support legalized gambling to boost local economies. Patrick don’t care.

Most Texans support legalizing marijuana. Patrick don’t care; he wants to ban the $4 billion-a-year hemp industry.

Republicans have controlled every statewide office for 30 years. At the state and national level, conservatives control every branch of government. The GOP is feeling strong, like they honey badger.

Patrick wants Texas and the United States to be a Christian nation and Texas laws to reflect his interpretation of the Bible. Sabotaging public schools is a key step to fulfilling that dream.

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Cruelty, Education Industry, Extremism, Funding, Privatization, Religion, Separation of church and state, Texas, Vouchers

Ohio: Laws Advance to Protect Voucher Schools While Punishing Public Schools

By dianeravitch

December 18, 2024 //

David Pepper blasts the Republican legislators in Ohio for relieving private voucher schools of any burdens associated with transparency and accountability, while simultaneously threatening to close the public schools with the lowest test scores every year.

He writes about the dangerous shenanigans of the gang in the Legislature that hates public schools:

So the bill that impressed me was an attempt to do something about this growing black hole.

Specifically, the bill would have:

2) required that private schools receiving vouchers administer the same standardized tests that public school students take, allowing an apples to apples comparison of the private school’s performance;

1) required that private schools receiving vouchers provide an annual report on how they are spending the public dollars they receive (and post that report on-line);

3) required that schools provide data on the income of students/families that receive vouchers along with other scholarships. (In states like Ohio, where they have removed all income limitations on vouchers recipients, the vast majority of voucher recipients were already attending, and could already afford, the private school they now use the voucher to pay for).

Again, these would be the bare minimum of safeguards for this out-of-control approach.

Which is, of course, exactly why the provisions were ultimately stripped out of the bill that ultimately passed the House Education Committee (where the original bill had been submitted).

Note: One of the points made by private school advocates was that the tests used to measure public school outcomes were not a good measure of the work they did.

So as the billions flow to private schools through vouchers, we taxpayers still don’t know how the funds are actually being spent. And we still don’t have an apples-to-apples comparison to see if all this unaccountable money is actually leading to improved or worse education results. (Other data show the answer is “worse”).

But for Public Schools…Shut them Down

So that’s the treatment of private schools receiving public dollars via vouchers.

But wouldn’t you know it? For Ohio’s publicschools, constantly the target of attack and criticism, we see the exact opposite approach.

Rushing through the current “lame duck” Ohio legislative session is a brand new bill that takes seriously the same standardized tests the voucher-funded private schools convinced lawmakers they need not take (remember, they testified it’s not a good measure of their work). So seriously, the new bill proposes that all Ohio public school buildings that fall in the bottom five and 10 percent of two measures (both determined by standardized tests) for three years be shut down.

Under the bill, local school boards would be forced either “to fire its principal and majority of staff or turn over operations to a private entity, charter, or another district.”

Public school advocates have pointed out many of the flaws of this approach, including that many of the entities that would “take over” these schools have no experience providing K-12 education at all. They’ve also pointed out that this approach bears similarities to the failed top-down approach from a 2015 bill which created Academic Distress Commissions for struggling districts. After stripping away local control, the Commissions did not generate improvements, and the approach was ultimately repealed.

But bigger picture, of course, is the differential treatment of the two systems: One type of publicly funded Ohio schools doesn’t have to provide even the bare minimum of accountability and transparency, while the other set would face turmoil and even shutdowns for failing to meet certain criteria not applied to the first group.

It’s yet another blatant tipping of the scales towards privatizing public education.

Take Action

They are trying to rush this bill through the Ohio Senate’s Education Committee tomorrow. Here are steps you can take to stop it:

Tell Committee Chair Andrew Brenner NOT TO PASS the school closure bill:
- Tel: 614-466-8086
- Email: Brenner@OhioSenate.gov
- Twitter: https://x.com/BrennerForOhio
Tell your state senator to vote NO on SB 295 and vote NO on ANY bill that contains school closure language
- Type your address here to find your state senator

Contact your State Rep. Tell them the Ohio Senate is trying to pass a massive new school closure bill (SB 295) without any input from the House. Ask them, “Shouldn’t the House get a say on this issue??”
- Find your state rep by typing your address below this map
WHAT TO SAY:
- SB 295 would remove local control from elected school board members and parents
- The state should not be making big, closed-door decisions with little to no community involvement.
- Our students deserve safe, equitable, fully-resourced, engaging schools in their own area! In most cases, closing local schools is bad for our communities and bad for Ohio. In ALL cases, parents and students should be heavily involved in the decision-making processes!
FOR MORE INFORMATION:

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Education Industry, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Funding, Inequity, Ohio, Privatization, Religion, Separation of church and state, Standardized Testing, Vouchers

Jan Resseger: How Privatization Of Public Services Undermines Democracy

By dianeravitch

December 16, 2024 //

Jan Resseger lives in Ohio. Before retiring, Jan staffed advocacy and programming to support public education justice in the national setting of the United Church of Christ—working to improve the public schools that serve 50 million of our children; reduce standardized testing; ensure attention to vast opportunity gaps; advocate for schools that welcome all children; and speak for the public role of public education. Jan chaired the National Council of Churches Committee on Public Education for a dozen of those years.

Jan recently wrote this post for the National Center on Education Policy at the University of Colorado.

She writes:

I suppose many of us think about the classes we wish we had signed up for in college. Right now, as somebody who believes public schools are among our nation’s most important and most threatened public institutions, I wish that in addition to enrolling in The Philosophy of Education, I had also taken a class in political philosophy—or at least Political Science 101. How have groups like the Heritage Foundation, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, Betsy DeVos’s American Federation of Children and their proxies like Moms for Liberty managed to discredit public schooling and at the same time spawn an explosion of vouchers, which, according to the editors of last year’s excellent analysis, The School Voucher Illusion: Exposing the Pretense of Equity, are failing to serve our society’s poorest children even as they are destroying the institution of public schooling?

Here are that book’s conclusions: “As currently structured, voucher policies in the United States are unlikely to help the students they claim to support. Instead, these policies have often served as a facade for the far less popular reality of funding relatively advantaged (and largely White) families, many of whom already attended—or would attend—private schools without subsidies. Although vouchers are presented as helping parents choose schools, often the arrangements permit the private schools to do the choosing… Advocacy that began with a focus on equity must not become a justification for increasing inequity. Today’s voucher policies have, by design, created growing financial commitments of taxpayer money to serve a constituency of the relatively advantaged that is redefining their subsidies as rights—often in jurisdictions where neighborhood public schools do not have the resources they need.” (The School Voucher Illusion: Exposing the Pretense of Equity, p. 290)

As I watch the wave of school privatization washing across conservative states and read about universal school choice as one of the priorities of presidential candidate Donald Trump as well as a goal of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, I find myself wishing I had a better grasp of how our society has gone off the rails. I wonder what I would have learned about the difference between democracy and extreme individualism in that political theory class I missed, and I find myself trying to catch up by reading—for example—on the difference between a society defined by individualist consumerism and a society defined by citizenship.

Back in 1984, the late political theorist Benjamin Barber published Strong Democracy, a book defining the principles our federal and state constitutions and laws are presumed to protect: “Strong democracy … rests on the idea of a self-governing community of citizens who are united less by homogeneous interests than by civic education and who are made capable of common purpose and mutual action by virtue of their civic attitudes and participatory institutions rather than their altruism or their good nature. Strong democracy is consonant with—indeed depends upon—the politics of conflict, the sociology of pluralism, and the separation of private and public realms of action… The theory of strong democracy… envisions… politics as… the way that human beings with variable but malleable natures and with competing but overlapping interests can contrive to live together communally not only to their mutual advantage but also to the advantage of their mutuality… It seeks to create a public language that will help reformulate private interests in terms susceptible to public accommodation… and it aims at understanding individuals not as abstract persons but as citizens, so that commonality and equality rather than separateness are the defining traits of human society.” (Strong Democracy, pp 117-119)

In that same book, Barber describes the consumer as a representative of extreme individualism—the opposite of the public citizen: “The modern consumer is the… last in a long train of models that depict man as a greedy, self-interested, acquisitive survivor who is capable nonetheless of the most self-denying deferrals of gratification for the sake of ultimate material satisfaction. The consumer is a creature of great reason devoted to small ends… He uses the gift of choice to multiply his options in and to transform the material conditions of the world, but never to transform himself or to create a world of mutuality with his fellow humans.” (Strong Democracy, p. 22)

Two decades later, Barber published Consumed, in which he explores in far more detail the danger of a society defined by consumerism rather than strong democracy. As his case study he contrasts parent-consumers who prioritize personal choice to shape their children’s education and parent-citizens: “Through vouchers we are able as individuals, through private choosing, to shape institutions and policies that are useful to our own interests but corrupting to the public goods that give private choosing its meaning. I want a school system where my kid gets the very best; you want a school system where your kid is not slowed down by those less gifted or less adequately prepared; she wants a school system where children whose ‘disadvantaged backgrounds’ (often kids of color) won’t stand in the way of her daughter’s learning; he (a person of color) wants a school system where he has the maximum choice to move his kid out of ‘failing schools’ and into successful ones. What do we get? The incomplete satisfaction of those private wants through a fragmented system in which individuals secede from the public realm, undermining the public system to which we can subscribe in common. Of course no one really wants a country defined by deep educational injustice and the surrender of a public and civic pedagogy whose absence will ultimately impact even our own private choices… Yet aggregating our private choices as educational consumers in fact yields an inegalitarian and highly segmented society in which the least advantaged are further disadvantaged as the wealthy retreat ever further from the public sector. As citizens, we would never consciously select such an outcome, but in practice what is good for ‘me,’ the educational consumer, turns out to be a disaster for ‘us’ as citizens and civic educators—and thus for me the denizen of an American commons (or what’s left of it).” (Consumed, p. 132)

Barber concludes: “It is the peculiar toxicity of privatization ideology that it rationalizes corrosive private choosing as a surrogate for the public good. It enthuses about consumers as the new citizens who can do more with their dollars… than they ever did with their votes. It associates the privileged market sector with liberty as private choice while it condemns democratic government as coercive.” (Consumed, p. 143) “The consumer’s republic is quite simply an oxymoron… Public liberty demands public institutions that permit citizens to address the public consequences of private market choices… Asking what “I want’ and asking what ‘we as a community to which I belong need’ are two different questions, though neither is altruistic and both involve ‘my’ interests: the first is ideally answered by the market; the second must be answered by democratic politics.” “Citizens cannot be understood as mere consumers because individual desire is not the same thing as common ground and public goods are always something more than an aggregation of private wants…. (W)hat is public cannot be determined by consulting or aggregating private desires.” (Consumed, p. 126)

So that is today’s lesson from the political philosophy class I was never able to fit into my schedule in college: “Freedom is not just about standing alone and saying no. As a usable ideal, it turns out to be a public rather than a private notion… (N)owadays, the idea that only private persons are free, and that only personal choices of the kind consumers make count as autonomous, turns out to be an assault not on tyranny but on democracy. It challenges not the illegitimate power by which tyrants once ruled us but the legitimate power by which we try to rule ourselves in common. Where once this notion of liberty challenged corrupt power, today it undermines legitimate power… It forgets the very meaning of the social contract, a covenant in which individuals agree to give up unsecured private liberty in exchange for the blessings of public liberty and common security.” (Consumed, pp.119-123)

Categories Bigotry, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Citizenship, Democracy, Deregulation, Education Reform, Ethics, Inequity, Privatization, Vouchers

Jan Resseger: Voucher Leader in Ohio Legislature Says Public Schools Cost Too Much