Chalkbeat reports the likelihood of a legal challenge to any voucher bill in Tennessee if State Senate passes one as House did yesterday in a contentious proceeding.
Read the details here.
Archives for category: Vouchers
The Tennessee House of Representatives passed a hotly debated voucher bill by one vote after the deciding vote, Jason Zachary of Knoxville, was promised that his district would not get vouchers.
Isn’t it a curious commentary on the appeal of vouchers that the issue was decided by pledging that the decider would NOT get them? Vouchers in this bill would be limited to Nashville and Shelby County (Memphis). Just fine for black children, but not for Rep. Zachary’s District.
Thanks, Jason Zachary, for your profile in cowardice. If you thought it was a great idea, why not include Knoxville?
For cowardice, I place Rep. Jason Zachary on this blog’s Wall of Shame, along with the rest of his shameless and craven Republican colleagues who voted to undermine public schools in Nashville and Shelby County, endorsing a program known to harm children’s academic achievement.
Mercedes Schneider writes that the legislature in Tennessee is coming closer to passing voucher legislation that would provide $7,300 per pupil to attend a private or religious school.
Governor Bill Lee is making this happen because he found nearly $1 million in prizes that he could hand out to undecided legislators.
The students eligible to get a voucher would be in Nashville or Shelby County (Memphis).
Among 57 private schools in Nashville, only 17 would accept students with a voucher of $7,300, and of course the decision belongs to the school, not the family or the students.
If the schools didn’t like the students they accepted, they can toss them out.
Schneider notes:
The Tennessee voucher saga continues to unfold, but already it holds the same promise as does walking through a field of cow patties after dark in your best shoes.
Jim Scheurich is a professor at Indiana University and a public education activist. He writes here about how School Choice is intended to destroy community.
Folks, the philosophy that charter and innovation schools are built on is that your children’s school should be individualized parental choice. This means parents individually search across the Indy area as to where to send their children, which often means leaving their neighborhood community. Each family or individual parent is thus on her, his, or their own and not engaged with their neighborhood community. Also, each family or individual parent is pitted against or in competition with other similar families and parents for the so-called “better” schools.
This individualistic orientation of charters and innovation schools undermines neighborhood communities and even the possibility of neighborhood communities. Undermining neighborhood communities, according to sociological research, increases violence, including murder. Other research shows that building community decreases violence, including murder.
This, therefore, means that charter and innovation schools are likely one of the causes of our high murder rate in Indianapolis as the individualized school choice model is broadly undermining neighborhood communities across our city.
Of course, building community in low income areas is not easy, but not impossible. However, many such communities have created positive community spaces. Given the difficulty of creating such communities, we certainly do not need more policies, like charter and innovation schools, that are threats to community and community building.
If you study the neoliberal political and economic “philosophy” behind the choice school movement, you will find a strong focus on individualism over community. If you want to understand this movement, which is driving the creation of individualistic “choice” schools, read Democracy in chains by Nancy MacLean, a Duke historian, and then read the award winningDark money by Jane Mayer, which analyzes who the Koch brothers are as they are primary supporters of neoliberalism. Indeed, overwhelmingly, the financial supporters of neoliberalism, the people behind the curtain, the people funding Stand for Children and the Mind Trust, are conservative to rightwing billionaires.
If you don’t believe me or think I am just some conspiracy nut, I dare you to read Democracy in chainsby the highly respected Duke historian, Nancy MacLean. I dare you.
My point is that charter and innovation schools help destroy community, which according to sociological research can lead to increased violence.
Jim Scheurich, Indianapolis Public Schools Community Coalition, a multi-racial, multi-class, citywide group of Indianapolis citizens working to reverse the takeover of our school district by those funded by white, conservative or rightwing, billionaire neoliberals. Also, an activist professor of Urban Education Studies at Indiana University – Indianapolis
A coalition of civil rights and parent groups spoke out against Tennessee Governor Bill Lee’s proposal to create a voucher program, Chalkbeat reports.
The Tennessee Educational Equity Coalition, which champions policies that address disparities in education, said Lee’s plan to create education savings accounts would instead end up helping middle-class families. The accounts are a new kind of voucher that give families taxpayer money to pay for private school or other private education services.
The group charged that the proposed plan would exclude and discriminate against some students and questioned the state’s ability to measure the program’s success if participants are not required to take the same state assessments as Tennessee’s public school students.
Calling voucher bills moving through the legislature “a step backwards” for Tennessee, the coalition urged the governor to instead invest more money in proven school improvement strategies like Shelby County Schools’ Innovation Zone, which gives additional resources and pays for extended school days to turn around low-performing schools….
The coalition’s diverse members include the Tennessee chapter of the NAACP, the YWCA, the National Civil Rights Museum, and education funds, foundations, or urban leagues in Memphis, Nashville, Knoxville, and Chattanooga.
“Vouchers take critical resources away from our neighborhood public schools, the very schools that are attended by the vast majority of African-American students,” the NAACP said in a separate statement. “Furthermore, private and parochial schools are not required to observe federal nondiscrimination laws, even if they receive federal funds through voucher programs.”
Governor Lee met with leaders from the urban districts that would be affected by vouchers, and they gave him an earful.
“If this voucher bill passes, the private schools will pick the best of the best, and we will become a district of the academically and behaviorally challenged,” said Stephanie Love, a board member with Shelby County Schools in Memphis, recounting her message to the governor as she left the meeting.
In all, more than 20 board members and four superintendents from Memphis, Nashville, Knoxville, Chattanooga, and Jackson met with the governor, according to Tammy Grissom, executive director of the Tennessee School Board Association, which organized the gathering….
Meanwhile, the administration revised its proposed budget to move the $25 million previously allocated for the controversial program to go instead to fighting hepatitis C in state prisons. Lee’s finance commissioner, Stuart McWhorter, said the funding shift is not a sign of trouble for the governor’s education plan.
Florida has the worst education policies of any state in the nation, and it is about to get even more destructive, more ignorant, more backward.
Read this alarming article and remember that Betsy DeVos points to Florida as a model.
A model, yes. A model of how religious extremists, rightwing ideologues, and uneducated political hacks can destroy public education, drive away teachers, and fund “schools” that indoctrinate students in religious dogma.
The post was written by Kathleen Oropeza Parent Activist in Orlando.
Jeb Bush started the descent into the swamp of ignorance. Now the torch is carried by Ron DeSantis, who wants to arm teachers, expand the state’s voucher programs to include middle-class families with income up to $100,000 a year, reduce the power of local school boards so they can’t block new charter schools, and undercut public schools in every way their little minds can imagine.
Oropeza writes:
“Pay attention, because what happens in Florida usually shows up in the thirty or so other states under GOP control.
“Step one for DeSantis was to stock the State Supreme Court with three conservative judges. Next, DeSantis charged the Board of Education with appointing Richard Corcoran as State Commissioner of Education. As the immediate past Speaker of the Florida House, Corcoran was the architect of the “school choice” expansions logrolled into multi-subject, opaque omnibus bills that became law over the past several sessions.
“DeSantis, a known Trump ally, made it clear in his proposed education visionto legislators before the the start of the 2019 session that they should “send me a bill” for a new private school tax-funded voucher program. The DeSantis voucher became SB 7070/HB 7075, the radical Family Empowerment Scholarship Program. Funded through the Florida Education Finance Program from property taxes, this is a dangerous co-mingling of the already thin dollars designated for Florida’s district public schools.
“In a state that prizes high-stakes accountability for its public-school students, these vouchers go to unregulated private schools that maintain their right to discriminate against certain students, charge more than the voucher for tuition, teach extreme curriculums, and are not required to ensure student safety or hire certified teachers. This dramatic expansion of private religious school vouchers, once meant for low-income recipients, is morphing into a middle-class entitlement program for families of four making close to $100,000 a year….
”On teacher pay, DeSantis wants to double down on the awful policy of providing bonuses instead of raises via SB7070. Teacher pay in Florida ranks 45th in the nation: $47,858 on average. The state is struggling with a massive teacher shortage projected by the Florida Department of Education to reach 10,000 vacancies by the start of next school year.”
As Oropeza points out, no one ever bought a home with a one-time bonus (except on Wall Street).
”DeSantis supporter Representative Kim Daniels continues to insert religioninto public schools this session by sponsoring HB 195. This is model legislation from ALEC-like Christian Nationalist Project Blitz. Daniels, a Democrat, passed a 2018 law requiring “In God We Trust” to be displayed in public schools. This year Daniels is pushing Blitz legislation requiring public high schools to offer a religion class that teaches only Christianity.”
Another bill allows schools to withdraw any book that is “morally offensive,” such as Frank McCourt’s “Angela’s Ashes.” Expect to see demands to remove a lot of “morally offensive” classics by authors such as John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, Harper Lee, and Mark Twain.
“Another bill, HB 330 by Senator Dennis Baxley, the original sponsor of Florida’s Stand Your Ground law, seeks to revise curriculum standards and force public schools to teach “science” theories such as creationism and alternate views to subjects such as climate change.”
Florida is indeed a model: a model of kakistocracy.
Look it up.
I got an e-mail recently from Senator Bernie Sanders’s education advisor. She said she reads the blog and wondered if we could talk. I said sure but I was not ready to endorse anyone in the Democratic primaries.
I asked for and got her permission to share that this conversation occurred. As everyone knows who ever gave me confidential information, I never write or speak about what I was told in confidence.
We set a date to speak on the phone since I am in New York and she is in D.C.
She called and conferenced in the campaign’s chief of staff.
Here is what happened.
I told them that I was upset that Democrats talk about pre-K and college costs—important but safe topics—and skip K-12, as though it doesn’t exist. Every poll I get from Democrats asks me which issues matter most but doesn’t mention K-12.
I expressed my hope that Bernie would recognize that charter schools are privately managed (in 2016, he said in a town hall that he supports “public charter schools but not private charter schools). No matter what they call themselves, they are not “public” schools. They are all privately managed. I recounted for them the sources of financial support for charters: Wall Street, hedge fund managers, billionaires, the DeVos family, the Waltons, Bill Gates, Eli Broad, ALEC, and of course, the federal government, which gave $440 million to charters this year, one-third of which will never open or close soon after opening. (See “Asleep At the Wheel: How Athens Federal Charter Schools Program Recklessly Takes Taxpayers and Students for a Ride,” Network for Public Education).
I proposed a way to encourage states to increase funding for teachers’ salaries. I won’t reveal it now. I think it is an amazingly innovative concept that offers money to states without mandates but assures that the end result would be significant investment by states in teacher compensation, across the board, untethered to test scores.
I recommended a repeal of the annual testing in grades 3-8, a leftover of George W. Bush’s failed No Child Left Behind. I pointed out to them that all the Democrats on the Education Committee in the Senate had voted for the Murphy Amendment (sponsored by Senator Chris Murphy of Ct), which would have preserved all the original punishments of NCLB but which was fortunately voted down by Republicans. I suggested that grade span testing is common in other developed countries, I.e., once in elementary school, once in middle school, once in high school.
We had a lively conversation. Our values are closely aligned.
They are in it to win it. I will watch to see if Bernie moves forward with a progressive K-12 plan. No one else has.
My options are open. My priorities are clear.
Let’s draw a line in the sand. We will not support any candidate for the Democratic nomination unless he or she comes out with strong policy proposals that strengthen public schools, protect the civil rights of all students, curb federal overreach into curriculum and assessment and teacher evaluation, and oppose DeVos-style privatization (vouchers, charters, cybercharters, for-profit charters, home schooling, for-profit higher education).
Silence is not a policy.
Democrats support public schools.
Governor Bill Lee has proposed a voucher program. Teachers and parents are outraged. —but not enough of them.
When the bill moved from the House to the Senate, the number of vouchers were doubled to 30,000.
The money for vouchers will be subtracted from public schools, which educate 90% of the children of Tennessee. Expect more segregation, more bigotry, more children taught by uncertified teachers, more state-sponsored ignorance of science and history. Expect budget cuts in public schools, larger classes, no money for higher salaries, layoffs for teachers, school nurses, librarians, counselors, the arts.
Betsy DeVos visited Tennessee last week to promote vouchers, and she flatly lied about Florida’s test scores, which are mediocre. She claimed that achievement in Florida had gone up because of the $3 billion that the state spends each year on vouchers and charters. Not true. Surely she is well aware of the voucher studies in D.C., Milwaukee, Ohio, Louisiana, and Indiana showing that students who use vouchers do no better or much worse in school than their peers who remain in public schools.
Florida’s performance on NAEP is mediocre, except for fourth grade, where scores are artificially inflated by the state policy of holding back low-scoring third graders.
Quote of the day:
“‘We don’t have the luxury of worrying about a handful of children,” said Knox County teacher Lauren Hobson, speaking to another crowd assembled by the Tennessee Democratic Party. “We have to worry about the 90% of the children across the country left in schools with us.”
“Hobson and other critics believe underfunding is the real battle in public schools.
“‘Our legislators actually have a constitutional duty in Tennessee to maintain and support a public education,” she said. “They have no duty to support private education.’”
Read that last line again. She is right. Republican legislators in Tennessee, Florida, Indiana, and other states are ignoring their constitutional duty “to maintain and support public education,” not private schools.
Democracy is under attack, not only in D.C., but in the state capitols.
To understand just how serious this attack is, how insidious it is, how well-funded it is, please open the link.
This new USA Today/Arizona Republic/Center for Public Integrity in-depth investigation is a bombshell report on the thousands of “copy-and-paste bills” introduced and passed in state legislatures which purport to represent local interests but instead further a corporate or industry agenda. Among the goals: passing ESA Vouchers that siphon public funds from public education and redirect them to private, religious and home schooling.
ALEC and corporate America are churning out legislation that is introduced in your state under false pretenses as “reform.” Every one of these bills is meant to protect corporations and profiteers, whether in health care or any other industry.
You may have noticed a sudden mushrooming of voucher legislation in state after state. It was not written by your legislators. It was written by the rightwing corporate funded American Legislative Exchange Council. ALEC.
Not only is ALEC funded by corporations, it is funded by the DeVos family and the Koch brothers.
Arizona SOS beat them last fall by fighting for a referendum on vouchers. ALEC and the Koch brothers lost 65-35. The corporate mobsters hate refunds. They prefer to buy legislators, which is easier and cheaper.
There is quite a lot of fascinating material about the hoaxing of the public.
Here is the education piece:
“For Susan Edwards, it seemed like a godsend when Arizona lawmakers introduced a bill to create a new kind of school voucher for students with disabilities.
“With the money – funded by dollars taken from a recipient’s local district school – the mother of two children on the autism spectrum could send her kids to a private school where they would receive specialized attention they wouldn’t get elsewhere.
“With a sympathetic group of students as the face of the legislation, Democrats and Republicans rallied behind the 2011 bill which borrowed language from the Goldwater Institute, ALEC, and American Federation for Children, the pro-school choice group founded by U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos.
“Edwards’ opinion of the program, however, changed drastically as legislators later introduced bill after bill to give vouchers to more students, culminating in lawmakers approving them for all students.
“None of those bills, however, guaranteed Edwards’ sons and others with disabilities could keep their vouchers as more students were added. She didn’t know it at the time, but lawmakers were drawing their ideas from model legislation.
“Edwards said she realized in retrospect that students with disabilities were used as a Trojan horse to put on the legislative agenda a fringe idea that was part of a much bigger campaign. In the years that followed, 19 other states debated 93 nearly identical proposals based on model legislation. They became law in Florida, Mississippi, Nevada, North Carolina and Tennessee.
“Every single, little expansion, if you look at who’s behind it, it is the people that want to get that door kicked open for private religious education,” Edwards said. ”All we (families with disabled students) are was the way for them to crack open the door.”
“Riches, Goldwater’s CEO, said starting the Empowerment Scholarship Account voucher program with a small group of students and expanding it was the best approach.
“When you are talking about a big idea, a new idea, usually the best way of approaching it is to wade into it and demonstrate it can work on a smaller level and then grow it from there,” Riches said.
“The groups behind Arizona’s move toward universal vouchers, however, were shown in indisputable terms that the public opposed their ideas.
“On Election Day 2018, Arizona voters rejected universal vouchers by a 65-35 margin.
“It was only the most recent example of model legislation that didn’t reflect the will of voters, USA TODAY/Arizona Republic found.
“Model-legislation factories have increasingly proposed what are known as “preemption” bills. These laws, in effect, allow state legislators to dictate to city councils and county governing boards what they can and cannot do within their jurisdiction—including preventing them from raising the minimum wage, banning plastic grocery bags, and destroying guns.
“USA TODAY’s algorithm found more than 100 such bills had been introduced on an expanding array of topics.
“Kansas stopped local efforts to require restaurants to list calories on their menus.
“Arizona and New Hampshire prevented local regulations on home rentals. Airbnb has lobbied against home-sharing restrictions, often with the Goldwater Institute’s assistance.
“One model pushed by ALEC and the Goldwater Institute prohibits local jurisdictions from creating occupational licensing requirements. It reflects conservatives’ and libertarians’ belief that job licensing stifles competition and hurts the economy, and should only be required when it involves health and safety.”
At least 20 states have enacted voucher legislation, most using the ALEC model. Only Arizona held a referendum, which SOS Arizona fought for and handily defeated despite being outspent by the Koch and DeVos forces.
!
It is illegal for teachers to strike in Mississippi but they are considering a strike anyway.
Legislators offered them a paltry $1,500 raise while setting aside $2 million for vouchers.
The eyes of the nation are on Mississippi.
Strike!
The legislators won’t pay you any mind unless you put on your red T-shirt, make a sign, and gather at the State Capitol.
Don’t agonize, organize!
Strike!
Diane Ravitch's blog 