Archives for category: Vouchers

Do you remember that the 1983 report “A Nation at Risk” warned about the terrible condition of America’s public schools, setting off the frenzy of “reform” that has now fermented into high-stakes testing, privatization, profiteering, closing schools, firing teachers and principals, and enriching testing companies?

Here is a description of the composition of the Commission that wrote the report:

The commission included 12 administrators, 1 businessperson, 1 chemist, 1 physicist, 1 politician, 1 conservative activist, and 1 teacher. … Just one practicing teacher and not a single academic expert on education. It should come as no surprise that a commission dominated by administrators found that the problems of U.S. schools were mainly caused by lazy students and unaccountable teachers. Administrative incompetence was not on the agenda. Nor were poverty, inequality, and racial discrimination.

Perhaps the most famous line in the report was this one:

If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.

A reader of this blog who goes by the tag “Ohio Algebra Teacher” offered a new version of that famous line:

If a foreign country had inflicted upon our public education system what Ed Reform plutocrats and their toadying political sycophants have implemented upon it, we would have considered it an act of war.

I learned from Bill Phillis’s posts about a great new organization that has just been launched in Ohio.

If you live in Ohio, join it.

The organization, called Public Education Partners, was inspired by Jan Resseger’s post: https://janresseger.wordpress.com/2016/07/05/my-public-education-platform/

Every candidate running for public office, whether school board, state legislature, the governorship, or Congress should be asked to take a stand: Do you support this platform?

Preamble to PEP’s Public Education Platform

The Ohio Constitution (Article VI, sections 2 and 3) requires the state to secure a thorough and efficient system of common schools and provide for the organization, administration and control of the system. School district boards of education have the constitutional and statutory responsibility to administer the educational program. Boards of education have the fiduciary duty to ensure the educational needs of all resident students are met in an equitable and adequate manner.

The state’s first obligation is to ensure that a thorough and efficient system is established and maintained. The state has no right under the Ohio constitution to fund alternative educational programs that diminish moral and financial support from the common school system. Ohio’s system of school was declared unconstitutional more than two decades ago, yet since that time $11 billion have been drained from the public school system for publicly- funded, privately-operated charter schools. This egregious flaw in state policy must be addressed.

Jan Resseger of Cleveland Heights has aptly defined state and local responsibility for education as follows:

A comprehensive system of public education that serves all children and is democratically governed, publicly funded, universally accessible, and accountable to the public is central to the common good.

The education platform premised on the constitutional responsibility of the state of Ohio as stated in the preamble is:

A comprehensive system of public education that serves all children and is democratically governed, publicly funded, universally accessible, and accountable to the public, is central to the common good.
~Jan Resseger

Ohio Public Education Platform

This education platform is premised on the constitutional responsibility of the state of Ohio:

 Provide adequate and equitable funding to Ohio school districts to guarantee a comparable opportunity to learn for ALL children. This includes a quality early childhood education, qualified teachers, a rich curriculum that will prepare students for college, work and community, and equitable instructional resources. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1WLdVez25ZjDzzd2irSUwUggj-GflNQuO/view?usp=sharing

 Respect local control of public schools run by elected school boards. There are different needs for different schools of different sizes, and each local school board knows what its students, families, and community values. http://www.nvasb.org/assets/why_school_boards.pdf

 Reject the school privatization agenda, which includes state takeovers, charter schools, voucher schemes, and high-stakes testing. The school privatization agenda has proven to be ineffective at bringing efficiency and cost savings to our schools. https://www.alecexposed.org/wiki/Privatizing_Public_Education,_Higher_Ed_Policy,_and_T eachers

 Do away with the state takeovers of school districts imposed in House Bill 70. State takeovers of school districts (HB 70), followed by the appointment of CEOs with power to override the decisions of elected school boards and nullify union contracts, is undemocratic, unaccountable, and without checks and balances. http://www.reclaimourschools.org/sites/default/files/state-takeover-factsheet-3.pdf

 Promote a moratorium on the authorization of new charter schools while gradually removing existing charters, which take funding and other valuable resources from public school districts. Charter schools remove funds and other resources from public school districts and need to be phased out. For-profit charter schools should be eliminated – tax dollars should never be transferred into private profits. https://knowyourcharter.com/

 Eliminate vouchers and tuition tax credit programs. Voucher schemes take desperately needed dollars out of education budgets and undermine the protection of religious liberty as defined by the First Amendment. https://educationvotes.nea.org/2017/02/08/5-names- politicians-use-sell-private-school-voucher-schemes-parents/

 Encourage wraparound community learning centers that bring social and health services into Ohio school buildings. These wraparound services ensure that the public schools are the center of the neighborhood, and they include health, dental, and mental health clinics, after school programs, and parent support programs. Cincinnati Public Schools has a very successful program: https://www.cps-k12.org/community/clc

 End the test-and-punish philosophy, and replace it with an ideology of school investment and improvement. The tests have narrowed the curriculum to the tested subjects. If national standardized testing is to continue, testing should be limited to the federal minimum guidelines, and there should be no state standardized tests beyond those mandated by ESSA. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer- sheet/wp/2017/01/06/how-testing-practices-have-to-change-in-u-s-public- schools/?utm_term=.45d28f77dcb0

 Remove high stakes mandates from schools, and abolish the practice of punishing schools, teachers, families, and students for arbitrary test scores. Do away with mandatory retention attached to the 3rd Grade Reading Guarantee and high school end-of-course state tests. If parents choose to opt their children out of testing, no one should be penalized. http://www.fairtest.org/sites/default/files/Dangerous-Consequences-of-high-stakes- tests.pdf

 Restore respect for well-trained, certified teachers, and return educator evaluation systems to locally elected school boards. Dismiss Teach for America, which is funded by the Eli Broad Foundation and the Walton Family Foundation. https://progressive.org/public-school-shakedown/went-wrong-teach-america/

Eliminate the practice of judging teachers by their students’ scores – research has proven it unreliable. http://www.fairtest.org/sites/default/files/TeacherEvaluationFactSheetRevisionJanuary201 6.pdf

Remember that Arne Duncan said that Hurricane Katrina was “the best thing that ever happened to New Orleans” because it made it possible to wipe out public schools, fire all the teachers, eliminate the union, and replace them all with charter school?

Well, the Secretary of Education Julia Kelleher in Puerto Rico is grateful for the opportunity that Hurricane Maria has given her to do the same to the public schools there.

Forget the deaths of at least 4,000 people. Think of charter schools and vouchers!

Here she is in an interview.

She’s in the middle of closing 264 schools and working with Betsy Devos on vouchers.

Video of her here: https://twitter.com/GoHedgeClippers/status/1024336534965825536

Full text from full video: https://www.facebook.com/David-Begnaud-108679513654/

David Begnaud 24:07
And I’ll preface the question with this. When I first met Miss Keleher, her at the convention center we were sitting off in a cornerdidn’t actually know who she was, until about 10 minutes before I found out and I thought, Oh, well, she’d be a good person to talk to how are the schools to doing and this was in like, the first few days after the storm. And we sat down and you said to me, I’ll never forget “hurricane Maria Maybe the best thing that’s happened to this island” Do you still feel that way

Julia Keleher 24:37
I think the fact that I have $500 million to improve the quality of a kids academic experience and learning environment, I think that I have four times as much money as I would have to be able to fix the physical plant in which they go to school plus, plus the option to access more, I think that’s a tremendous opportunity that no one wanted the storm, but I’m I’m not going to miss spend, pardon the pun, the the opportunity that I have to, to to redirect these things that would have never been available to Puerto Rico, I would have been short $300 million, I wouldn’t be able to do the things that we’re going to be able to do for teachers and for kids.

Jan Resseger reviews the AFT report on “A Decade of Neglect,“ a decade in which states cut funding for public schools and diverted the shrinking pie to charters and vouchers. This state-by-state attack on public schools is the match that ignited the teachers’ strikes and may ignite even more in the future. Teachers will be silent no more. They will vote in massive numbers in November for those who support public schools. Many teachers are running for state legislative offices. Good luck to them!

The new report from the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), A Decade of Neglect, is one of the most lucid explanations I’ve read about the deplorable fiscal conditions for public schools across the states. It explains the precipitous drop in school funding caused by the Great Recession, temporarily ameliorated in 2009 by an infusion of funds from the federal stimulus (a financial boost that disappeared after a couple of years), compounded by tax cutting and austerity budgeting across many states, and further compounded by schemes to drain education dollars to privatized charter and voucher programs all out of the same budget.

The report delineates the conditions tangled together over the decade: “While some states are better off than most, in states where spending on education was less in 2016 than it was before the recession, our public schools remain nearly $19 billion short of the annual funding they received in 2008, after adjusting for changes in the consumer price index… The recession ran from December 2007 through June 2009 and prompted a crisis setting off a chain of actions that resulted in significant budget cutting by our state governments. When the recession hit, it devastated state budgets. Job losses, lower wages, the crash in housing prices and the panic in the financial markets all worked to lower state tax revenues, while the demand for government services in the form of unemployment benefits, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, and housing and Medicaid assistance drove up expenditures. The Brookings Institution estimated that by the second quarter of 2009, income tax collections were 27 percent below their prior-year levels, and total state taxes were 17 percent lower… The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s annual report of education indicators recently found that U.S. spending on elementary and high school education declined more than 4 percent from 2010-2014…. Over this same period, education spending on average, rose 5 percent per student across the 35 countries in the OECD.”

Many states also adopted an ideology promising that tax cuts would bring the economy back. Sam Brownback’s Kansas experiment in supply side economics, however, exemplifies the failure to confirm these hopes. In Kansas the economy didn’t improve and state revenues collapsed. Only in the past two years has the legislature there raised taxes—beginning an effort to undo the damage. Overall, according to AFT’s report: “In 2016, 25 states were still providing less funding for K-12 schools than before the recession, after adjusting for inflation… Eighteen of the 25 states that provided less funding for k-12 education reduced their tax effort between 2008 and 2015.” The eight states that cut taxes most deeply were: Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Virginia. And, “In 38 states, the average teacher salary in 2018 is lower than it was in 2009 in real terms… According to the Economic Policy Institute, teacher pay fell by $30 per week from 1996-2015, while pay for other college graduates increased by $124. The gap between teachers and other college graduates has continued to widen and deep cuts in school funding leave states unable to invest in their state’s teacher workforce… In 35 states, between 2008 and 2016, the ratio of students to teachers grew.”

Here is an example of the result: “(W)hile some states are doing better than others, no state is really doing well enough. California is a leader on many of the measures used in this report. But there are less than one tenth the number of school librarians as is recommended. Most school districts don’t have a nurse and there are only about a quarter of the recommended number of school counselors.”

Betsy DeVos and her husband Dick DeVos sponsored a referendum to change Michigan’s State Constitution in 2000 so that the state could fund vouchers for religious schools. Their referendum was overwhelmingly defeated, by 68-32%.

Now the rightwing is trying again, bypassing another referendum (which would be defeated) and sponsoring a law to achieve the same purpose.


ELC JOINS FIGHT TO MAINTAIN MICHIGAN’S CONSTITUTIONAL BAN AGAINST PUBLIC FUNDING OF PRIVATE SCHOOLS

Education Law Center filed an amicus curiae (“friend of the court”) brief earlier this month in a crucial case before the Michigan Court of Appeals challenging a law that would redirect public education funds to private schools. The challenged statute, which was found unconstitutional and blocked by the lower court, would divert $2.5 million a year from the State’s appropriation of public school funding to reimburse private schools for a wide array of expenses.

Several Michigan entities filed the lawsuit, Council of Organizations and Others for Education About Parochiaid (CAP) v. Michigan, alleging violations of state constitutional provisions prohibiting public aid to nonpublic schools and requiring a two-thirds majority vote of the Legislature to appropriate public funds for private purposes. The legal team representing the plaintiffs includes the ACLU of Michigan and the firm White Schneider.

After entering a preliminary injunction blocking the law, Court of Claims Judge Cynthia Stephens ruled in April 2018 that the statute violated the plain language of Article 8, § 2 of the Michigan Constitution. This constitutional provision, approved by voter referendum in 1970, prohibits the use of public funds to “directly or indirectly” support private schools. Judge Stephens found that the statute “effectuate[s] the direct payment of public funds to nonpublic schools” and “supports the employment of nonpublic school employees.” The State then appealed Judge Stephens’ ruling.

ELC’s amicus brief provides the appeals court with historical context demonstrating that Michigan voters intended to protect the funding of public education and improve the quality of their public school system when they approved the constitutional ban on public funds for private schools.

The amicus brief also highlights the persistent underfunding of Michigan’s public schools and the widening disparities in student performance, as demonstrated by the State’s own studies. Michigan fails to equitably allocate funding and resources to state public schools, with at-risk students, including economically disadvantaged students, English language learners, and students with disabilities, experiencing the most inequitable funding and the lowest academic outcomes.

The amicus brief argues that the challenged statute will exacerbate the underfunding of Michigan public schools by diverting already inadequate funding from public schools to reimburse private school expenses in some of the same categories in which public schools are struggling to meet basic requirements.

Other states have enacted similar laws authorizing “nonpublic school aid” to reimburse private schools for a wide variety of expenditures. In New Jersey, for example, the Legislature allocates over $110 million in public funds in the annual state budget to pay for textbooks, security, nurses and remedial programs in private and religious schools. New York recently enacted a law to reimburse private schools for the salaries of STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) teachers.

“Michigan’s public school funding is protected by the constitutional firewall between public tax dollars and private education,” said ELC Executive Director David Sciarra. “It is crucial that the courts not allow the diversion of any funds from Michigan’s chronically and severely underfunded public schools.”

ELC was represented as amicus pro bono by the law firms Paul Weiss and Salvatore Prescott & Porter. As the nation’s legal defense fund for education rights, ELC advocates for fair and adequate public education funding and opposes the use of public funds to pay for or support private schools.

Education Law Center Press Contact:
Sharon Krengel
Policy and Outreach Director
skrengel@edlawcenter.org
973-624-1815, x 24

Tom Ultican reviews here how school choice has devastated (DeVos-tated?) the public schools of Milwaukee.

Milwaukee is the city with public schools, charter schools, and voucher schools. It is also one of the lowest performing urban districts tested by NAEP.

He begins:

This past school year, Wisconsin taxpayers sent $250,000,000 to religious schools. Catholics received the largest slice, but protestants, evangelicals and Jews got their cuts. Wisconsin’s Department of Public Instruction (DPI) reveals that private Islamic schools took in $6,350,000. Of the 212 schools collecting voucher money, 197 were religious schools.

The Wisconsin voucher program was expanded before the 2014-2015 school year. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported, “Seventy-five percent of eligible students who applied for taxpayer-funded subsidies to attend private and religious schools this fall in the statewide voucher program already attend private schools, ….”

Money taken from the public schools attended by the vast majority of Milwaukee’s students is sent to private religious schools. Public schools must adjust for stranded costs while paying to serve a higher percentage of special education students because private schools won’t take them. Forcing public schools to increase class sizes, reduce offerings such as music and lay off staff.

The public schools have a disproportionate number of students with disabilities, because the charter schools and voucher schools don’t want them.

Ultican recounts the history of charters and vouchers in Milwaukee and Wisconsin. He reminds us that charter schools are NOT public schools. They are privately managed organizations draining money from public schools.

And he concludes:

In the Zelman v. Simmons-Harris case, the Supreme Court ruled in a 5-4 decision that vouchers to religious school did not violate the Establishment Clause of the Constitution. This decision re-wrote more than a century worth of precedence and further eroded the separation of church and state. No matter how this case was decided, it is patently un-American to force citizens to send money to religious organizations that they do not support.

Privatizing public education is a horrible idea. Public-schools are the bedrock upon which America’s democracy is built. Now strange conservatives and their fellow traveler in the Democratic party, the neoliberals, are claiming that democratically elected school boards are an anachronism. Know this; if someone is opposing democratic governance, they are proposing totalitarian rule by the wealthy.

Steven Singer read the article explaining that voucher schools do not increase test scores, a fact now confirmed by multiple studies and evaluation, but they do make racism acceptable.

He writes:

For decades, school voucher advocates claimed that sending poor kids to private schools with public tax dollars was acceptable because doing so would raise students’ test scores.

However, in the few cases where voucher students are even required to take the same standardized tests as public school students, the results have been dismal.

In short, poor kids at private schools don’t get better test scores.

So why are we spending billions of public tax dollars to send kids to privately run schools?

A 2018 Department of Education evaluation of the Washington, D.C., voucher program found that public school students permitted to attend a private or parochial school at public expense ended up getting worse scores than they had at public school.

Their scores went down 10 points in math and stayed about the same in reading.

These are not the pie in the sky results we were promised when we poured our tax money into private hands.

However, corporate education propaganda site, The 74, published a defense of these results that – frankly – makes some pretty jaw dropping claims.

The article is “More Regulation of D.C. School Vouchers Won’t Help Students. It Will Just Give Families Fewer Choices for Their Kids” by far right Cato Institute think tanker Corey DeAngelis.

In his piece, not only does he call for less accountability for voucher schools, he downplays the importance of standardized test scores.

And he has a point. Test scores aren’t a valid reflection of student learning – but that’s something public school advocates have been saying for decades in response to charter and voucher school cheerleaders like DeAngelis.

Supply side lobbyists have been claiming we need school privatization BECAUSE it will increase test scores. Now that we find this claim is completely bogus, the privatizers are changing their tune.

The new song is, “why shouldn’t parents be able to choose a school that has a ‘culture’ more to their liking?”

Singer hears a racist dog whistle in that reference to “culture.”

So parents don’t like the CULTURE of public schools. And they’re afraid public schools aren’t as SAFE.

Hmm. I wonder what culture these parents are objecting to. I wonder why they would think public schools wouldn’t be as safe.

Could it perhaps be fear of black students!?

Give DeAnglis credit for his honesty. No more happy talk about higher scores. It’s all about picking a school where the children look like you. Why are we surprised?

For years, for decades, we have been told that the answer to low-scoring public schools was School Choice.

That was until we learned that most charters don’t get higher scores than public schools, and voucher schools actually lead to lower scores.

So school choice advocates now claim that test scores don’t matter, at least not for non-public schools. They are still absolutely essential for public schools, and can be used to stigmatize them and close them down.

But for schools of choice, they just are not all that important. They don’t matter. They only matter for public schools.

Mike Petrilli, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, one of the leading advocacy groups in the Corporate Reform Movement, offers advice and consolation to fellow Reformers.

“After two decades of mostly-forward movement and many big wins, the last few years have been a tough patch for education reform. The populist right has attacked standards, testing, and accountability, with particular emphasis on the Common Core, as well as testing itself. The election of Donald Trump and appointment of Betsy DeVos, meanwhile, have made school choice and charter schools toxic on much of the progressive left. And the 2017 results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress indicate a “lost decade” of academic achievement. All of these trends have left policymakers and philanthropists feeling glum about reform, given the growing narrative that, like so many efforts before it, the modern wave hasn’t worked or delivered the goods, yet has produced much friction, fractiousness, and furor.”

Take heart, he says. The children of America need us to privatize their schools, bust teachers’ unions, and Judge their teachers by student test scores. Remember when they all laughed at NCLB, but now “we” know that it was a great success?

It’s true that NAEP scores have been flat for a decade. It’s true that charters close almost as often as they open. It’s true that the charter industry is riddled with fraud, waste, and abuse.

But stick with proven leaders like the hedge fund managers, Bill Gates, and DeVos.

Sorry to be snarky, Mike, but I couldn’t resist.

A few days ago, I posted teacher Stuart Egan’s description of the attack on public schools in North Carolina, which identified the malefactors who are luring kids to charter schools, religious schools, cyber charters, and home schools, driving down public school enrollment to 81%.

Egan received a response from a staff member of the North Carolina Department of Instruction, which is led by Mark Johnson, former TFA who marches to the tune of the Tea Party and has no conscience of his own, no vision for the 81%, no concern about the quality of education in the state’s charter or religious schools. How does TFA find the people who advocate and act so strongly against public schools that enroll the majority of students? Will TFA ever be held accountable for them?

Here is the comment:

“This is so spot on. Everyone should translate ‘choice’ into ‘undermining of public schools’, because that is exactly what it is. The most sickening part is how low-income families and those of children with disabilities have been targeted, cajoled, hoodwinked and bamboozled into believing that choice automatically equates to quality. (Anyone who considers themselves conservative should be outraged at this profound misuse of their tax dollars.)

“Unfortunately, I get to witness this erosion and implosion every day at DPI. I just met another of my colleagues whose job was eliminated by the General Assembly’s draconian cuts and our puppet superintendent’s ‘just following orders’ approach. It was so sad to see this person, who was providing passionate, competent and knowledgeable support to eastern NC schools trying mightily to serve their markedly low-income populations, tossed aside in this ponzi scheme to dangle ‘school choice’ in front of needy families. It’s like eliminating the road crew that is fixing potholes and cracks on I-95 and using the public’s money to build a flimsy expensive two-lane highway right next to it that has no markings, guardrails, speed limits or enforcement (with full kickbacks going to the private paving company). ‘Hey mom and dad — let your kids ride on this shiny new road because you’ll have a choice, and we all know choice is better!’

“EdNC put out an excellent article a few days ago: https://www.ednc.org/2018/07/11/steep-cuts-to-north-carolinas-education-agency-hurt-low-performing-schools-the-most/. It perfectly spells out the absurdity in our agency and our feckless leadership. We’re told ‘shh, be quiet; this is a sensitive time’ for all our colleagues who were laid off, when in reality there should be a loud leader fighting for his folks every step of the way, even if the jobs could not be saved. You see, that’s how the damage really occurs here in our agency — not by vocal or visible action of those who ultimately have to answer to their supervisor every day, month and year, but by the SILENCE and joint inaction of the only ones in the agency who AREN’T supervised. The superintendent has no official boss and writes no annual work plan like the rest of us; instead, he gets a four-year ride and won’t have a whiff of accountability for another two and half years, long after the damage has been done. Meanwhile, scores of good people continue to walk out the door, either voluntarily or involuntarily, and the Public Schools of North Carolina will continue to suffer for it.”