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Peter Greene: Will Trump Achieve His Education Goals?

By dianeravitch
December 13, 2024 //
10

Peter Greene writes about the contradiction at the heart of Trump’s education goals. On the one hand, Trump says he will eliminate the Department of Education and turn federal funding over to the states, to use as they wish. At the same time, he says that he will punish schools if they persist in teaching liberal ideas that Trump dislikes, like diversity, equity and inclusion, or if they are insufficiently patriotic.

How will he punish schools if the federal funding has been relinquished to the states?

Greene writes:

It has been on the conservative To Do list for decades, and the incoming administration keeps insisting that this time it’s really going to happen. But will it? Over the weekend, Trump’s Ten Principles for Education video from Agenda 47 was circulating on line as a new “announcement” or “confirmation” of his education policy, despite the fact that the video was posted in September of 2023.

The list of goals may or may not be current, but it underlines a basic contradiction at the heart of Trump’s education plans. The various goals can be boiled down to two overall objectives:

1) To end all federal involvement and oversight of local schools.

2) To exert tight federal control over local schools

Trump has promised that schools will not teach “political indoctrination,” that they will teach students to “love their country,” that there will be school prayer, that students will “have access to” project-based learning, and that schools will expel students who harm teachers or other students. 

He has also proposed stripping money from colleges and universities that indoctrinate students and using the money to set up a free of charge “world class education” system.

Above all, he has promised that he “will be closing up” the Department of Education. Of course, he said that in 2016 with control of both houses of Congress and it did not happen.

Are there obstacles? The Department of Education distributes over $18 billion to help support schools that educate high-poverty populations, providing benefits like extra staff to supplement reading instruction. The Project 2025 plan is to turn this into a block grant to be given to the states to use as they wish, then zeroed out. Every state in the country would feel that pinch; states that decide to use the money for some other purpose entirely, such as funding school vouchers, will feel the pinch much sooner. The department also handles over $15 billion in Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) funding, which helps cover the costs of special education; Project 2025 also calls for turning it into an unregulated block grant to states with no strings attached, meaning that parents would have to lobby their state government for special ed funding.

Cuts and repurposing of these funds will be felt immediately in classrooms across the country, particularly those that serve poor students and students with special needs. That kind of readily felt, easily understood impact is likely to fuel pushback in Congress, and it’s Congress that has the actual power to eliminate the department.

Beyond the resistance to changing major funding for states and the challenge of trying to move the trillion-plus-dollar funding system for higher education, the Trump administration would also face the question of how to exert control over school districts without a federal lever to push.

Previous administrations have used Title I funding as leverage to coax compliance from school districts. In 2013, Obama’s education secretary Arne Duncan threatened to withhold Title I funds if a California failed to adopt an “acceptable” standardized testing program. In 2020, Trump himself threatened to cut off funding to schools that did not re-open their buildings. And on the campaign trail this year, Trump vowed that he would defund schools that require vaccines. That will be hard to do if the federal government has given all control of funds to the states.

The Department of Education has limited power, but the temptation to use it seems hard to resist. Nobody wanted the department gone more than Trump’s education secretary Betsy DeVos, who was notably reluctant to use any power of her office. But by 2018, frustrated with Congressional inaction on the Higher Education Act, DeVos announced a plan to impose regulations on her own. In 2020, she imitated Duncan by requiring states to compete for relief money by implementing some of her preferred policies.

Too many folks on the Trump team have ideas about policies they want to enforce on American schools, and without a Department of Education that has control of a major funding stream, they’d have little hope of achieving their goals. Perhaps those who dream of dismantling the department will prevail, but they will still have to get past Congress. No matter how things fall out, some of Team Trump’s goals for education will not be realized.

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Bigotry, Budget Cuts, Cruelty, Curriculum, Disruption, Education Industry, Elections, Equity, Ethics, Extremism, Failure, Freedom of Speech, Freedom to Read, Funding, Trump, U.S. Department of Education, Vouchers

Voters Defeated the Dark Money Behind Vouchers

By dianeravitch
December 9, 2024 //
3

David Armiak of the Center for Media and Democracy reviewed the recent defeat of vouchers in three states: Colorado, Kentucky, and Nebraska. He points out that vouchers have never won a state referendum. Voters have always said “No” to sending public money to private and religious schools.

Who pays for the state campaigns on behalf of vouchers?

Billionaires.

The two most reliable funders of voucher proposals are billionaires Betsy DeVos and Charles Koch.

The billionaires keep pushing vouchers even though we now know that they are subsidies for families whose children are already enrolled in private schools. And we now know that vouchers don’t help public school students who use them. And we now know that vouchers are a huge drain on state budgets and always cost more than predicted.

DeVos and Koch like to fund failure. Their goal is not to improve education but to destroy public schools.

Armiak writes:

The dark money group Advance Colorado Action (ACA, formerly Unite for Colorado) qualified the ballot measure, but most of the identifiable money spent pushing its passage came from a related advocacy group, Colorado Dawn.

Unite for Colorado was founded in 2019 by Dustin Zvonek, the former vice president for strategy and innovation and state director for Charles Koch’s astroturf operation Americans for Prosperity. As of 2022, Unite for Colorado provided Colorado Dawn with almost half of its revenue ($2.7 million out of $5.9 million).

Both groups have been hit with multiple campaign finance complaints in recent years, including one last month against Colorado Dawn for sending misleading text messages and spending money to influence a ballot measure without registering as an issue committee.

Colorado Dawn reported spending nearly $1.9 million as of October 23 to back Amendment 80, The Colorado Sun reported.

In Kentucky, voters in every county rejected Amendment 2 by a margin of almost two to one (65%).

If it had passed, the state constitution would have been amended to allow public funding to go to private schools.

A record-breaking $14 million was spent by groups in favor and against the amendment, Kentucky Public Radio reported. The Protect Freedom PAC pulled in $5 million from school privatization billionaire Jeff Yassand spent $4 million on ads supporting the measure.

Other groups spending in favor of the amendment included Kentucky Students First ($2.5 million); Empower Kentucky Parents ($1.25 million); Empower Kentucky Parents PAC ($800,000); and the state chapter of Koch’s Americans for Prosperity ($328,000).

Empower Kentucky Parents received $1 million from American Federation for Children, a group organized and funded by the billionaire DeVos family. Betsy DeVos served as secretary of education during Trump’s first term in office and now supports his plans to eliminate the department.

In Nebraska, 57% of voters supported a ballot measure (Referendum 435) to repeal a new state law that would have provided parents with $10 million in public funds per year in the form of vouchers for their children to attend private K–12 schools.

The Nebraska Examiner reported that Keep Kids First spent just $111,000 as of November 4 to prevent the repeal of the referendum in the Cornhusker state. The American Federation for Children is also the largest known donor so far to Keep Kids First, giving $561,500 in 2023–24.

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Billionaires, Democracy, Education Industry, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Funding, Koch Brothers, Religion, School Choice, Separation of church and state, Vouchers

Arkansas: Yes! You Can Use Your Voucher to Pay for Horseback Riding Lessons!

By dianeravitch
December 7, 2024 //
9

At the behest of Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the legislature enacted a voucher program. As in every other state with vouchers, most are used by students already enrolled in private or religious schools. The voucher is a subsidy for families who could already pay but are happy to take the extra money.

The Arkansas Times revealed that vouchers could be spent on horseback riding lessons. Taxpayers are paying for those lessons.

The story says:

The Arkansas LEARNS Act, signed into law in 2023 by Gov. Sarah Sanders, created a voucher program that sends public money to private school families to use for tuition, fees and other expenses. This school year, the program is open to many homeschoolers as well. Homeschool families don’t have tuition bills to pay, but they’re able to use voucher funds for a variety of other education-related expenses, such as books and supplies, curricula, computers and other technology, and private tutoring.

Extracurricular activities are fair game as well. A list of 569 “education service providers” approved for participation in the LEARNS voucher program as of Nov. 18includes climbing gyms, dance studios, jiu-jitsu instructors — and at least seven equestrian-related vendors, according to a cursory review by the Arkansas Times….

Some of those vendors appear to focus in whole or in part on “equine-assisted therapy” services for people with disabilities or trauma. Others appear to simply offer kids the opportunity to ride, interact with and care for horses. But all of them have been given the go-ahead by the Arkansas Department of Education to receive taxpayer dollars at a time when the state has cut inflation-adjusted spending in other areas.

Relatively speaking, equestrian centers are unlikely to eat up too much of the overall voucher pie. Each LEARNS voucher costs the public about $6,856 in the current 2024-25 school year, and there are about 14,000 students in the program this year, most of whom attend private schools. (About 3,000 are homeschooled.) The majority of the roughly $96 million that Arkansas spends on vouchers is flowing to private schools, such as Little Rock Christian Academy or Shiloh Christian School in Springdale.

The idea of publicly subsidizing horseback riding seems to be striking a nerve in a way that paying private school tuition does not. But one could argue there’s not a lot of difference between the two. 

There are no income-eligibility requirements for either homeschool or private school households to receive a voucher. Well-off homeschool families who already paid out of pocket for riding lessons before Arkansas LEARNS can now get them comped by the state. In the same vein, families who paid private school tuition before LEARNS are now getting a taxpayer-funded boost to their bank accounts, freeing them to spend that money on whatever else they please (including horseback riding, if they wish).

Categories Arkansas, Curriculum, Education Industry, Ethics, Funding, Vouchers

Wisconsin: Dane County Judge Overturns Notorious Act 10!

By dianeravitch
December 2, 2024 //
5

Thirteen years ago, Republican Governor Scott Walker and the legislature of Wisconsin enacted Act 10, which banned collective bargaining for public employees, except for public safety employees. Teachers, social workers, and other public employees were outraged. They encircled the State Capitol for days. Walker became a star, and his sponsors, the Koch brothers, were happy.

But today, Act 10 was declared unconstitutional. Time will tell whether the decision is upheld.

A Dane County judge on Monday sent ripples through Wisconsin’s political landscape, overturning a 13-year-old law that banned most collective bargaining among public employees, consequently decimating the size and power of employee unions and turning then-Republican Gov. Scott Walker into a nationally known political figure.

But there’s been a revival of hope in Wisconsin:

The effort to overturn Act 10 began in November 2023 when several unions representing public employees filed the lawsuit, citing a “dire situation” in workplaces with issues including low pay, staffing shortages and poor working conditions. 

In July,  Dane County Circuit Judge Jacob Frost ruled provisions of Act 10 unconstitutional and denied a motion filed by the Republican-controlled Legislature to dismiss the case.

The lawsuit argued the 2011 law violated equal protection guarantees in the Wisconsin Constitution by dividing public employees into two classes: “general” and “public safety” employees. Public safety employees are exempt from the collective bargaining limitations imposed on “general” public employees.

Categories Billionaires, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Koch Brothers, Unions, Vouchers, Walker, Scott, Wisconsin

Jan Resseger: What Would Linda McMahon’s Agenda Be at ED?

By dianeravitch
December 2, 2024 //
4

Jan Resseger read the proposals of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 and the America First Policy Institute to divine the likely shape of Linda McMahon’s plans if she is confirmed as Secretary of Education. McMahon was chair of the board of the America First Policy Institute so its goals are inportant.

It’s not as if these two groups are far apart: they are both closely aligned with Trump and his determination to expand public funding of private schools and sow chaos.

Please open the link, as I am posting only the first half of Jan’s post.

She writes:

Linda McMahon formerly served as an executive of World Wrestling Entertainment; led the Small Business Administration during Trump’s first term; and took a job in 2919 leading the America First Action PAC to support Trump’s candidacy for President. Beginning in 2009, McMahon served part of a term on Connecticut’s state board of education, and once upon a time, after majoring in French in college, the now 76-year-old McMahon secured a teaching certificate in her home state of North Carolina. Currently she chairs the board of the America First Policy Institute, a think tank competitor to the Heritage Foundation and its Project 2025. Both think tanks have been drawing up a policy agenda to drive Trump’s second term.

There is some agreement that McMahon is not as likely to shut down the U.S. Department of Education as many feared Trump’s appointment would be charged to do. The National Education Policy Center’s Kevin Welner believes the complexity of the history and needs served by that federal department would make its closure unlikely: “By the time Congress established the department in 1979, the federal government was already an established player in education policy and funding. For instance, the Higher Education Act of 1965 began the federal student loan program. In 1972, Congress created the basic Educational Opportunity Grant, the predecessor program to today’s Pell Grants. The G.I Bill of 1944, which, among other things, funded higher education for World War II veterans, preceded them both. At the K-12 level, federal involvement in vocational education began with the Smith-Hughes Act of 1917. Federal attention to math, science and foreign language education began in 1958 with the National Defense Education Act. Two laws passed during the Lyndon Johnson administration then gave the federal government its modern foothold in education: the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. The 1964 law provided antidiscrimination protections enforced by the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights. The 1965 law… includes Title I, which sends extra funding to schools with high populations of low-income students. In 1975, Congress added the law currently known as the Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act, or IDEA… To dissolve the Education department, both houses of Congress would have to agree, which is unlikely.”

Assuming the U.S. Department of Education will survive a second Trump administration, it is worth comparing the policy agendas both think tanks—the Heritage Foundation with its Project 2025, and the America First Policy Institute (AFPI) where Linda McMahon has been chair of the board—have prepared for the incoming Trump administration’s Department of Education.

The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 suggests systematically dismantling or relocating to other departments the institutions that were originally pulled together in 1979 to be managed by one federal agency. According to a concise report in August from the Brookings Brown Center on Education Policy, the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 prescribes tearing apart the Department’s structure and functions: “dismantle the U.S. Department of Education; eliminate the Head Start program for young children in poverty; discontinue the Title I program that provides federal funding to schools serving low-income children; rescind federal civil rights protections for LGBTQ+ students; undercut federal capacity to enforce civil rights law; reduce federal funding for students with disabilities and remove guardrails designed to ensure these children are adequately served by schools; promote universal private school choice; and privatize the federal student loan portfolio.”  Project 2025 would, first, end or reduce specific federal funding streams enacted by Congress to serve vulnerable groups of students, and second, disrupt or undermine the specific agency prepared to enforce laws and regulations that protect the civil rights of groups which have experienced discrimination and unequal access to opportunity in the past.

The America First Policy Institute’s agenda is far more focused on what have been called culture war issues, while both think tanks do make universal school choice—the diversion of public dollars for school privatization—a priority.  The agenda of the America First Policy Institute (AFPI) features four pillars, each one described in a two page brief:

First — “Give Parents Control by Allowing Them to Select the School Their Child Attends.” AFPI’s brief on school privatization is piece of classic pro-privatization ideology. Ignoring the fact that two weeks ago in three states, voters rejected ballot measures which would have expanded tuition vouchers for private schools and further, that every single time voters have been presented with voucher initiatives in previous years, voters have flatly rejected school vouchers, the America First Policy Institute (AFPI) tells a lie: “Just 18% of Americans are opposed to school choice. Support for school choice in America has increased from 64% to 72% since April 2020.” And despite Josh Cowen’s research that demonstrates lower academic achievement when students use vouchers at private schools, AFPI declares: “Standardized test scores significantly improve for students who exercised school choice.”  AFPI endorses charter schools and criticizes the Biden administration’s efforts to strengthen regulation of the federal Charter Schools Program, which the Network for Public Education has repeatedly shown suffers from poor oversight.  AFPI writes: “(R)egulations would severely limit the types of schools that could apply for funding and would restrict any potential expansion of charter school programs.”  AFPI concludes mistakenly: “Educational freedom is a tool that has a proven record of putting students and families first, and parents need to be given the power to choose the best educational opportunities for their children.”

Education Week‘s Brooke Shultz directly quotes Linda McMahon in 2016 strongly supporting charter schools : “One of the issues most important to me is the question of school choice.” Shultz also quotes McMahon in 2015: “I don’t believe charter schools take anything away from traditional public schools; rather I think they can be centers for innovation and models for best practices.”

Second —“Give Every Parent the Right to See All Curriculum Materials in Every Class their Child Attends.”  AFPI endorses parents’ individualist right to insulate and shield their children from programs and ideas that the parents consider offensive. However dangerous it may be for a school district to privilege individual parents with the power to set the curriculum according to the biases of the most powerful parents, and however impractical it may be for parents to review and debate each classroom’s lessons in advance, that is the policy AFPI endorses: “The formal authority to approve curriculum for public schools rests with states and local school boards. However, the authority for educating children rests with parents. As such, they should be involved early in the approval process in determining what qualifies as appropriate content for curriculum and lesson plans.”  The bias here is clear: “Many children are being taught to see white supremacy everywhere, indoctrinated to believe America’s foundation was built on racism, talked to about sex and gender identity in developmentally inappropriate ways, and presented with other questionable curriculum…  Officials that have the authority to make and approve curriculum do so as stewards of the public’s trust. The taxpayers and parents who schools ultimately answer to deserve to know what schools are teaching and how tax dollars are being spent.”

Again, please open the link to read this excellent post in full.

Categories Bigotry, Disruption, Education Industry, Elections, Extremism, For-Profit, Trump, U.S. Department of Education, Vouchers

Perry Bacon: Education Is Not a Partisan Issue–Or Is it?

By dianeravitch
December 1, 2024 //
10

Perry Bacon, a regular columnist for The Washington Post, paints a sunny view of the politics of education. He thinks that the public is so strongly united behind their public schools that Trump might back off his plan to turn federal funding into vouchers. Higher education, however, is a different story, he says, with a bipartisan coalition arrayed against student protests and debt relief.

I do not share his view that Republicans will relinquish their fealty to vouchers and privatization. No matter how determined the public is to defend their public schools, the billionaires who want vouchers are unrelenting. Bacon doesn’t see that the monied people don’t give a damn what the public wants. Betsy DeVos, the Koch machine, Jeff Yass, and Texas billionaires Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks don’t care what the public wants. Perry Bacon would have written a different article if he had read Josh Cowen’s new book The Privateers: How Billionaires Started a Culture War …

Bacon writes:

The Biden years have featured some surprising bipartisan and cross-ideological coalitions on education issues, including school vouchers and protests on college campuses, that might extend into Donald Trump’s presidency. It’s the rare policy area where the divides aren’t simply along party lines.


On K-12 education, Republican and Democratic voters have unified — against the desires of powerful conservative groups and Republican politicians. The political right has long been frustrated with American education and is pushing a number of major changes, most notably voucher programs that would put more kids in private schools and either shrink or, perhaps eventually, dismantle the public school system.


But a clear majority (57 percent) in Nebraska earlier this month voted to repeal a voucher initiative, nearly matching Trump’s support there (60 percent). In Kentucky, all 120 counties (and 62 percent of voters) rejected a proposal to start a voucher program.


The results from those two states aren’t outliers. States with huge Republican majorities in their legislatures have struggled to get voucher programs passed because lawmakers are hearing from wary constituents, including Republicans. Even when they are enacted, voucher programs so far have not resulted in a huge number of students flooding to private schools.

In another rejection of conservative education policy, Moms for Liberty, the group that backs right-wing candidates running in local school board races, has struggled electorally. Only about one-third of the candidates it backed won their races last year, according to a Brookings Institution analysis. (There hasn’t yet been a detailed analysis of the group’s election results in 2024.) There has been a strong backlash against Moms for Liberty and other conservative groups seeking to ban books on racial and LGBTQ+ issues from public schools.


Meanwhile, counties throughout Florida, where Trump won easily, voted to increase local property and sales taxes to boost public school funding.


What’s behind this strong support of public schools? Only 45 percent of all Americans and 31 percent of Republicans say they are satisfied with public schools nationally, according to Gallup polling. But 70 percent of all Americans and 62 percent of Republicans are satisfied with the schools their kids are attending. Education policy tends to reflect local dynamics, so schools in very conservative areas are probably cautious in speaking about racism or LGBTQ+ issues. But what I suspect is actually driving that strong support for public schools is that for Republicans, particularly in rural areas, public schools are a central, positive part of their lives, where their friends and relatives work and their kids play sports.


But on higher-education policy, the bipartisan coalition is against the left. Like their Republican counterparts, many Democratic politicians and prominent left-of-center leaders and activists think both that the United States became overly invested in recent decades in having people attend college and that campuses are too left-wing. (I disagree with both claims.)

So in the spring, Democratic politicians, including President Joe Biden, joined Republicans in portraying on-campus protests against Israel’s military actions in Gaza as antisemitic. Schools in both red and blue states, pushed by their centrist or conservative governing boards, have now created new limits on protests, particularly barring the kind of encampments that pro-Palestinian students created.


Biden himself was under fire from centrist Democrats and Republicans alike for trying to cancel student-loan debt, a policy strongly backed by many progressives. Many in either party argue that mass college attendance, unlike K-12 education, is not a necessity for the country and people who accrued debt during college knew the costs and should pay it back in full. The recent progressive pushes for both universal free college and mass debt cancellation seem stalled for now.


Prominent liberals have joined conservatives in questioning the value of humanities classes and departments and want colleges to focus more on graduating students ready to work in science, technology and other fields where jobs are growing. Nearly every day a Democratic politician says something along the lines of, “Our party is too influenced by the views and perspectives of professors and students on campuses and college graduates,” mirroring the rhetoric of conservatives such as Vice President-elect JD Vance.


How did we end up with Republican voters defending public schools and Democratic politicians criticizing colleges? Part of the explanation for why education policy hasn’t split on predictable partisan lines is that Biden hasn’t made the issue one of his major priorities. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona has been more low-profile than Betsy DeVos and Arne Duncan. Biden didn’t have a major education initiative such as No Child Left Behind (President George W. Bush) or Race to the Top (President Barack Obama).

Trump and his incoming administration could make this issue super-partisan. The activist right is unified around the idea that both K-12 schools and colleges are using taxpayer dollars to force liberal ideas on young people, particularly on issues of race, gender and sexual orientation. So, the Trump administration could push hard to get more K-12 students enrolled in private schools, stop K-12 schools and colleges from offering classes out of line with conservative ideology, and limit on-campus protests for left-wing causes.


Trump, in his post on Truth Social announcing that Linda McMahon would be education secretary, emphasized his support for vouchers.
But in that statement, Trump also said that education policy should be left largely to states. (It’s not clear that Trump can or would fully eliminate the federal Education Department, as he suggested during the campaign.) So perhaps his administration will take a more hands-off approach, aware that many Republican voters like how their schools are run locally.


Looking forward, it’s possible that Republican voters fall in love with voucher programs if the Trump administration pushes them hard. Or perhaps Democratic politicians will feel more compelled to defend colleges if they become a target of Trump.

But if I had to guess, I would predict that education policy continues to be an issue that doesn’t break down simply along party lines. After all, it’s personal for so many Americans, who vividly remember their time in grade school or college. And it’s complicated — exactly how should colleges have handled the Gaza protests? The happy middle for America might be a robust public school system, more of a Democratic goal, along with less liberal colleges that fewer people attend, more in line with Republican preferences.

Categories Betsy DeVos, Billionaires, Democracy, Education Industry, Extremism, Privatization, Vouchers

Politico Reporter Falls in Love with Voucher Pusher

By dianeravitch
November 27, 2024 //
12

Yeah, yeah, I know it’s a strange headline, but it’s true.

Here is the story: Politico reporter goes to Arizona to cover the voucher story. Discovers that the chief advocate for vouchers is a beautiful, charming mom who uses state money to home-school her five children.

Writer is wowed by this mom. Writer notes that mom is funded by DeVos and Koch machine. It doesn’t matter. She’s so charming and pretty, who cares that vouchers are busting the state budget?

Writer pays more attention to the adorable mom than to those fighting to stop the damage she is doing to kids, public schools, and communities. Somehow she becomes the hero of the story.

Who cares that vouchers are used mostly by families whose kids never went to public schools? Who cares that vouchers are harming the state’s public schools?

Who cares that Arizona voters overwhelmingly rejected voucher expansion? Who cares that the legislature ignored their vote?

Who cares that less than 5% of the state’s students are undermining the state budget and the schools that educate the other students?

Families, mostly from high-income zip codes, have applied the taxpayer funds for everything from ski lift passes to visits to trampoline parks, a $4,000 grand piano, more than a million dollars in Legos, online ballet lessons, horse therapy and cookie-baking kits. Proponents justify expenditures like these in the name of parents’ prerogative to shape their children’s education or by pointing to wasteful spending by public schools. As a result, ESA costs have ballooned from the legislature’s original estimated price tag of $100 million over two years, to more than $400 million a year — a figure, critics have noted, that would explain more than half of Arizona’s projected budget deficit in 2024 and 2025.

Ain’t it grand?

Love is love, even when it is underwritten by billionaires!

Categories Arizona, Budget Cuts, Disruption, Education Industry, Home Schooling, Love, Privatization, Vouchers

Please Sign the NPE Petition Opposing Trump’s Appointment of Linda McMahon

By dianeravitch
November 25, 2024 //
12

The Network for Public Education urges you to sign a petition opposing the appointment of Linda McMahon as Secretary of Education. McMahon is committed to privatization of our neighborhood schools. Her background in the wrestling industry does not qualify her to lead the federal role in education.

https://actionnetwork.org/letters/tell-your-senators-to-vote-no-for-linda-mcmahon-for-secretary-of-education/

Open the link. It will send your petition to your Senators on your behalf.

Categories Education Industry, Privatization, Trump, U.S. Department of Education, Vouchers

ProPublica: Voters in Three States Rejected Vouchers

By dianeravitch
November 13, 2024 //
8

It remains a fact that vouchers have never won a state referendum. Typically, voters reject vouchers by large margins. Yet Republicans continue to push them. This election, three states that voted for Trump defeated vouchers.

ProPublica reported on the public’s rejection of vouchers:

In 2018, Arizona voters overwhelmingly rejected school vouchers. On the ballot that year was a measure that would have allowed all parents — even the wealthiest ones — to receive taxpayer money to send their kids to private, typically religious schools.

Arizonans voted no, and it wasn’t close. Even in a right-leaning state, with powerful Republican leaders supporting the initiative, the vote against it was 65% to 35%.

Coming into this week’s election, Donald Trump and Republicans had hoped to reverse that sort of popular opposition to “school choice” with new voucher ballot measures in several states.

But despite Trump’s big win in the presidential race, vouchers were again soundly rejected by significant majorities of Americans. In Kentucky, a ballot initiative that would have allowed public money to go toward private schooling was defeated roughly 65% to 35% — the same margin as in Arizona in 2018 and the inverse of the margin by which Trump won Kentucky. In Nebraska, nearly all 93 counties voted to repeal an existing voucher program; even its reddest county, where 95% of voters supported Trump, said no to vouchers. And in Colorado, voters defeated an effort to add a “right to school choice” to the state constitution, language that might have allowed parents to send their kids to private schools on the public dime.

Expansions of school vouchers, despite backing from wealthy conservatives, have never won when put to voters. Instead, they lose by margins not often seen in such a polarized country.

Candidates of both parties would be wise “to make strong public education a big part of their political platforms, because vouchers just aren’t popular,” said Tim Royers, president of the Nebraska State Education Association, a teachers union. Royers pointed to an emerging coalition in his state and others, including both progressive Democrats and rural Republicans, that opposes these sweeping “school choice” efforts. (Small-town Trump voters oppose such measures because their local public school is often an important community institution, and also because there aren’t that many or any private schools around.)

Yet voucher efforts have been more successful when they aren’t put to a public vote. In recent years, nearly a dozen stateshave enacted or expanded major voucher or “education savings account” programs, which provide taxpayer money even to affluent families who were already able to afford private school.

That includes Arizona, where in 2022 the conservative Goldwater Institute teamed up with Republican Gov. Doug Ducey and the GOP majority in the Legislature to enact the very same “universal” education savings account initiative that had been so soundly repudiated by voters just a few years before.

Another way that Republican governors and interest groups have circumvented the popular will on this issue is by identifying anti-voucher members of their own party and supporting pro-voucher candidates who challenge those members in primary elections. This way, they can build legislative majorities to enact voucher laws no matter what conservative voters want.

In Iowa, several Republicans were standing in the way of a major new voucher program as of 2022. Gov. Kim Reynolds helped push them out of office — despite their being incumbents in her own party — for the purposes of securing a majority to pass the measure.

A similar dynamic has developed in Tennessee and in a dramatic way in Texas, the ultimate prize for voucher advocates. There, pro-voucher candidates for the state Legislature won enough seats this Tuesday to pass a voucher program during the legislative session that starts in January, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott has said.

The day after the election, Abbott, who has made vouchers his top legislative priority, framed the result as a resounding signal that Texans have now shown a “tidal wave of support” for pro-voucher lawmakers. But in reality, the issue was conspicuously missing from the campaigns of many of the new Republicans whom he helped win, amid polling numbers that showed Texans hold complicated views on school choice. (A University of Houston poll taken this summer found that two-thirds of Texans supported voucher legislation, but that an equal number also believe that vouchers funnel money away from “already struggling public schools.”)

In the half dozen competitive Texas legislative races targeted in this election by Abbott and the pro-voucher American Federation for Children, backed by former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, Republican candidates did not make vouchers a central plank of their platforms. Most left the issue off of their campaign websites, instead listing stances like “Standing with Public Schools” and “Increased Funding for Local Schools.”

Corpus Christi-area Republican Denise Villalobos pledged on her website that if elected she would “fight for increased funding for our teachers and local schools”; she did not emphasize her pro-voucher views. At least one ad paid for by the American Federation for Children’s affiliated PAC attacked her opponent, Democrat Solomon Ortiz Jr., not for his opposition to vouchers but for what it claimed were his “progressive open-border policies that flood our communities with violent crime and fentanyl.” (Villalobos defeated Ortiz by 10 points.)

Matthew Wilson, a professor of political science at Southern Methodist University, said that this strategy reflects a belief among voucher advocates that compared to the border and culture wars, vouchers are not in fact a “slam-dunk winning issue.”

In the wake of Tuesday’s results in the presidential election, NBC News chief political analyst Chuck Todd said thatDemocrats had overlooked school choice as a policy that might be popular among working-class people, including Latinos, in places like Texas. But the concrete results of ballot initiatives around the nation show that it is in fact Trump, DeVos and other voucher proponents who are out of step with the American people on this particular issue.

They continue to advocate for vouchers, though, for multiple reasons: a sense that public schools are places where children develop liberal values, an ideological belief that the free market and private institutions can do things better and more efficiently than public ones, and a long-term goal of more religious education in this country.

And they know that popular sentiment can be and has been overridden by the efforts of powerful governors and moneyed interest groups, said Josh Cowen, a senior fellow at the Education Law Center who recently published a history of billionaire-led voucher efforts nationwide.

The Supreme Court could also aid the voucher movement in coming years, he said.

“They’re not going to stop,” Cowen said, “just because voters have rejected this.”

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Elections, Vouchers

Colorado: Voters Reject Proposal to Embed School Choice in State Constitution

By dianeravitch
November 6, 2024 //
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Colorado voters rejected a proposal that was likely to protect school vouchers.

Colorado Public Radio reported:

It’s looking like Coloradans have rejected an effort to enshrine school choice in the state Constitution. 

As of 9:45 p.m., Amendment 80 was losing, with 52 percent opposed to 48 percent in support. This measure, which would have been the first of its kind in the nation, needs 55 percent of the vote to go into the state constitution.

It would have added language stating each “K-12 child has the right to school choice” and that “parents have the right to direct the education of their children.” It explicitly named charters, private schools, home schools and “future innovations in education” as options guaranteed by the state constitution.

Opponents celebrated the amendment’s apparent defeat.

“We find it really encouraging that people understand what this ballot measure was really trying to do, which was to create a pathway for a private school voucher system,” said Kevin Vick, president of the Colorado Education Association. “And we’re also really encouraged that Colorado voters really value public schools and don’t want to see that happen.”

A legislative analysis concluded that the measure would have no immediate impact on education in Colorado but could have opened the door to future changes to laws and funding for education.

Vick said the vagueness of the measure would have created a “legal quagmire,” which he said, in a worst-case scenario could have meant millions of dollars taken out of the public education system. 

The battle over the measure drew millions of dollars from both sides and complaints against proponents alleging deceptive campaign practices. Amendment 80 was a nuanced ballot issue and difficult for many to understand.

When Denver voter Kyle Slusher first read Amendment 80, he thought giving children options would be a good thing. 

“But if it is actually just creating a lane for private schools to take from public school funding, that’s not obviously something that needs to be occurring,” he said.

After doing more research he changed his mind and voted “no.”

Advance Colorado, a conservative action committee that doesn’t disclose its donors, proposed the amendment. They argued Amendment 80 would protect families’ right to choose the school — public, private or home school — that they deem is the best fit for their child. It was also backed by Ready Colorado, the Colorado Catholic Conference and the Colorado Association of Private Schools.

The measure was opposed by a coalition that included the Colorado Education Association, the Colorado PTA, the Christian Home Educators of Colorado, Colorado Democrats, Stand for Children, the ACLU Colorado and others.

School choice is popular in Colorado, with nearly 40 percent of public school students choosing a school outside their assigned neighborhood school. The 30-year-old school choice law has bipartisan support. Critics of the measure argued that the constitutional amendment wasn’t needed because laws giving Coloradans the right to attend the school of their choice for free already exist.

But proponents worried about what they said were increasing attempts to erode choice by local school boards, the state legislature and the State Board of Education. Proponents said Amendment 80 would be a backstop to any legislative attempt to reverse decades of bipartisan work to expand choice for students.

Categories Accountability, Colorado, Education Industry, Elections, Privatization, Vouchers
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