Archives for category: Vouchers
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Why Republicans Blocked Vouchers in Texas

By dianeravitch
May 9, 2017 //
14

Gary VanDeaver is a conservative member of the House of Representatives in Texas. On most of the hot-button social issues, he is a hardline conservative.

But Representative VanDeaver of New Boston, Texas, opposes vouchers.

He is well informed and he is looking out for the best interests of his constituents. What the story does not mention is that Rep. VanDeaver, before he ran for office, was a teacher, a principal, and superintendent of schools in his home town, New Boston. He understands what it means to offer “school choice” in a small rural community.

“When it comes to one centerpiece conservative initiative – allowing tax-subsidized vouchers for students to enroll in private schools – VanDeaver says absolutely no way.

“In my district, public school is the community,” said VanDeaver, of New Boston, a town about 25 miles from the Arkansas border where the Lions high school football stadium has 3,500 seats, nearly enough for every resident.

“If we do anything to pull those students away, then we’re harming those communities,” said VanDeaver, 58, after joining an overwhelming majority of the GOP-dominated state House this month to reject school vouchers…”

Rural Republicans have helped to sink vouchers in every legislative session, despite the support they get from the Governor, Greg Abbott, and the Lt. Governor, Dan Patrick.

The combination of rural Republicans and urban Democrats has blocked vouchers again and again. They get passed in the state Senate, and they never come to a vote in the House.

That, plus the vigorous activity of Pastors for Texas Children, has prevented the voucher movement from succeeding in Texas.

Categories Rural Schools, Texas, Vouchers

The Great Retreat Now Begins: Choice is No Longer About “Saving Poor Children from Failing Schools”

By dianeravitch
May 6, 2017 //
18

Do you remember back in the old days when the privatization movement began that choice was going to “save poor children from failing schools”?

Well, that slogan is now obsolete. Now the advocates say that the purpose of choice is choice, regardless of results.

That subtle shift has happened because of the many recent studies and evaluations showing that charters and vouchers do not necessarily get better results, and that they may even have a negative effect, as we learned from recent evaluations of voucher programs in D.C., Louisiana, Indiana, and Ohio.

Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos sounded the bugle call for retreat after learning of the poor results of the latest evaluation of the D.C. voucher program, funded by the U.S. Department of Education.

In the past, she had said that choice would “save poor kids from failing schools.” Now, however, she says, “When school choice policies are fully implemented, there should not be differences in achievement among the various types of schools.” Parents are satisfied, and that is good enough for her, even if the children’s test scores are falling. If you parse this sentence, what she is saying is that when everyone chooses, none of the schools will be better than any others. They will all get the same results, even if they are dismal. The purpose of choice is choice.

Results don’t matter. Only parent satisfaction matters. If poor kids are moved from a “failing public school” to a “failing charter school” or “failing religious school,” that’s fine. An opinion piece in a D.C. paper suggested that we should not pay attention to those studies, because critics of school choice twist their findings anyway, especially if their findings are negative.

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Privatization, School Choice, Testing, Vouchers

DeVos Will Visit Christian School Today

By dianeravitch
May 4, 2017 //
33

Politico Education reports that Betsy DeVos will visit a Christian school today.

DEVOS TO VISIT PRIVATE CHRISTIAN SCHOOL IN D.C. THIS MORNING: The Trump administration’s campaign to promote D.C.’s voucher program continues this morning as Education Secretary Betsy DeVos visits Cornerstone, a private school that says on its website it provides a “Christ-centered” education. President Donald Trump on Wednesday touted the program at an event with DeVos and Vice President Mike Pence. Trump said it makes an “extraordinary difference” to students in the nation’s capital, though a recent study found that it had a negative impact on children’s reading and math scores.

Valerie Strauss wrote about Trump’s remarks to a group of D.C. students, in which he told flat-out whoppers to them.

President Trump on Wednesday surprised a group of young D.C. students who were at the White House to meet the vice president and education secretary, and he touted the “winning” federally funded school voucher program in Washington. He failed to mention a new Education Department study that found that students in the program get lower standardized test scores than those in what he called “failing” public schools.

Trump called the event, scheduled during National Charter Schools Week, “beautiful” and “very exciting.” Students from public and private schools and family members were there to meet Vice President Pence and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos. Both DeVos and Trump have criticized traditional public schools while praising alternatives, including charter schools, which are publicly funded but privately run, and voucher/voucher-like programs that allow public money to be used for private and religious school. Their support for the latter is in contrast with the Obama administration, which backed charters but not vouchers.

Trump’s schedule did not include a stop in the Roosevelt Room, where the event was being held, but he joked that when he heard DeVos was there, he thought he would come to interrupt her, and “maybe I’ll be allowed to say a few words.”

In his remarks, he took the opportunity to slam D.C. public schools while talking up the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program, the only federally funded school voucher program in the country. He said to the kids, according to a White House transcript:

So yesterday I said that our spending bill was a win for the American people, which is exactly what it was — an amazing day. And this is what winning for young children and kids from all over the country looks like. The Opportunity Scholarship program that we’re funding allows families in the inner city of our nation’s capital to leave failing public schools and attend a private school, making an extraordinary difference in these incredible young lives. You’re so lucky. Great. You’re happy about it? Huh? That’s great.

The results speak for themselves. Ninety-eight percent of scholarship recipients represent their high school diplomas, and they’re really very, very special. They go into tremendous successes. So I think you’re going to all be very, very successful. You have a big start, right? Great start.

No study has ever found a 98% graduation rate from voucher schools. The latest study showed students in D.C. voucher schools losing ground.

Boasting comes naturally to him, it seems, even to little children. They didn’t have to hear any negative remarks, but they didn’t need to hear flat-out lies.

Categories Education Reform, Trump, Vouchers

Jeannie Kaplan: Denver’s Corporate Reformers Try to Distance Themselves from DeVos

By dianeravitch
May 4, 2017 //
28

Jeannie Kaplan watches with amusement as the corporate reform-led Denver School Board tries to distance themselves from Betsy DeVos.

She says, “They can run, but they can’t hide.”

You see, Denver Board of Education and superintendent, once the drip of privatization as characterized particularly by choice and charters starts, it is very difficult, if not impossible, to stop. What starts as a drip quickly becomes a flood that is almost impossible to control. You may truly not believe in vouchers, but you have fostered an atmosphere in Denver where vouchers could be the logical outcome of Choice and Charters, intended or not. And while DFER, too, tried to separate itself from parts of the Trump/DeVos agenda, it simultaneously sent out a notice congratulating “Betsy DeVos on her appointment as Secretary of Education, and we applaud Mrs. DeVos’s commitment to growing the number of high-quality public charter schools.” Further, Betsy DeVos has given money to DFER which in turn has given lots of money to DPS campaigns including the Committee for Denver’s Kids cited below. You can’t always have it both ways, and even the best public relations departments cannot always convince you of their stories.

This is a problems for all the Democrats who have cheered on “school choice,” but thought they could draw the line at vouchers. Like Senator Michael Bennett of Colorado, who is a major supporter of charters. Like Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York, who wants to be President and has been a major supporter of charters. Like California Governor Jerry Brown, who never saw a charter he didn’t like. Like Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey, who voted against DeVos, but advocates both charters and vouchers.

Once you jump on board the school choice train, it is hard to explain why you only meant charters, not vouchers.

Categories Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Democrats for Education Reform, Denver, Education Reform, School Choice, Vouchers

Can Schools Cure Poverty?

By dianeravitch
May 4, 2017 //
29

Jennifer Berkshire posted this interview with economist Harvey Kantor in response to a column in the New York Times by David Leonhardt suggesting that schools were the best way to address poverty.

Leonhardt wrote that education “is the most powerful force for accelerating economic growth, reducing poverty and lifting middle-class living standards.” He then goes on to argue that vouchers don’t work, but charters do. This runs contrary to Roland Fryer and Will Dobbie’s study of charters in Texas, where they found that attendance in charter schools had no effect on future earnings.

What Kantor has to say is crucial in this discussion.

Kantor says what I have come to believe is bedrock truth. Poverty should be addressed by reducing poverty. No matter how high the standards, no matter how many tests, no matter how swell the curriculum is, those are not cures for homelessness, joblessness, and lack of access to decent medical care. This realization explains why I changed my mind about the best way to reform schools. It is not by turning schools over to the free market but by seeing them as part of a web of social supports for families and children.

Here is part of a fascinating discussion:

One of the consequences of making education so central to social policy has been that we’ve ended up taking the pressure off of the state for the kinds of policies that would be more effective at addressing poverty and economic inequality. Instead we’re asking education to do things it can’t possibly do. The result has been increasing support for the kinds of market-oriented policies that make inequality worse.

If we really want to address issues of inequality and economic insecurity, there are a lot of other policies that we have to pursue besides or at least in addition to education policies, and that part of the debate has been totally lost. Raising the minimum wage, or providing a guaranteed income, which the last time we talked seriously about that was in the late 1960’s, increasing workers’ bargaining power, making tax policies more progressive—things like that are going to be much more effective at addressing inequality and economic security than education policies. That argument is often taken to mean, *schools can’t do anything unless we address poverty first.* But that’s not what we were trying to say.

Berkshire: But isn’t part of the attraction of today’s education reform movement, that it holds out the tantalizing possibility that we can correct the effects of poverty without having to do anything about, well, poverty?

Kantor: That’s right. What’s interesting about our our contemporary period is that we’re now saying schools can respond to problems of achievement and we don’t need to address any of these larger structural issues. When you think about these larger questions—what causes economic inequality? What causes economic insecurity? How are resources distributed? Who has access to what?—they’ve been put off to the side. We’re not doing anything to address these questions at all.

Please read the entire discussion. It is very important in understanding the attack on schools and the fruitlessness of corporate reform, which ignores the causes of poor student achievement.

It will help you understand why billionaires and right-wingers love corporate reform. It enables policymakers to forget about the necessity of social policy that affects the conditions in which many families live.

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Poverty, Privatization, School Choice, Vouchers

Mother Jones: DeVos’ Favorite “Reform” Gets Horrible Grades

By dianeravitch
May 2, 2017 //
18

Edwin Rios of Mother Jones writes here about the dreadful evaluations on Betsy DeVos’ favorite form of school choice: Vouchers.

Researchers used to find that students who received vouchers saw little or no difference in their test scores.

Now a new body of research is reporting that students (who enter the program with low scores) actually lose ground when they transfer to a voucher school.

We had seen these discouraging reports before about Louisiana, Indiana, and Ohio.

Now the latest study from D.C. reaches the same conclusion. Students are negatively affected by switching from a public school to a voucher school.

The logic seems clear. The public school has experienced and credentialed teachers. Many voucher schools do not.

School choice advocates (aka reformers) used to claim that they were “saving poor kids from failing schools.”

DeVos, however, told the Washington Post that when the choice movement is fully implemented, all three sectors (public, charter, and voucher) will have the same results. “When school choice policies are fully implemented,” she said, “there should be no differences in achievement among the various types of schools.”

In other words, the children who are now low-performing will continue to be low-performing, and all three sectors will have the same outcomes they have now.

Remind me of the reason for school choice?

Categories Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, District of Columbia, Failure, School Choice, Vouchers

Congress Reauthorizes DC Voucher Program, Despite Evidence of Negative Effects, and Restricts Future Research

By dianeravitch
May 2, 2017 //
20

Emma Brown and Peter Jamison report that Congress reauthorized the D.C. Voucher program, on the heels of a federal evaluation showing that vouchers have a negative effect on students who use them.

Now we know that vouchers don’t “save poor children from failing schools.” They actually do educational harm to those children. The purpose of vouchers is choice for its own sake.

Even more surprising is that the new language in the reauthorizatuon bars the use of randomized field trials–long considered “the gold standard”–in future evaluations. RCT is a means of comparing similar groups.

Thus, Congress demonstrates that it not only doesn’t care about the effects of vouchers, but doesn’t want to learn about them in the future.

“The D.C. study was conducted using what’s known as the gold standard in scientific research: An experimental design, comparing the performance of students who received a voucher through a citywide lottery to the performance of their peers who applied for a voucher and didn’t receive one. The study was designed to comply with the law as currently written, which requires the “strongest possible research design” for determining the vouchers’ effectiveness.


“The reauthorization rolls back that language and prohibits the department’s researchers from using that gold standard. Instead, it says that researchers must use a “quasi-experimental” design, comparing voucher recipients to students with “similar backgrounds” in D.C. public and public charter schools.


“Researchers say this approach is generally weaker because it creates uncertainty about whether the comparison is fair.

“This program has been studied rigorously since it began in 2004, using an approach that the field of medical research would regard as common practice,” said Mark Dynarski, who co-authored the D.C. study released last week. “If rigor is rolled back, a future study might lead to more questions than answers.”


“Rep. Gerald E. Connolly (D-Va.) called the research change an “egregious dilution” of serious science, accusing his Republican counterparts of trying to escape empirical data that might not back up their school-choice philosophy.”

Categories District of Columbia, Vouchers

Missouri: Legislature Likely to Pass a School Choice Bill, Despite State Constitution

By dianeravitch
May 1, 2017 //
19

Legislators in Missouri are about to pass an expansive school choice bill that paves the way for vouchers and privatization of public education.

Here is the language of the Missouri state constitution:

“Section 5. The proceeds of all certificates of indebtedness due the state school fund, and all moneys, bonds, lands, and other property belonging to or donated to any state fund for public school purposes, and the net proceeds of all sales of lands and other property and effects that may accrue to the state by escheat, shall be paid into the state treasury, and securely invested under the supervision of the state board of education, and sacredly preserved as a public school fund the annual income of which shall be faithfully appropriated for establishing and maintaining free public schools, and for no other uses or purposes whatsoever.

“Section 8. Neither the general assembly, nor any county, city, town, township, school district or other municipal corporation, shall ever make an appropriation or pay from any public fund whatever, anything in aid of any religious creed, church or sectarian purpose, or to help to support or sustain any private or public school, academy, seminary, college, university, or other institution of learning controlled by any religious creed, church or sectarian denomination whatever; nor shall any grant or donation of personal property or real estate ever be made by the state, or any county, city, town, or other municipal corporation, for any religious creed, church, or sectarian purpose whatever.”

But what does the constitution mean anyway when you want to put kids into private and religious schools with public funds?

NPR reports:

“A wide-ranging education bill is expected to make it through: one that would establish a tax credit program known as education savings accounts, or ESAs, which could be used by foster children, children with disabilities, and children of military personnel to enroll in private schools. It would also expand Missouri’s student transfer law, allowing students in unaccredited districts to attend a public school in another district, or go to a private nonreligious school, charter school or virtual school.

“Backers of the measure say that the bill, known as a “school choice” measure, allows parents to make the best choices for their kids. But opponents believe it’s a way to put public money toward private schools instead of better-funding public schools.”

However, the legislature is not likely to increase charters outside of St. Louis and Kansas City.

In Arizona, voucher supporters started with the same limitations and expanded the program bit by bit to extend vouchers to almost everyone.

Why should a detail like the state constitution get in the way?

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Missouri, Privatization, Vouchers

Julian Vasquez Heilig: The Eight Questions Betsy DeVos Will Never Answer About Vouchers

By dianeravitch
April 30, 2017 //
8

Julian Vasquez Heilig dissects the claims about vouchers by posing eight questions about vouchers that Betsy DeVos cannot or will not ever answer.

First is, where did the idea come from? Well, there is that famous essay by libertarian economist Milton Friedman in 1955, but there is also the advocacy of Southern politicians following the Brown decision. Friedman had the idealistic belief that parents should spend their education voucher in any school. Southern politicians persistently and loudly called for “school choice” as a way to preserve racially segregated schools.

Julian also asks about the international repute of the free market and mentions Chile, which has seen the inevitable segregation that follows vouchers. He might have also mentioned Sweden, which took the same path, and found not only increased segregation but plummeting scores on international tests.

Voucher advocates have noticed that research does not support their claims about higher test scores or better education so they have resorted to advocating for choice for the sake of choice.

Today we have the unprecedented phenomenon of a U.S. Secretary of Education who advocates for a policy that will produce ever higher levels of segregation. This is wrong.

Categories Betsy DeVos, International, Segregation, Vouchers

Russ Walsh: No, Betsy, Choice Is Not Always a Good Thing

By dianeravitch
April 30, 2017 //
11

Russ Walsh posted this column earlier this year. I am reposting it now because it is an insightful critique of DeVos’s ideology that choice is always good.

Walsh points out that there are many choices we used to have that we don’t have any more. We are not free to smoke where we want. He remembers the thick smoke in the teachers’ lounge. I remember the smokers on the commercial airplanes. He remembers the days when we drove without seat belts. We no longer have those choices. One could make a long list of the things you cannot do because of their effect on the common good, which overrides your personal choice.

School choice undermines the common good by taking resources from the schools that we are all obliged to support, even if we don’t have children.

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Privatization, School Choice, Vouchers
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