Archives for category: Vouchers
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

Russ Walsh: Vouchers Are for the Rich, the Racists, and the Religious Right

By dianeravitch
March 7, 2017 //
12

Russ Walsh, literacy expert, describes the Three are of vouchers: They are for the Rich, the Racists, and the Religious Right.

http://russonreading.blogspot.com/2017/03/school-vouchers-welfare-for-rich-racist.html

Russ writes:

“Our new Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, is rich, white, and a proselytizing supporter of the Christian religious right. DeVos is also an outspoken champion of school vouchers. These two things are not coincidences. While voucher proponents will tell you, and some may even believe, that their push for vouchers is a push to make sure all children have the opportunity to get a great education, the real benefactors of school vouchers are the rich, the white and the religious right….

DeVos claims that voucher opponents are foes of change and champions of the status quo. I hope to show that it is the voucher schemes and the DeVos’ of the world who are championing the status quo – the status quo where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer as we see happening in this country right now.

“What are the problems with vouchers? Do vouchers achieve the supposed goal of improving educational opportunity for low-income and minority children? Many have cataloged the issues, but here is a quick list with some links for further reading.

*Vouchers do not improve student academic performance

*Vouchers do not improve opportunities for low-income children

*Vouchers lead to private schools of questionable quality

*Voucher divert public money to unaccountable private institutions

*Vouchers undermine religious liberty

*Vouchers do further harm to already struggling public schools

*Vouchers enable discrimination and segregation

So why the push for vouchers? Because vouchers are very good for the rich. If the rich can sell vouchers as the cure for educational inequality, they may be able to get people to ignore the real reason for public education struggles – income inequity. If the rich really want to improve schools, they need to put their money on the line. If the rich are really interested in helping poor school children they need to invest – through higher taxes (or maybe just by paying their fair share of taxes), not unreliable philanthropy, in improved health care, child care, parental education, pre-school education, public school infrastructure and on and on. This will be expensive, but we can do it if the wealthy would show the same dedication to the “civil rights issue of our time” with their wallets as they show to harebrained schemes like vouchers.”

Categories Betsy DeVos, Privatization, Racism, Religion, Vouchers

The Florida Corporate Tax Credit Program: A Statewide Scam

By dianeravitch
March 7, 2017 //
14

A nonprofit parent-led group called Fund Education Now created a fact sheet about Florida’s Corporate Tax Credit plan, which was designed to evade the state constitution’s explicit ban on using public money to fund religious or private education.

In 2006, as governor, Jeb Bush pushed through a universal voucher plan, which was subsequently ruled unconstitutional by the Florida Supreme Court.

In 2012, Jeb Bush led a campaign to amend the state constitution to remove the prohibition on spending public money on religious schools. The amendment was cleverly called the Florida Religious Freedom Amendment, on the assumption that not many people would oppose “religious freedom.” However, a majority of people figured out that it was an effort to make vouchers for religious schools legal, and the “religious freedom amendment” was defeated 55-45. Probably, had it been honestly named the Vouchers for Religious Schools Amendment, the margin would have been even larger.

Florida now has a large voucher program funded by tax credits to businesses that get large tax write-offs in return for funding vouchers. It is called the Corporate Tax Credit (CTC) program. It is administered by four groups, which collect an administrative fee of up to 5% for their services. The largest of the administrative groups is called Step Up for Students. As of 2012, Step Up had more than $300 million in its coffers at present. By 2014, it reported that it had assets of $439 million. The administrative fee is very significant on assets of this magnitude.

At the time the Fund Education Now brief was written, the voucher was worth about $4,500, far less than the cost of the private or religious schools available to the children of Jeb Bush and other elites. The participating schools are largely unsupervised and unregulated. Numerous evaluations have shown that students in voucher schools do no better on tests than students in public schools.

The reason for CTC vouchers: the assumption that voucher schools are cheaper than public schools, which is true, and save taxpayers the cost of educating children well.

Categories Betsy DeVos, Florida, Vouchers

Mother Jones: Why Did Trump and DeVos Choose Florida as Their National Model for School Reform?

By dianeravitch
March 7, 2017 //
8

Kristina Rizga, the veteran education journalist at Mother Jones, explains why Trump and DeVos love Florida. Although the state has a constitutional ban on the use of public money for private and religious schools, although the state’s voters rejected Jeb Bush’s effort to change the state constitution in 2012, Florida has figured out numerous DeVious ways to circumvent the state constitution and the will of the voters.

Jeb Bush is the permanent state minister of education in Florida, and he loves school choice. He does not like public schools. The state has hundreds of charter schools, many of which are managed by for-profit entrepreneurs. The head of the education appropriations committee in the state senate is a member of a family that owns the state’s largest for-profit charter chain. But better yet, for the purposes of DeVos, who is a religious zealot, Florida has a tax-credit plan that funnels hundreds of millions of dollars to unregulated and unaccountable religious schools.

Rizga writes:

Tax credit scholarships provide a crafty mechanism to get around these obstacles. Tax credits are given to individuals and corporations that donate money to scholarship-granting institutions; if parents end up using those scholarships to send their kids to religious schools—and 79 percent of students in private schools are taught by institutions affiliated with churches—the government technically is not transferring taxpayer money directly to religious organizations.

While DeVos is best known as an advocate of vouchers, most veteran Beltway insiders told me that a federal voucher program is very unlikely. “Democrats don’t like vouchers. Republicans don’t like federal programs, and would rather leave major school reform decisions up to states and local communities,” Rick Hess, a veteran education policy expert with the conservative American Enterprise Institute said. “Realistically, nobody thinks they’ve got the votes to do a federal school choice law, especially in the Senate.”

This political reality is perhaps why Trump and DeVos are singling out Florida’s tax credit programs as a way to expand private schooling options. While Trump and DeVos have not specified what shape this policy might take at the federal level, most of these changes will come from the state legislators. Republicans have full control of the executive and legislative branches in 25 states, and control the governor’s house or the state legislature in 44 states. At least 14 states have already proposed bills in this legislative session that would expand some form of vouchers or tax credit scholarships, according to a Center for American Progress analysis. (And 17 states already provide some form of tax credit scholarships, according to EdChoice.)

This perfect storm for pushing through various voucher schemes comes at a time when the results on the outcomes of these programs “are the worst in the history of the field,” according to New America researcher Kevin Carey, who analyzed the results in a recent New York Times article. Until about two years ago, most studies on vouchers produced mixed results, with some showing slight increases in test scores or graduation rates for students using them. But the most recent research has not been good, according to Carey: A 2016 study, funded by the pro-voucher Walton Family Foundation and conducted by the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute, found that students who used vouchers in a large Ohio program “have fared worse academically compared to their closely matched peers attending public schools.”

Businesses make gifts to Step Up for Students. They get a tax credit. Step Up for Students gets a hefty cut of the take. It currently has about $500 million to use to fund vouchers for private and religious schools that the state does not regulate or supervise. The voucher-receiving schools report attendance, but are not subject to the state standards, curriculum, or tests, and they do not report on academic performance.

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

Lousiana Voucher School Program Graded D by the State

By dianeravitch
March 6, 2017 //
1

Students who wanted to sign up for the Louisiana Voucher Program had to make their decision by February 24. But that was before the state released the grades for the participating schools.

Overall, the voucher schools performed very poorly, as reported by Danielle Dreilinger writing in the New Orleans Times-Picayune. Please open the story for the links and for the data charts.

Louisiana parents interested in the school voucher program, which allows students from struggling public schools to attend participating private ones, had to sign up by Feb. 24. But they didn’t have an important piece of information: the most recent academic results from schools that accept vouchers.

The Louisiana Department of Education sent the 2016 Louisiana Scholarship Program performance scores to NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune more than three months later than usual — on the voucher registration deadline.

Those scores synthesize test results and graduation rates to give a complete picture of how effectively private schools have educated their taxpayer-funded voucher students. Usually they are released with their public school equivalents, which came out in November.

Spokeswoman Sydni Dunn atrributed the difference to “a delay in the data verification process.” She noted that the department was two months early on submitting its annual report to the Legislature, which it also did Feb. 24.

Now in its fifth year, the Louisiana Scholarship Program lets low-income students enroll in participating private schools at public expense if they are entering kindergarten or zoned for public schools graded C, D or F. It’s the kind of program President Donald Trump is promoting Friday (March 3) as he visits his first school since taking office, and a signature initiative of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.

Louisiana’s long-awaited 2016 voucher data shows some improvement, to a level that is still very low.

Measured like a school district, the Louisiana Scholarship Program earned 61.4 on a 150-point scale, Dunn said. That would be a D on the state public school report card, and worse than any public school system except for those in St. Helena Parish, Morehouse Parish and Bogalusa. No voucher program earned an A.

In short, students are encouraged to leave a public school rated C, D, or F, for a voucher school that may be rated C, D, or F.

Categories Betsy DeVos, Louisiana, Vouchers

Good News! Looks Like Vouchers Are Dead This Year in Texas, Again!

By dianeravitch
March 5, 2017 //
5

Here is some good news: “State Rep. Dan Huberty, a Houston Republican and chairman of the House Public Education Committee, said Tuesday morning that school choice legislation has no path forward in the House during the current legislative session.”

The Texas Senate, under the fat thumb of former radio talk show host Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, is gungho for vouchers. Patrick is also pushing a bathroom bill, modeled on North Carolina’s HB 2, to keep transgender girls or boys out of the bathroom of their choice. He has not suggested who will be in charge of monitoring genitalia in every public bathroom.

The Texas House of Representatives is not as eager to pass voucher legislation as the state senate. . The voucher bills so dear to Dan Patrick may not even get out of committee in the House.

This is what the Texas Tribune says:

State Rep. Dan Huberty, a Houston Republican and chairman of the House Public Education Committee, said Tuesday morning that school choice legislation has no path forward in the House during the current legislative session.

Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick has called Senate Bill 3 one of his top priorities. The bill would create two separate public programs to subsidize private school tuition and homeschooling, including one giving parents debit cards backed by taxpayer money.

“Yes, this is dead to you as an issue?” Texas Tribune CEO Evan Smith asked Huberty as a Tribune event Tuesday morning.

“I believe so, yes,” Huberty said.

School choice advocates are having a hissy fit and they want to censure Rep. Huberty.

School choice is an issue that divides Republicans; battle lines are often drawn more along rural-urban lines than party lines. Last session, the House did not take up the leading private school choice bill for a vote. In the past couple of months, Patrick has called on the House to at least take a vote on this session’s Senate Bill 3, which would create two public programs subsidizing families’ private school tuition and homeschooling expenses.

“We want a vote up or down in the Senate and in the House this session on school choice. It’s easy to kill a bill when no one gets to vote on it,” he said at January’s “National School Choice Week” rally.

On a talk radio show Monday, Patrick said the school choice bill would have the 76 votes needed to pass in the House if it made it out of committee.

Smith asked Huberty on Tuesday to weigh in on Patrick’s comments: “Do you believe you can get the 76 in the House on the floor if you let this go out of committee?”

“Your responsibility as chairman is to protect your membership,” Huberty replied.

When Smith asked what Huberty was protecting them from, Huberty said, “We’ve had a vote count over many sessions about where these numbers lie. I look at the committee and I know where the membership is on this particular issue and where we stand. Why don’t we focus on the things that we can do?”

We can thank House Speaker Joe Straus (R-San Antonio) for selecting Rep. Dan Huberty as the new chair of the House Committee on Public Education. The retiring chair, Jimmie Don Aycock (R-Killeen) was a supporter of public schools, and so is Rep. Huberty.

Huberty understands that no one ever got criticized for a bill that never made it out of committee. Rep. Huberty is protecting his fellow legislators from the wrath of the voters by strangling the voucher bills in committee.

Texans are divided about vouchers. A large association of home schoolers called Texans for Homeschool Freedom oppose vouchers, because they fear that government money will be followed by mandates about textbooks and testing, and they will lose the freedom they treasure.

Ross Ramsey, writing for the Texas Tribune, warns that the battle is far from over:

Elected officials who want vouchers have never been able to get them through the Texas Legislature. And if Huberty holds, it’s probably not going to happen in 2017, either.

One of those truisms borne of experience: Nothing is dead in the Texas Legislature while lawmakers are still in session. Resurrection is part of the game.

Vouchers could turn up as an amendment to another education bill, to legislation that rewires funding for public schools, to anything that has a similar enough subject to justify that sort of an attachment.

It would be weird, but Straus could always decide to send the vouchers bill somewhere other than Huberty’s committee for consideration. The members of the House could express an overwhelming change of heart and demand the opportunity to bring vouchers to the floor for a vote — either to pass it along to Gov. Greg Abbott, who has said he would sign such a bill, or to kill it outright to make a statement.

Categories Texas, Vouchers

The Disappointing Results of Vouchers in Louisiana: An Evaluation of the First Two Years

By dianeravitch
March 5, 2017 //
13

A team of researchers associated with the University of Arkansas studied the first two years of the Louisiana Scholarship Program. Their report was released in late February. For those hoping to see a validation of the transformative power of vouchers, the results were disappointing, to say the least.

“The Louisiana Scholarship Program (LSP) is a statewide private school voucher program available to moderate- to low-income students in low-performing public schools. The LSP is limited to students with family income at or below 250% of the federal poverty line. Children in these families also have to either be entering kindergarten or be attending a public school that was graded C, D, or F for the prior school year. In the program’s rst year, 9,809 students were eligible applicants, with a majority of them located outside of Orleans parish. This group of students, the 2012-13 LSP applicant cohort, is the focus of our evaluation.

“The voucher size is the lesser of the amount the state and local government provides to the local school system in which the student resides or the tuition charged by the participating private school that the student attends. Average tuition at participating private schools ranges from $2,966 to $8,999, with a median of $4,925, compared to average per pupil spending of $8,500 in Louisiana’s public schools.

“To participate in the program, private schools must meet certain criteria related to enrollment; nancial practice; student mobility; and health, safety and welfare of students. Participating schools are prohibited from being selective in their enrollment of voucher students and must administer the state accountability test (LEAP and iLEAP) annually to voucher students in grades 3-8 and 10.

“Nearly 60% of applicants received scholarships for the 2012-13 school year. Of the students who received voucher awards, 86% used their voucher to enroll in a private school in the rst quarter of 2012- 13.

“Roughly 87% of the students in this cohort are black; with 8% white, and 3% Hispanic. Prior to applying for the LSP, students in the 2012-13 cohort performed below the state average in English Language Arts (ELA), math, science, and social studies by around 20 percentile points on the LEAP and iLEAP in 2011-12. Applicants to the program in 2012-13 were concentrated in the earlier grades, with a third entering Kindergarten through 3rd grade.”

As noted in the report, the students who received the voucher were already low-performing. Over two years, their test scores declined significantly. Even though some of the academic losses were reduced in the second year, the students nonetheless lost ground. The academic losses were significant.

Looking for other results, the researchers sought to measure non-cognitive skills like “grit,” self-esteem, “locus of control, and “political tolerance.”

The report says:

“The differences between the two groups are minuscule and not statistically significant. We find little evidence to suggest that, after two years, students receiving an LSP scholarship had noticeably different non-academic skills or political tolerance than students who did not receive a scholarship. Moreover, given the limitations in our measures, we stress that our results are largely inconclusive.”

The researchers conclude that the scholarship program improved integration because the public schools that students left became somewhat less segregated, while the private schools became somewhat less integrated. Thus, “When we combine the largely integrating effects of the program on students’ former public schools with its slightly segregating effects on their new private schools, the overall effect of the LSP is to improve the racial integration of Louisiana Schools.”

The researchers also examined what they believed were the competitive effects of vouchers on nearby public schools:

“We find no effects across both math and ELA overall, but find large positive effects on math and ELA test scores when we restrict the sample to those public schools with a private competitor in close proximity. In sum, our analysis of the competitive impacts of the LSP show that public school performance in Louisiana was either unaffected or modestly improved as a result of the program’s expansion.”

Overall, these are might slim pickings. The students who received a voucher experienced large academic losses, which might or might not rebound in years ahead. There was no change in their noncognitive skills, to the extent these can be measured. Highly segregated public schools became less segregated when black students left for private schools, but this was not the purpose of the program, and it is certainly a roundabout and inefficient way to increase racial integration. As for the supposed benefits to public schools, this seems awfully speculative. And again, the purpose of the program is to “save poor kids trapped in failing schools, not to raise test scores of students in public schools that low-performing students leave.

Bottom line: getting a voucher had negative effects on the test performance of those who received the vouchers.

Please review the bios of the authors:

Patrick Wolf, who has conducted numerous voucher evaluations, is part of the Department of Educational Reform at the University of Arkansas, where he is “Distinguished Professor of Education Policy and 21st Century Endowed Chair in School Choice at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville.” He earned his Ph.D. at Harvard where his mentor was Paul Peterson, the nation’s leading academic proponent of school choice. Jonathan Mills received his Ph.D. at the University of Arkansas in 2015. Anna Egalite received her Ph.D. from the University of Arkansas and postdoctoral work at Paul Peterson’s program at Harvard.

This is a team predisposed to find the bright side. But they are honest scholars and the bright side was hard to find.

Categories Louisiana, Vouchers

Martin Carnoy: Vouchers Will Not Help the Neediest Students

By dianeravitch
March 5, 2017 //
55

Martin Carnoy is a professor at Stanford University who has studied education systems around the world.

Carnoy wrote a report for the Economic Policy Institute about the efficacy of vouchers, or their lack thereof. The report is titled “School Vouchers Are Not a Proven Strategy for Improving Student Achievement.” Carnoy reviews the longest-running voucher programs in the U.S. and other countries and finds little evidence that they improve student achievement.

Here is his summary:

“This report seeks to inform that debate by summarizing the evidence base on vouchers. Studies of voucher programs in several U.S. cities, the states of Florida, Indiana, Louisiana, and in Chile and India, find limited improvements at best in student achievement and school district performance from even large-scale programs. In the few cases in which test scores increased, other factors, namely increased public accountability, not private school competition, seem to be more likely drivers. And high rates of attrition from private schools among voucher users in several studies raises concerns. The second largest and longest-standing U.S. voucher program, in Milwaukee, offers no solid evidence of student gains in either private or public schools.

“In the only area in which there is evidence of small improvements in voucher schools—in high school graduation and college enrollment rates—there are no data to show whether the gains are the result of schools shedding lower-performing students or engaging in positive practices. Also, high school graduation rates have risen sharply in public schools across the board in the last 10 years, with those increases much larger than the small effect estimated on graduation rates from attending a voucher school.

“The lack of evidence that vouchers significantly improve student achievement (test scores), coupled with the evidence of a modest, at best, impact on educational attainment (graduation rates), suggests that an ideological preference for education markets over equity and public accountability is what is driving the push to expand voucher programs. Ideology is not a compelling enough reason to switch to vouchers, given the risks. These risks include increased school segregation; the loss of a common, secular educational experience; and the possibility that the flow of inexperienced young teachers filling the lower-paying jobs in private schools will dry up once the security and benefits offered to more experienced teachers in public schools disappear.

“The report suggests that giving every parent and student a great “choice” of educational offerings is better accomplished by supporting and strengthening neighborhood public schools with a menu of proven policies, from early childhood education to after-school and summer programs to improved teacher pre-service training to improved student health and nutrition programs. All of these yield much higher returns than the minor, if any, gains that have been estimated for voucher students.”

Carnoy published a shorter version of the report for a popular audience. He wrote an article for the New York Daily News explaining why Trump and DeVos are wrong about school choice, specifically vouchers.

He reviews recent research in plain language. Kids don’t benefit. In some places, they actually lose ground.

As I have often written in this space, if vouchers, charters, and school choice were the solution to the problems of urban education, Milwaukee would be the model district of the nation, as it has had choice since 1990. That’s two full generations of students.

He writes:

If the President and his new secretary of education, Betsy DeVos, were right about choice, Milwaukee would be among the highest-scoring urban school districts in the nation. Milwaukee’s private students would be outscoring those in public schools, and students in public schools would have made large gains because of the intense competition from private and charter schools.

None of that is the case. Research over a four-year period that compared the gains of voucher and public school students in Milwaukee showed that the voucher students did no better. And it’s African Americans, who make up roughly two-thirds of Milwaukee’s student body, who are the main recipients of vouchers and also most likely to attend charter schools.

When we compare the National Assessment of Educational Progress scores — that’s the gold standard of achievement tests — of black students in eighth-grade math and reading in 13 urban U.S. school districts, black students in Milwaukee have lower eighth-grade math scores than students in every city but Detroit — notably, another urban district with a high level of school choice.

In reading, Milwaukee’s black eighth-graders do even more poorly. They score lower than black eighth-graders in all other 12 city school districts.

How many billions will we waste on this failed free-market ideology? As Carnoy points out, investing in proven strategies in public schools with credentialed teachers would have long-term benefits.

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Milwaukee, School Choice, Vouchers

Teacher: What Mike Pence Did to Schools and Teachers in Indiana

By dianeravitch
March 4, 2017 //
58

A retired teacher shared the story of Mike a Pence’s role in transforming the schools of Indiana:


Our former governor, Mike Pence, absolutely loves vouchers.Under his “leadership” Indiana became a national leader in giving vouchers to students and families. In fact, we have the dubious reputation of being one of the fastest-growing voucher states. We have a ridiculous merit pay system where highly-effective teachers in the wealthy Carmel-Clay school system received a bonus check of $2422, whereas highly-effective teachers in the poorer school system of Wayne Township a few miles away received $42. Because of Pence and the Republican legislature, many schools in areas of high poverty are struggling financially. I retired from Muncie Community Schools where I was offered an early retirement incentive of staying on the teacher health insurance plan until I turned 65. Hundreds of other employees and I took the “bait” and were promptly dropped from the plan, leaving us without health insurance. Now because of the inequitable funding to schools (and because of a new local superintendent who doesn’t appear to like teachers much), the school board has made its final contract offer to teachers (as reported in our local newspaper, the Star Press):

• A 10 percent reduction in salary for teachers making between $36,005 and
$61,006 for 2015-16.

• A 28 percent cut, including a 20 percent reduction in salary retroactive to July 1,
2016 and the cancellation of two pay checks in the 2016-17 contract.

• Contributing a fixed total to insurance premiums, equal to about 68 percent to the
health insurance option

• Eliminating sick bank contributions

• Eliminating additional pay for teaching a sixth period

• Eliminating the $150 professional development stipend for teachers

• Eliminating retiree benefits

• A one-time salary raise to the minimum of $37,000 for any teacher currently
making less

Thank you, Vice-President Pence, for ruining the teaching profession in Muncie and in the entire state of Indiana.

Categories Education Reform, Indiana, Teacher Pay, Teachers, Vouchers

Oklahoma: School Vouchers Dead for This Legislative Session

By dianeravitch
March 3, 2017 //
6

Vouchers died in the Oklahoma legislature, for now. The sponsor of voucher legislation pulled the bill, saying he didn’t want it to squeak through. Probably, he didn’t have the votes.

No reference was made, apparently, to the research showing that vouchers don’t improve academic performance and often depress it.

“A divisive school-choice proposal that would create state-funded education savings accounts allowing students to attend private schools is off the legislative agenda, at least for now.

“Sen. Rob Standridge, R-Norman, pulled Senate Bill 560 from consideration on Wednesday, which appears to eliminate the possibility of school vouchers becoming law this session.

“The move was a bit of a surprise. Five senators had signed on as co-authors, and Standridge had collected letters of support from political groups and religious leaders.

“Up against the committee deadline, though, Standridge felt he didn’t have the votes.

“I don’t want to pass it by a thin margin,” Standridge told senators in an appropriations committee meeting Wednesday morning. “I want us to feel good about this.”

“The bill had squeaked through the education committee Feb. 20 by a vote of 9 to 7.

“An education savings account – or education scholarship account, as SB 560 called it – gives parents a portion of the state funding used to educate their child, and the parents can spend the money on private school tuition or other qualifying expenses. Critics of education savings accounts and other forms of school choice say such programs siphon money from district schools, hurting public education, and channel it to private schools, often religious ones.

“Oklahoma City Public Schools Superintendent Aurora Lora, in a written statement, urged senators to reject the proposal because it would compound budget cuts that public schools have already endured.

“Vouchers are not the answer to improving educational outcomes for all students, especially in the current budget crisis,” she wrote.

“The Oklahoma State School Boards Association also opposed the measure.

“I appreciate the Senate for not moving forward with a divisive bill that distracts from the most important issues facing Oklahoma’s nearly 700,000 public school students: a historic teacher shortage and severe budget cuts,” Executive Director Shawn Hime said.

“Standridge, however, said he’s not giving up, and like-minded legislators have encouraged him to reintroduce education savings accounts through another avenue, such as in the budget negotiation process. “We’ll see what tomorrow brings,” he said.

“Standridge’s proposal would have varied students’ fund amounts based on their families’ household income, and the total number of participants would have been capped at 1 percent of all public school students.

“Based on those parameters and others, Senate staff estimated public schools could see an estimated net loss of $16 million the first year. More than $5 million would have remained in the school funding formula for 7,000 students who were no longer in public school.

“The School Boards Association ran its own fiscal analysis, finding that the proposal would divert from public schools up to $30 million in the first year and $1.6 billion over a decade.”

Categories Budget Cuts, Education Reform, Funding, Oklahoma, Vouchers

Jeff Bryant: Trump and DeVos Want Vouchers to Promote Religious Fundamentalism

By dianeravitch
March 2, 2017 //
78

This is an alarming post. Read at your own peril.

Trump gave a shout out to the glories of vouchers when he spoke to Congress. DeVos, a religious zealot, smiled with gratification as her 30-year crusade to transfer public funds to religious schools now appears near accomplishment.

Trump pointed to a young woman who had achieved success because of receiving a voucher funded by a tax credit in Florida. Her accomplishments are considerable.

But what kind of school did she attend?

“Over the past three years, Merriweather has had the opportunity to tell her story in numerous media outlets including the Wall Street Journal, The Hill, the Tampa Bay Times, and The 74 (a pro school choice media site funded by charter school and voucher advocates such as the Walton Family Foundation and the Dick & Betsy DeVos Foundation). She’s also been the subject of pro school choice profiles in politically conservative news outlets. And after Merriweather was highlighted at the Trump’s speech, she was interviewed by Fox News.

“None of this is to take away from the sincerity of Merriweather’s writing or the validity of her lived experience. But it needs to be noted that few public school students have had such prominent venues to repeatedly tell their success stories.

“Further, the school Merriweather attended through the school choice program Trump champions is no ordinary school.

“Religious Fundamentalism At Taxpayer Expense

“The private school Merriweather attended and graduated from is the Esprit De Corps Center for Learning in Jacksonville which she has described in testimony she gave last year to a U.S. House Committee as “a church based school, a church that I actually attended.”

“According to the Esprit de Corps website, the “vision for the school was birthed from the mind of God in the heart of Dr. Jeannette C. Holmes-Vann, the Pastor and Founder of Hope Chapel Ministries, Inc.” The education philosophy guiding the school is based on “a return to a traditional educational model founded on Christian principles and values. In accordance with this vision, each component of the school was purposefully selected and designed.”

“A significant “component” of the Esprit de Corps school is its adherence to a fundamentalist Christian curriculum. Its official listing in a Jacksonville directory of private schools describes its education program as a “spiritual emphasis and Biblical [sic] view, which permeates the A-Beka curriculum.”

“A Beka is one of the most widely used K-12 curriculum series for home schooling and private Christian schools,” Rachel Tabachnick explains to me in an email. “This includes many private schools receiving public dollars through voucher and tax-credit programs.”

“Tabachnick has collected textbooks used by voucher and corporate tax-credit schools for over ten years, including curriculum from A Beka Book and Bob Jones University Press.

“In an investigative article for Alternet in 2011, Tabachnick writes, “Throughout the K-12 curriculum, A Beka consistently presents the Bible as literal history and science. This includes teaching young earth creationism and demeaning other religions and other Christian faiths including Roman Catholicism.”

“An A Beka history text she reviews teaches that “socialist propaganda” exaggerated the Great Depression “so that Franklin Delano Roosevelt could pass New Deal legislation” and that the Vietnam War “divided the country into the ‘hawks who supported the fight against Communism, and doves, who were soft on Communism.’”

“Tabachnick quotes a fourth-grade A Beka text that celebrates President Ronald Reagan’s presidency under a banner of “A Return to Patriotism and Family Values.” In describing President Bill Clinton’s administration, an A Beka high school history text calls First Lady Hilary Clinton’s effort to overhaul health care as a “plan for socialized medicine” and describes Vice President Al Gore as “known for his radical environmentalism.”

“Christ Is History, Africans Are Inferior

“In her emails to me, Tabachnick shares excerpts from a newer edition of A Beka’s textbook on “History and Civil Government” that teaches, “The first advent of Jesus Christ to earth – His incarnation, birth, life, death, resurrection, and ascension – is the focal point of history. History began with God and His act of Creation. I climaxed with Gods’ act of redemption.” (emphasis original)

“In the current edition of A Beka’s 10th grade history text “World History and Cultures in Christian Perspective” Tabachnick shares with me, “modern liberalism” is described as “the desire to be free from absolute standards and morals, especially the Scriptures.”

“From this text, high school students like Denisha Merriweather learn, “The beginning of the 20th century witnessed a cultural breakdown that threatened to destroy the very roots of Western civilization. The cause of this of this dissolution was the idea or philosophy known as liberalism.” (emphasis original)

“The curriculum used by Esprit de Corps also taught Merriweather and her African American classmates about the innate inferiority of the African continent and its people.

“The textbooks teach the narrative that the people of African nations descended from Noah’s son Ham and that Ham’s descendant Nimrod led the rebellion against God by building the Tower of Babel,” Tabachnick tells me. This Biblically supported lesson is often referred to as “the curse of Ham,” which has historically been a primary justification for slavery among Southern Christians, according to numerous sources.

“In the A Beka text “History and Civil Government,” Adam and Eve are referred to as “the parents of humanity” and racial variations in human kind are described as the result of “recessive traits” due to “(1) a rapidly changing environment, (2) a small population, (3) and extensive inbreeding.”

“Current A Beka texts also falsely claim that only ten percent of the population of Africa is literate and that literacy rates may drop further because of communists shutting down mission schools,” Tabachnick tells me.”

Read the entire article. Ask yourself whether religious fundamentalism provides the kind of education that our nation’s children need to prepare for a complex world.

Categories Betsy DeVos, Education Reform, Religion, Separation of church and state, Trump, Vouchers
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »