Archives for category: Vouchers
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Who Is Trump’s Poster Girl for Vouchers?

By dianeravitch
March 1, 2017 //
40

During his speech to Congress last night, Teump singled out a young woman in the audience as an exemplar of the benefits of vouchers. He said:

“Joining us tonight in the gallery is a remarkable woman, Denisha Merriweather. As a young girl, Denisha struggled in school and failed third grade twice. But then she was able to enroll in a private center for learning, with the help of a tax credit scholarship program. Today, she is the first in her family to graduate, not just from high school, but from college. Later this year she will get her masters degree in social work.”

Mitchell Robinson, professor of music at Michigan State University, sent the following comment:

“Denisha Meriweather is not simply “an intelligent, dynamic and motivating individual whose life was changed by the school choice policies promoted by Betsy DeVos.” She’s an employee of “Step Up For Students”, a state-approved nonprofit scholarship funding organization that helps administer the very Florida Tax Credit Scholarship Program she benefitted from. [My note: Step up for Students has more than $500 million in assets. https://www.stepupforstudents.org/wp-content/uploads/2012.13-SUFS-Form-990.pdf]

“Ms. Meriweather has also been writing versions of this article at least since she graduated from college in 2014. So, to date, the only job Ms. Meriweather has secured as a result of receiving her voucher is working for the organization that gave her the voucher, and trying to influence public opinion on the worth and value of vouchers.”

Why we must NOT give Betsy DeVos and school choice “a chance”

Categories Betsy DeVos, Florida, School Choice, Trump, Vouchers

Amazing Tape of Texas Sen. Huffines Yelling at Students Who Disagreed with Him about Vouchers

By dianeravitch
February 28, 2017 //
27

First thing this morning I posted the story about Texas State Senator Don Huffines debating middle-schoolers about vouchers. I thought they were in grades 7-12, but they were actually grades 7-8.

Texas Kids Whup State Senator From Dallas in Debate About Vouchers

I just received a copy of the tape. Huffines berates the students for challenging him. He is rude and condescending.

This man is a disgrace to his district. He should be laughed out of his office. Or voted out, whichever happens first. The students are far better informed than he is.

This is the best part of the exchange:

“Critics of the voucher program Huffines is pushing say the amount of the vouchers will not be large enough to actually help students attend some costly schools that will be benefiting from taxpayer dollars. One student specifically asked that question, with more grace and decorum than her adult senator could muster up.

“The student asked, “Excuse me Senator, I don’t mean to offend you but you are speaking on behalf of the students, and as a student of public education I disagree with this completely. I’ve gone to a private school before…with these vouchers, what are you going to get — $5000 a year? The majority of these private schools are $5000 a semester. How are lower income families supposed to pay for the rest of the school year?” Huffines, with a very combative and condescending tone answers, “Oh, so it doesn’t pay for all their education. It doesn’t pay for all their education, does it? The $5000 won’t pay for it, right? So you’re saying since we’re not giving them enough money to pay for all their education, screw ’em they can’t go to private school! Do you want me to give them $15,000? Is that what you want? So they can all go to Hockaday or St. Mark’s? That’s the most selfish thing I’ve ever heard.”

I propose a debate between Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos and the middle school students of Richardson ISD. I would pay to see that!

Categories Texas, Vouchers

Texas Kids Whup State Senator From Dallas in Debate About Vouchers

By dianeravitch
February 28, 2017 //
27

A Texas State Senator debated a group of students from Richardson ISD, and as they say in Texas, the kids gave Sen. Don Huffines a whupping. The students were in grades 7-12.

He tried to persuade them they needed vouchers so they could go to private schools, and a student told him it wouldn’t work because the vouchers would never be large enough to get them into the best schools.

He got testy and snapped at her:

“Huffines countered by asking: “Do you want me to give them $15,000 so they can go to Hockaday or St. Mark’s? That’s the most selfish thing I’ve ever heard.”

Huffines got hot under the collar when the students took issue with him. He lost his cool. His spokesman said “he was ambushed.”


“But Meredyth Childress, a PTA member and mother of one of the students at the meeting, said the students were not political operatives looking to “ambush” Huffines. They were given articles to review about private school vouchers before meeting with the senator. “We’re very proud of the students,” Childress said. “Both sides were passionate. One side displayed the proper respect and decorum. One side did not.”

During one heated exchange, a woman told Huffines that it wasn’t right to send money to private schools that was meant to help public schools.

“What makes you think it’s your money?” Huffines responded, adding that businesses were taxpayers. “Sixty-two percent of all taxes are paid by businesses,” he said.

At one point, Huffines barked at the group: “What are you all afraid of?”

Richardson ISD Superintendent Jeannie Stone said she was proud of how the students responded and grateful they attended the event with her and the PTA.

Bottom line: the high school students were better prepared and more thoughtful than Sen. Huffines.

They knew their stuff. He was outsmarted and outclassed.

Is Sen. Huffines as smart as a seventh-grader from Richardson ISD? What do you think?

Categories Education Reform, Students, Texas, Vouchers

Mercedes Schneider: Betsy DeVos Will Use D.C. Power to Force Vouchers Down Your Throat

By dianeravitch
February 27, 2017 //
51

Here is a paradox. Congress wrote a new law called “Every Student Succeeds Act,” late in 2015, loaded with limits on the power of the Secretary of Education. Both parties were fed up with Arne Duncan’s overweening reach into every school in the nation, going far beyond what Congress intended. Perhaps they knew that all the boasting about his great successes was empty, as a recent evaluation proved.

But along comes Betsy DeVos, never having ever attended or worked in a public school, and knowing nothing of federal policy or federal programs, who has decided to impose her personal ideology on the schools of America. She knows nothing of evidence, and when it flatly contradicts her ideology, she ignores it. This is the definition of a closed mind.

DeVos wants vouchers. The research says that vouchers haven’t improved student test scores.

Mercedes Schneider says we will learn the details later, stuff like the cost. DeVos claims that every child will be able to attend the same quality school as the most affluent but she knows that no voucher will be large enough to put every student (any student) into an elite private school, that such schools don’t have empty seats, nor do they want the kids with disabilities and a host of other issues. She is peddling empty promises. Does she know it? Does she believe what she is saying?

What we do know is that DeVos’s personal desire to bust up public schools and use federal funds for vouchers has been tried for 25 years without any evidence of success. Indeed, there is a growing body of research showing that children who use vouchers may actually lose ground compared to students in public schools. If vouchers were the solution, as she insists, we would be looking now to Milwaukee and Cleveland as the lodestars of American education. Sadly, they are not. Milwaukee has had vouchers since 1990, Cleveland since 1995. Researchers pore through data looking for the promised gains. They can’t find them.

Why is Congress allowing Trump and DeVos to foist their failed ideas on public schools? If NASA were run like the U.S. Department of Education, every space mission would explode on launch.

When will they learn? Schools need well-prepared, certified educators who are able to do their work as professionals, unencumbered by the petty whims and interventions of politicians. Students need healthcare, food security, and the basic essentials of life. Students and teachers need reasonable class sizes and adequate resources. What they don’t need is disruption and the demonstrably failed policies of a rightwing religious extremist.

Tim Slekar, the dean at Edgewood College in Wisconsin, summarizes the research consensus about the effect of vouchers: Vouchers suck. http://bustedpencils.com/2017/02/busted-pencils-trending-news-vouchers-suck/

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Vouchers

Peter Greene: Betsy Drew the Wrong Lesson from the Failure of Obama and Duncan

By dianeravitch
February 26, 2017 //
17

Peter Greene read Betsy DeVos’s speech to CPAC and realized that she totally misunderstood why Obama and Duncan’s reforms failed. It wasn’t because they spent money. It was because they spent money on bad ideas. Now she proposes to spend money on vouchers, which have failed miserably, and on charters, which Obama and Duncan promoted. What is new about her approach? She is candid: she wants to destroy public education. Obama and Duncan either believed or pretended that public education would get better because of high-stakes testing, punishments, and charter schools. They were wrong. DeVos is wrong too. The difference is that we already know she is wrong, but she doesn’t.

Greene writes:

“School improvement grants were like food stamps that could only be spent on baby formula, ostrich eggs, and venison—and it didn’t matter if the families receiving the stamps lived on a farm with fresh milk and chicken eggs, or if they were vegetarians, or if they lived where no store sells ostrich eggs, or if there were no babies in the family. The Department of Education used the grants to dictate strategy and buy compliance with their micro-managing notions about how schools had to be fixed.

“As with many classic reform moves, plenty of folks on the ground level could have told the reformers what was wrong with their plan. But as DeVos’s comments show, the damage of School Improvement Grants is not only in wasted money, it’s also in convicting the wrong suspect and discrediting a whole reform approach.

“DeVos and other conservative reformers are taking the real lesson of the grant program’s failure: “spending money on the wrong thing for schools doesn’t help,” and shortening it to a far more damaging assessment: “spending money on schools doesn’t help.”

“The Obama-Duncan-King program didn’t just fail, they say, but it also helped discredit the whole idea of funding schools at all. Thanks Obama.”

Given the miserable failure of school choice in Michigan and Detroit, you would think DeVos was open to reflecting on the error of her ideas. But don’t make that mistake. Her ideas of school “reform” are based on ideology and theology. They won’t change. They can’t be proved or disproved. They are set in stone. Evidence doesn’t matter.

If allowed to do her wishes, public schools will be defunded (they are “godless”), unions will disappear, for-profit entrepreneurs will cash in, and a million weeds will bloom.

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Closing schools, Corporate Reformers, Duncan, Arne, Education Industry, Education Reform, Failure, Funding, Obama, Privatization, Race to the Top, Vouchers

Milwaukee: The Failed Promise of Vouchers

By dianeravitch
February 26, 2017 //
13

Milwaukee has had vouchers since 1990. The program was expanded to include religious schools in 1998. Voucher advocates, led by former superintendent Howard Fuller, insisted that school choice was the best way to raise the woeful academic performance of black students. Fuller, a social worker and one-time advocate for black nationalism, is now head of the pro-choice Black Alliance for Educational Options. Fuller, the one-time radical, has long been subsidized by rightwing foundations, including the Bradley Foundation and the Walton Foundation (and the Gates Foundation). None of the whites who run these foundations have any credibility in black communities, but Fuller is an effective salesman for their segregationist ideas.

In the early days of vouchers and charters, advocates promised that school choice would cause schools to get better by competing for students. School choice would bring about a rising tide that would lift all boats. Public schools would improve, they said, adopting new programs and higher standards to retain their students and beat the competition. John Chubb and Terry Moe published a seminal work in 1990 called “Politics, Markets, and Schools” in which they argued that all reforms of the existing system were doomed to fail because of its democratic governance and the power of the unions; they boldly claimed that school choice is a “panacea.”

That was the same year that Milwaukee first offered vouchers.

For several years, the Milwaukee voucher program was evaluated by opposing groups. Some said it helped students, others said it didn’t. Over time, critics and supporters reached a consensus view. The voucher program overall had no impact on student performance but parents were happier. Although students were not better prepared academically, they had a higher graduation rate, but they had such high attrition rates that the students least likely to graduate had already dropped out or returned to public schools.

Meanwhile, the public schools enrolled far higher proportions of students with disabilities because the voucher schools and charter schools said they could not meet their needs. The choice schools were also able to eliminate students who were disciplinary problems or academically unable and send them back to public schools.

This article portrays the situation in Milwaukee to mark the 25th anniversary of vouchers, in 2014. Nothing has changed since then. The evaluation industry has moved on. The consensus holds: students in voucher schools do not make greater test score gains than those in public schools. Public schools do not improve as a result of competition. Public schools lose funding to voucher schools and charter schools, which makes them less able to compete. Public schools get the students that the private voucher schools don’t want.

Pro-choice evaluators have reached the same conclusions in D.C. and Cleveland. No rising tide.

And this is the failed program that Betsy DeVos wants to spread across the nation. We now know that vouchers do not save poor kids from failing schools. Vouchers have no purpose other than to undermine public schools.

Categories Milwaukee, Vouchers

Kevin Carey: Researchers “Surprised” by “Dismal Results” from Vouchers

By dianeravitch
February 24, 2017 //
22

Kevin Carey is the director of education research at the New America Foundation in D.C., a think tank funded by tech magnates.

He writes in the New York Times that researchers are reacting with surprise at the “dismal results” from vouchers.

I am not sure why this is news, because vouchers have been tried out since 1990 in Milwaukee and elsewhere and have been subject to numerous evaluations, almost all of which have reached the same conclusion: vouchers don’t have a significant effect on test scores.

This conclusion has been reported again and again over the past 25 years.

It doesn’t seem to have much effect on the pro-voucher crowd, who have been promising since 1955 (when economist Milton Friedman published his seminal essay about vouchers) that school choice would have dramatic positive effects. Back in 1990, John Chubb and Terry Moe predicted in their book “Politics, Markets, and Schools” that school choice was a “panacea,” and that the problem with schools is that they are democratically controlled. Take away the democratic governance, and all will go well, they said.

Anyone who looks at the many evaluations of the voucher programs in Milwaukee, Cleveland, D.C., Indiana, and Louisiana has to search hard for any positive news.

Still, it is good to see this research consensus publicly acknowledged in the New York Times.

Carey is part of the neoliberal Democratic consensus in the D.C. think tank world that favors charters, but not vouchers. So he takes care to say that charters in Massachusetts produce higher test scores than public schools, although he does not note the vote last November in which the people of Massachusetts voted overwhelmingly not to expand the number of charter schools. (He did mention it in his article in the Times last November, when he assured readers that DeVos could not possibly privatize public schools.) Nor does he make any reference to the numerous financial scandals associated with charters schools, nor to their frequent practice of excluding children with special needs and English language learners, nor to the fiscal burden they impose on public schools by draining away resources from them.

Carey is still trying to salvage the charter idea–which DeVos embraces wholeheartedly–from Trump’s wrecking ball approach to public education. The difficulty is that phony reformers like DeVos can use charters to destroy public education as easily as they can use vouchers. Michigan, after all, is a paradise for school choice, as is Florida, and neither has the sort of voucher program that DeVos prefers. They are hotbeds of rapacious, for-profit charter operators.

Neoliberals are caught on the horns of a dilemma. They think they can advance their kind of school choice (charters) while resisting going “all the way” with vouchers. But once you say that school choice is good, it is very tough to draw a line in the sand against vouchers. It is like being just a little bit pregnant. School choice produces community dissension and segregation. Its true forebears are not Milton Friedman but the racist leaders of the South after the Brown decision.

Full disclosure: Carey wrote an unfriendly article about me in The New Republic (referenced in his Wikipedia listing) in 2011. He sought to belittle my scholarship and credentials, although I had just been awarded the Daniel Patrick Moynihan Award by the American Academy of Political and Social Science for scholarship in the interest of the public good. That was Carey’s way of defending charters at that time, which was then and remains the favorite idea of the neoliberal consensus in DC. The neoliberals are still trying to save charters from their embrace by DeVos and Trump.

All that is past. I forgive him. I look forward to the day that Carey examines the charter scandals in Ohio, Michigan, Arizona, Florida, and Pennsylvania, and considers what they are doing to the public schools that are defunded by charters. The majority of students still go to public schools, not charter schools, and they have fewer resources as a result of a dual system. If deregulation makes schools better, why not deregulate them all?

But all that aside, I am pleased to see him skewer vouchers, which have failed again and again and again. They don’t help poor kids; they are all about diverting taxpayer monies to nonpublic schools. The majority of the public has consistently said that they don’t want their taxes to fund religious schools. Regardless of the religious school, taxpayers say no. Whenever there is a referendum, they vote against vouchers. But that doesn’t stop DeVos or her allies.

Categories Charter Schools, Failure, School Choice, Vouchers

Tennessee: Legislators Propose Vouchers for Shelby County, One of Nation’s Most Fiscally Distressed Districts

By dianeravitch
February 24, 2017 //
10

A bill was filed in the Tennessee legislature to establish vouchers for students in Shelby County. It would divert $18 million from the district, which is already one of the most fiscally disadvantaged districts in the nation.

The voucher program would deepen the fiscal distress of the district. With the amount of the vouchers, students would not be accepted at first-rate private schools but at low-quality religious schools that teach creationism.

The bill, filed by Sen. Brian Kelsey, R-Germantown, includes language that only students in districts with at least 30 schools in the bottom 5 percent in the state in academic performance would be eligible for a voucher. SCS is the only district in Tennessee with that many low-performing schools.

Students would also have to be zoned to or currently attending a school in the bottom 5 percent and would have to meet-age-and-income requirements.

The bill creates a phased-in Opportunity Scholarship Pilot Program that would eventually offer 20,000 students a scholarship to attend private school.

In the 2017-18 school year, the program would cost SCS an estimated $8.8 million in funding, followed by $13.6 million the year after and $18.6 million in 2019-2020. That assumes students claim just 25 percent of each year’s available vouchers.

The program would also cost the state a one-time expense of $330,094 in 2017-18 and a recurring expense of $230,394 in administrative costs per year. Vouchers would be worth just over $7,000 and would increase slightly each year.

Kelsey said Monday the funding loss for SCS would be proportional to the number of students the district would no longer have to educate. The bill also only diverts state money, and requires students using a voucher to be counted toward the enrollment of their local school district. That means the district still retains local funds for them.

“The beauty is they no longer have to educate the child, and yet they’re still getting paid some money,” Kelsey said.

What Kelsey fails to acknowledge is that the public schools that lose students would have to increase class sizes, would have to cut back on arts programs and other parts of the curriculum, but still must pay the cost of buildings and grounds, heating and cooling, and other locked-in expenses. If 10% of the students leave, the schools can’t pay 10% less for electricity.

Does Kelsey know that no voucher program in the U.S. has shown significant benefits to students? Does he care?

Categories Tennessee, Vouchers

Lindsay Wagner: North Carolina Is Already a DeVos World in Education

By dianeravitch
February 23, 2017 //
11

Veteran education journalist Lindsay Wagner writes that anyone who wants to know what Betsy DeVos will do to schools need look no further than North Carolina. It has already happened there.

North Carolina was taken over by the Tea Party in 2010 and has gone on a rampage to privatize education and defund public schools. The legislature wiped out its very successful investment in teacher preparation–the North Carolina Teaching Fellows program–and replaced it with Teach for America. The Teaching Fellows made a five-year commitment and most became career teachers. TFA come and go within 2-3 years. Same cost, different results. One produces well-prepared career teachers, the other produces education tourists.

Charters, vouchers, cybercharters. North Carolina has it all.

Devos’ philanthropic efforts and her work running the American Federation for Children (AFC) have helped pave the way for North Carolina’s own school voucher program, which allows low-income families to use taxpayer-funded $4,200 vouchers each year for tuition at private, mostly religious schools that are not held to robust transparency and accountability standards and can discriminate against those who don’t pass a religious litmus test or identify as LGBTQ by barring them from enrolling.

In 2012, Democratic and Republican North Carolina lawmakers who were on board with the idea of school vouchers received more than $90,000 in campaign donations from AFC. The next year lawmakers enacted the school voucher program, which started out with an annual state commitment of just $10 million.

Then after winning a court case challenging the constitutionality of the program, lawmakers voted to significantly expand the school voucher program even though they had no data before them to indicate one way or another whether students leaving public schools using vouchers were actually doing better at private schools. The school voucher program is now scheduled to grow to $145 million annually by 2027. Between now and then, North Carolina will have spent nearly $1 billion on an unaccountable taxpayer-funded program.

The state’s top recipient of school vouchers, Trinity Christian School in Fayetteville, has received nearly $1 million in taxpayer funds since 2014. Last week it was reported that the state Department of Revenue arrested Trinity Christian’s athletic director following an investigation that turned up enough evidence to charge him with embezzling hundreds of thousands of employee tax withholdings over a seven year period.

It’s an unsurprising turn of events given that the state hasn’t enacted strong oversight measures for the school voucher program. Virtually anyone running a private school can receive publicly-funded school vouchers—most schools don’t have to routinely provide a look at how they balance their books or provide any robust evidence that their students are learning.

Now that DeVos is no longer just a private fundraiser pushing school vouchers at the state level but is now the federal education secretary, can she “voucherize” the entire public education system in the United States? No, not alone — besides, most of public education is financed at the state and local level. President Trump’s proposal to pour $20 billion into vouchers is contingent on state and local actors matching dollars and then some. As Vox’s Libby Nelson explains, DeVos could find some other creative ways to get federal dollars into voucher-like programs, but really the onus is on state legislatures to move the voucher agenda.

But if North Carolina’s steady march toward a school voucher program that continues to expand with very few accountability and transparency measures in place is any indication, DeVos has levers outside of her role as federal education secretary to try to keep the momentum going for state-born school voucher programs. And that is worth watching.

Charter schools

DeVos favors charter schools as well, although we’ve heard less about those from her as of late. Nonetheless, charter schools have been part of her philanthropic efforts over time and charter school advocates in North Carolina are enthusiastic about her confirmation as education secretary.

From 1997 until 2011, North Carolina experimented with charter schools, keeping a cap on how many can operate here at 100 schools. Charters are public schools too, but they are given more latitude in hiring and management practices and can do innovative things with their academic offerings—all in the name of improving education writ large.

But in 2011 something changed. Lawmakers did away with the cap on how many charter schools can operate here and since then, the charter school sector has grown at a fairly rapid rate—now at 167 schools. One effect of this expansion has been an an ever-increasing squeeze on public school budgets, which has in turn touched off a years-long fight at the legislature on how public dollars should flow to charter schools.
Meanwhile, resources and increased oversight have not grown concurrently with the charter school sector’s expansion, however; still a tiny group of people in Raleigh is charged with overseeing what is now approaching double the number of charters. And, according to the National Association of Charter School Authorizers (NACSA), recent legislation weakens charter school accountability and oversight and allows bad schools to stay open longer than they should be allowed.

A number of charter schools have suddenly closed in recent times, sometimes leaving students without an academic home in the middle of the school year. Poor governance and financial problems most commonly plague charters, and robust accountability and transparency measures still seem to be lacking as the industry experiences rapid growth. For-profit charter chain operators can run these schools and shield how they spend tax dollars behind a curtain—and lawmakers haven’t done much to force them to be more transparent.

The Tea Party leaders in North Carolina are thrilled with her selection as Secretary of Education. They have invited her to come and see how they have implemented all of her failed ideas. She has given generously to the political campaign’s of the state’s very rightwing senators.

As a result of DeVos efforts—along with those of other school privatization advocates—hundreds of millions of public dollars now flow to school vouchers, charter schools and virtual charter schools.

So when she does come to visit, it will be more like a welcome home party for DeVos. North Carolina has been her playground for years.

Categories Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, North Carolina, Privatization, Virtual Charter Schools, Vouchers

ALERT! GOP Congress Launches First Effort to Undermine Public SCHOOLS!

By dianeravitch
February 21, 2017 //
53

Republicans in The House of Representatives have proposed legislation that would require states to adopt vouchers or lose their federal funding. This is an outrage! This is step one of the Trump-DeVos agenda to force vouchers and charters on states that do not want them. This is a blatant misuse of federal power to coerce states to go along with religious zealots like DeVos.

The legislation, HR 610, has been filed. Let your Representative in Congress know that you oppose this egregious federal overreach. Support The Network for Public Education as we rally supporters of public schools to repel this obnoxious legislation.

The language of the legislation and the steps you can take to oppose it are included here.

If you do not want your tax dollars to fund evangelical religious schools, madrassas, or yeshivas, get active.

If you believe in public schools with certified teachers who teach modern science and history, not religious fervor, get active.

Speak up. Speak out. Defend separation of church and state. Defend your community public schools. Stop the raid on the public school funds.

Categories Betsy DeVos, Religion, Separation of church and state, Trump, Vouchers
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