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Arizona: Surprise! State Board Says Parent May Not Use Voucher $$ to Buy Dune Buggies

By dianeravitch
August 31, 2024 //
3

Arizona is truly the Wild West of privatization. Its voucher program started small and grew fast. Parents and teachers organized a state referendum on vouchers in 2018, and the voters overwhelmingly rejected their expansion, by 65-35%.

But the Republican legislature ignored the public smack down and opened the nation’s first universal voucher program. Anyone can get a voucher, even if they are rich, even if they have never attended a public school.

The state’s voucher money could be used for a vast variety of products and services. But a few days ago, the State Board of Education drew a line: voucher money could not be used to buy dune buggies.

ArizonaCentral.com reported:

The Arizona State Board of Education on Monday struck down a parent’s appeal to use state school voucher money to finance three dune buggy purchases.

The parent sought reimbursement for the recreational vehicles through the Empowerment Scholarship Account program, citing her children’s need for interactive learning. Since 2022, the school voucher program has allowed any child in Arizona to receive public money to pay for education expenses such as private school tuition, supplies, tutoring and supplemental materials.

The board’s near-unanimous decision broke from an appeal hearing officer’s recommendation this spring that the family should be reimbursed. Several board members suggested the purchases were needlessly extravagant, even under the broad statute governing the ESA voucher program.

Board member Jennifer Clark, who cast the sole dissenting vote, said the board had voted in line with the hearing officer’s recommendation in every voucher appeal case since she joined in 2022. She said the board should defer to the officer.

The family can appeal the board’s decision, said Board President Daniel Corr.

“Regardless of your feelings on ESA — and I think they range along a spectrum — at some point, I think the question of reasonableness comes to mind,” Corr said. “And this particular purchase, purchases, exceeds my definition of reasonableness.”

The Arizona Department of Education first denied the parent’s request for reimbursement in December. The parent appealed, according to board meeting agenda materials, and then the department “mistakenly approved” her reimbursement request in January. 

The department suspended the family’s school voucher accounts in March and requested repayment for the dune buggies. The parent appealed again to the Education Board and described the department’s handling of her case as “crass incompetence.” 

“Telling us months later that we have to pay back something that was approved by the department has to be illegal in 50 states and a few territories,” she wrote in the appeal.

The department testified during the May hearing that the dune buggies “are not primarily education items, are disallowed by the ESA Parent Handbook, and are not items funded in a public-school setting,” according to the board agenda materials. Textbooks and supplemental materials, such as dune buggies, must be tied to a curriculum for a purchase to be justified under the voucher program, according to the department. 

This interpretation was affirmed by the Attorney General’s Office in a July 1 letter alleging the department had allowed expenditures not supported by curriculum and directing the department to stop approving those expenses. 

The parent later provided a curriculum plan that was “narrowly tailored” with help from an occupational therapist, according to agenda materials. The therapist testified during the hearing that the students engaged more effectively with learning materials that involved physical interaction, such as dune buggies, which allowed them “to engage in movement before returning to more traditional learning environments.”

Categories Accountability, Arizona, Education Industry, Funding, Vouchers

Pierre Tristam: The Great Florida Voucher Swindle! Welfare for the Rich!

By dianeravitch
August 29, 2024 //
7

Pierre Tristam is the editor of FlaglerLive in Flagler County, Florida. In this brilliant article, he describes vouchers as welfare for the rich, a new kind of state socialism. He points out that vouchers are destroying public schools.

I want to acknowledge that I cribbed the article from the blog of the Network for Public Education, which you should subscribe to. It’s free, and it’s curated by the great Peter Greene. If you have a passion for public schools, sign up.

Tristam writes:

It would be absurd, I think we can all agree, if Paul Renner, our esteemed Speaker of the House and Flagler’s chief pork slabber, were to champion a bill entitling every citizen to take out $2,000 from their local policing budgets so they can have their own private security and call it “Police Choice.” After all, don’t we all pay taxes? Shouldn’t we have a choice how that money is spent? Don’t we free Floridians know best? Sheriff Rick Staly would be the first to tell Renner he’s out of his mind. 

It would be absurd, I think we can all agree, if Renner, claiming that taxpayers shouldn’t have their park choices limited to Holland and Ralph Carter Park, were to champion a bill entitling every household to take out $1,000 from the parks and rec budget so they could help subsidize their Disney and Universal experiences and call it “Park Choice.” Even Renner’s chamber of commerce courtesans would tell him he’s out of his mind. 

But not too many people told Renner he was out of his mind when he did exactly that to public schools: he championed a bill entitling every child in Florida to $8,000 a year to spend on private education, at the public school system’s expense, and called it “school choice.” The few who did were themselves told they’re out of their mind. 

“School choice” is an orchestrated demolition of public schools and the social contract. The focus-group euphemism masks the thieving of tax dollars to subsidize private schools, transforming what was once an aspiration of  fringe Christian and anti-government militants into state doctrine. “I hope to see the day when, as in the early days of our country, we won’t have public schools,” the televangelist and founder of the Moral Majority Jerry Falwell said in a 1979 sermon. “The churches will have taken them over again and Christians will be running them. What a happy day that will be.” Falwell lived long enough to see Jeb Bush’s Florida reopen that door. Renner swung the wrecking ball. 

Flagler County schools are losing close to $11 million this year to “choice,” siphoned out so 1,250 students can get their $8,000 either for private school or home school. True, not every one of these students was attending Flagler schools before, so it’s not a net loss of 1,250 students. But very few of these students were either qualifying or getting taxpayer subsidies before. Exactly 136 did in Flagler just four years ago, costing the district less than $1 million. Now anyone qualifies, including millionaire families, and every dollar going to them is a dollar diverted from public education. 

That figure of 1,250 students is for the first full year of this “choice” being in effect. Coming years will only accelerate the drain on public schools, because if you have children you’d be out of your mind not to take the $8,000-per-child handout, especially since most of you aren’t paying anywhere near $8,000 in school taxes each year. The rest of us, and even more so businesses and renters, are subsidizing the swindle. 

Advocates of the swindle have come up with a couple of defenses: first, that they’re taxpayers who should choose where their money is spent–the untenable argument that would then support “police choice” and “park choice,” and if you push that logic far enough, “war choice,” as in: you may spend my money on the Ukraine war but not the genocide of Palestinians. But in our social contract how our taxes are spent is not an a-la-carte option, though Boomer narcissists who can’t see past the hedge of their gated community think it should be.

Second, the advocates claim the dollars “follow the child,” as if public money going to private subsidies were new money that doesn’t affect public school budgets. It’s excellent propaganda. But it’s a double-barreled lie–double-barreled, because not only is every student lost to the public schools a loss of $8,000, but every student who was never enrolled in  public school but is now getting the $8,000 compounds that loss, since these are public dollars that would have otherwise been allocated to public schools. 

Incidentally, we don’t say that people receiving food stamps are on “food choice.” We don’t say that people getting Temporary Assistance for Needy Families are on “poverty choice.” When people get free money from the government, we call it welfare. Ditching the ordurous school-choice euphemism and applying the language’s proper definition–school welfare–exposes the state’s fabrications.

Facts do the rest. The welfare kings and queens this time are much richer than those on food stamps. As the Miami Herald reported Sunday, “Last school year, the average income of families who provided income data and received scholarships for a family of four was $86,000.” (To be eligible for food choice this year a family of four can’t have a household income above $62,400.) 

According to Step Up for Students, the state’s arm administering school welfare, 82 percent of handouts went to students attending religious schools–madrassas–like one in Palm Coast that boasts of “raising champions for Christ” and still sports a crusader for a mascot, which is no less offensive to a few hundred million people than if it flew the Confederate or Nazi flags. Our tax dollars are subsidizing that kind of bigotry. 

More perniciously: When Bush started the welfare-to-school wagon he limited it to the disabled and the needy. Minorities benefited disproportionately. It was a form of segregation in reverse, like affirmative action. Renner’s scheme, like so much under Gov. Ron DeSantis, revives pre-Brown v. Board of Education segregation. By eliminating eligibility barriers, wealthier families use the subsidy as a bridge to very expensive public schools whose tuition keeps the riff raff out, even with $8,000 subsidies. A family might’ve afforded a $9,000 school but couldn’t afford a $15,000 school. So clever schools adjust their tuition just so as a barrier to undesirables and to make extra profit, thus cashing in twice over: in dollars and in whitening their own “choice” of who gets in. Et voilà. Jerry Falwell’s jolly jowly ideal realized. 

Finally, to make sure the dagger cuts deeply and fatally, the state makes it mandatory for school districts to advertise school welfare on their websites. Districts like Flagler must make it as easy as possible for parents to apply for the money and get out of the district, while the state provides a detailed list of private schools to choose from, including, of course, every madrassa under the sky. State and districts could not be shouting louder: Public schools suck. Here’s $8,000. $16,000. $24,000. Now leave.

As students continue to be bribed out, public schools will be left with less money, all the responsibilities for higher standards, more challenging students, crumbling buildings and, revoltingly, school board members and superintendents in full Stockholm Syndrome mode. You hear them in board meetings not only talking about school welfare but praising it, pandering to it, the way the condemned suck up to their executioner. 

There are exceptions. Our own Colleen Conklin for years has been sounding the alerts about the swindle, starting with the charter schemes. She thankfully kept a few of those out of the district, back when local school boards had a say. They no longer do. And Conklin is leaving in November. Our remaining board members love the school welfare swindle and are probably trying to figure out how to cash in with their own kids without looking like public school traitors. 

But as Jerry Falwell implied, it’s a matter of time before those school board members are surplus property, like public school buildings, like buses, for that matter like teachers, counselors, paraprofessionals, bus drivers and administrators, all of whom are already treated like disposable obstructions in the way of school welfare and the cult known as “parental rights.”

Categories DeSantis, Education Industry, Extremism, For-Profit, Fraud, Hoax, Privatization, Vouchers

Paul Krugman: Why Do Republicans Oppose Free Lunches for Children?

By dianeravitch
August 27, 2024 //
35

Paul Krugman, the economist who writes a regular column for the New York Times, recently explored why Republicans oppose free lunch for students. The simple answer is that it’s just plain weird. The more complex answer is that they don’t want to create an “entitlement” for children. The irony that he does not explore is why Republicans are unwilling to pay for free lunches, yet eager to pay the tuition of students who attend religious or other private schools, regardless of their family’s income.

He writes:

You could say that Tim Walz became the Democratic vice-presidential nominee with one weird trick — that is, by using that word to describe Donald Trump and JD Vance, a categorization that went viral. In his maiden campaign speech he upgraded it a bit further to “creepy and weird as hell.” (If you think that’s over the top, have you seen Trump’s bizarre rant speculating about whether Joe Biden is going to seize back his party’s presidential nomination?)

But Walz is more than a meme-maker. He has also been an activist governor of Minnesota with a strong progressive agenda. And I’d like to focus on one key element of that agenda: requiring that public and charter schools provide free breakfasts and lunches to all students.

Perhaps not incidentally, child care has long been a signature issue for Kamala Harris, and Walz’s policies may have played a role in his selection as her running mate.

In any case, free school meals are a big deal in pure policy terms. They have also met fierce Republican opposition. And the partisan divide over feeding students tells you a lot about the difference between the parties, and why you really, really shouldn’t describe the MAGA movement as “populist.”

Now, even many conservatives generally support, or at least claim to support, the idea of cheap or free lunches for poor schoolchildren. The National School Lunch Program goes all the way back to 1946, when it passed with bipartisan support and President Harry Truman signed it into law.

Why should the government help feed kids? Part of the answer is social justice: Children don’t choose to be born into families that can’t or won’t feed them adequately, and it seems unfair that they should suffer. Part of the answer is pragmatic: Children who don’t receive adequate nutrition will grow up to be less healthy and less productive adults than those who do, hurting society as a whole. So spending on child nutrition is arguably as much an investment in the future as building roads and bridges.

There’s a strong case that in general child nutrition programs more than pay for themselves by creating a healthier, higher-earning future work force. In other words, this is one area where there really is a free lunch.

Schools, then, should feed students who might otherwise not get enough to eat. But why make free meals available to all children, rather than only to children from low-income households? There are multiple reasons, all familiar to anyone who has looked into the problems of antipoverty policy in general.

First, trying to save money by limiting which children you feed turns out to be expensive and cumbersome; it requires that school districts deal with reams of paperwork as they try to determine which children are eligible. It also imposes a burden on parents, requiring that they demonstrate their neediness.

Additionally, restricting free meals to children whose parents can prove their poverty creates a stigma that can deter students from getting aid even when they’re entitled to receive it. I know about this effect from family history: My mother, who grew up in the Depression, used to talk about her shame at not being able to afford new shoes because her parents, although just as poor as her classmates’ parents, couldn’t bring themselves to apply for government assistance.

And it’s not as if feeding children is prohibitively expensive. So if you want to make sure that children get enough to eat, having schools offer free meals to all their students, without an income test, would seem to be simple common sense.

But Republicans in general aren’t on board. The Minnesota law that Walz signed passed essentially along party lines. The people behind Project 2025, in particular, don’t approve. (Yes, despite denials, Project 2025 is a very good guide to what a second Trump administration might do.) The project’s magnum opus, “Mandate for Leadership,” whose 900 pages lays out a detailed policy agenda, singles out feeding students as something that should be reined in. “Federal school meals increasingly resemble entitlement programs,” it warns, as if this is self-evidently a bad thing. A bit farther down, it reads, “The U.S.D.A. should not provide meals to students during the summer unless students are taking summer-school classes.” I guess being hungry isn’t a problem when school is out.

Stories like this are why my hackles rise whenever people call MAGA a populist movement. The people who will almost certainly make policy if Trump wins are as committed as ever to a right-wing economic agenda of cutting taxes on the wealthy while slashing programs that help Americans in need — including programs that help children.

In addition to being cruel, this agenda tends to be unpopular. Most Americans support providing all students with meals, regardless of their income, just as most Americans now support the Affordable Care Act, which Trump will very likely again try to destroy if returned to office.

But the American right lives in an echo chamber that normalizes views on both economic and social policy that are very much at odds with what a majority of voters want. Those extreme views often fly under the radar. But sometimes they do attract attention. And when they do, many people find them … weird.

Categories Childhood, Cruelty, Elections, Funding, Health, Hypocrisy, Inequality, Poverty, Students, Vouchers

Dan Rather: Trump Is Lying About Project 2025

By dianeravitch
August 26, 2024 //
78

When Project 2025, the definitive guide to Trump’s second term, began to generate negative reactions, Trump claimed he was taken by surprise. All of a sudden, he played dumb about Project 2025: He said he didn’t know who was behind it and had barely heard about it.

As Dan Rather and his team at “Steady” determined, he was lying again. Nothing new there, but he wanted to discourage the public from learning more about Project 2025.

Dan wrote:

Donald Trump and his campaign may have disavowed it, but don’t think for a moment that Project 2025 is going anywhere. A newly released hidden camera interview with one of the project’s authors, who also served in Trump’s Cabinet, reveals that the Republican nominee has “blessed it.” 

First, a little background.

Project 2025, the MAGA blueprint to completely overhaul the federal government, is being spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation, the daddy of conservative think tanks, with input from more than 100 other right-wing organizations. “The Mandate for Leadership 2025: The Conservative Promise,” the official title, consists of four pillars:

  • A 900-page policy guide for a second Trump term
  • A playbook for the first 180 days, consisting of 350 executive orders and regulations that have already been written
  • A LinkedIn-style database of potential MAGA personnel 
  • A “Presidential Administration Academy,” a training guide for political appointees to be ready on day one

On July 24, Russell Vought, Trump’s former director of the Office of Management and Budget, Project 2025 author and Republican National Convention policy director, met with two people he thought were potential donors to his conservative group, Center for Renewing America. They were actually working for a British nonprofit trying to expose information about Project 2025. The two secretly recorded the two-hour conversation.

In the video posted on CNN, Vought described the project as the “tip of the America First spear.” He said that after meeting with Trump in recent months, the former president “is very supportive of what we do.” The project would create “shadow agencies” that wouldn’t be subject to the same scrutiny as actual agencies of the federal government. Vought also told members of the British nonprofit that he was in charge of writing the second phase of Project 2025, consisting of the hundreds of executive orders ready to go on day one of a new administration. 

When asked how the information would be disseminated, his deputy said it would be distributed old-school, on paper. “You don’t actually, like, send them to their work emails,” he said, to avoid discovery under the Freedom of Information Act.

Last week, ProPublica, an investigative journalism nonprofit, obtained more than 14 hours of training videos, which are part of Project 2025’s effort to recruit and train tens of thousands of right-wing appointees to replace a wide and deep swath of current federal civil servants. 

“We need to flood the zone with conservatives,” said Paul Dans, who was in charge of Project 2025 until he was fired because it’s become such a headache for Trump. “This is a clarion call to come to Washington,” Dans said in 2023. 

Project 2025 is not a new plan; it has been in the works for decades. The first version was published just after Ronald Reagan took office in 1981. In 2015 the Heritage Foundation gave the incoming Trump administration the seventh iteration. Should you think that Trump and his cronies know nothing about any of this, the Heritage Foundation boasted that Trump instituted 64% of the policy recommendations in that document, including leaving the Paris Climate Accords.

Trump has tried and largely failed to distance himself from Project 2025. Perhaps because two high-ranking members of his administration were directors of the project. On Truth Social, Trump posted, “I know nothing about Project 2025. I have no idea who is behind it….” As for those training videos, most of the speakers in them are former Trump administration officials.

Many of Project 2025’s recommendations are deeply unpopular with Americans. A survey conducted by YouGov found that almost 60% of respondents opposed several big tenets, including: eliminating the Department of Education, giving tax cuts to corporations, ending the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), and changing the law to allow the president to fire civil servants.

It is difficult to convince voters that the project’s policy recommendations are real because they are so radical. Anat Shenker-Osorio, a political strategist, spoke about the challenges of discussing Project 2025 with focus groups on the podcast “The Wilderness.”

“When we actually cut and paste verbatim from the Heritage document, people are like, that’s a bunch of bull****. Like, why did you make that up? And what is wrong with you? And why are you lying to us?” she said. 

To that end, here are just a few of the most democracy-threatening suggestions, verbatim:

On child labor: “With parental consent and proper training, certain young adults should be allowed to learn and work in more dangerous occupations.”

On education: “Federal education policy should be limited and, ultimately, the Federal Department of Education should be eliminated.“

On climate change: “Climate-change research should be disbanded … The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) should be broken up and downsized.”

On LGBTQ+ rights: “The next secretary should also reverse the Biden Administration’s focus on ‘LGBTQ+ equity,’ subsidizing single-motherhood, disincentivizing work, and penalizing marriage, replacing such policies with those encouraging marriage, work, motherhood, fatherhood, and nuclear families.”

On families: “Families comprised of a married mother, father, and their children are the foundation of a well-ordered nation and healthy society … The male-female dyad is essential to human nature and … every child has a right to a mother and father.”

Not to mention several highly publicized recommendations on abortion and women’s rights that are an effort to return to America of the 1950s.

The architects of and adherents to Project 2025 want a white, heterosexual Christian nation. The ideals of our 250-year-old form of government, in which majority rules, are anathema to them. They want to inflict their beliefs on everyone, representative democracy be damned. 

I cannot state it strongly enough: Project 2025, with Donald Trump at the helm, is the greatest existential threat to American democracy in recent history. And make no mistake, should Trump win in November, he will usher in many if not most of the project’s recommendations. 

Perhaps Project 2025 should be referred to as Project 1925. In Trump’s mind, that was the time that America was “great,” and they want to go back to that era of low taxes, no abortions, white Christian male domination, no civil rights laws, low taxes, and a very limited federal government.

No thanks. We are not going back!

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Censorship, Civil Rights, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Elections, Environment, Extremism, Freedom, Gender, Health, School Choice, Science, Trump, Vouchers

Peter Greene: Conservatives Think States Can Support Both Public Schools and “Choice.” They Can’t.

By dianeravitch
August 19, 2024 //
21

Peter Greene critiques the conservative idea that states should support public schools and all sorts of choice. Greene explains why this idea erodes the quality of public schools, which enroll the vast majority of the nation’s students. Conservatives blame teachers’ unions for whatever they dont like about pibkic schools, but Greene denonstrates that they are wrong. Open the link to read the full article.

He writes:

In the National Review, Michael Petrilli, Thomas Fordham Institute honcho and long-time reformster, poses the argument that folks on the right don’t need to choose “between expanding parental options and improving traditional public schools.” Instead, he asserts, they “can and should do both.”

On the one hand, it’s a welcome argument these days when the culture panic crowd has settled on a scorched earth option for public schools. As Kevin Roberts, Heritage Foundation president, put it in his now-delayed-until-after-it-can’t-hurt-Trump-election-prospects book, “We don’t merely seek an exit from the system; we are coming for the curriculums and classrooms of the remaining public schools, too.” For many on the right, the education policy goal is to obliterate public schools and/or force them to closely resemble the private christianist schools that culture panickers favor. 

Pertrilli is sympathetic to the “let’s just give parents the money and be done with it” crowd. 

We’ve inherited a “system” that is 150 years old and is saddled with layers upon layers of previous reforms, regulations, overlapping and calcified bureaucracies, and a massive power imbalance between employees and constituents, thanks to the almighty teachers unions.

Sigh. Reforms and regulations, sure, though it would be nice for Petrilli to acknowledge that for the last forty-ish years, those have mostly come from his own reformster crowd. And I am deeply tired of the old “almighty teachers unions” trope, which is some serious baloney. But his audience thinks it’s true, so let’s move on. 

Petrilli’s point is that conservatives should not be focusing on “school choice” alone, but should embrace an “all of the above” approach. Petrilli dismisses Democrats as “none of the above” because of their “fealty to the unions,” which is, again, baloney. Democrats have spent a couple of decades as willing collaborators with the GOP ; if they are “none of the above” it’s because they’ve lost both the ability and authority to pretend to be public education supporters. The nomination of Tim Walz has given them a chance to get on the public education team, but let’s wait and see–there’s no ball that the Democratic Party can’t drop.

Petrilli sits on a practical point here (one that Robert Pondiscio has made repeatedly over the years)– public schools are a) beloved by many voters, b) not going away, and c) still educate the vast, vast majority of U.S. students. Therefore, folks should care about the quality of public education.

Petrilli then floats some ideas, all while missing the major obstacle to his idea. There are, he claims, many reforms that haven’t been tried yet, “including in red states where the teachers unions don’t have veto power.” I believe the actual number of states where the union doesn’t have veto power is fifty. But I do appreciate his backhanded acknowledgement that many states have dis-empowered their teachers unions and still haven’t accomplished diddly or squat. It’s almost as if the unions are not the real obstacle to progress.

His ideas? Well, there’s ending teacher tenure, a dog that will neither hunt nor lie down and die. First of all, there is no teacher tenure. What there is is policy that requires school districts to follow a procedure to get rid of bad teachers. Behind every teacher who shouldn’t still have a job is an administrator who isn’t doing theirs. 

Tenure and LIFO (Last In First Out) interfere with the reformster model of Genius CEO school management, in which the Genius CEO should be able to fire anyone he wants to for any reason he conceives of, including having become too expensive or so experienced they start getting uppity. 

The theory behind much of education reform has been that all educational shortfalls have been caused by Bad Teachers, and so the focus has been on catching them (with value-added processing of Big Standardized Test scores), firing them, and replacing them with super-duper teachers from the magical super-duper teacher tree. Meanwhile, other teachers would find this new threatening environment inspirational, and they would suddenly unleash the secrets of student achievement that they always had tucked away in their file cabinet, but simply hadn’t implemented.

This is a bad model, a non-sensical model, a model that has had a few decades to prove itself, and has not. Nor has Petrilli’s other idea– merit pay has been tried, and there are few signs that it even sort of works, particularly since schools can’t do a true merit pay system and also it’s often meant as a cost-saving technique (Let’s lower base pay and let teachers battle each other to win “merit” bonuses that will make up the difference).

Petrilli also argues against increased pay for teacher masters degrees because those degrees “add no value in terms of quality of teaching and learning” aka they don’t make BS Test scores go up. He suggests moving that extra money to create incentives for teachers to move to the toughest schools. 

Petrilli gets well into weeds in his big finish, in which he cites the “wisdom of former Florida governor Jeb Bush” and the golden state of Florida as if it’s a model for all-of-the-above reform and not a state that has steadily degraded and undercut public schools in order to boost charter and private operations, with results that only look great if you squint hard and ignore certain parts(Look at 4th grade scores, but be sure to ignore 8th and 12th grade results). And if you believe that test results are the only true measure of educational excellence.

So, in sum, Petrilli’s notion that GOP state leaders should support public education is a good point. What is working against it?

One is that his list is lacking. Part of the reform movement’s trouble at this point is that many of its original ideas were aimed primarily at discrediting public education. The remaining core– use standardized tests to identify and remove bad teachers– is weak sauce. Even if you believe (wrongly) that the core problem of public education is bad teaching, this is no way to address that issue. 

Beyond bad teachers, the modern reform movement hasn’t had a new idea to offer for a couple of decades. 

Petrilli also overlooks a major challenge in the “all of the above approach,” a challenge that reformsters and choicers have steadfastly ignored for decades.

You cannot run multiple parallel school systems for the same cost as a single system. 

If you want to pay for public schools and charter schools and vouchers, it is going to cost more money. “School choice” is a misnomer, because school choice has always been available. Choicers are not arguing for school choice–they’re arguing for taxpayer funded school choice. That will require more taxpayer funds. 

You can’t have six school systems for the price of one. So legislators have been left with a choice. On the one hand, they can tell taxpayers “We think school choice is so important that we are going to raise your taxes to pay for it.” On the other hand, they can drain money from the public system to pay for charters and vouchers all while making noises about how the public system is totes overfunded and can spare the money easy peasy. 

I can offer a suggestion for conservatives who want to help public schools improve.

Get over your anti-union selves.

Please open the link to finish the article.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Every Student Succeeds Act, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Race to the Top, School Choice, Segregation, Unions, Vouchers

Ohio: Cost of Vouchers Soars to $966 Million a Year—from $124 Million

By dianeravitch
August 16, 2024 //
8

Ohio adopted a voucher program. Then another and another. There are five different voucher programs. The Republicans who control the State Legislature hate public schools, so they eventually decided to make vouchers universal. They removed the income limit so that every family could obtain vouchers.

The cost of vouchers yearly went from $124 million last year to $966 million this year—and it may go even higher.

Do Ohioans really want to underwrite the tuition of every student who chooses to enroll in nonpublic schools?

You will not be surprised to read that the vast majority of students who use vouchers are already students in private and religious schools.

Poor kids are not being “saved” by vouchers. Affluent families are getting a subsidy from the states. Many private schools have raised their tuition in response to the new voucher money.

Ohio also has many charter schools. Typically they get worse academic results than public schools. Some have been mired in financial scandals. The most notorious charter scandal involved an online for-profit school called The Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow (ECOT). Over two decades, it collected $1 billion from the state. Its owner contributed to politicians. It had big-name speakers at its graduation ceremonies, like the Governor and, on another occasion, Jeb Bush. It has the lowest graduation rate of any high school in the nation. When the state auditor asked ECOT to return $67 million due to phantom students, it declared bankruptcy.

Categories Education Industry, Funding, Ohio, Vouchers

Texas: The Fight Against Vouchers Continues

By dianeravitch
August 16, 2024 //
10

Texas Governor Greg Abbot said last year that voucher legislation was his top priority. Was it because Pennsylvania billionaire Jeff Yass gave him $6 million to vouchers through the legislature? A score of Republicans from rural districts voted against vouchers. They knew that their district schools would be crippled by vouchers. Although Governor Abbot called multiple special sessions, although he offered bribes and threats, the rural Republicans defied him and said no to vouchers. The people who taught in their local public schools were their sisters and brothers, aunts and uncles, children and friends.

So Governor Abbot took Jeff Yass’s $6 million and used it to fund extremist Republicans who would vote for vouchers, putting their local public schools at risk.

Many of the Yass extremists won, paving the way for Abbot to win his vouchers.

Democrats are challenging Abbot’s puppets in November, the ones that Jeff Yass paid for.

The Pastors for Texas Children have not given up the fight.

Their leader Charles Foster Johnson post the following on Twitter:

As we write this, we are in the hearing room with our pastors. We are told the committee will hear testimony tomorrow, too.

 This written testimony by PTC Trustee Bill Jones is superb! It is a sterling example of what effective written testimony is. It is not too late for you to submit written testimony. You may do so here.   

#######

 I am Bill Jones, a resident of Collin County for the past 37 years. My state representative is Jeff Leach. I have three grandchildren in Frisco ISD and one in Allen ISD. My daughter is a schoolteacher in Frisco ISD and formerly taught for many years in Plano ISD. Both of my children grew up in Plano ISD schools. I am a trustee of Pastors for Texas Children, where I have served since 2013, and a member – since 2004 – of Wilshire Baptist Church in Dallas, where I serve on the Christian Advocacy Committee.

 With respect to your August 12 hearing on “educational opportunity” proposals, I testify to oppose any bill that would transfer public taxpayer funds to private entities. Public taxpayer funds should go ONLY to public schools that benefit all, not to private schools that benefit only a privileged few. Any bill that would give public funds for the support of private schools would drain funds from our children’s and grandchildren’s neighborhood public schools, which are already gravely underfunded.

 Any claim by voucher proponents that vouchers benefit the underprivileged is an outright lie. The vast majority of parents who would take advantage of vouchers – as has been the case in other states – are those whose children are already in private schools. They go to parents who are able to afford the private school tuition, and the voucher is merely a supplement to reduce their expense. Voucher amounts are never even close to sufficient for those who cannot afford private schools in the first place. They benefit the well-to-do.

 Above all, I do not want my tax money to go to support someone else’s religious indoctrination any more than I want the tax money of those of other faiths to support mine.

 In addition, private schools are not accountable to the state – their teachers do not have to be certified; their curriculum is not subject to oversight; and they are free to refuse applications from, for example, special needs children, which they almost always do. Public schools, on the other hand, are required to meet state standards, and they must take ALL children, including those with special needs. We should not be further draining them of the resources needed to serve children of every type of need, every faith, every color, every ethnic background.

Voucher plans, no matter what name or euphemism is attached to them, are bad policy, hurting our children and grandchildren, and the dedicated public servants – schoolteachers, principals, superintendents, and other staff – who serve them.

Please vote against any bills that provide public taxpayer funds for the support of private schools.

Donate to PTC

PO Box 471155, Fort Worth, Texas, 76147

Categories Billionaires, Education Industry, Elections, Texas, Vouchers

Washington Post: A Biased View of Tim Walz’s Record on Education

By dianeravitch
August 14, 2024 //
11

Laura Meckler and Hannah Natanson wrote about Governor Tim Walz’s record on education in Minnesota. In making decisions, Walz relied on his own knowledge as a veteran public school teacher and very likely on research, but The Washington Post misleadingly attributed his views to “the teachers’ union,” the bugbear of the far-right.

The article is saturated with bias against teachers unions and presents the pro-education Walz as a tool of the union, not as a veteran educator who knows the importance of public schools. Walz grew up and taught in small towns. They don’t want or need “choice.” They love their public schools, which are often the central public institution in their community.

The 2019 state budget negotiations in Minnesota were tense, with a deadline looming, when the speaker of the House offered Gov. Tim Walz a suggestion for breaking the impasse.

They both knew that the Republicans’ top priority was to create a school voucher-type program that would direct tax dollars to help families pay for private schools. House Speaker Melissa Hortman, a Democrat, floated an idea: What if they offered the Republicans a pared-down version of the voucher plan, some sort of “fig leaf,” that could help them claim a symbolic victory in trade for big wins on the Democratic side? In the past, on other issues, Walz had been open to that kind of compromise, Hortman said.

This time, it was a “hard no.”

He used his position’s formidable sway over education to push for more funding for schools and backed positions taken by Education Minnesota, the state’s teachers union of which he was once a member. His record on education will probably excite Democrats but provide grist for Republicans who have in recent years gained political ground with complaints about how liberals have managed schools.

Teachers and their unions consistently supported Walz’s Minnesota campaigns with donations, records show. And in the first 24 hours after he was selected as Vice President Kamala Harris’s running mate, teachers were the most common profession in the flood of donations to the Democratic ticket, according to the campaign.

During the chaotic 2020-21 pandemic-rattled school year, Walz took a cautious approach toward school reopening that was largely in line with teachers, who were resisting a return to in-person learning, fearful of contracting covid.

Critics say that as a result, Minnesota schools stayed closed far too long — longer than the typical state — inflicting lasting academic and social emotional damage on students.

As a former teacher, Walz knew that teachers were reluctant to return to the classroom until safety protocols were in place.

Walz also advanced his own robust and liberal education agenda. He fought to increase K-12 education spending in 2019, when he won increases in negotiations with Republicans, and more dramatically in 2023, when he worked with the Democratic majority in the state House and Senate. He won funding to provide free meals to all schoolchildren, regardless of income, and free college tuition for students — including undocumented immigrants — whose families earn less than $80,000 per year. He also called out racial gaps in achievement and discipline in schools and tried to address them…

And as culture war debates raged across the country in recent years, Walz pushed Minnesota to adopt policies in support of LGBTQ+ rights…

In the 2022 elections, Walz was reelected, and Minnesota Democrats took control of the Senate. Democrats now had a “trifecta” — governor, House and Senate — and a $17.6 billion budget surplus.

After taking his oath of office in January 2023, Walz said Minnesota had a historic opportunity to become the best state in the nation for children and families. His proposals included a huge increase in K-12 education spending.

“Now is the time to be bold,” he said.

The final budget agreement in 2023 increased education spending by nearly $2.3 billion, including a significant boost to the per-pupil funding formula that would be tied to inflation, ensuring growth in the coming years. Total formula funding for schools would climb from about $9.9 billion in 2023 to $11.4 billion in 2025, according to North Star Policy Action. The budget also included targeted money for special education, pre-K programs, mental health and community schools.

Walz also signed legislation providing free school meals for all students — a signature achievement — not just those in low-income families who are eligible under the federal program…

In his 2023 State of the State address, Walz drew a pointed contrast between the culture wars raging in states such as Florida and the situation in Minnesota.

“The forces of hatred and bigotry are on the march in states across this country and around the world,” Walz said. “But let me say this now and be very clear about this: That march stops at Minnesota’s borders.”

Through his tenure, he repeatedly took up the causes of LGBTQ+ rights and racial justice.

He signed a measure prohibiting public and school libraries from banning books due to their messages or opinions, and another granting legal protection to children who travel to Minnesota for gender-affirming care.

Categories Bigotry, Character, Democracy, Education Reform, Elections, Ethics, Freedom to Read, Funding, Health, Minnesota, Teacher Pay, Teachers and Teaching, Unions, Vouchers, Walz, Tim

ProPublica: How Vouchers Almost Bankrupted Arizona

By dianeravitch
July 31, 2024 //
6

Voters in Arizona voted overwhelmingly against voucher expansion in a state referendum in 2018, but Republican Governor Doug Ducey and the Republican legislature expanded them anyway. The pro-voucher campaign was funded by Charles Koch and Betsy DeVos.

The financial blow to the state has been devastating. As in every other state, most vouchers are used by private and religious school students from affluent families.

ProPublica writes here about the voucher disaster in Arizona:

In 2022, Arizona pioneered the largest school voucher program in the history of education. Under a new law, any parent in the state, no matter how affluent, could get a taxpayer-funded voucher worth up to tens of thousands of dollars to spend on private school tuition, extracurricular programs or homeschooling supplies.

In just the past two years, nearly a dozen states have enacted sweeping voucher programs similar to Arizona’s Empowerment Scholarship Account system, with many using it as a model.

Yet in a lesson for these other states, Arizona’s voucher experiment has since precipitated a budget meltdown. The state this year faced a $1.4 billion budget shortfall, much of which was a result of the new voucher spending, according to the Grand Canyon Institute, a local nonpartisan fiscal and economic policy think tank. Last fiscal year alone, the price tag of universal vouchers in Arizona skyrocketed from an original official estimate of just under $65 million to roughly $332 million, the Grand Canyon analysis found; another $429 million in costs is expected this year.

As a result of all this unexpected spending, alongside some recent revenue losses, Arizona is now having to make deep cuts to a wide swath of critical state programs and projects, the pain of which will be felt by average Arizonans who may or may not have school-aged children.

Among the funding slashed: $333 million for water infrastructure projects, in a state where water scarcity will shape the future, and tens of millions of dollars for highway expansions and repairs in congested areas of one of the nation’s fastest-growing metropolises — Phoenix and its suburbs. Also nixed were improvements to the air conditioning in state prisons, where temperatures can soar above 100 degrees. Arizona’s community colleges, too, are seeing their budgets cut by $54 million.

Still, Arizona-style universal school voucher programs — available to all, including the wealthiest parents — continue to sweep the nation, from Florida to Utah.

In Florida, one lawmaker pointed out last year that Arizona’s program seemed to be having a negative budgetary impact. “This is what Arizona did not anticipate,” said Florida Democratic Rep. Robin Bartleman, during a floor debate. “What is our backup plan to fill that budget hole?”

Her concern was minimized by her Republican colleagues, and Florida’s transformational voucher legislation soon passed.

Advocates for Arizona’s universal voucher initiative had originally said that it wouldn’t cost the public — and might even save taxpayers money. The Goldwater Institute, a conservative think tank that helped craft the state’s 2022 voucher bill, claimed in its promotional materialsat the time that the vouchers would “save taxpayers thousands per student, millions statewide.” Families that received the new cash, the institute said, would be educating their kids “for less than it would cost taxpayers if they were in the public school system.”

But as it turns out, the parents most likely to apply for these vouchers are the ones who were already sending their kids to private school or homeschooling. They use the dollars to subsidize what they were already paying for.

The result is new money coming out of the state budget. After all, the public wasn’t paying for private school kids’ tuition before…

Arizona doesn’t have a comprehensive tally of how many private schoolers and homeschoolers are out there, so it remains an open question how much higher the cost of vouchers could go and therefore how much cash should be kept on hand to fund them. The director of the state’s nonpartisan Joint Legislative Budget Committee told lawmakers that “we’ve never really faced that circumstance before where you’ve got this requirement” — that anyone can get a voucher — “but it isn’t funded.”

Most importantly, said Beth Lewis, executive director of the public-school-advocacy group Save Our Schools Arizona, only a small amount of the new spending on private schools and homeschooling is going toward poor children, which means that already-extreme educational inequality in Arizona is being exacerbated. The state is 49th in the country in per-pupil public school funding, and as a result, year after year, district schools in lower-income areas are plagued by some of the nation’s worst staffing ratios and largest class sizes.

Spending hundreds of millions of dollars on vouchers to help kids who are already going to private school keep going to private school won’t just sink the budget, Lewis said. It’s funding that’s not going to the public schools, keeping them from becoming what they could and should be.

Categories Accountability, Arizona, Billionaires, Budget Cuts, Democracy, Education Industry, Elections, Extremism, Fraud, Funding, School Choice, Vouchers

American Prospect: Tim Walz Is the Best Choice for Kamala’s Veep

By dianeravitch
July 30, 2024 //
20

Ten days ago, a friend suggested that Tim Walz would be Kamala Harris’s best choice for her VP. My response was: “Tim who?” I looked him up on Google, and I was intrigued. He is Governor of Minnesota. He grew up in Nebraska. He taught public school for 20 years. He believes in community schools. He believes in public schools.

Then I saw Jen Psaki interview him on MSNBC, and I became a believer. Without being asked about education, he volunteered that vouchers were a terrible idea, and he was well informed about why. He had read the research.

I was pleased to see that Ryan Cooper of The American Prospect agrees with me.

He wrote:

With Kamala Harris abruptly taking Joe Biden’s place as the next Democratic nominee for president, speculation about who will be her running mate has naturally exploded. Some reporting has the choice being narrowed down to Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona, Gov. Roy Cooper of North Carolina, and perhaps Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg.

I am neither capable of nor interested in trying to predict which one she will pick. However, I do believe there is a better choice that fits all the apparent criteria: Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz.

First, the other contenders have some significant downsides. As David Klion writes at The New Republic, Shapiro is one of the worst Democrats in the country on the Gaza war. He supports legal prohibitions on the BDS movement, joined in the cynical Republican dogpile on University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill, repeatedly implied that all the protesters against Israel’s war are antisemites, and in general supported Benjamin Netanyahu’s psychotic violence for the last nine months. To be fair, Shapiro had also said that Netanyahu is “one of the worst leaders of all time” who is leading Israel in the “wrong direction.”

Biden’s support for Israel’s war has badly split the Democratic Party, and alienated key youth and minority constituencies. It is vital for Harris to at least paper over this crack (and, one hopes, actually force an end to the war should she become president). She seems to realize this, and sources close to her are leaking stories to reporters about how she would likely take a different tack on Gaza.

Picking Shapiro would immediately reopen that wound in the party coalition. Many activists would immediately start attacking her vociferously, deflating the rare moment of party goodwill and optimism that has built up.

Sen. Kelly is not so incendiary as Shapiro, but he has one massive black mark on his record: Back in 2021, he refused to support the PRO Act, a sweeping overhaul of labor law that would make it easier to organize and add some actual punishments for companies that break the law. One of the reasons so many employers routinely infringe on their workers’ rights is that when they do, the typical punishments are tiny fines or being forced to put up a sign. Even Sen. Joe Manchin (I-WV) supported the PRO Act. Picking Kelly would also mean Dems have to win a special election in 2026 to keep his Senate seat, while he would otherwise not be up until 2028.

Unions are not only a core Democratic Party constituency and source of campaign cash and precinct walkers, as Hamilton Nolan argues in his recent book The Hammer, they are absolutely vital for rebuilding a source of institutional ballast in the party that isn’t a handful of ultra-rich donors, and, indeed, for protecting American democracy over the long term. Kelly reversed course and endorsed the PRO Act on Wednesday, but this belated conversion makes his sincerity somewhat questionable.

Buttigieg is great on TV, but he has also never held even statewide office, and his tenure at the Department of Transportation has been marred by severe problems in both the airline industry and at Boeing. That’s not really his fault, but also probably not something Americans want to be reminded of.

Of the named contenders, Roy Cooper is perhaps best on paper. He’s a white guy from a swing state, he’s term-limited out, he’s been elected repeatedly in this otherwise Republican state that some think could swing Democratic this year with him on the ticket, and best of all, he’s got an excellent surname. However, he’s also a bit old at 67, and doesn’t have a very inspiring record—mainly he has been trampled underfoot by feral Republicans in the state legislature, who have all but abolished democracy at the legislative level with extreme gerrymandering. That’s not his fault, but it also doesn’t give him much of a record to boast of.

So let’s consider Walz. Demographically, he’s just what the party apparently thinks it needs: a straight, white, cis man from the Midwest. He’ll also be term-limited out in 2026. Though he doesn’t exactly look it, he’s also on the younger side—almost exactly the same age as Harris, as it happens. He’s also quite a good attack dog on TV.

More importantly, he’s had the best record of any recent Democratic governor. (Some might argue for Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, but she’s taken herself out of the veepstakes.) By way of comparison, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, blessed with an overwhelmingly Democratic legislature, recently canceled a congestion pricing scheme that had been in the works for decades, flushing perhaps a billion dollars down the toilet in the process. Meanwhile, Walz, with just a one-vote majority in the state Senate, has signed a legitimately sweeping set of reforms. As I detailed in a Prospect piece some time ago, these include a major expansion of labor rights (including a first-in-the-nation ban on employers compelling employees to attend anti-union meetings), a new paid family and medical leave system, protections for abortion and LGBT rights, legal recreational marijuana, restored voting rights to felons, universal free school breakfast and lunch, and more.

That reform package isn’t some kind of radical craziness far out of the Democratic mainstream. It amounts, more or less, to a state-level version of Biden’s Build Back Better agenda. Picking Walz would signal that Harris is serious about her plans to take another big policy swing, should Democrats win control of Congress, and likely inspire rank-and-file Dems to work even harder on her behalf.

The choice of running mate is often discussed in terms of campaign strategy—how the candidate might pander to certain regions or demographics, how the media might react, and so on. But as we are seeing right now, there is also the possibility it will be a very consequential decision. Just as Harris is taking Biden’s place in the campaign, her vice president might have to take over in turn. Tim Walz has shown he has what it takes.

Categories Accountability, Censorship, Democracy, Education Reform, Elections, Minnesota, Vouchers
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