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What Trump Could Learn from Bobby Jindal’s Failed Voucher Program

By dianeravitch
December 8, 2016 //
14

Robert Mann, professor of journalism at Louisiana State University, hopes that Donald Trump will pay attention to the disaster of former Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal’s failed voucher program. Open the article to read the links.

 

“This is where the disappointment of Jindal’s voucher program enters the picture, as policy makers and the media will inevitably examine its dismal performance. At Jindal’s urging, in 2008 lawmakers created the Louisiana Scholarship Program (LSP), enabling some disadvantaged students to leave public schools graded a C or lower and enroll in a participating private school. By 2014, more than 6,000 public school students attended one of 126 private schools.

 

“In 2015, Jindal bragged about his program. “For students attending private schools on public dollars, almost all of whom arrived several years behind, their lives are being turned around,” he wrote in a column on CNN’s website.

 

“If only that were true. In a paper published last year by the National Bureau for Economic Research, three scholars documented “the large negative effects” and the reduced academic achievements of scholarship program students in 2013, the first year after the program’s expansion.

 

“Our results show that LSP vouchers reduce academic achievement,” the researchers concluded, explaining, “attendance at an LSP-eligible private school is estimated to lower math scores” and “reduce reading, science and social studies scores.”

 

“Why? “We find evidence,” the researchers wrote, “that the negative effects of the LSP may be linked to selection of low-quality private schools into the program.”

 

“A comprehensive 2016 study of the program for the Education Research Alliance for New Orleans also concluded “an LSP scholarship user who was performing at roughly the 50th percentile at baseline fell 24 percentile points below their control group counterparts in math after one year. By year 2, they were 13 percentile points below.”

 

“Imagine that. Pluck kids from troubled public schools, put them into substandard private schools and — voila! — you’ve made their academic condition worse.”

 

 

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Louisiana, New Orleans, Privatization, School Choice, Vouchers

Mother Jones: Mike Pence’s Voucher Program for Religious Schools

By dianeravitch
December 7, 2016 //
73

Indiana has one of the most expansive voucher programs in the nation, even though the state constitution explicitly forbids spending public money for religious schools. The state courts decided that the constitution doesn’t mean what it says. Former Governor Mitch Daniels initiated the voucher program and Mike Pence expanded it. Although born a Catholic, Pence is now an evangelical Christian.

 

Mother Jones investigated the Indiana voucher program and found that it has been a boon for religious schools, including many that teach creationism. Student performance in the voucher schools is poor; maybe someday the state will realize that it has to save kids who are failing to learn in mediocre voucher schools.

 

“One of Vice President-elect Mike Pence’s pet projects as governor of Indiana was expanding school choice vouchers, which allow public money to pay for private school tuition. President-elect Donald Trump has said he’d like to expand such vouchers in the rest of the country, but what happened in Indiana should serve as a cautionary tale for Trump and his administration.

 

“Pence’s voucher program ballooned into a $135 million annual bonanza almost exclusively benefiting private religious schools—ranging from those teaching the Koran to Christian schools teaching creationism and the Bible as literal truth—at the expense of regular and usually better-performing public schools. Indeed, one of the schools was a madrasa, an Islamic religious school, briefly attended by a young man arrested this summer for trying to join ISIS—just the kind of place Trump’s coalition would find abhorrent.

 

“In Indiana, Pence created one of the largest publicly funded voucher programs in the country. Initially launched in 2011 under Republican Gov. Mitch Daniels, it was sold as a way to give poor, minority children trapped in bad public schools a way out. “Social justice has come to Indiana education,” Daniels declared after the voucher legislation passed. It was supposed to be a small program, initially capped at 7,500 vouchers. Full vouchers, worth 90 percent of the per-pupil spending in a school district, were reserved for families with incomes up to 100 percent of the cutoff for free or reduced-price school lunch, about $45,000 a year for a family of four.

 

“But in 2013, Pence and the state’s GOP-controlled Legislature raised the income limits on the program so that a family of four with up to $90,000 in annual income became eligible for vouchers covering half their private school tuition. They also removed most requirements that students come from a public school to access the vouchers, making families already attending private school eligible for tuition subsidies, thus removing any pretense that the vouchers were a tool to help poor children escape failing schools.

 

“Pence’s school choice experiment demonstrates that vouchers can create a host of thorny political problems and potential church- and-state issues.

 
“By the 2015-16 school year, the number of students using state-funded vouchers had shot up to more than 32,000 in 316 private schools. But Pence’s school choice experiment demonstrates that vouchers can create a host of thorny political problems and potential church-and-state issues. Almost every single one of these voucher schools is religious. The state Department of Education can’t tell parents which or even whether any of the voucher schools are secular. (A state spokeswoman told me Indiana doesn’t collect data on the school’s religious affiliation.) Out of the list of more than 300 schools, I could find only four that weren’t overtly religious and, of those, one was solely for students with Asperger’s syndrome and other autism spectrum disorders, and the other is an alternative school for at-risk students.

 

“Opponents, including public school teachers and local clergy, sued the state to try to block the voucher program in 2011, arguing that it clearly violated the state constitutional provisions that protect taxpayers from having to support religion. They were also concerned that the money going to the religious schools was coming directly from local public school systems, draining them of critical funding in violation of the state constitution. But the Indiana state Supreme Court ruled in 2013 that the voucher program was constitutional because public money was going to the students and not to religious institutions directly….

 

“Perhaps not surprisingly, the kids in these schools aren’t performing very well on the state’s standardized tests, putting voucher schools among the state’s worst-performing schools. The three campuses of Horizon Christian Academy rank near the bottom. Two of its schools were once for-profit charter schools that lost their charters because they were badly underperforming. They reconstituted as private religious schools and now take taxpayer-funded vouchers. In 2015, less than 9 percent of the students at one of the Horizon campuses passed the state standardized tests in math and English, a rate worse than most of the state’s public schools from which the vouchers were supposed to provide an escape.

 

“A study by researchers at Notre Dame University published last year shows that in the first three years of the program, Indiana kids who left public schools to attend voucher schools saw their math scores decline in comparison with their peers who remained in regular public schools. The public school students saw improvements in their English skills, but the voucher kids’ results stayed flat. The voucher schools can’t necessarily blame low test scores on poverty, either. According to data from the state, today more than 60 percent of the voucher students in Indiana are white, and more than half of them have never even attended any public school, much less a failing one. Some of the fastest growth in voucher use has occurred in some of the state’s most affluent suburbs. The Center for Tax and Budget Accountability, a Chicago-based think tank, recently concluded that because white children’s participation in the voucher program dwarfed the next largest racial group by 44 points, the vouchers were effectively helping to resegregate public schools.”

 

This is what is in store for the nation in the Trump-Pence era.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Categories Betsy DeVos, Education Industry, Mike Pence, Privatization, Vouchers

Mercedes Schneider: Betsy DeVos on Video Explains How to Turn Corporate Taxes into Vouchers

By dianeravitch
December 7, 2016 //
8

The Nevada state constitution contains this language:

 

Article 11, Section 10: “No public funds of any kind or character whatever, State, County or Municipal, shall be used for sectarian purpose.”

 

Mercedes Schneider explains how the Nevada Supreme Court did a fancy rhetorical two-step to conclude that the state constitution does not forbid vouchers, it just forbids funding them. Got that?

 

She then shows a video of Betsy DeVos, Trump’s pick for Secretary of Education, telling a Florida lawyer how corporate taxes can be used to provide vouchers for use in any school, including religious schools. This, despite the fact that the Florida state constitution explicitly says in Article 1, Section 3:

 

“There shall be no law respecting the establishment of religion or prohibiting or penalizing the free exercise thereof. Religious freedom shall not justify practices inconsistent with public morals, peace or safety. No revenue of the state or any political subdivision or agency thereof shall ever be taken from the public treasury directly or indirectly in aid of any church, sect, or religious denomination or in aid of any sectarian institution.”

 

This, despite the fact that the voters of Florida rejected an effort to change this portion of the Florida state constitution to allow vouchers for religious schools in 2012. The so-called “Religious Freedom Amendment” was voted down by 55-44%.

 

US Secretary of Education nominee and “true pioneer of the school choice movement across the country,” Betsy DeVos, explains how the educational tax credit enables what would be public money (collected in the form of corporate taxes) from becoming public money at minute 4:45 in the 2015 Youtube video below in which Edward Pozzuoli, the president of Florida-based Tripp Scott Law Firm, interviews then-American Federation for Children (AFC) Chair DeVos, about tax credits.

 

The entire 9-minute video is an eye opener; DeVos talks about how the AFC does it all: finds the school choice candidates (she’s particularly keen on private school choice); puts “political effort” behind electing/defeating candidates; “works on the policies… the actual legislation,” and “helps parents and kids to find schools and schools to find parents and kids.”

 

“Reformers” intent on replacing public schools with for-profit charters and religious schools don’t let a little thing like the state constitution get in their way. Conservatives used to call themselves “strict constructionists” when it came to the federal or state constitution. They insisted on abiding by the original intent of those who wrote the constitution. It turns out now that they believe quite the opposite and are ready to reinterpret the clear language of state constitutions to achieve their goal of privatization.

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Florida, Nevada, Vouchers

Education Law Center on the Nevada Voucher Decision

By dianeravitch
December 6, 2016 //
7

Molly Hunter of the Education Law Center sent me its news release on the ruling in Nevada that the state cannot take funding dedicated to public schools and use it for “education savings accounts” (ESA), a thinly disguised voucher.

 

A Nevada judge enjoined the implementation of the voucher program last January.

 

In the 2016 election, Democrats in Nevada gained control of both houses of the legislature. They do not need to repeal the ESA legislation, although they could. All they need to kill the vouchers is to not allocate any funding to ESAs. The state courts made clear that the funding could not be taken away from the public schools, a policy embedded in the state constitution.

 

 

From the Education Law Center:

 

September 29, 2016

 

Education Law Center welcomes the Nevada Supreme Court decision in Lopez v. Schwartz firmly declaring the state’s Education Savings Account (ESA) voucher program unconstitutional and permanently blocking its implementation.

 

The Court’s ruling makes clear that the Nevada Legislature violated a constitutional prohibition against the use of public education funding for any purpose other than the operation of the public schools. The ESA voucher program would have diverted funds from the public schools for private education expenditures.

 

This decision strikes at the heart of the ESA voucher program, which was designed to remove significant amounts of funding from public school budgets to pay for private school tuition and other expenses, even for the wealthy. The court’s sweeping ruling permanently blocks the program from being implemented in the future.

 

“The Court confirmed that the parent plaintiffs’ claims were correct – the state constitution expressly directs that funds appropriated by the Legislature for public education be used for that purpose and that purpose alone,” said David G. Sciarra, ELC Executive Director, and, along with ELC attorney Jessica Levin, a member of the pro bono legal team representing Nevada parents and children in the voucher lawsuit.

 

ELC is a partner in Educate Nevada Now (ENN), a Nevada campaign in support of public education founded by the Rogers Foundation. ENN and the Rogers Foundation provided crucial support in the voucher lawsuit. With implementation of the voucher program now blocked, ELC will continue to work with ENN and the Rogers Foundation to improve the educational experiences of the half million children in Nevada’s public schools.

 

Here is a brief chronology of the case, Lopez v. Schwartz, also from the ELC:

 

On September 9, 2015, a group of parents whose children attend Nevada public schools filed a lawsuit challenging the state’s new voucher law. The lawsuit, Lopez v. Schwartz, has generated media attention and interest from parents, educators and taxpayers.

 

In June 2015, the Nevada Legislature passed Senate Bill 302 (SB302) establishing a controversial program to use public funding to pay for private schooling. For students who qualify, the voucher law directs the State Treasurer to deposit taxpayer funding into private bank accounts – called “Education Savings Accounts” (ESAs) – to pay for private school tuition, tutoring, online classes, home-schooling expenses, transportation to and from private schools, and other private services.

 

ESAs are funded by diverting the per pupil funds provided by the Legislature for Nevada public schools. The ESA amount is based on the statewide average per pupil amount guaranteed in the state budget to operate the public schools. The vouchers are either 90% or 100% of that amount, or between approximately $5,100 and $5,710. For each ESA, the State Treasurer deducts the per pupil amount from public school district budgets, which then reduces the funding available to educate public school students.

 

Nevada parents sued because ESAs will take critically needed funding away from public schools and lower the quality of education for their children. ESAs will also reduce public school funding, causing cuts to teachers, support staff and other vital programs for the 450,000 Nevada children attending public schools across the state, many of whom are children with disabilities, English language learners (ELL), and students at-risk of falling behind or dropping out.

 

The Nevada Constitution prohibits taxpayer funds provided by the Legislature for the operation of the public schools from being used for any other purpose. The parents claim that the voucher program violates this constitutional ban by diverting the funding necessary to educate their children in the public schools to pay for private school vouchers.

 

The parents also claim that the voucher law violates the Nevada constitution by lowering the amount of funding provided in the Nevada state budget for public education and by using public funds to pay for private schools that are not required to serve all students, are not subject to anti-discrimination laws, and are not accountable for student performance like the public schools are.

 

In January 2016, the parents won their motion for a preliminary injunction in the trial court, which halted implementation of the voucher program. State Treasurer Dan Schwartz appealed the trial court decision to the Supreme Court of Nevada, which heard oral arguments in July 2016. On September 29, 2016, the Supreme Court ruled that the ESA voucher program is unconstitutional because it violates the prohibition on use of public school funds for other purposes, and permanently blocked its implementation.

 

 

 

 

Categories Nevada, Vouchers

Mitchell Robinson: How Betsy and Dick DeVos Devoured the Schools of Michigan

By dianeravitch
December 6, 2016 //
14

In this post, Mitchell Robinson lays out the strategy of Betsy and Dick DeVos in Michigan, which they have since exported to other states in their well-funded campaign to destroy public education and substitute for it a marketplace of for-profit charters and publicly-funded religious schools.

 

Robinson, a professor of music education at Michigan State, writes:

 

 

“As Michiganders know, Betsy and Dick DeVos are religious and school privatization/choice/voucher zealots. They were humiliated by the twin failures of voucher legislation in 2000 and Dick’s loss in the Michigan governor’s race to Jennifer Granholm in 2006, and these dual humiliations resulted in the development of the DeVos’ “long-game” strategy to achieve their goals of privatizing public education:

 

*destroy the Democrats’ biggest single source of financial support by gutting teacher unions via Right to Work legislation
*capitalize on the elimination of the charter school “cap” to explode the number of non-regulated and for-profit charter schools in the state
*use charter schools as the mechanism to “blur the lines” between public and private/religious schools
use this “blurring” of boundaries between church and state to build public support for the redistribution of public funds to religious and private schools”

 

In the timeline that Robinson created, he includes the infamous secret video of Dick DeVos speaking at the Heritage Foundation in 2002.

 

He writes:

 

“One of my first encounters with the DeVos ideology of education was stumbling upon this video of a speech that Amway heir Dick DeVos (husband of Betsy, brother-in-law of Blackwater private mercenary army founder Eric Prince, Betsy’s brother), gave on December 3, 2002, at the Heritage Foundation (which is funded generously by the DeVos family foundations). The gist of this speech was Mr. DeVos’ argument that school privatization was an issue that was deeply divisive, and not at all popular with the public; so in order to get vouchers and privatization through the legislature a “stealth approach” was necessary: “We need to be cautious about talking too much about these activities.”

 

At least we know where she stands. She is not neutral among the different sectors of K-12 education. She doesn’t like public schools. She wants unregulated competition among charters and religious schools, all funded by taxpayers.

 

A few years back, I visited Michigan and spoke to a group of district superintendents who collectively represented about half the students in the state. They described Michigan’s public school choice program, which obliterated district lines. Students could go to any public school, taking their dollars with them. Every district competed with every other district to lure students because total revenues rose or fell based on enrollments. Each district spent about $100,000 a year on radio and TV advertising, trying to “poach” students from neighboring districts. No one liked this approach. No one thought it was educationally sound. It was a colossal waste of money. Add to this the competition with charters, most of which operate for profit, and you have a state school system focused on dollars as the bottom line, not students or education.

 

 

 

Categories Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Michigan, Privatization, Vouchers

EduShyster: A Brilliant Explanation of Betsy DeVos’ “Long Game” (Link Fixed!)

By dianeravitch
December 6, 2016 //
20

Jennifer Berkshire (aka EduShyster) is a funny, affable, charming person who often visits reformer gatherings, to learn more, get to understand the reformer ideas, and engage reformers face to face. Not in a hostile way, but as an interested observer who listens and learns.

 

In this remarkable post, she explains what Betsy DeVos wants. She first encountered Betsy DeVos at a Republican candidates’ parley in the summer of 2015. The candidates spoke, each outlining their bipartisan views on school choice, and DeVos spoke, and Berkshire wondered:

 

“Could the education reform coalition’s major selling point, its bipartisan-ness, really stretch to incorporate the extreme right-wing views of DeVos?”

 

Some reformers are less than thrilled with DeVos, says Berkshire, especially because of her personal role in torpedoing efforts to bring some order and accountability to the charters in Detroit. Other reformers did not appreciate the “outsized role she has played in shaping Detroit as an, um, education laboratory in which an out-of-control lab fire now burns.” Detroit is hardly an advertisement for educational reform via school choice.

 

For a brief moment in time, there was a genuinely broad-based coalition that wanted to save Detroit. It formed in 2014, and it seemed to be heading towards a hopeful conclusion. But the effort collapsed in the summer of 2016:

 

The feel-good story screeched to a halt last summer thanks to a wall of GOP opposition. Except that *wall* and *opposition* make it sound as though there were a whole bunch of people involved in the kneecapping that went down. There was a single family: Betsy and Dick DeVos. The bill that ultimately passed, with the DeVos’ blessing and with the aid of the lawmakers they bankroll, did virtually nothing to regulate Detroit’s *wild west* charter school sector, and will likely hasten the demise of the Detroit Public Schools. While Michigan’s burgeoning charter lobby was well represented in the final negotiations, elected representatives from Detroit were missing; in a clear violation of House rules, they weren’t even allowed to speak on the bill. And in a final twist of the shiv, the legislation that emerged lets uncertified teachers teach in Detroit, something not allowed anywhere else in Michigan. Oh, and don’t forget the new punishments for teachers who engage in *sick outs* to call attention to the appalling conditions in the city’s schools.

 

There is a queasy, racialized undertone to much of the education reform debate, with its constant implication that students of color fare best in schools over which their communities have little say. In Michigan, though, that argument has been taken by reform advocates, Betsy DeVos chief among them, to its extreme conclusion. The official message of DeVos’ organization, the Great Lakes Education Project, during last summer’s legislative battle was that dissolving the Detroit Public Schools would *protect kids and empower parents,* a cause that came with its own hashtag: #EndDPS. But what GLEP really meant was hard to miss. Detroit is a tax-hoovering abyss whose residents are too corrupt and incompetent to oversee their own schools.

 

After the GOP took control of Michigan in 2010, the charter cap was lifted, then eliminated. The state, once home to the nation’s industrial unions, became a right-to-work state. The legislature passed a law allowing “emergency managers” to take control of financially stressed districts, with unlimited powers. Voters passed a refendum eliminating the emergency managers, but the legislature revived it in a budget bill.

 

Guess whose districts and and schools were taken over by emergency managers and turned over to charter operators?

 

You’ve heard about Detroit, and Flint, with its poisoned water, but there are other less well known cases—like Benton Harbor, Muskegon, and Highland Park, which at last count was down to a single public school. Within a few years of Public Act IV’s enactment, half of Michigan’s Black population was living under some form of emergency management. *The municipalities and school districts that have been taken over are predominantly African American and poor,* David Arsen, an economist at Michigan State University, told me when I interviewed him last summer. *The optics are not good, especially in the context of the long civil rights struggle for voting rights.*

 

Berkshire realized that the real danger of the Trump era is that he is “moldable clay,” amenable to the plans of others.

 

The terrifying thing about the dawning of the Trumpian era isn’t just the specific awfulness of the President-elect’s policies. It’s that Trump is what the long gamers think of as *moldable clay,* receptive to whatever plots and plans they’ve spent years dreaming and scheming up. In Michigan, the long game has long been about making over the state’s schools: breaking up the government monopoly over education and getting rid of that pesky prohibition that keeps public monies from following kids to private schools, especially private schools of the religious variety. When Detroit-based writer Allie Gross set out this summer to document the long history of the efforts of the DeVos family and its allies to remake Detroit’s schools, she dug up an archival piece that a reporter at her paper, the Metro Times, wrote in 1995. Gross’ predecessor described a *relentless attack* on Michigan’s public education system, and a *Trojan horse* meant to blur the distinction between public and private schools en route to realizing the real goal: public funding for parochial schools.

 

Betsy DeVos is playing the long game, and she knows what she wants. What others want is irrelevant.

 

 

 

 

Categories Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Detroit, Education Industry, Michigan, Religion, Separation of church and state, Vouchers

North Carolina: Governor McCrory Concedes

By dianeravitch
December 5, 2016 //
9

 

 

In one of the closest elections in the country, Governor Pat McCrory conceded at last to State Attorney General Roy Cooper in the race for governor.

 

McCrory came to office as the formerly moderate mayor of Charlotte. Once in office, he joined the far-right wing Tea Party majority in the General Assembly to pass legislation for charters and vouchers, to eliminate the respected North Carolina Teaching Fellows program (which required a five-year education commitment and produced career teachers) and replaced it with a $6 million grant to Teach for America, and enacted law after law to reduce the status of the teaching profession.

 

To understand the damage that McCrory and his cronies did to the state read this summary of five years of political wrecking imposed on the state.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, North Carolina, Privatization, Teacher Pay, Teacher Tenure, Vouchers

GOOD NEWS in Nevada: Supreme Court Strikes Down Funding of Vouchers

By dianeravitch
December 5, 2016 //
12

Nevada’s legislature enacted the most sweeping voucher legislation in the nation. The state courts have affirmed its constitutionality, although last September the Supreme Court of Nevada struck down the funding portion of the voucher program. Meanwhile, the state continues to send out applications for “education savings accounts” as though the latest ruling from the highest court never happened.

 

It was an odd ruling. Figure out the logic here:

 

The Nevada Supreme Court on Thursday struck down the state’s education savings account law, ruling that while the premise of using taxpayer money for private education was constitutional, the method used to fund the ESA program was not.

 

The high court ordered a permanent injunction against the law — viewed as the most sweeping school choice legislation in the country — that was passed last year on a party-line vote by the Republican-controlled Legislature.

 

What is especially odd about the ruling by the Nevada Supreme Court is that the state constitution of Nevada has clear, explicit prohibitions against spending public money on sectarian (religious) schools:

 

Article 11 of the state constitution includes this language:

 

Sec: 9.  Sectarian instruction prohibited in common schools and university. No sectarian instruction shall be imparted or tolerated in any school or University that may be established under this Constitution.

 

Section Ten.  No public money to be used for sectarian purposes. No public funds of any kind or character whatever, State, County or Municipal, shall be used for sectarian purpose.

 

Could it be any clearer? No public money to be used for sectarian purposes. No public funds of any kind or character whatever, State, County or Municipal, shall be used for sectarian purpose.

 

What part of this does the Nevada legislature and voucher advocates not understand?

 

As it happened, Democrats recaptured control of both houses of the legislature last month, with slim majorities. They have a chance to defund the ESA program altogether, if they have the will.

 

Nevada still has a Republican governor who wants to keep vouchers alive. The ACLU of Nevada is challenging the state for continuing to invite applicants for a program that has been enjoined by the state Supreme Court.

 

The American Civil Liberties Union of Nevada has taken issue with the state treasurer’s office for continuing to accept Education Savings Account applications, two months after the Supreme Court had struck down the funding part of the program.

 

The ACLU argues that the treasurer’s office shouldn’t be accepting new applications on its website for a program that was found unconstitutional.

 

“I think it’s particularly misleading to parents to ask them to sign up for a program that isn’t funded and can’t be funded,” said ACLU of Nevada Legal Director Amy Rose.

 

The ruling further divided both sides in the debate over the school-choice law, which creates state-funded savings accounts for parents who seek education outside of the public school system.

 

A group that supports public education called Educate Nevada Now declared that the legal ruling against “Education Savings Accounts” made it possible to address the real needs of children in the state’s schools.

 

An Education Savings Account (ESA) is a voucher that diverts taxpayer money constitutionally allocated for public schools to private schools. The voucher program threatened to strip away nearly $40 million from Nevada public schools. The same funds could be better served if they were allocated to fund Pre-K, Special Education, ELL, and the many programs that are currently underfunded.

 

Educate Nevada Now wrote:
On November 18, 2016, Judge James Wilson of the Eighth Judicial District Court issued an order ending Lopez v. Schwartz, the case that challenged Nevada’s controversial Education Savings Account (ESA) voucher program. Judge Wilson entered a permanent injunction halting the program based on the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling declaring the ESA funding scheme unconstitutional.

In its ruling, the Nevada Supreme Court affirmed Judge Wilson’s earlier decision, finding the voucher program “violates Article 4, Section 19 and Article 11, Sections 2 and 6 of the Nevada Constitution…” These are the sections of Nevada’s Education Article that expressly prohibit the use of public school dollars for other purposes – including vouchers for private education.
A little over a year ago, a group of courageous parents from across the state took a stand in court against ESA vouchers. They were concerned that millions of dollars would be diverted from the public schools to pay for private schools and other private education expenditures. With many public schools woefully underfunded, the voucher bill meant Nevada’s nearly 440,000 public school children would face further cuts to the critical programs, staff, and services they need to succeed in school.
The Supreme Court’s ruling on September 29, 2016, and Judge Wilson’s order permanently blocking the voucher law put an end to the ESA voucher program. The law in our state is now clear: funds appropriated by the State Legislature for public education can only be used for one purpose – funding our public schools.
It’s time now to renew the effort to strengthen Nevada’s public schools. Yet voucher proponents are still trying to find a way to resurrect the failed ESA program. They are asking legislators to find $40 million in the state budget to subsidize private school tuition for children in families that previously signed up for vouchers, even though most of those children already attend private schools, and their families can afford the tuition without a government subsidy.
Nevada faces a $400 million dollar budget deficit going into the 2017 Legislative Session. Our state consistently ranks near the bottom of the nation on measures of educational success. For example, Nevada offers very limited access to high quality preschool, a research-proven program to boost academic progress. The state’s school funding system ranks at or near the bottom in funding fairness, according to an annual report released by the Education Law Center.
We are now at a crossroads. We simply can’t afford to spend scarce education dollars on subsidizing private education for a handful of students. Instead, we need to join together to lift up all students. This starts with a serious investment in public education to fund urgently needed initiatives, especially in those schools serving high numbers of at-risk students.

 

During this Legislative Session, let’s do the right thing for all Nevada children and make sure our neighborhood schools have what they need to provide every student with the opportunity to succeed.

 

A voucher by any other name is just as bad for the vast majority of kids who attend public schools

Categories Funding, Nevada, Vouchers

Angie Sullivan: This is What the Schools of Nevada Need

By dianeravitch
December 5, 2016 //
3

Something amazing happened in Nevada in the 2016 election. Democrats won control of both houses of the legislature. There is still a Republican governor.

 

Angie Sullivan is a second-grade teacher in Nevada who often writes letters to legislators and journalists, to keep them grounded in the reality of the classroom. Nevada has what is very likely the worst performing charter sector in the nation; most of the state’s lowest performing schools are charter schools. It also has a voucher program with no income limits, that is utilized by affluent families to underwrite private school tuition. It is starting an “achievement school district,” modeled on the one that failed in Tennessee and the one that voters in Georgia just rejected, where state officials may take over public schools with low scores and hand them over to charter operators.

Here is Angie with her good-sense newsletter:

Read this:

http://m.reviewjournal.com/opinion/lawmakers-must-work-together-fund-schools

Educators have been forced to become issue based in our state. We can no longer afford to depend wholly on either party. We have to get things done and work with any ally.

We have to get things done.

We will not get everything we want but we have to make headway.

Last session I was proud of the leadership in my state.

Teachers are used to compromise – we do it everyday to make headway for kids. Please be willing to do the same again this session.

These are my asks.

_______________

First Ask: A real teacher in every classroom –

In the recent past, politicians, administrators and businessmen have scape-goated Nevada’s education problems onto those working directly with students – the teachers.

This has lead to unfunded mandates, witch-hunt type behavior, firing professionals, and driving off good teachers in our state. This never made sense – since the classroom teacher is directed by many others and very little is in our control at any level. My day is outlined and many classrooms are micromanaged to the point of damaging students. And the supplies are very limited. Teachers were blamed none-the-less.

These attacks on professional teachers occurred on both sides of the aisle.

Less productive.

We are the front line. We never were the enemy.

Now we have at-risk schools filled with under-prepared people struggling to become an educator. It is the poor, the disenfranchised, and the needy who do not have a teacher for several years in a row. If a child has an IEP and a special education need, they probably do not have a prepared professional to implement the plan.

This is reform?

We need to step back from attacks on collective bargaining, whittling teacher due process, and proclamations that skilled teachers are the problem. Filling our schools with temporary labor is damaging a generation of students – mainly students of color.

Spending all our time looking for the “lemon” instead of retaining the “good guys” is costly in more ways than one.

_______________________

Second Ask: Stop funding scams and craziness.

In an effort to produce quick results, Nevada grabs ideas from other states. These ideas have not proven themselves and flaunt questionable research. None have proven effective with populations as diverse as ours. These Nevada legislative ideas are failing on epic levels and need to be cleaned up.

– Charters are a disaster in Nevada. The amount of fraud, embezzlement, and criminal type behavior occurring in Nevada’s charters is astounding. The bipartisan legislature who supported and implemented reform by charter needs to put some teeth into laws to clean this mess up. I’m adding up the cost and it is millions and millions.

– Read-by-Three which is grant based will fund programs in the north. 75% of the students in need are in the south but the way the language was built – only a drizzle of funding will help students who are most likely to be punished by this legislation in Vegas. Again Nevada demands rigor without giving students and teachers resources to get the job done. Punishing 8 year olds without giving them adequate opportunity is a violation of civil rights. Read-by-Three has only been successful in states willing to fully fund early intervention. And that costs a significant amount of money. States which implement Read-By-Three as Nevada is doing without funding – fail miserably. This is not tough love – it is a crime.

-ASD [Achievement School District] is scary. Due to our lack of per pupil funding, Nevada cannot attract viable charter operators. We spent $10 million on a harbor master, Allison Serafin, to attract charters to Nevada. What a waste. We will now replace 6 failing public schools with charters who have failed elsewhere. To be watched over by the same system that allows the charter systems in Nevada to fail on an epic level already. Just how much are we spending on the Charter Authority and other groups responsible for overseeing charters? Do we continue to ask public schools to be accountable while ignoring the atrocious failure of charters? And we force charters on communities of color with the ASD – in the name of school choice. Force is not choice.

– ESA [Education Savings Accounts–or vouchers] is scary. A treasurer will determine education curriculum and spot check for fraud. Parents will “police themselves”. Blank checks will be given to mainly white affluent parents to take wherever they like or allow children to lay on the couch. And those checks will go to 8,000 applicants in the amount of $40 million in tax payer money. While lack of regulation sounds like a great idea, in Nevada education it leads to waste and fraud. This is a nightmare of waste ready to happen.

We have little money for real research based best practice but have spent millions on unproven and failing reform.

Ten years of reform and limited gains. Some reform may have damaged a generator. Of learners. Time for a return to the steady growth produced by funding best practice. It’s not fancy or flashy but it works.

____________________

Third Ask: Funding Fairness.

The Southern Caucus needs to advocate for our children.

In a bipartisan manner, the southern caucus needs to work and make progress for our children. Teachers and students need our legislators to do the heavy lift for the kids in our area. Frankly we need money.

The south generates most of the revenue for the state. 80% of the DSA (Distributive Schools Account) is funding put there from Clark County.

Clark County receives 50% in return. This is the antiquated Nevada Plan.

Also the south does not have access to mining proceeds which many rural communities can also tap for school funds.

I am not advocating a grab from other schools. I am advocating for restructuring that is fair to all students wherever they reside.

The south serves students who traditionally need more financial support to be successful.

CCSD [Clark County School District: Las Vegas] has huge numbers of children in poverty.

Our students cannot continue to endure class sizes of 40 plus.

We cannot continue to ignore early intervention so vital to future success.

We have to continue to fund and expand Victory and ZOOM schools.

CCSD was considering an ELL plan which is necessary. The cost would be $1 billion to fund at a level appropriate for our learners in Clark County.

We cannot continue to train educators who leave for greener pastures. We need committed and permanent educators to see a return in teacher development investment. We need to invest in teacher pipelines and retention of excellent and fully qualified professionals. We also need teachers who reflect the faces we see in our community. It is very expensive to endure teacher churn as skilled labor looks for a better deal.

__________________________

Final Ask:

Listen up both sides of the aisle . . .

Everything costs.

Unfunded mandates that may be easily implemented in a tiny rural district, can cost multiple millions to implement in CCSD with 380,000 students and 36,000 educators.

That great idea a random legislator has – needs to have a price tag on it. Just one thing – can rob a classroom of supplies. A great idea – can mean my students do not have books. The pot is limited. The budget is already stretched thin. We have to prioritize and necessities need to come first.

We cannot continue to do more with less.

Unfunded mandates are killing public schools. Do not send that idea without cash.

Just don’t do it.

I’m looking at everyone here because I have seen it non-stop. Most returning law makers are guilty.

If we are running at a deficit of $300-$400 million, please know unfunded mandates will rob from another need.

If there is zero money. There is zero money. No money – no reform. No money – no new ideas. No money – no change. It is not that different from a budget at your house. It is not that we do not want things, we just cannot afford it right now.

Whipping teachers like we are going to row faster on a Viking ship – just leaves us too whipped to teach.

Unfunded mandates are usually implemented by teachers from our own pockets – we pull from our personal bank accounts, our families, and our time to implement that great idea. Many unfunded mandates are half implemented and just waste time and money because they are impossible. It is a burden.

Ideas cost money.

____________

Listen to me.

I am without guile.

My hands are clean as I work to teach seven year olds to read.

These are my asks.

I have spent a lifetime educating children. I am from Nevada where we used to fund near the top and achieve results near the top too. I have watched my state’s educational success plummet as our per pupil spending has declined. That is a fact proven with real data.

Educating students costs.

Competition has not and will not improve Nevada’s system.

Tough love, fads and gimmicks are draining precious resources.

Teachers will fail if we do not have what we need to do the job.

Some things are more important than winning and losing a political game.

Please work together for kids this session in a well thought out way that makes progress.

You expect a lot from teachers.

Teachers need resources spent the right way to make progress.

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Funding, Nevada, Privatization, Teach for America, Teachers and Teaching, Vouchers

Mercedes Schneider: Is Campbell Brown’s “The 74” a Credible News Source?

By dianeravitch
December 4, 2016 //
7

Mercedes Schneider turns her well-honed investigative talents to exploring the history and funding of Campbell Brown’s website, The 74.

 

Betsy DeVos, Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Education, has given generously to The 74. Brown sits on the board of DeVos’s American Federation for Children, which advocates for vouchers. Both share an interest in attacking teachers’ unions, teacher tenure, and public schools. DeVos gave Brown’s 74 a gift of $2.4 million in 2014. A token of friendship, I suppose. That’s what friends are for. We should all have friends like that.

 

Mercedes has done a phenomenal job of analyzing the tax records of The 74 to decipher its funders and its evolution.

 

Much information remains undisclosed. She urges its disclosure.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Media, Privatization, Vouchers
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