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Texas: Governor Abbott’s Maniacal Passion for Vouchers

By dianeravitch
May 28, 2024 //
19

Politico reporters Liz Crampton and Andrew Atterbury report on Governor Greg Abbott’s determination to purge the Republican Party in Texas of any elected official who opposes vouchers. He managed to defeat some rural Republicans who put the needs of their communities over the demands of the governors. He has driven the state party to the extremist right by targeting moderate Republicans. He is fighting for a voucher program that will cost the state $2 billion a year by 2028 and serve mainly students already in private schools. In effect, the state would transfer billions to the mostly white, affluent kids in private schools while underfunding the public schools that enroll five million children, mostly black and brown.

Today are the runoffs that will determine whether Abbott has enough votes to pass a voucher bill. If he wins, he can deliver a plum to his wealthy and upper-middle-class supporters who send their kids to private schools.

Crampton and Atterbury write:

When nearly two dozen Republican state lawmakers defied Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to oppose a centerpiece of his agenda — the creation of a school voucher program — they knew they’d face political payback. 

But Abbott’s vengeance has been ferocious, even by Texas standards.

He helped knock off seven incumbents in the Republican primary in March and is targeting a handful more contests at the end of the month by handpicking conservative challengers and collecting millions of dollars from donors in Texas and beyond. Another two anti-voucher incumbents lost even though they weren’t specifically blacklisted by Abbott.

The enormous amount of money pouring into Texas Republican primaries from national pro-school-choice groups sets a new precedent as national interests become increasingly intertwined in state legislatures. Abbott’s targeting of former allies has escalated a Republican civil war that is defining Texas politics today, all in pursuit of enacting a voucher law that stands to remake K-12 education in the nation’s second biggest state.

“It’s just so unusual for an incumbent governor to campaign against members of his own party,” John Colyandro, a Texas lobbyist and former top aide to Abbott, said in an interview. “He was the pivot around which everything turned here.”

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott arrives to speak at the State Capitol during a rally in support of school vouchers.
Gov. Greg Abbott’s targeting of former allies has escalated a Republican civil war that is defining Texas politics today. | Ricardo B. Brazziell/Austin American-Statesman via AP

Backed by deep-pocketed conservative figures like former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, and Republican megadonor Jeff Yass, the school-choice movement has leveraged Republican majorities in state legislatures across the country to pass laws that provide families with lump sums to spend on private school tuition. The efforts, according to supporters, are meant to bolster parental rights by giving families the financial freedom to choose a different option for schooling their children.

Anti-voucher Republicans “thought they had a stronghold,” said Hillary Hickland, a candidate who was backed by Abbott and won her race in March. “They had this elitist air, that they know better for a community than the taxpayers, or the parents. And they were wrong.”

[Of course, it’s the height of irony to refer to the supporters of public schools as “elitists.” Abbott could not have knocked off his critics without the millions sent by out-of-state billionaires DeVos and Yass and in-state billionaires Dunn and Wilks.]

Ten states passed or expanded school-choice laws in 2023 alone. There are now 18 states that have education savings accounts, which allow parents to spend state funding on a variety of choices including private schools. Students are flocking to these programs, yet data shows that the majority of scholarships or vouchers are going to wealthier families already enrolled in private schools — not students leaving their traditional public schools.

But despite all the momentum across the country, voucher bills have repeatedly failed in Texas. That’s why Abbott and pro-school-choice advocates are continuing their big money push as early voting is underway for the primary runoffs next week. Even after knocking out a number of party defectors in March, Abbott and aligned Republicans are teetering on securing enough votes to pass school-choice when the Legislature returns with a new class in January 2025.

“We’re not counting our chickens, not stopping, not laying off,” said David Carney, a consultant with Abbott’s campaign, in an interview.

Abbott’s vendetta comes as other GOP figures are also going after fellow Republicans for perceived crimes against the party, notably Attorney General Ken Paxton’s targeting of incumbents for voting to impeach him. House Speaker Dade Phelan is among those under siege as he fights to defend his own hold on power in the runoffs next Tuesday.

In prior years, state legislature races in Texas typically cost about $250,000. But spending in some of these primaries has been upwards of $1 million, thanks to the involvement of pro-voucher interests attacking Republicans.

“We are outgunned here big time,” said Rep. DeWayne Burns, a Republican lawmaker fighting to keep in his seat representing a district encompassing Cleburne, Texas, a town on the outskirts of Dallas-Fort Worth. “This is a true David v. Goliath situation and I’m the David here.”

The negative attacks on anti-voucher Republicans financed by PACs have gone beyond school-choice and targeted the incumbents for lacking conservative bona fides on issues like guns and the border — often in false or misleading mailers, texts and advertisements.

In one example, residents of Mineral Wells, Texas received mailers paid for by Libertarian PAC Make Liberty Win going after incumbent Rep. Glenn Rogers, who lost his primary in March to an Abbott-backed challenger. That mailer accused him of being “anti-gun” and warned that “if we don’t vote Rogers out, he will only drift further left.”

Rogers, a fifth-generation rancher and veterinarian who was first elected in 2021, said that he was also accused of being soft on the border, an attack line he believes Abbott chose because that issue resonates more with voters than vouchers.

“If you tell a lie often enough, it becomes truth to a low-information voter,” Rogers said. “Unfortunately we have a lot of low-information voters. That doesn’t have anything to do with their mental ability, it has to do with them keeping up. Eventually it becomes truth in their minds.”

Although Republicans boast big majorities in both chambers and control the governorship, school-choice proposals were repeatedly swatted down in 2023, even after Abbott made them a top priority and called special sessions to address the issue. The latest proposal would have given around 40,000 students access to about $10,500 in vouchers for private schooling or $1,000 toward homeschooling.

Republicans, many from rural areas, who have long been opposed to vouchers over concerns that it would jeopardize public education funding, banded with Democrats for an unlikely alliance that proved to be a thorn in Abbott’s side. Those lawmakers were spooked by an estimate that the vouchers program would cost the state more than $2 billion annually by 2028.

“I voted for my district and I have no regrets,” said San Antonio Rep. Steve Allison, who lost his primary. “What the governor did is extremely wrong. Me and the others that he came after have been with him 100 percent of the time on every issue except this one.”

Abbott has major money on his side. Among the constellation of PACs and donations from wealthy political players dumping money into Texas elections this year, there’s Pennsylvania billionaire Yass. A major school-choice supporter, Yass personally cut a check to Abbott for $6 million last year, which the governor called the largest single donation in Texas history.

Yass has also given to PACs backing pro-voucher candidates, like the School Freedom Fund, which is affiliated with the Club for Growth and has run multi-million-dollar TV blitzes.

DeVos’ PAC, the American Federation for Children Victory Fund, has pumped $4.5 million into the races — nearly half of what the PAC has promised to spend nationwide this cycle. Of the 13 anti-school-choice lawmakers zeroed in on by the PAC, 10 candidates either lost their race or were forced into an upcoming runoff.

“If you’re a candidate or lawmaker who opposes school-choice and freedom in education — you’re a target,” Tommy Schultz, CEO of AFC, said when the fundraising organization was createdin 2023. “If you’re a champion for parents — we’ll be your shield.”

Another group, the Family Empowerment Coalition PAC, launched in June 2023 with the singular goal of defending incumbents from both parties who voted for school-choice. But the organization expanded its mission a few months later to include supporting primary challengers to incumbents who voted against the measure — and has spent at least $1.4 million this election cycle, according to data from Transparency USA, a political spending database.

Texas is just one state where the groups are getting involved. Make Liberty Win is also singling out anti-voucher Republicans in Tennessee and Ohio.

All that outside money comes on top of typical spending from big-name conservative donors in Texas, like Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks who each have donated at least $1.7 million to various lawmakers since July 2023, according to data from the Texas Ethics Commission compiled by Chrisopher Tackett, a campaign finance watchdog.

Abbott’s own PAC has donated hundreds of thousands of dollars this cycle to candidates seeking to unseat incumbents who opposed vouchers. He has handed out endorsements to challengers and shown up for appearances to back them on the campaign trail.

The Abbott campaign is projected to spend some $11 million during the primary races, including $4 million on the runoffs alone, Carney said. That’s a massive jump from the $500,000 he would typically spend for primaries, he said.

The governor touts school-choice as a means for parents to leave struggling campuses, often using districts in Houston and Dallas as punching bags. He recently pointed to Dallas schools having a resource guide about students identifying with a different gender and a Lewisville teacher dressing in drag as examples of why vouchers are needed — demonstrating how Republicans are leveraging the culture war to bolster support for vouchers.

“If you’re a parent in that situation, should you be trapped within a school district that’s focusing on issues like that?” Abbott said during a keynote address to the Texas Public Policy Foundation in March. “Of course not.”

By Abbott’s math, the Texas House is sitting at 74 votes in favor of school-choice considering who won their primary race and the candidates that reached a runoff. That count, though, would still put the House two votes shy of passing the landmark policy — upping the stakes for the runoffs.

“I came out with no ambiguity about where I stood or what I expected,” Abbott said. “If the governor puts something on the emergency item list, that means this is something that must pass. And if it doesn’t pass, there’s going to be challenges to deal with.”

Categories Bigotry, Billionaires, Corruption, Cruelty, Democracy, Education Industry, Elections, Funding, Religion, Separation of church and state, Texas, Vouchers

Justice Clarence Thomas Attacks Brown Decision

By dianeravitch
May 24, 2024 //
45

Seventy years ago, in 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a decision that overturned state laws that required racially separate schools. That decision, the Brown vs. Board of Education decision, is generally considered the accelerant that launched the Civil Rights movement and led to sweeping changes in American law and society.

A few days ago, Justice Clarence Thomas attacked the Brown decision, echoing views of segregationists who always opposed it. In the early decades after the decision, the Supreme Court took an expansive view of Brown. States and school districts not only had to dismantle laws that required racial segregation, they had to demonstrate to the courts that their actions had actually produced racial integration of students and staff.

Over time, the replacement of liberal judges by conservative judges caused the Court to moderate its stand on segregation. It increasingly abandoned its stringent guidelines and withdrew its orders to districts. Districts that were under supervision by the courts are no longer monitored. School segregation has been on the rise.

At long last, a senior justice on the Court said what conservative critics had long espoused: the Court exceeded its authority by striking down state laws that enforced racial segregation. Appointed by President George H.W. Bush, Clarence Thomas has long been a critic of civil rights laws, despite the fact that he is African-American.

Axios reported:

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas issued a strong rebuke of the Brown v. Board of Education ruling on Thursday, suggesting the court overreached its authority in the landmark decision that banned separating schoolchildren by race.

Why it matters: Thomas attacked the Brown decision in a concurrence opinion that allowed South Carolina to keep using a congressional map that critics say discriminated against Black voters.

Driving the news: The court “took a boundless view of equitable remedies” in the Brown ruling, wrote Thomas, who in 1991 replaced Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall — the first Black Supreme Court Justice and the lead lawyer in the Brown case.

  • Those remedies came through “extravagant uses of judicial power” to end racial segregation in the 1950s and 60s, Thomas wrote. 
  • Federal courts have limited power to grant equitable relief, “not the flexible power to invent whatever new remedies may seem useful at the time,” he said, justifying his opinion to keep a predominantly white congressional district in South Carolina.

Zoom out: The U.S. marked the 70th anniversary of the landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling last week.

  • The 9-0 decision declared the “separate but equal” doctrine unconstitutional and helped usher in the Civil Rights Movement, though it took two decades to dismantle some school segregation policies.

State of play: An Axios review found American public schools are growing more separate and unequal even though the country is more racially and ethnically diverse than ever.

  • Racial segregation in schools across the country has increased dramatically over the last three decades, according to two new reports and an Axios review of federal data.
  • The resegregation of America’s public schools coincides with the rise of charter schools and school choice options and as civil rights groups have turned away from desegregation battles.
Categories Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Education Reform, Equity, Ethics, School Choice, Segregation, Vouchers

Idaho: A Conservative Republican Wins an Uphill Battle Against Extremists Who Run the State

By dianeravitch
May 24, 2024 //
5

Politico published a fascinating article about Idaho’s extremist Republican politics. The story focused on one former Republican state legislator, Jim Woodward, who is anti-abortion and pro-gun in a state where Democrats are a tiny minority, only 12.6% of registered voters.

Idaho has one of the strictest abortion laws in the nation.

Woodward was elected in 2018 and re-elected in 2020. But he lost in 2022 to Scott Herndon, an extremist who wants to criminalize abortion and codify it as murder; who wants vouchers for religious schools; and who wants guns everywhere.

This year Woodward is running as a moderate Republican, still anti-abortion but supporting exceptions like the health of the mother.

Idaho’s ban, which automatically took effect when Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022, begins at conception and doesn’t make an exception for the future health of the mother. In 2020, Woodward, a Republican, voted yes on a law that requires physicians to prove that a mother’s life is at risk before performing an abortion or face fines, lawsuits, jail time and revoked medical licenses. In March of 2022, Woodward voted yes on another law that allows family members, including those of rapists (although not rapists themselves), to sue providers for performing abortions.

But Woodward is now running to moderate the law, having realized belatedly that physicians are fleeing the states and the hospital in his own district has closed its labor and delivery service, leaving 50,000 women without access to OB-GYN health services. Democrats can’t vote in the Republican primary. So Woodward must reach out to moderate Republicans.

His opponent Scott Herndon opposes any exceptions to the ban on abortion. Herndon believes that there should be no abortion allowed even for a child who has been raped. Instead, the child should view her pregnancy as “an opportunity.”

Woodward beat Herndon in a close election by 52-48%. But in the same election, other moderate Republicans lost their seats to extremists, who picked up two Senate seats and five House seats.

The Politico article uses the contest between Woodward and Herndon to illustrate the close link between extremist views on abortion and on vouchers. They want to ban all abortions and destroy public schools.

The Recall Replace Rebuild West Bonner County School District (RRR) group was started by a group of Priest River moms — both Republicans and Democrats — when their school board was infiltrated by far-right culture warriors in the 2022 election. In June 2023, those members, who held a majority as three of the five trustees on the board, elected a superintendent, Brendan Durst, with zero state-required education certifications and ties to the Idaho Freedom Foundation, a far-right political activist organization that aims “to defeat Marxism and socialism”; it has called public schools “the most virulent form of socialism.” Militia members began showing up at school board meetings, the school levy that funds basic operations failed to pass as residents became divided into camps “for” or “against” public education, curriculum slipped out of state compliance, and Durst began working to have intelligent design taught in biology classes and offer an Old Testament course (neither came to pass). The resulting chaos, social and political division, and lack of resources sent nearly 50 teachers, counselors and a principal fleeing the district. Many families left as well. Durst told one reporter that “his takeover was a ‘pilot’ others could learn from.”

Less than three months after Durst was hired, RRR gathered enough signatures to hold a recall election — framed not along party lines, but as those who cared about a functioning school district for their children against those embracing extremism. An astonishing 60.9 percent of voters turned out, and two of the three far-right board members were voted off. Durst resigned the following month when the State Board of Education blocked his certification.

“Eight hundred people voted in the 2022 election where those three board members were elected, and they won by a handful of votes, literally single digits,” Woodward says as we pull up to the community center. “But when 2,100 people showed up to vote in the recall election, then two of those same people were told to pack their bags. When you get a bigger slice of the population showing up, you get a decision that really reflects the values of the community.”

The RRR meeting tonight is attended by at least 50 people, in a town of only 1,700 on a rainy Monday night; there’s a lot of work to be done still to pass a levy to fund the school district. It’s clear that there’s no love in the room for Herndon. People say he escorted Durst into the first school board meeting where Durst was considered as superintendent, which was packed with militia members (Herndon says he was at the meeting, but did not escort Durst). After finishing the meeting agenda, Dana Douglas, one of the group leaders and a self-described conservative Christian, introduces Woodward with a reminder to the group that in the 2022 election, “only a third of Priest River turned out to vote. And of those votes, 75 percent went to Herndon and 25 percent went to Woodward. We want to flip that this time, and we need your help.”

Even if Woodward does win this race, it’s doubtful how much he can accomplish in a legislature with a far-right caucus bullying legislators into voting in lockstep. But he’s optimistic that a stronger moderate showing in the election will empower more moderate lawmaking.

“It takes leadership and a few strong individuals to do the right thing,” he says. “If the voters are supportive of a more moderate position, then legislators can step forward and do that. The party’s controlled by the minority position, so that silent majority needs to step up and let people know that they want to be represented.”

The article is a stark reminder of the deep divide that splits the nation and the rise of extremist politics in the Republican Party.

Categories Democracy, Elections, Extremism, Gender, Guns, Idaho, Vouchers

Jan Resseger: Why Vouchers Are Disastrous Public Policy

By dianeravitch
May 23, 2024 //
6

Jan Resseger can always be counted on to add the voice of reason into heated issues, relying on research and calm discussion.

She writes:

In a thoughtful commentary, the Economic Policy Institute’s Hilary Wething and Josh Bivens deride as bad public policy today’s state-by-state wave of new and expanded private school tuition vouchers:

“Public education is worth preserving—it should be seen as one of the most important achievements in our c0untry’s history and crucial for the social and economic welfare of future generations… In the 21st century, unfortunately, too many policymakers seem determined to squander this legacy by starving public education of money and legitimacy, often in the name of  ‘school choice.’  Their central claim (when they bother to make one with any clarity) is that public provision of goods or services is ineffective by definition and that a dose of private market-like competition will lead to better schooling outcomes for the nation’s children.”

Wething and Bivens explore the basic economic flaws in pro-voucher ideology and argue that “conditions needed for market competition to lead to better outcomes clearly do not exist in the educational realm.”  In the first place, our nation benefits  from educating all children, and the marketplace can’t be counted on to fill that role: “In other markets, if the private sector is doing a poor job at offering attractive options for a good or service, people can just consume other things.” “Second, competition works well when the cost of switching providers is small,” but “switching schools is an extraordinarily costly decision in time, administrative burden, and severed social networks.”  Third, markets work when the choice of product affects only the buyer and seller, but, “Universal schooling generates positive spillovers to society at large, meaning that individuals would be inclined to underinvest in education relative to the full benefits it provides.”

Wething and Bivins describe voucher supporters presuming that diversion of dollars to vouchers will not harm the essential institution of public schools. In fact, however, public schools in most places are underfunded in terms of the actual cost of needed services: “Newer research with better methods confirms that more money for public schools does improve educational outcomes… In short, the evidence indicates that public schooling in the United States simply needs more resources to deliver even better student achievement—not some radical disruption in how it is delivered and by what institutions.”

Not only does more money improve schooling outcomes for children, but recent academic research demonstrates that by investing more public resources in their public schools, states and localities can “improve schooling outcomes for children… (with) the largest beneficial effects on the performance of particularly disadvantaged students.” Wething and Bivins cite peer-reviewed, 2016, research by Kirabo Jackson, Rucker Johnson, and Claudia Persico on the impact of statewide school finance reforms that increased public school spending between 1972 and 2010: “(A) 10% increase in school spending for 12 years led to increases in high school graduation rates, 7% higher wages, and 10% higher family incomes in adulthood for children from districts that saw the spending increase.”

New research also confirms that vouchers are ineffective as an educational investment. Dollars diverted from public schools often flow to private schools with inferior academics: “Several high-quality studies have investigated the impact of recent voucher programs and have found notably worse outcomes for student achievement… In Ohio, under the EdChoice program, students who went to private schools with a voucher performed worse than they would have had they remained in public schools. In Indiana, students that used the Indiana Choice Scholarship voucher program experienced an average achievement loss of 0.15 standard deviations in mathematics.”

The expansion of vouchers inevitably sets up a long term drain on public resources: “Vouchers reduce public school resources, but introduce large new fiscal obligations overall… Where significant voucher programs have been instituted, the resources available to public school children have decreased…  The failure to increase per-pupil (public school) funding leads to the erosion of public education services in all forms: everything from school meals, extracurricular activities, mental health and counseling services, vocational and technical programs and investments in teacher quality and pay. It is worth noting that flat per-pupil educational spending—even in inflation-adjusted terms—is effectively a decline in the quality of education over time.”

Wething and Bivens sum up the evidence: “Vouchers are not a cost-free policy that simply adds on another education option for children—they are instead an intentional attack on universal public education… Vouchers make no coherent economic sense, and the evidence shows that vouchers harm student achievement and expose state budgets to large future obligations that are hard to forecast, even while they divert spending away from public education.”

The new brief from Wething and Bivens describes in concrete economic terms,what the late political theorist Benjamin Barber formulates as a basic principle of good public policy: “Privatization is a kind of reverse social contract: it dissolves the bonds that tie us together into free communities and democratic republics… Public choices rest on civic rights and common responsibilities, and presume equal rights for all. Public liberty is what the power of common endeavor establishes, and hence presupposes that we have constituted ourselves as public citizens by opting into the social contract. With privatization, we are seduced back into the state of nature by the lure of private liberty and particular interest; but what we experience in the end is an environment in which the strong dominate the weak… the very dilemma which the original social contract was intended to address.” (Consumed, pp. 143-144)

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Ethics, Extremism, Funding, Vouchers

Mercedes Schneider: Louisiana’s Very Bad, Horrible Voucher Plan

By dianeravitch
May 22, 2024 //
9

Mercedes Schneider takes a close look at Governor Landry’s awful voucher plan. He wants a universal voucher plan, one that every student can apply for, no matter how rich they are, no matter if they ever attended public school. And the cost is staggering: more than $500 million a year.

She begins:

Louisiana governor Jeff Landry wants to expand school vouchers in the state. On May 16, 2024, Landry attended two town halls(both at private schools) to push the idea. 

One might think that Landry’s promoting school vouchers at private schools as odd, except that a few years down the road, the legislation Landry is championing could help subsidize private school expenses for Louisiana residents who can already afford to send– and, indeed, are already sending– their children to private school.

And so, the day following Landry’s school voucher speechifying at private schools (and for private schools), on May 17, 2024, the Louisiana senate approved SB 313, “SCHOOLS. Creates the Louisiana Giving All True Opportunity to Rise (LA GATOR) Scholarship Program to provide educational savings accounts for parental choice in K-12 education.” Only weeks earlier, on April 30, 2024, the Louisiana senate had sidelined the bill; it seems that Landry’s multifaceted efforts (Louisiana Illuminator notes Landry’s TV ads, town halls, and discussions with individual senators) paid off for him.

As of this writing, the senate’s version of the GATOR bill has moved to the Louisiana House, thereby potentially setting the stage for a universal school voucher program in Louisiana. The Louisiana House had already passed its own version, HB 745, on April 08, 2024. The two versions are similar.

If it passes in its current form, SB 313 will end Louisiana’s previous school voucher program, the Student Scholarships for Educational Excellence Program, in 2024-25, and begin phasing in the new, eventually-universal, GATOR voucher program. Beginning in 2025-26, all children beginning kindergarten become eligible, as do all students “enrolled in a public school for the previous school year.” Families of students not previously enrolled in public school but “with a total income at or below two hundred fifty percent of the federal poverty guidelines” are also eligible. The major change for year two is the inclusion of students not previously enrolled in public school but “with a total income at or below four hundred percent of the federal poverty guidelines.” After that, the program basically becomes universal.

Universal and expensive.

Categories Education Industry, Louisiana, Separation of church and state, Vouchers

Nancy Flanagan: Just Who Is Trashing Public Education?

By dianeravitch
May 21, 2024 //
14

Veteran teacher Nancy Flanagan explores the question of who is trying to destroy our public schools. She nails some of the loudest critics, who have personally benefitted from public schools. She doesn’t explore why they are trying to annihilate the schools that educated them, but that may because we know what the privatization movement has to offer: money. There is a gravy train overloaded with munificent gifts from Betsy DeVos, the Waltons, Charles Koch, Michael Bloomberg, and a boatload of other billionaires. They can endlessly underwrite anti-public school organizations that offer well-paid jobs.

On the pro-public education side, it’s hard to find big spenders or highly compensated jobs. The two big unions have resources, all of which come from the dues of their members. They do not have the funds to support the numerous grassroots groups that are found in every state. Most, if not all of the state and local groups, operate on a shoestring; typically, their employees are volunteers. They do not have six-figure jobs for someone who tweets and writes statements. No one who works for a state “Save Our Schools” group makes big money.

The Network for Public Education is the biggest pro-public education groups; it has 350,000 people who have signed up to support it, but there is no membership fee. NPE has one full-time employee and a few part-timers.

So, Nancy Flanagan asks, just who is trashing public schools?

She writes:

Get ready for a big dump–a deliberately chosen word–of anti-public education blah-blah over the next five months. It’s about all the right wing’s got, for one thing–and it’s one of those issues that everybody has an opinion on, whether they went to public school. have children in public schools, or neither.

Public education is so big and so variable that there’s always something to get exercised over. There’s always one teacher who made your child miserable, one assigned book that raises hackles, one policy that feels flat-out wrongheaded. There’s also someone, somewhere, who admires that teacher, feels that book is a classic and stoutly defends whatever it is—Getting rid of recess? The faux science of phonics? Sex education that promotes abstinence? —that someone else finds ridiculous or reprehensible.

Not to mention—teaching is the largest profession in the country, So many teachers, so many public schools, so much opportunity to find fault.

In other words, public education is the low-hanging fruit of political calculation. Always has been, in fact.

A few years back, when folks were going gaga over Hillbilly Elegy, seeing it as the true story of how one could rise above one’s station (speaking of blahblah)—the main thing that irritated me about ol’ J.D. Vance was his nastiness about public education. Vance has since parlayed a best-seller that appealed to those who think a degree from Yale equates to arriving at the top, into a political career—and putting the screws to affirmative action, in case anyone of color tries to enjoy the same leg-up he did.

J.D. Vance’s education—K-12, the military, Ohio State—was entirely in public institutions until he got into Yale Law School. He doesn’t have anything good to say about public ed, but it was free and available to him, a kid from the wrong side of the tracks. When I read Rick Hess’s nauseating interview with Corey DeAngelis in Education Week, I had a flashback to ol’ J.D., intimating that he achieved success entirely on his own, without help from that first grade teacher who taught him how to read and play nice with others.

DeAngelis says:

I went to government schools my entire K–12 education in San Antonio, Texas. However, I attended a magnet high school, which was a great opportunity. Other families should have education options as well, and those options shouldn’t be limited to schools run by the government. Education funding should follow students to the public, private, charter, or home school that best meets their needs. I later researched the effects of school choice initiatives during my Ph.D. in education policy at the University of Arkansas’ Department of Education Reform.

So—just to clarify—Corey DeAngelis went to public schools K-12, for his BA and MA degrees (University of Texas), as well as a stint in a PUBLICLY FUNDED program at the notoriously right-focused University of Arkansas. That’s approximately 22 years, give or take, of public education, the nation-building institution DeAngelis now openly seeks to destroy.

I’m not going to provide quotes from the EdWeek piece, because anyone reading this already knows the hyperbolic, insulting gist—lazy, dumb, unions, low bar, failing, yada yada. He takes particular aim at the unions—although it absolutely wasn’t the unions—shutting down schools during a global pandemic. He paints schools’ turn-on-a-dime efforts to hold classes on Zoom as an opportunity for clueless parents to see, first-hand, evidence of how bad instruction is. He never mentions, of course, the teachers, students and school staff who died from COVID exposure.

Enough of duplicitous public school critics. My point is this:

The people who trash public education—not a particular school, classroom or curricular issue, but the general idea of government-sponsored opportunity to learn how to be a good, productive American citizen—have a very specific, disruptive ax to grind:

I got what I needed. I don’t really care about anybody else.

This goes for your local Militant Moms 4 Whatever on a Mission, out there complaining about books and school playsand songs and health class. It’s not about parents’ “rights.” It’s about control. And never about the other families and kids, who may have very different values and needs.

It’s about taking the ‘public’ out of public education. And it’s 100% politically driven.

OPEN THE LINK TO FINISH READING THE ARTICLE!

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Dark Money, Disruption, Education Industry, Funding, Privatization, Religion, Unions, Vouchers

North Carolina: A Billionaire Who Wants to Destroy Public Schools

By dianeravitch
May 21, 2024 //
7

If you have been reading this blog for a while, you are familiar with Jeff Yass. He is a billionaire, the richest man in Pennsylvania. He spends money lavishly to privatize public schools. He gave Governor Abbott of Texas $6 million to promote vouchers and to defeat moderate Republicans who opposed vouchers. He also opposes abortion. The “Center for Education Reform” in DC gives out the Yass Prize for the most successful charter schools. Top prize is $1 million (a school in Harlem, NYC, cofounded by Sean “Diddy” Combs was recently a semi-finalist). Now Yass has decided to buy the Republican Party in North. Carolina to advance his goals.

Bob Hall of NC Newsline reports:

Despite strong opposition, the North Carolina Senate voted this month to boost enrollment in privately run K-12 schools by doubling state funding for tuition subsidies called “opportunity scholarships.” More than $200 million is earmarked for kids in high-income families. 

Why would Republican leaders do this now when polls show voters oppose subsidies for the rich? And when public schools clearly need those funds – North Carolina ranks 48th in per-pupil spending. 

It’s not about helping children. It’s about getting the money to win elections.

Truth be told, public education has long been warped by the corrupting influence of big money.  Generations of North Carolinians suffered because employers profited by exploiting poorly educated workers. Politicians gave pro-education speeches but deliberately underfunded schools – worse in Black communities – effectively pushing students out of class into low-paying jobs.

I’m old enough to remember a textile mill CEO – and top political donor – telling state leaders that the UNC system was vital for training the managerial class but investing in a quality K-12 system was unnecessary. The elite and wannabe elite sent their children to private, all-white academies.  

The mills are now largely gone, and there’s broad support to improve our schools and make real the 1997 NC Supreme Court Leandro ruling that our constitution “guarantee[s] every child of this state the opportunity to receive a sound basic education.” 

The answer is campaign money. GOP leaders are telling the billionaires financing a national movementto privatize public education that the General Assembly will take radical steps to prove that, as one senator said, “North Carolina is at the forefront of school choice and education freedom.”

But an elitist, racist bias against robust public institutions, coupled with a political system tilted to wealthy donors, keeps slowing progress and distorting how legislators address the Leandro mandate. 

For example, from 2010 to 2016, Oregon millionaire John Bryan contributed $700,000 to dozens of North Carolina politicians to gain support for his “school reform” agenda. In 2016, his investment paid off with legislative approval for an “innovative” program to convert low-performing public schools into charter schools, which his corporation would manage for a fee. 

The program became a boondoggle, with no academic progress achieved. Bryan said his goal was to “inculcate my belief in the libertarian, free market, early American Founder’s principles” into schools. He died in 2020.

Sadly, a host of Bryan-like millionaires are now handing out big checks to encourage politicians to privatize rather than strengthen public education. At the top of the list is Jeffrey Yass, a Pennsylvania billionaire with a passion for subsidized private schools and gambling. 

In October 2022, Yass gave an eye-popping $1 million to a committee controlled by North Carolina Republican legislative leaders – its largest donation ever from an individual. Several months later, the General Assembly legalized sports gambling and expanded the voucher program to subsidize more private schools. 

Yass is dramatically increasing his donations this year – he’s now the nation’s single biggest donor to federal campaigns and committees. He’s teaming up with other millionaires and Super PACs to finance advocacy groups and candidates who demonize diversity, promote censorship and attack schools. 

He just donated $6 million to Texas Gov. Greg Abbott for his controversial voucher plan, plus $3.5 million to elect pro-plan legislators. Another $2 million went to a Virginia PAC backing GOP state legislators.

North Carolina Republican leaders also want more money from Yass and his ilk – and that inspires more radical steps, like giving vouchers worth millions to wealthy families. 

Long range, these steps create a two-tier system: subsidized, costly private schools with little government oversight, geared to middle- and upper-class kids, and under-resourced public schools for the low income and poor who are disproportionately people of color. This is the opposite of the civic commitment to mutual uplift embedded in the Leandro decision. 

Republicans will likely get their millions in campaign money from Jeff Yass et al, but at a steep price for the people of North Carolina. 

Categories Billionaires, Disruption, Education Industry, Privatization, Vouchers

Where Do We Stand Today in the Struggle to Save Public Schools?

By dianeravitch
May 13, 2024 //
3

A few days ago, I joined a discussion with Dr. Tim Slekar and Dr. Johnny Lupinacci about the current state of public education. It was aired on their show “Busted Pencils,” which is dedicated to teachers, students, and public schools.

We talked about charters, vouchers, testing, and how to get involved. Everyone can stand up for what they believe.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Civics, Community Schools, Corporate Reform, Courage, Creativity, Democracy, Education Industry, Elections, Extremism, For-Profit, Freedom, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Privatization, Race to the Top, Resistance, Teachers, Vouchers

Samuel Abrams Is Stepping Down at the National Center on the Study of Privatization in Education

By dianeravitch
May 7, 2024 //
4

Educators and policymakers need unbiased analyses of the effects of privatization of education, and that is what the National Center on the Study of Privatizatuon in Education at Teachers College, Columbia University has provided since it was founded by noted economist Henry Levin in 2000. In 2015, Levin stepped down and was succeeded by Samuel Abrams, who wrote a superb study of The Edison Project called Education and the Commercial Mindset. For the best nine years, Abrams has run NCSPE with integrity. Privatization is rapidly spreading around the globe, and the public needs a reliable source to keep watch on it. I hope that TC can find someone as able and thoughtful to succeed him.

Samuel Abrams wrote this letter about his decision and the next chapter in his career:

After nine years as the director of NCPSE, I’m writing to share that I’m stepping down to become the director of the International Partnership for the Study of Educational Privatization (IPSEP).

IPSEP will be anchored at the National Education Policy Center (NEPC) at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Partner institutions will include, to start, the Department of Economics at Stockholm University in Sweden; and the Turku University of Applied Sciences as well as the School of Education at the University of Turku in Finland. To receive IPSEP publications, please sign up here to join the NEPC mailing list (in case you’re not already a subscriber).

The idea for IPSEP derived from my time last year as a Fulbright visiting professor at the University of Turku, where I studied the role of public-private partnerships central to apprenticeship programs at vocational secondary schools. Nearly 50 percent of secondary students in Finland attend vocational schools (in comparison to about 5 percent in the U.S.). Such public-private partnerships make such robust participation in vocational education possible and pave the way to impressive job training and placement.

The private sector has nevertheless failed to distinguish itself in other educational domains in Finland. For example, commercial firms are playing a growing role in managing preschools and running teacher professional development. In both cases, significant questions have been raised about quality. In addition, school districts have allowed tech companies to play a growing role in determining curricula, with iPads and tablets replacing books, which may explain to a significant degree the plunge in reading proficiency among Finnish youth. The mean score for reading for the Finns on PISA dropped from 520 in 2018 to 490 in 2022, which amounts to nearly a year of learning, generating alarmist headlines in newspapers across Finland. A country known since the publication of the first PISA results in 2001 as an education mecca for policymakers seeking pedagogical solutions had lost its shine.

The realm of preschools may be most telling. A company called Pilke is now running 227 preschools across Finland, up from 19 in 2013. Pilke, in turn, was acquired in 2020 by a Norwegian preschool operator called Læringsverkstedet. Both Pilke and Læringsverkstedet now operate as subsidiaries of a parent company called Dibber, which counts over 600 preschools in its portfolio across several countries, from Norway, Sweden, and Finland to Latvia, Poland, Germany, South Africa, the UAE, India, and Hong Kong. In the spring of 2023, workers at Pilke went on strike twice to protest low pay and poor working conditions.

Such outsourcing in Finland echoes what’s happening in its Nordic neighbors as well as countries around the world. Across the Gulf of Bothnia, after all, Sweden went much further in introducing vouchers in 1992, allowing parents to send their children to private schools with public funds and permitting commercial firms to run such schools. Three decades later, about 15 percent of students at the primary and lower-secondary level and 30 percent of students at the upper-secondary level employ vouchers to attend private schools, about 75 percent of which are managed by commercial firms. On top of substantial documentation of corner-cutting by such commercial firms in the name of profits, segregation, grade inflation, and poor academic outcomes overall have been attributed to this dramatic transformation of the Swedish system.

With educational privatization clearly now a multifaceted global phenomenon, there is a need for an international multi-institutional version of NCSPE involving scholars abroad to conduct comparative research and disseminate findings. The outsourcing of management of preschools as well as teacher professional development, the prominence of vouchers in countries like Sweden as well as Chile, and the encroachment of ed tech on classrooms represent merely a slice of this story. Educational privatization has taken many other forms around the world: low-fee private schooling has proliferated across Sub-Saharan Africa, India, and Pakistan; “free schools” and “academies” in England (functioning much like charter schools in the U.S.) now enroll more than 50 percent of the nation’s primary and secondary students; and “shadow education” in the mold of after-school tutoring to aid students prepping for exams for admission to secondary schools as well as universities dominates the lives and strains the budgets of many families in many countries.

With NCSPE, Henry Levin laid the foundation for how a research center can address such issues in a dispassionate, rigorous way. While a professor at Stanford serving on an advisory board to assess the implementation of school vouchers in Cleveland in the mid-90s, Levin concluded that a glaring absence of reliable information on educational privatization precluded informed debate. To fill that void, Levin set to work on creating a research center that would provide impartial documentation, publish working papers, conduct research, and hold conferences. Lured in 1999 to Teachers College by then-President Arthur Levine to assume an endowed professorship and establish this center on Morningside Heights, Levin launched NCSPE the following year and ran it until 2015, when he asked me to take over.

It has been an honor to serve as the director of NCSPE. Following 18 years as a high school history teacher, I joined NCSPE as a visiting scholar in 2008 to work on a book on educational privatization. That book became Education and the Commercial Mindset (Harvard University Press, 2016), an exploration of the impact of market forces on public education in the U.S. and abroad. The last two chapters concern educational reform in Sweden and Finland, respectively. In doing the research for those two chapters, which involved school visits and interviews in Denmark and Norway as well as Finland and Sweden, I quickly learned the immense value of comparative analysis. To know one’s home, one must leave it.

In running NCSPE, I have had the privilege of collaborating with a range of gifted scholars in editing their working papers and contextualizing them in my announcements to the listserv. I have also had the privilege of getting to know a parade of visiting scholars from numerous countries and of working with a group of talented research associates who wrote book reviews and news commentaries for the NCSPE site. To all, I express my profound gratitude for all they have taught me. Finally, to Henry Levin, I am indebted for his faith in me to run this center and for his example of erudition, diligence, and openness. Levin has indeed been a role model for scholars everywhere and in all fields.

Going forward, I would like to thank Faith Boninger, Alex Molnar, and Kevin Welner, professors of education at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and experts on privatization, for their warm welcome to NEPC. In addition, for making this partnership international, I would like to thank Jonas Vlachos, a professor of economics at Stockholm University and an expert on privatization; Vesa Taatila, the rector of the Turku University of Applied Sciences and an expert on public-private partnerships; and Mirjamaija Mikkilä-Erdmann and Anu Warinowski, professors of education at the University of Turku and experts on teacher education. A board of advisors for IPSEP will be posted on the NEPC site in due time.

NCSPE is slated to remain operating at Teachers College. An update about the center’s status should appear on this site before long.

As I have continued to serve as a visiting scholar at the University of Turku, you may reach me with any questions at samuel.abrams@utu.fi.

Samuel E. Abrams
NCSPE Director
May 6, 2024

Categories Charter Schools, Education Industry, Privatization, Vouchers

Rick Perlstein: Texas is a Fascist State

By dianeravitch
May 2, 2024 //
7

Rick Perlstein writes in The American Prospect about a conversation with a friend who is a journalist in Texas. His friend describes how his native state is run by men who are determined to stamp out every last vestige of democracy in Texas. The Republican Party keeps moving to the extreme and crushing reasonableness and sanity. The result is a fascist state where all power is concentrated in the hands of Gregg Abbott, Dan Patrick, and far-right fascists.

Perlstein writes:

I made a friend a few years back, a young journalist at a newspaper in a smaller Texas city, bored with his work and seeking out conversation on the kind of things I write about. As time went on, however, he just wanted to talk about escape. “A local city I cover, as a matter of habit, appeals every single public records request,” went a typical plaint. “In a state that hasn’t completely lost its mind, maybe the solution is to reach out to the AG’s office. Except in Texas, you’re trying to get an indicted man who might have helped with January 6 to act on behalf of the public.”

At the end of that year, he approached me on the horns of a dilemma: take a job offer as a beat reporter at a daily in a big Texas city, or quit journalism and find some job at a do-gooder nonprofit. The guy’s dog was named “Molly Ivins.” I told him I didn’t think he had much choice. Alas, he took this graybeard’s advice. Things since have been hardly more rewarding.

One day: “Working on a deep dive into how the state of Texas fails to protect intellectually disabled people from predatory guardians. Depressing stuff.”

Another day: “A thing that really irks me about covering conservative dustups is how profoundly dishonest the whole thing is … When it comes time to write, you have two options. Either cut through the BS and call it what it is; then they’ll tell you you’re just biased. Or you can try to finesse it and sound insane.”

Another: “I also just finished a story about how domestic violence homicides are through the roof in Texas (even as overall homicide rates have declined), but we don’t have the infrastructure to really know how bad conditions have become. It turns out when you turn women into second-class citizens and make guns easily accessible, that doesn’t go well.”

A couple of weeks back, he shared with me a dark epiphany: He no longer felt hope. Thought it might be high time to get the hell out of his native state forever. He asked if there was anything out there that gave me hope. Having reached the “Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown” stage of my relationship with the United States (in part thanks to his testimony from the front lines), I had no comfort to offer.

I did, however, have a suggestion. He could tell me about what all this was like. I could let you listen in. Forthwith, an edited and annotated transcript of my conversation with a man I’ll call Lonely Star. Though it’s not so much that he’s lonely; he has manyanguished compatriots who feel the same way. It’s just that they feel like there’s less they can do about it with every passing day.

Please open the link and read their conversation. It’s enlightening and frightening.

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Cruelty, Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Texas, Vouchers
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