Archives for category: Vouchers
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How Embarrassing for the Friedman Foundation

By dianeravitch
January 9, 2014 //
70

The Friedman Foundation, named for free-market economist Milton Friedman and his wife Rose, is the nation’s most fervent advocate of vouchers.

It commissioned a national poll to ascertain the depth of support for vouchers, and much to its surprise (and, no doubt, embarrassment), the public prefers smaller class sizes far more than vouchers.

Furthermore, the least favored option among those presented in the poll was vouchers for low-income families. To the extent that the public favors vouchers, it is for everyone, not just for the poor.

The public’s least favorite way to “reform” school was longer school days, according to this poll.

But the big problem for the Friedman Foundation is that the public prefers to improve public schools by reducing class sizes, not by adopting vouchers.

Categories Class size, Education Reform, Vouchers

2013: A Very Bad Year for Teachers and Public Education in North Carolina

By dianeravitch
January 1, 2014 //
37

2013 was a horrible year for teachers and public schools in North Carolina.

The legislature and the governor passed bill after bill intended to demoralize teachers, defund public schools, and expand the transfer of public funds to privately managed schools, private schools, and religious schools.

Here, Lindsay Wagner of NC Policy Watch describes the nine actions that were intended to crush public school teachers and privatize public education.

The movement to snuff out public education begins by funneling public dollars to private schools, home schools, and charter schools, none of which are accountable for their spending or actions.

Then it starts the dismantling of the teaching profession by turning teachers into temps, removing any due process rights.

Into the mix, increase the amount and importance of standardized testing.

And meanwhile, cut the budgets of public schools and higher education.

It’s time to quote Garrison Keillor again. I may have to quote him once a week.

“When you wage war on the public schools, you’re attacking the mortar that holds the community together. You’re not a conservative, you’re a vandal.”

― Garrison Keillor, “Homegrown Democrat: A Few Plain Thoughts from the Heart of America”

Conservatives don’t destroy their community’s public schools. Conservatives don’t blow up traditional and beloved institutions.

Conservatives don’t place the free market above human values.

In North Carolina, the cultural vandals control the state.

Categories Charter Schools, North Carolina, Privatization, Teachers and Teaching, Vouchers

Judge in Douglas County, Colorado, Rules Against School Board for Buying Favorable “Studies”

By dianeravitch
December 28, 2013 //
22

A judge in Douglas County, Colorado, ruled that the school board had violated the state fair campaign practices law by hiring two conservative commentators to write papers praising the district’s privatization agenda.

One paper was produced by Frederick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute and the other by conservative activist William Bennett. Hess was paid $30,000 (half from district coffers) and Bennett was paid $50,000 ( by a private foundation).

Although there was no fine, the district plans to appeal.

Categories Charter Schools, Colorado, Vouchers

Tony Bennett and the Privatization Money Trail

By dianeravitch
December 23, 2013 //
19

You remember Tony Bennett? Not the famous singer but the guy who was State Commissioner of education in Florida. The guy who led the effort to privatize public education in Indiana and led the charge for charter schools, vouchers, for-profit charters, virtual charters, high-stakes testing, the A-F grading system, and the elimination of collective bargaining rights for teachers. Remember that he was honored by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute as the leading “reformer” (translated, privatizers) of all state chiefs. He was also chair of Jeb Bush’s “Chiefs for Change,” composed of state superintendents who share Jeb’s antipathy to public education.

Now, you may recall, that Bennett ran for re-election and was trounced by Democrat Glenda Ritz. Despite Bennett’s more than 5-1 funding advantage over Ritz, she won more votes than the new Republican governor, Mike Pence.

Here is a recap: After his stunning defeat, Bennett was promptly hired as state superintendent in Florida, where Jeb Bush created the template for the privatization movement. Meanwhile, back in Indiana, newly elected Governor Pence has done whatever he could to strip power and authority away from Glenda Ritz’s office and turn it over to a parallel agency that he created or to the Legislature, controlled by his allies.

As for Bennett, he didn’t last long in Florida. In August 2013, he resigned after a journalist for AP revealed that Bennett and his team had changed the A-F grading system to avoid giving a C grade to a charter school founded by a major contributor. Bennett contested the journalist’s interpretation, but his resignation suggested tat he wasn’t prepared to fight to refute the allegations.

The Bennett story was one of the biggest of the year.

There is only one other important detail that has not been explored, at least not on this blog: Who put up nearly $2 million to re-elect Tony Bennett in Indiana? Was it supplied by grateful parents in Indiana? No.

Mostly, it was big out-of-state donors who fund the privatization movement across the nation, in state and even local races.

His single biggest contributor was Alice Walton of the Walmart family of Arkansas. She gave $200,000, nearly 11% of Bennett’s total. Alice Walton has generously funded privatization campaigns in Georgia, Washington state, and elsewhere.

His second largest contribution of $175,000 came from Dean V. White, an Indiana corporate leader who is a major on or to Indiana Republicans.

Christel Dehaan gave Bennett $90,000. It was her charter school that was at the center of the grade–fixing scandal. Dehaan gave a total of $283,000 to the Indiana Republican Party this year.

Michelle Rhee’s StudentsFirst contributed $64,000.

There were also contributions to Tony Bennett by Eli Broad of Los Angeles, who pretends to be a liberal Democrat; the voucher-loving, far-right American Federation of Children, led by the DeVos family; Michael Bloomberg, Mayor of New York City, who prefers to project an image as a liberal independent; Roger Hertog, equity investor in New York and former chair of NYC’s conservative Manhattan Institute; Dan Loeb, hedge fund manager in New York City.

Florida blogger Bob Sikes reported: “Rhee’s contribution to Bennett’s Indiana campaign places her among his top contributors. Among his contributors from Florida were three members of Florida’s board of education, Jeb Bush, Patricia Levesque and charter school giants Charter Schools USA and Academica.” Patricia Levesque is Jeb Bush’s top policy advisor.

Categories Charter Schools, Closing schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Florida, Indiana, Vouchers

North Carolina: Home Schools May Qualify for Vouchers

By dianeravitch
December 16, 2013 //
81

Lindsay Wagner of NC Policy Watch reports that North Carolina law may permit home schools to qualify for public funding.

Nonpublic schools in North Carolina will have little or no supervision over their standards or academic performance.

Wagner writes:

“The school voucher program is intended for use at private schools only. But thanks to weak laws and a lack of capacity to ensure compliance, anyone who opens a school in their home may be able to get public money—and face little in the way of accountability.

“No academic standards required in NC voucher program

“Families in North Carolina will be able to participate in the Opportunity Scholarships program beginning with the 2014-15 academic school year.

“The new school voucher system that the General Assembly passed into law last July will provide low-income students currently enrolled in public schools with up to $4,200 annually to use at state-recognized private schools (the list of endorsed schools is viewable here).

“Lawmakers pushed for school vouchers, arguing that North Carolina’s public schools are failing its low-income and minority students and that families should have the choice—at the expense of taxpayers— to send their students to private schools as an alternative. The voucher program will siphon $10 million dollars away from the public school system in its first year, and is expected to expand in the future.

“School voucher programs have been on the rise since Milwaukee implemented them in 1990, with 13 states and the District of Columbia implementing their own voucher programs since that time.

“Private schools that receive school vouchers are typically subject to few regulatory requirements and are free to create their own standards. While some private schools hold themselves to high quality standards for their teachers and curricula, they are often not legally required to do so.

“Milwaukee has become known for rampant fraud and abuse of its voucher program —and its poor educational outcomes. The founder and principal of Milwaukee’s Mandella School of Science and Math used taxpayer funds to purchase his own Mercedes, and a recent study concluded that Milwaukee students participating in the voucher program performed significantly worse in both reading and math than students in the Milwaukee public school system.

“North Carolina law requires nothing in the way of academic standards, curricula or accountability measures for its non-public schools.”

– See more at: http://www.ncpolicywatch.com/2013/12/12/taxpayer-funds-may-be-funneled-to-home-schools-through-school-vouchers/#sthash.uiR3M0rJ.dpuf

Categories North Carolina, Vouchers

Indiana: Public Schools Show Stronger Performance than Charter Schools or Voucher Schools

By dianeravitch
December 14, 2013 //
23

At some point the PR bubble will burst, and the public will realize that school choice solves no problems and that charters and vouchers perform no better and often worse than regular public schools.

Blogger Steve Hinnefeld analyzed Indiana’s growth scores and found that public schools usually showed greater gains than charters or religious schools.

Hinnefeld writes:

“You can download 2012-13 growth scores for all the schools in the state from the Indiana Department of Education website. Sort and rank them, and what do they show?

For Indiana’s 1,400-plus public schools, the median score – the value at which half the scores are higher and half are lower – was at the 51st percentile in math and the 50th in English. That’s about what you’d expect: Most Indiana schools are public schools, so naturally the median score will be in the middle.

For private schools reporting growth scores, median scores were at the 46th percentile in English and only the 40th percentile in math.

For charter schools, median scores were at the 46thpercentile in English and only at the 36th percentile in math.”

This is the great secret of our time: Our public schools are doing a better job than the competition.

Categories Charter Schools, Indiana, Vouchers

EduShyster: What Happened to Free-Market Schooling in Sweden

By dianeravitch
December 14, 2013 //
3

EduShyster has written a hilarious and accurate description of Sweden’s love affair with privatization.

School choice advocates swooned over the Swedish model.

But something very bad happened on the Road to Utopia.

Read her post and learn from it.

Categories Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, International, Privatization, Vouchers

Julian Vasquez Heilig: Why School Choice Is NOT the Civil Rights Issue of Our Time

By dianeravitch
December 2, 2013 //
6

Proponents of the market-based approach to schooling often say that school choice is “the civil rights issue of our time.” We have heard this refrain from sources as diverse as Mitt Romney, Bobby Jindal, and Arne Duncan.

But scholar Julian Vasquez Heilig refutes this idea.

Read the entire article, which as always from Heilig, is brilliant.

We know what works, he writes, based on research and experience over many years. Here is what works:

  • Curriculum that represent diverse populations (Vasquez Heilig, Brown & Brown, 2012).
  • An accountability system that doesn’t stigmatize students who score poorly on only one measure of success— high-stakes tests (Vasquez Heilig, Young & Williams, 2012).
  • An accountability system that doesn’t hide students who fall through the cracks while simultaneously claiming fantastic results (Vasquez Heilig, 2011a)
  • An accountability system that recognizes the unique needs of English Language Learners relative to high-stakes testing (Vasquez Heilig, 2011b).
    • Teachers that have more than five weeks of training (Vasquez Heilig & Jez 2010).
    • Teachers that have more than 30 hours of “alternative certification” training (Vasquez Heilig, Cole & Springel, 2011).
    • Schools that don’t have a 40% attrition rate for their African American students (Vasquez Heilig, Williams, McNeil & Lee, 2011).
    • Schools that have vibrant public arts programs (Vasquez Heilig, Cole & Aguilar, 2010).
    • Schools that have low student-teacher ratios (Vasquez Heilig, Williams & Jez, 2010).
    • Schools that don’t have to cheat and game the system to make their numbers for NCLB (Vasquez Heilig & Darling-Hammond, 2008)
    • Districts and schools that actively seek to desegregate schools (Richards, Stroub, Vasquez Heilig, & Volonnino, 2012).
    • Schools that utilize innovative disciplinary approaches to stem the school-to-prison-pipeline (Cole & Vasquez Heilig, 2011).
    • Schools that have teachers in every classroom who are teaching in field and have extensive training in classroom management, curriculum development and pedagogy (Darling-Hammond, Holtzman, Gatlin, & Vasquez Heilig, 2005).

Here is the conclusion:

This essay demonstrates that school choice is a civil rights issue, but not as currently framed. First, school choice, on average, does not produce the equity and social justice that proponents spin (Wells, Slayton, & Scott, 2002). Second, school choice has created a motely alliance between privatizers and traditional civil rights proponents that is not in the best interest of poor and minority students (Wells, Lopez, Scott & Holme, 1999). Scott (2013b) posited,

Can we imagine Martin Luther King, Jr., A. Philip Randolph, Ella Baker, or Rosa Parks marching on Washington to secure the right for parents to compete in lotteries for spaces in free-market schools? Rather than these figures, the managers of such reforms in fact seem to be emulating another iconic cultural figure: Milton Friedman, the Nobel Prize-winning libertarian economist whose 1962 best-selling book was entitled “Free to Choose.”

Moving our schools from the public sector to the private sector is a false choice. Instead, as the research concisely demonstrates, parents and students should be able to choose a neighborhood public school with the important characteristics that are already established in the research literature and consistently observed in wealthy high-performing public and private schools. Access to those choices in democratically-controlled neighborhood public schools is the civil rights issue of our time— large-scale privatization of education is not.

This article appears in the Texas Education Review, the new student run journal at the University of Texas at Austin. Retrieve the pdf of this article here. See the entire issue here.

Citation: Vasquez Heilig, J. (2013). Reframing the refrain: Choice as a Civil Rights issue. Texas Education Review.1(1), 83-94.

Categories Charter Schools, Education Reform, Privatization, Vouchers

Nearly Half of Louisiana’s Voucher Students Attend D or F-Rated Schools

By dianeravitch
November 29, 2013 //
7

According to a local report, almost half the students enrolled in Louisiana’s voucher program are attending failing schools. Most voucher schools, however, did not release accountability data. This runs contrary to Governor Bobby Jindal’s claims that vouchers would allow students to escape failing public schools and choose better schools.

The story says,

“At least 45 percent of students in Louisiana’s controversial voucher program last year attended schools with performance scores in the D to F range of the state’s grading scale, according to data the state released Wednesday.

“The full impact of the program cannot be assessed, however, because the state released scores only for one-fifth of the 118 schools in the program. The schools for which data was provided served 2,888 of the nearly 5,000 students who used vouchers last year.

“The limited data raises questions about how the high-profile program can be held accountable to taxpayers. Voucher schools are only lightly vetted on the front end, with state Superintendent John White promising in 2012 that he would hold schools accountable based on academic results. The average voucher costs $5,245, meaning possibly $11 million in state dollars went to schools with no publicly released accountability score.

“The state released the scores in a report Wednesday, several days after a federal judge ruled the U.S. Department of Justice had the right to monitor the program to ensure it does not worsen racial segregation. In the political fight over the case, Gov. Bobby Jindal has said vouchers gave underprivileged children a shot at a better education.”

Categories Louisiana, Vouchers

NC Voucher School Bars Gay Students and Children from Gay Families

By dianeravitch
November 20, 2013 //
39

NC Policy Watch reports that Myrtle Grove Christian School will not admit students who are gay or who come from gay families. The school is now eligible to receive public funding under North Carolina’s new voucher program.

Categories North Carolina, Vouchers
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