Archives for category: Vouchers
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News from Wisconsin: “Reign of Error” Puts Voucher Advocates on Defensive

By dianeravitch
October 16, 2013 //
1

A progressive Wisconsin newspaper reports that “Reign of Error” has thrown voucher advocates onto the f
Defensive. Despite the obvious failure of vouchers in Milwaukee, Governor Scott Walker has expanded the voucher program to a larger geographical area and lifted the income limits for participants. His goal becomes clear: he has no interest in saving poor children from “failing public schools,” but destroying Wisconsin’s public school system and creating a market system. Markets never serve the needs of the poor. Markets favor the haves, not the have-nots.

“Reign of Error” is an antidote and guide to fighting the privatization movement. Everything they sell is failing. Everything they promote lacks evidence behind it. Some innocents have gone along with the siren song of “choice,” perhaps being too young to remember that “choice” was the battle cry of segregationists.

Don’t let the privatizers, libertarians, and government haters fool you. Defend public education. It belongs to the public, not to the entrepreneurs.

Categories Reign of Error, Vouchers, Wisconsin

Business Leaders Push More Privatization in Milwaukee

By dianeravitch
October 8, 2013 //
30

Some critics of my book “Reign of Error” say that “reformers” are not privatizers. Who, me, they say, in all innocence?

I invite them to read this post by veteran reporter Bobby Tanzilo in Milwaukee. Here is a city with a thriving voucher program, a thriving charter sector, and a shrinking public school system (that contains disproportionate numbers of students with disabilities and English learners who are unwanted by the other two sectors).

All of this competition among the three sectors was to produce dramatic improvement, but it didn’t. Milwaukee has had school choice for 23 years. Today, it is one of the lowest performing urban districts on the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

But the business leaders of Milwaukee, Tanzilo writes, want more choice. They want more privatization. They want the entire city school district turned into a “Recovery School District,” to emulate those in New Orleans and Memphis.

Tanzilo writes:

The Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce – which has in the past supported stripping the elected school board of its power and drawing away funding from Milwaukee Public Schools to pay for private and religious school vouchers – sponsored a pair of PowerPoint presentations on education that were shown to its members in August.

These slideshows touted the so-called “recovery districts” in New Orleans and Memphis and suggest to me – and others I’ve spoken to – that rumors that the group is pushing the recovery district idea for Milwaukee are true.

Recovery districts are public school systems that have had their autonomy and local control usurped by state capitols at the urging of corporate school reformers whose goal is to privatize public schools. The districts are then turned over to private, outside entities that are accountable to no one … or at least not us citizens and parents.

In short, they want to eliminate public education in Milwaukee altogether. They should do their homework. Even the Cowen Institute at Tulane–which supports charter schools–acknowledges that 2/3 of the charters in New Orleans are low-performing schools. And the so-called Achievement District in Memphis is too new to have any meaningful results.

The bottom line is that the business and civic leaders in Milwaukee think that the best way to improve the schools is to abolish public education and privatize control of all the schools. They have not a scintilla of evidence for doing so. The charter sector and the voucher sector in Milwaukee do not outperform the struggling public sector.

What is it that appeals to Milwaukee’s leaders? The absence of any democratic role in public education?

 

Categories Milwaukee, Privatization, Vouchers

The Right-Wing Agenda of MinnCAN

By dianeravitch
October 2, 2013 //
19

Here is a summary of a recent mayoral forum in Minneapolis, sponsored by MinnCAN.

MinnCAN is a spinoff of ConnCAN and 50CAN, organizations that promote school choice and look askance at public education. To be fair, they are quite happy to take public dollars, but to run their schools with rules that are very different from those that govern public schools, which are not allowed to pick their students or exclude those with low scores.

The candidates who came before the group in Minneapolis were singing the same song:

It goes like this: Our public schools are broken, our experienced teachers are no good, what we need is what the far-right think tanks have been advocating for fifty years:

Pressurizing teachers, “school choice,” standardized testing, “accountability”, charter schools, and vouchers.

School choice is the answer! No evidence needed.

Innovative? No, this is the status quo. This is the agenda of the Bush-Obama era.

With enough of this ideology, Minneapolis can destroy its public schools, replace them with privately managed charter schools and vouchers. And in short order, Minneapolis will look like Milwaukee, which has a charter sector, a voucher sector, and a withering public sector. Note that the public schools of Milwaukee has more students with disabilities than the other two sectors. And on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, Milwaukee is one of the nation’s lowest performing urban districts.

Is this what is called a Race to the Bottom?

Categories Charter Schools, ConnCAN, Corporate Reformers, Minnesota, Vouchers

Reformers Target Affluent Douglas County, Colorado, for All-Choice Plan

By dianeravitch
September 26, 2013 //
15

Douglas County, Colorado, has a school board that is enthralled with choice and apparently disdains public education.

Former Secretary of Education Bill Bennett spoke in Douglas County on September 25. According to the local media, he was well compensated. Rick Hess has also been busy consulting and promoting the school board’s plan to bust free of the cage of government schools.

Unless the public selects a new school board, Douglas County might become the first district to privatize public education.

EduShyster provides her typical dazzling overview of the situation. Unfortunately, there is not much humor here. Some of the nation’s wealthiest choice advocates have decided that Douglas County will be a fine Petri dish for a Milton Friedman-style experiment, along the lines already established in Chile and now unwinding there.

Categories Charter Schools, Colorado, Vouchers

Why Does the Chicago Tribune Want Vouchers?

By dianeravitch
September 24, 2013 //
8

Paul Horton, a history teacher at the University of Chicago Lab School, is a strong supporter of public education. Surprisingly, the Lab School is private but has a teachers’ union. That is the school where the children of Barack Obama and Arne Duncan were enrolled, as are the children of Mayor Rahm Emanuel.

Horton here tries to figure out why the Chicago Tribune is so eager to promote vouchers in Chicago and Illinois. The Tribune printed an opinion piece by Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal extolling vouchers in his state, though they are so new that they have produced no results as yet, and only 2% of eligible students applied for one, and several of the voucher schools teach creationism and other subjects from a Biblical point of view.

Horton might have added that vouchers have been ineffective wherever they have been tried; not only in Milwaukee, but in Cleveland and D.C. Those who push for them don’t care about evidence. They consider it irrelevant to their ideological crusade.

The Chicago Tribune is Whole Hog on Vouchers

Most hog farmers in the Midwest say that when you go “whole hog” on something there is no turning back.

Many Midwestern farmers also have a hatred of the Chicago Tribune because it has historically represented the interests of the infamous Chicago Board of Trade, the late nineteenth and early twentieth century equivalent of Wall Street in the Midwest.

In the last week, the Tribune, not to be satisfied with “yellow caking” support for the Chicago school shutdowns by rolling out an Augean stable’s worth of misinformation from the Joyce Foundation, is returning to its former unabashed support of speculative free enterprise when it comes to schools.

In the last week, the Tribune has rolled out three pieces on its editorial pages in support of Bobby Jindal and vouchers.

On September 8, the Tribune reprinted an Op-Ed originally published in the Washington Post that called the Obama Department of Justice and the Obama administration out on prosecuting the disparate racial impact of Louisiana’s voucher laws. This piece is hilarious reading that describes the defense of vouchers as the Civil Rights issue of our time that Martin Luther King would have clearly supported. It is almost as though Jindal was channeling King through Michelle Rhee who has recently given such speeches in Birmingham, among other places.

Yesterday, again on the editorial page, a very long human-interest piece (“In Search of an Education”) about a young student looking for a decent education was published. The story, written by a paid libertarian policy wonk from the newly formed Illinois Policy Institute (http://illinoispolicy.org/news/article.asp?ArticleSource=6316), could have been taken straight from a late nineteenth century “Ragged Dick to Horatio Alger” story. A young Chicagoan from a poor Chicago community could not find a decent education within the Chicago Public School system where drop out and college admission rates always fell below fifty per cent even at the best schools available. But this young person, who lives only a few miles from Indiana and the Educational freedom of the most open voucher system in the country, faces a three hour commute every day to get a decent education among students who are more likely to go to college at a private charter.

Of course this article fails to mention that the private charter routinely weeds out students with learning challenges and students with any academic or disciplinary issues.

And the article also fails to mention that the most comprehensive and thorough study ever done on voucher programs in Milwaukee, Wisconsin found that there were no appreciable performance differences among public, public charters, and private charters in the city.

Nor did the piece mention that the Board of the Illinois Policy Institute is heavily invested in charter school chains.

Today (Saturday), the lead editorial is “The United States vs. Minority Children.” We can only assume that the piece is written by Paul Weingarten, the Tribune’s Education and Health issues editorial writer, who uncritically published Joyce Foundation polling information this spring that vastly overrepresented the number of white parents of Chicago public school students on the day that the school closing lists were first announced. Prewritten editorials that supported the first were rolled out in the following days, almost as though they had been coordinated with the Mayor’s office and CPS announcements.

You can probably guess what the editorial says. It pretty much repeats what Jindal said about vouchers as a critique of Obama administration’s prosecution of corrupt private charters. There is nothing here about the context of huge Obama and Duncan support of private charters in Louisiana, and, of course, nothing about the stench of incomprehensible levels of corruption in those private charters that smells worse than southern Louisiana paper mills. Indeed, we in Illinois should take heart that there is one state that produces more corruption than we do!

We can expect more of the same in the next few days. Aside from the obvious tack to the right away from identification with Mr. Emanuel and the Obama administration that these editorials represent, the Tribune seems to be trying to steer potential Republican candidates for governor and other state offices away from criticisms of the Common Core Curriculum and loss of local control in Education and more toward a less divisive focus on vouchers. The Illinois Tea Party is all over CCS and loss of local control. These editorials attempt to heal the rift on the right on education.

The Tribune also faces issues with its circulation and income. Because the Sun-Times and local blogs are being read and viewed more in the city because they are more sensitive to communities impacted by the mayor’s draconian education policies, the Tribune is obviously trying to build more circulation in the suburbs and semi-rural areas that might be more sympathetic to harder conservative editorial stances. To do so they must tack harder to the right to compete with the Arlington Heights Daily Herald.

And finally, and most importantly, the Tribune’s publishers are trying to sell their paper to remain solvent. As we know, the Koch brothers could not get the deal that they wanted, or decided that the Tribune was not worth any risk. Potential buyers of the Tribune Company that includes the LA Times include a group lead by Eli Broad, whose foundation has supported school privatization all over the country. The LA Times has published a few pieces critical of the Corporate Education Reform movement. Even though other potential suitors include Warren Buffet, the group that owns The Chicago Sun-Times, and Rupert Murdoch, my money is on the group lead by Eli Broad to buy the Tribune Company.

This might go a long way to explain this new embrace of vouchers by the Tribune, and it would not be too big of a leap to speculate that the Illinois Policy Institute that is feeding the Editorial Board all of the voucher stuff gets a huge chunk of change form the Eli Broad Foundation.

The irony is, of course, that the Broad Foundation is “whole hog” on both voucher’s and Arne Duncan, whose career and policies are defined by the Broad Foundation. Just follow the money and the Democrats and Republicans are no different when it comes to education policy.

Paul Horton is the product of public schools and has spent half of his thirty-year career teaching in public schools. He is a member of AFT Local 2063 of the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools that stands in solidarity with the Chicago Teachers Union

Categories Chicago, Vouchers

My Conversation with Salon: What Works and Why Corporate Reform is Failing

By dianeravitch
September 23, 2013 //
6

You might find it interesting to read a conversation I had with Sara Scribner, a teacher who writes for Salon.

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Poverty, Vouchers

Outrage: How Extremists Brought Vouchers to North Carolina (Follow the $$$$)

By dianeravitch
September 23, 2013 //
11

The extremists in the North Carolina legislature and in the governor’s mansion have decided that the state’s public education system must be subject to market pressures.

That means they want public money put into private hands, as much as possible.

North Carolina was once the most progressive of southern states. It is now among the most regressive, competing with Louisiana in a race to the bottom.

Please note that the lawmakers did not put the decision about vouchers in the hands of the electorate.

No state referendum on vouchers has ever passed, and they know it.

Being fearful to say out loud what they are doing, they call vouchers with a deceptive name, as do their supporters in other states. They call them “opportunity scholarships.”

One state official is responsible to oversee the nearly 700 schools that are eligible to receive voucher students.

The campaign for vouchers was funded by extremist groups, from inside and outside the state.

Please note that in the latest TIMSS international tests, students in North Carolina’s public schools took the test and were rated as one of the highest performing entities in the world.

Want to know about vouchers in North Carolina?

Read these outstanding and objective articles by Lindsay Wagner of the NC Policy Watch. Here, here, and here.

Who is footing the bill to privatize public dollars? Follow the money. North Carolina has its own Art Pope, who handsomely funds libertarians who agree with his views; this very conservative and politically important multi-multi-millionaire is now state budget director. Art Pope was profiled by the New Yorker magazine because of his outsize influence in changing the face of the North Carolina Republican party.

And then there is all the out-of-state money that has helped elect a reactionary legislature.

The voucher promoters–who represent the most reactionary elements of our society–are always able to find and pay people of color willing to make ridiculous claims that they are doing the work of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., by helping to destroy public education that serves all children. Think of the Black Alliance for Educational Options, which is handsomely funded by the Walton Family Foundation (whose stores do not allow unions and pay minimum wage to their employees). And North Carolina has its own cheerleaders for local billionaires, falsely laying claim to Dr. King’s campaign for public responsibility, not privatization.

And lest we not forget: the governor’s senior education advisor is Eric Guckian, a distinguished leader groomed by Teach for America.

Categories North Carolina, Vouchers, Walton Foundation

Bobby Jindal’s Voucher Hoax

By dianeravitch
September 20, 2013 //
18

When the U.S. Department of Justice filed suit against Louisiana’s voucher program, on grounds that it threatened to undermine court-ordered desegregation, Jindal went on a well-publicized rant against the DOJ, claiming politics. Suddenly, Jindal presented himself as a leader of he civil rights movement, trying to save poor black kids from failing public schools. His op-eds appeared in the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, and other media. Shocking that the U.S. Department of Justice was upholding court orders intended to protect the roghts of black children!

Jeb Bush rushed to Jindal’s side, claiming that the voucher program was already showing amazing results. So did GOP leaders in Congress, including John Boehner.

Of course, none of this was true.

The courts in Louisiana said the funding for the voucher program was unconstitutional. So many voucher schools taught creationism and lacked qualified teachers that the voucher program made the state an international laughingstock.

The test scores of the students in the voucher schools were appallingly low, but, hey, there’s always next year.

Here Louisiana blogger CenLamar shows how cynical Jindal was.

He writes: here about Jindal’s claims:

“Unfortunately, that’s just not true. None of it. The truth is, from the very beginning, Bobby Jindal and John White worked with a group of highly-paid political consultants to market the voucher program, almost exclusively, to African-Americans. The Louisiana Black Alliance for Educational Opportunities (or LA BAEO) was created, seemingly out of thin air, by a national organization of conservative “school choice” activists, and they spent months touring the state and recruiting African-Americans to participate in the program, with very little understanding of the public schools they were attempting to disparage as “failures.” For example, about a year ago, I got into a Twitter exchange with one of LA BAEO’s principal consultants over remarks he had made about Peabody Magnet High School in my hometown of Alexandria. Peabody may not be an academic powerhouse, but it is a damn good school with an amazing campus and a deep connection with its community. But nonetheless, LA BAEO held town hall meetings in Alexandria in an attempt to convince parents to take their kids out of Peabody and, instead, enroll them in voucher schools. It didn’t seem to matter that the voucher schools in Central Louisiana are, with only a few exceptions, fly-by-night church schools with shoddy facilities, questionable finances, and uncertified teachers.

“See, the real issue– and how Bobby Jindal duped John Boehner– is that, on the whole, Louisiana’s voucher schools are significantly worse than the public schools. Jindal and Boehner both argue that Louisiana’s voucher program provides students with the opportunity to seek a “better education.” In reality, however, Louisiana’s voucher program is comprised, in large part, of unaccountable and completely unregulated schools, many of which rely on thoroughly discounted, ahistorical, and anti-scientific curricula.

“Last year, voucher students scored thirty points less on the LEAP test than their peers in public schools. Notably, while Superintendent White and Governor Jindal love to use test results as a way of gauging the performance of public schools, neither of them were willing to make the same argument against the dramatically worse performance of voucher schools.”

CenLamar sums up Jindal’s voucher program: “We’re not sending 91% of Louisiana’s voucher students to the best and most important voucher schools. This is not about integrating African-American students in traditionally and well-established and high-performing private schools; this is nothing to do with integration and almost everything to do with quietly re-codifying segregation.”

Categories Bush, Jeb, Jindal, Bobby, Louisiana, Segregation , Racial Isolation and Integration, Vouchers

Bruce Baker: How to Eliminate Accountability and Transparency While Claiming the Opposite

By dianeravitch
September 19, 2013 //
33

Bruce Baker of Rutgers University here dissects the fundamental flaws at the heart of the corporate reform agenda.

This is the set of policy prescriptions that he reviews:

What I have found most intriguing over time is that the central messaging of these reformy template policy prescriptions is that they will necessarily improve accountability and transparency of education systems, and that they will do so largely by improving the responsiveness of those intractable systems through altered governance and finance, including but not limited to “market” based choice mechanisms.

The standard list of strategies that are supposedly designed to increase accountability and transparency of our education system include, among other things:

  1. Expansion of charter schools, coupled with multiple charter authorizers (including private entities) and minimized charter regulation
  2. Adoption of tuition tax credit programs providing individuals and corporations the option to forgo paying a portion of taxes by contributing that amount to a privately governed entity (or entities) that manages tuition scholarships to privately governed/managed schools.
  3. Parent trigger policies that permit a simple majority of parents of children currently attending any school within a district to mandate that the local board of education displace the entire staff of the school and potentially turn over governance and management of school’s operations (and physical/capital assets?) to a private management company to be operated as a charter school.

It is argued that current large bureaucratic public education systems are simply intractable, non-responsive and can’t be improved – That they are simply not accountable to anyone because they are run by corrupt self-interested public officials elected by less than 2% of eligible voters (turnout for board elections) and that they have no incentive to be responsive because they are guaranteed a constantly growing pot of revenue regardless of performance/quality/responsiveness.

Whatever problems do exist with the design of our public bureaucracies, I would argue that we should exercise extreme caution in accepting uncritically the belief that we could not possibly do worse, and that large scale privatization and contracting of private entities to provide the public good is necessarily a better and more responsive, more efficient, transparent and accountable option.

Read the entire post. He shows, step by step, why each of these claims are misleading; and why they do not lead to greater accountability or transparency, or even to better outcomes for students.

In his analysis of “parent trigger,” he writes:

Parent trigger is quite possibly the most ludicrous corruption of public governance and accountability on the education reformy education policy table. Put simply, parent trigger is the most ill-conceived subversion of governance I’ve seen out there in the reformy playbook.

And he explains why.

It is an important read.

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Parent trigger, Privatization, Vouchers

Walton Foundation Hires Bloomberg Deputy

By dianeravitch
September 18, 2013 //
25

With the likely election of Democrat Bill de Blasio as mayor of Néw York City, the educrats at Bloomberg’s Department of Education are updating their resumes and starting to pack their bags.

First to jump ship is Deputy Chancellor Marc Sternberg, who is moving to Arkansas to help the Walton Family Foundation in its quest to replace public schools with vouchers and charter schools.

This article, written before the Democratic primary (which de Blasio won) explains why the DOE will no longer need Mr. Sternberg’s inestimable services:

“Two days ago NYC Mayoral Candidate de Blasio (the frontrunner for Tuesday’s Democratic primary) announced his support for a moratorium on ‘co-locating’ charter schools into buildings already occupied by neighborhood schools. If ‘co-locating’ sounds reasonable, well it’s because the practice was given a deceptively anodyne title.

“NYC co-locations are really hostile takeovers (sometime in whole, sometimes in part) of zoned neighorhood schools. Kids attending then’co-located’ neighborhood schools are kicked out of their classrooms and forced into yet more crowded classrooms. Charter schools don’t pay rent, often get the best facilities, and cherry pick the use of ‘shared space’. They often reject students who don’t fit in their managers’ model of the right sort of student.”

Apparently Sternberg will keep pushing those co-locations in NYC until the day he moves to Arkansas. The Bloomberg administration has a long list of co-locations that it expects to approve next month.

It is time for de Blasio to assert that the last-minute efforts of Bloomberg’s lame-duck Panel on Educational Policy to give as much space as possible to charter operators will be subject to a moratorium on January 1, when a new day begins for Néw York City

Categories Charter Schools, Closing schools, NYC, Vouchers
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