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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

Texas: Rightwing Lt. Gov. Wants to Abolish Property Taxes and Public Schools

By dianeravitch
April 30, 2024 //
11

Chris Tomlinson, a columnist for The Houston Chronicle, writes here about the audacious, mendacious plan of Lt. Governor Dan Patrick to destroy public schools. Patrick was a talk-show host like Rush Limbaugh before he entered politics. In Texas, the Lt. Governor has more power than the Governor, so his actions must be closely scrutinized.

Dan Patrick hates public schools. He wants to abolish them and replace them with vouchers.

Tomlinson explains Dan Patrick’s malevolent plan:

Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick’s fantasy of abolishing property taxes would set the state up for financial failure and end public education as we know it by placing a greater burden on low- and medium-income Texans.

The most powerful man in Texas politics wants you to believe he’s looking out for homeowners, but there’s always an unacknowledged goal for significant initiatives like this one. You need only look at who deposited $3 million in Patrick’s campaign account and who gave the record $6 million donation to Gov. Greg Abbott to boost private religious schools.

As lieutenant governor, Patrick appoints the leaders of Senate committees, sets their agendas and decides whether a piece of legislation gets a vote. Patrick also rewards senators who appease him and punishes those who don’t with his fat campaign war chest.

Last week, the lite guv ordered the Senate Finance Committee to “determine the effect on other state programs if general revenue were used to fully replace school property taxes, particularly during economic downturns.”

Rising property taxes are directly correlated to the growing cost of housing in Texas. When home or apartment values go up, so do taxes, and the two combined create a crisis across the country.

Median property taxes in Texas rose 26% between 2019 and 2023, according to data from real estate research firm CoreLogic, and first reported by Axios, an online news agency. In four years, the median payment rose to $4,916 from $3,900 as property values nationwide grew 40%.

Texas has crazy property taxes due to a convoluted system that protects the wealthy and pushes the burden of paying for government services onto low- and middle-income families.

To understand how and why, Texans must remember that we pay for schools through property taxes levied by school districts. The state is forbidden from collecting a property tax, so the Legislature depends primarily on sales taxes and severance taxes levied on oil and gas production.

The Texas Constitution also forbids an income tax, perpetuating the myth Texas is a low-tax state. The wealthy, who spend less of their income on retail purchases and real estate, get off easier than in other states. But the half of Texans who struggle to make ends meet pay a higher proportion of their income in sales and property taxes.

Most states rely on the proverbial three-legged stool of income, property and sales taxes to fairly charge families and businesses based on their ability to pay. Texas relies on only two legs, and Patrick is talking about kicking away one of them.

Patrick’s command comes less than a year after the Legislature took $18 billion from sales taxes and oil and gas severance taxes to pay down school taxes. Most of that money came from high crude oil and natural gas prices and a roaring economy that generated huge sales tax returns. The move marked the first tax reduction paid by most property owners in decades.

Ending property taxes is part of the Republican Party of Texas platform, but it would require collecting $73.5 billion from the remaining leg of the stool, the sales tax.

The state sales rate is 6.25%, while local authorities can collect up to 2% more. The Texas Taxpayers and Research Association in 2018 calculated the sales taxes would need to reach 25% to replace property taxes.

Right-wing fantasists will point at Texas’ colossal budget surplus last year as proof that lawmakers will only need to raise sales taxes a tiny bit. However, anyone who’s lived in Texas for a decade or more knows the fossil fuel business goes through boom-and-bust cycles.

During a bust in 2011, Texas lawmakers slashed school funding by $4 billion. When the money runs out, the Republicans who control every lever of power in Texas do not hesitate to sacrifice public education to avoid raising taxes. Even with last year’s windfall, they refused to give teachers a raise.

This is where school vouchers and property taxes collide. The billionaires backing Abbott and Patrick believe public schools are Marxist, woke indoctrination factories. They want to give parents vouchers to choose Christian nationalist indoctrination factories exempted from state or federal oversight.

The vouchers, though, are insufficient to cover private school tuition, so families must pay the difference. The GOP hopes to create a system in which the state pays a defined amount and normalizes parents’ paying the rest.

Don’t be fooled by promises of lower taxes; this is about killing public schools by underfunding them and shifting more of the burden onto young families and off the wealthy.

This malicious proposal could be politically palatable. There are some five million public school students in Texas. There are more than six million privately owned homes. The population of Texas is majority-minority, like the public school students. The Republican-dominated legislature is overwhelmingly white. Do the math. The people with the power, the people who pay the most property taxes, are white. Do they want to pay property taxes for other people’s children?

Award-winning opinion writer Chris Tomlinson writes commentary about money, politics and life in Texas. Sign up for his “Tomlinson’s Take” newsletter at houstonhchronicle.com/tomlinsonnewsletter or expressnews.com/tomlinsonnewsletter.

Categories Disruption, Education Industry, Elections, Evil, Extremism, For-Profit, Funding, Ignorance, Privatization, Religion, Republicans, Texas, Vouchers

My Conversation about the State Takeover of Houston Public Schools on KPFT-Pacifica

By dianeravitch
April 29, 2024 //
6

I was invited by KPFT, a Pacifica station in Houston, to discuss the state takeover of the Houston Independent School District.

This is a better link.

The host of the show is Paul Castro, who has taught in HISD and in an open enrollment charter school.

It was a good exchange. We talked about The state-appointed superintendent Mike Miles, about charter schools, and about Governor Abbott’s determination to get a voucher bill passed by the next legislature. I explained what a voucher program would mean and what has been learned from the experience of other states.

You have to search the website to find the program. It aired April 26 at 9 am.

“Amplified Houston” Friday

Host:Paul Castro

Guest:Diane Ravitch 

Topic

Public school reform and HISD Takeover

Amplified Houston for Fri., April 26, 2024, focuses on public school reform and the HISD takeover. Dr Diane Ravitch, Founder and President of the Network for Public Education (NPE) will guest. NPE is the single largest organization of parents and teachers and other citizens working to stop the privatization of public education and the misuse of standardized testing.Diane Ravitch’s Blog is dianeravitch.net. Her two most recent books are EdSpeak and DoubleTalk:A Glossary to Decipher Hypocrisy and Save Public Schooling and The Death and Life of the Great American School System.

Friday, April 26, 2024 9:00 am30:07

Categories Charter Schools, Democracy, Houston, State Takeover, Texas, Vouchers

Indiana: Jennifer McCormick for Governor!!

By dianeravitch
April 28, 2024 //
0

Indiana has plunged headlong into privatization of its-once-beloved public schools.

Fortunately, there is a knowledgeable candidate for Governor who has promised to stop the destruction of public education.

Jennifer McCormick is a career educator who began as a special education teacher, then became a language arts teacher, a principal and a district superintendent.

She was elected Indiana State Superintendent of Public Instruction in 2016; she ran as a Republican. She served out her four-year term and switched parties in 2021.

McCormick wrote on Twitter:

Indiana GOP’s school privatization efforts have diverted 1.6B of tax dollars away from public schools, and the majority of communities do not have families and/or private schools participating. As governor, I will champion for Indiana to pause funding school privatization.

At the NPE conference in D.C. in 2023, JenniferMcCormick and me.

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Education Industry, Elections, Extremism, Indiana, Privatization, Vouchers

Tennessee: Gov. Lee Fumes About Voucher Failure, But Parents and Educators Celebrate

By dianeravitch
April 26, 2024 //
6

Governor Bill Lee of Tennessee made school vouchers his top priority but the issue died in the Legislature despite its Republican supermajority. He will bring the issue back next year. He’s hoping for universal vouchers, where every student in the state is eligible for a voucher but opponents call his plan a subsidy for the wealthy who already are attending private schools.

In eastern Tennessee, and very likely across the entire state, parents and educators heaved a huge sigh of relief.

Dustin Park is a parent of kids who go to school in Maryville. He’s opposed to the universal school voucher plan because he said it excludes students with disabilities.

“The only thing that protects kids with disabilities is that federal law,” Parks said. “A bedrock of our public schools is that they accept everybody.”

The school district he sends his children to supports his stance. 

“We continue to maintain our belief that public funds should not be diverted to private entities, and taxpayers should not be required to subsidize private schools that are not held to the same standards of accountability and inclusivity as public schools,” said Mike Winstead, Director of Maryville City Schools. “If the Education Freedom Scholarship Act passed, it would have been harmful to the very students and vulnerable populations it maintained to assist.”

Dave Gorman is a teacher at Knox County Schools and also said he’s not sure lawmakers will listen to their constituents.

“We also have seen enough dirty dealings,” Gorman said. “We’ll never forget when Jason Zachary was the deciding vote to bring vouchers to a couple of cities in the state a few years ago — when it looked like it was about to die and he changed his vote.”

Knox County Schools provided the following statement about the proposal failing.

“As we have stated before, our attention has and will continue to stay focused on our students and providing them with a high-quality education. We are confident that our families will continue to choose KCS regardless of what happens at the state level.” 

Several school districts across East Tennessee also said they also are pleased a school voucher plan would not pass this session…

Kelly Johnson, Director of Clinton City Schools

“Elected officials are responsible for listening to their constituents, not answering to outside special interest groups. We know Governor Lee plans to bring it back next year. It is my hope that the citizens of TN remain vigilant in celebrating the many successes of public schools.”

The billionaire funded outside special interest groups will be back next year. Parents and educators should vote to replace those who want to undermine public schools.

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Failure, Privatization, Tennessee, Vouchers
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