Ryan J. Higgins is a captain in the U.S. Arny Reserve who received an Ed.D. in education at TCU. He is a strong supporter of public schools. 
Archives for category: Vouchers
The state commissioner of education in New Hampshire, Frank Edelblut, homeschooled his 10 children. He knows nothing about public schools and the role they play in communities. Appointed by Governor Chris Sununu, Edelblut has devoted his time in office to promoting anything but public schools.
He pushed voucher legislation and projected it would cost $3.3 million in its first two years. The actual cost was $22.7 million. The vast majority of children who use vouchers never attended public schools.
New Hampshire has about 160.000 students who attend public schools. In the first year of the voucher program, 90% of the students who claimed vouchers were already enrolled in religious and private schools. The proportion now remains over 80%. Vouchers are now claimed by about 2.6% of the state’s students. About 1/2 of 1% of the voucher users previously were enrolled in public schools.
Vouchers are a subsidy for private school students.
Garry Rayno of IndepthNH writes:
CONCORD — In three years, the enrollment in the Education Freedom Account program has grown 158 percent, while the cost has increased 174 percent in figures released this week by the Department of Education.
For the current school year, 4,211 students are in the program, up from 3,025 at the same point last year, and from 1,635 for the 2021-2022 school year.
The costs have grown from $8.1 million the first year, to $14.7 million the second year and $22.1 million this school year.
This year the financial threshold to participate in the program was raised from 300 percent of the federal poverty level to 350 percent.
That increases the threshold for the current school year from $59,160 for a family of two, to $69,020, and for a family of four from $90,000 to $105,000 annually.
Once a family qualifies for the program there are no future financial limits on earnings.
Department of Education Commissioner Frank Edelblut, who championed the program before the legislature, was pleased more and more students are participating in the EFA program
“It has been three years since the launch of New Hampshire’s successful Education Freedom Account program, and it is apparent that New Hampshire families are taking advantage of this tremendous opportunity that provides them with different options and significant flexibility for learning,” said Edelblut. “With three years of data under our belt, we know that students are coming and going from the program, which is exactly how it was designed – to allow various options for personal learning needs that may fluctuate from year-to-year based on whatever path is appropriate in the moment.”
The program was sold by Edelblut and others as an opportunity for lower-income parents to find the best educational fit for their children if they have problems within the public school system.
However the vast majority of the money spent through the expansive voucher program has gone to pay the religious and private school tuition of students in those schools prior to the EFA program’s creation. [Emphasis added]…
A larger number of EFA students this year left public schools to go into private or parochial schools, 444 students, compared to 282 last school year, and 286 in the 2021-2022 school year.
Overall there are 1,577 new students to the EFA program this school year, while 109 students left the program due to graduation, 75 returned to public schools, and 524 students left the program for other reasons.
The 1,577 new students are 128 more students than the previous year.
When the program first began, the Department of Education projected its first two years would cost about $3.3 million and instead the state paid $22.71 million.
The advocacy group Illinois Families for Public Schools were shocked by Governor Pritzker’s decision to extend the state voucher program. They were shocked because of his campaign promises not to support schools that discriminate, and they were shocked by the data showing that discrimination against students with disabilities and LGBT students is widespread among voucher schools. Most voucher schools are religious, and they are free to exclude any student they don’t want.
Illinois Families for Public Schools’ Statement on Gov. Pritzker’s Vow to Sign an Extension of the Illinois Voucher Program
Friday October 20, 2023
Illinois Families for Public Schools is profoundly disappointed at Governor Pritzker’s statement yesterday that he is committed to signing any bill sent to him that would extend the Invest in Kids voucher program.
This commitment contradicts the statements he made when he ran for governor in 2018, including his response to our candidate questionnaire:
“I oppose Bruce Rauner’s backdoor voucher program that was inserted into the school funding reform bill last year. As governor, I will work to repeal that measure.”
Worse yet, it conflicts with the values Pritzker has espoused again and again in his time in office: That Illinois is a welcoming and inclusive state where it is unacceptable to treat individuals differently because of their identity, where justice and equity make Illinois a safe space for all, where we want our young people “to become critical thinkers, exposed to ideas that they disagree with, proud of what our nation has overcome, and thoughtful about what comes next”, where K-12 schools are “liberatory learning environments that welcome and affirm LGBTQ+ young people, especially those how are transgender, nonbinary, intersex, Black, Indigenous, people of color, people with disabilities, and all communities that experience marginalization.”
Since 2018, the Invest in Kids voucher program has diverted more than $250 million in state funds to private schools, 95% of which are religious. Religious schools, even those getting public dollars, can and do legally discriminate against nearly any protected category of student, family or staff:
- At least 85 schools in the Invest in Kids program, nearly 1 in 5, have anti-LGBTQ+ policies.
- Only 13% of private schools in the Invest in Kids program last year reported to the Illinois State Board of Education that they served any special education students. The majority of schools in the program are Catholic schools, and four of six Catholic dioceses in Illinois have policies that say schools may refuse to accommodate students with disabilities.
- Policies that discriminate against pregnant and parenting students, students who have had an abortion, English-language learners, students with disabilities, undocumented students, and more are widespread in Illinois voucher schools as well.
Due to recent Supreme Court decisions, there is essentially no way to have a state voucher program that only funds non-religious schools or alternatively prohibits religious schools from discriminating based on religious belief. As such, there is no way to end discrimination in voucher schools in Illinois short of ending the program altogether.
Extending the voucher program is supported by anti-public good extremist groups, including Betsy DeVos-funded Illinois Federation for Children, the Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity, Awake Illinois, and Moms for Liberty Lake County.
Access to a well-resourced public education is a fundamental right. Illinois public schools are still short billions of dollars in state funding needed to educate their students.
Public dollars must be for used public schools that welcome and educate all children, as well as protect their civil rights. Strong public schools are the foundation of a healthy, pluralistic democracy and are a public good that benefits everyone in Illinois.
It is unacceptable to continue the Invest in Kids program in any form.
Why is Governor Pritzker thinking so small when it comes to our public schools?
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Contact:
Cassie Creswell, 773-916-7794, info@ilfps.org
About Illinois Families for Public Schools
Illinois Families for Public Schools (IL-FPS) is a grassroots advocacy group that represents the interests of families who want to defend and improve Illinois public schools. Founded in 2016, IL-FPS’ efforts are key to giving public ed parents and families a real voice in Springfield on issues like standardized testing, student data privacy, school funding and more. IL-FPS connects families and public school supporters in more than 100 IL House districts. More at ilfps.org.
The National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado invited scholar Chris Lubienski of Indiana University to review a recent publication of EdChoice (the new name of the Milton and Rose Friedman Foundation), which summarizes what voucher advocates believe about the efficacy of vouchers. The publication is titled “The 123s of School Choice: What the Research Says About Private School Choice Programs, 2023 Edition.”
Not surprisingly, EdChoice concludes that vouchers are effective. Lubienski, however, is critical of the studies they include and those they exclude. In short, EdChoice engages in cherry-picking to bolster its cause.
While the report confidently asserts that school choice works, Lubienski says that the authors ignore recent studies that show the opposite to be true. For many students, vouchers are harmful.
If your district or state is under pressure to endorse vouchers, be sure to read this review.
The New Republic convened a meeting to discuss Trump, book banning and the culture wars. Randi Weingarten described the attack on schools as a coordinated strategy to destroy public schools and promote vouchers. Edith Olmsted of The New Republic interviewed her. None of this is new to readers of this blog, but the American public needs to hear this message. Again and again.
Book Bans Are a Conservative Plot to Destroy Public Schools, Says Randi Weingarten, The teachers union head denounced the “extremist strategy,” which also includes voucher campaigns and manufactured outrage over critical race theory.
DANIEL BOCZARSKI/GETTY IMAGES FOR MOVEON
Teachers union head Randi Weingarten says that the campaign by conservatives to ban books isn’t about the books at all, but part of a broader strategy to destroy public schools—one that was supercharged by the pandemic.
“You take the agita and the anxiety that people had at Covid, that fear, and you combine it with a right wing who has wanted to kill public schools for years and take that money for vouchers, and you have the scenario we have,” Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, said Wednesday at The New Republic’s Stop Trump Summit.
Vouchers, which use public education dollars to fund private and religious school attendance, are just one pillar of the conservative campaign to “undermine, destroy, and defund” public schools, she said. The other two are book banning and manufactured outrage over critical race theory.
Weingarten pointed to conservative activist Chris Rufo and a comment he made at Hillsdale College, a Christian nationalist school, in which he admitted that focusing on these issues was all part of a master plan to promote universal vouchers: “To get to universal school choice, you really need to operate from a premise of universal public school distrust.”
In an interview with TNR after the event, Weingarten explained the “extremist strategy” Rufo and other conservatives have used to defund public schools. “The hook was trust. If you really create as much distrust as possible in public schooling, then parents will look at privatization as an option,” she said.
That’s where critical race theory comes in.
“[Rufo] tried to make a term that nobody knows so toxic, so that you can weaponize it and make fear,” she said. “Conversations about hard subjects became weaponized as indoctrination. Which is patently ridiculous, and dangerous.”
Race, as well as gender, is the subject conservatives have focused on in their campaigns to ban books in public schools and libraries.
“What [Republican Governor Ron] DeSantis is doing in the so-called ‘war on woke,’ is exactly part of their playbook—to make people afraid of books, and afraid of what we do in school,” Weingarten said. According to Pen America, Florida passed 15 “educational intimidation” bills in the last two and a half years.
The “parents’ rights” movement is made up of a loud minority, Weingarten said, and actively undermines what most parents want. “What we see in Florida is that 60 percent of the book banning has been done by 11 people,” she said.
The AFT has partnered with The New Republic in fighting back against such bans. TNR’s Banned Books Tour has been delivering thousands of banned books across the country this month, most recently in Florida.
Charles Foster Johnson is the founder of Pastors for Texas Children. He actively supports full funding of public schools and separation of church and state. He, along with other faith leaders, wrote the following article in The Dallas News.
Don’t Defund Public Schools
Voucher scheme wastes money, violates Constitution
The education community in Texas has remained patient and courteous throughout the spring general session of the Legislature despite the record $32.7 billion surplus. They have upheld the values of kindness and respect that society expects. However, there comes a point when patience wears thin, and the truth must be spoken: it is time to allocate the necessary resources to educators and school districts.
Simply put, it’s time to provide the funding our educators and school districts need. This funding is not a luxury; it is a necessity. It is essential for Texas teachers to keep pace with the rising cost of living. School districts must fulfill their role in shaping the future workforce of Texas, which boasts the ninth-largest economy in the world. It is imperative to honor the trust placed in you by Texas taxpayers, who expect their hard-earned money to be invested wisely in the education of over 5 million Texas students.
The time for political games and holding funds hostage for private schools must end. Public schools are the heart of our educational system and need their fair share of resources. Even after passing tax relief measures earlier this summer, there remains a surplus of $14 billion, not to mention the over $21 billion in the state’s rainy day fund. Moreover, inflation ensures that surplus funds will continue to accumulate in the foreseeable future. This is not the government’s money to wield for hardline negotiations; it belongs to the people of Texas.
Over 90% of Texas students attend public schools, yet the state has not increased funding to school districts since 2019. Operating costs have significantly risen during this period. Additionally, our teachers, who demonstrated unwavering dedication during the global pandemic, have yet to receive sufficient salary increases to keep pace with inflation.
It is high time to allocate the necessary resources to public schools to address these issues.
Due to legislative inaction during the spring, school boards across Texas were forced to approve deficit budgets merely to survive this academic year. For example, Dallas ISD approved a $186 million deficit budget, Garland ISD faced a $69 million deficit, and Plano ISD had to manage a $24 million shortfall. This approach is akin to depleting one’s savings to pay the electric bill — it is unsustainable and morally unacceptable.
What is most disheartening is the lack of significant funding for schools this year and the mounting frustration within the education community: educators, administrators and parents alike. It should not have come to this point.
Instead of prioritizing public schools, Gov. Greg Abbott has traversed the state promoting a program that redirects tax dollars to private schools, masquerading under the banner of “education freedom.” Comparable programs in other states have proven to be financially burdensome. Arizona’s private school subsidy program, initially allocated at $65 million, is estimated to cost $900 million next year. In Florida, a similar program has been used for non-educational purposes like theme park tickets, kayaks and televisions (https://www.firstcoastnews.com/article/news/verify/yes-school-vouchers-in-florida-can-be-used-for-tvs-skateboards-theme-park-tickets/77-49577639-1a29-4acd-86ac-af50efc107e9).
Voucher programs like these do not align with the principles of fiscal conservatism. Moreover, the effectiveness of private school subsidies in improving student achievement remains highly questionable. In other states, established private schools have yet to embrace these subsidies due to limited capacity and high costs. Consequently, makeshift private schools have arisen, unable to match the offerings of public schools, resulting in most students returning to the public system.
The notion that funding for Texas public schools has been delayed to channel resources to private schools should anger the parents of millions of children and the thousands of educators who tirelessly serve them. Our students have only one chance to experience their current grade level; they should not be made to wait.
In a disturbing breach of the American principle of separation between church and state, Abbott has called upon ministers and pastors to advocate for this subsidy program from their pulpits on Sunday, Oct. 15. Texans understand a fundamental truth that eludes the governor: Genuine faith must be voluntary and cannot be endorsed or supported by state authority. Using tax dollars to subsidize religious instruction is a violation of this principle.
Abbott’s threats against state representatives who support public education constitute a desperate attempt to intimidate them. The Texas House has consistently opposed private school subsidies for over two decades, and there is no reason for that stance to change now.
The time for delay has passed; enough is enough.
Charles F. Johnson is executive director of Pastors For Texas Children. George A. Mason is senior pastor emeritus at Wilshire Baptist Church. Victoria Robb Powers is senior pastor at Royal Lane Baptist Church. Andy Stoker is interim executive director at Interfaith Alliance Texas. Neil G. Thomas is senior pastor at Cathedral of Hope United Church of Christ. They wrote this column for The Dallas Morning News.
Denis Smith is a retired school administrator in Ohio who worked in the State Education Department’s office for charter schools. He writes here about the strong resistance to vouchers in Texas, compared to the collusion between legislators and religious leaders in Ohio.
You read that headline correctly.
It may come as a shock to readers to know that with all the issues confronting Ohio, it hasn’t been listed in recent surveys as the worst place to live and work. That honor, according to a new CNBC survey, goes to Texas.
The survey methodology targeted a range of issues facing the Lone Star State, with reproductive rights, health care, and voting rights identified as leading deficits that are adversely affecting the state’s citizens.
Noticeably absent from the CNBC list of top issues was education, which might come as a surprise to observers who have long deplored the low per-pupil spending for schools in one of the fastest growing states in the nation.
But there might be another reason why education didn’t pull Texas even deeper into the deficit column. As of now, and unlike Ohio, Texas does not have a universal education voucher program. In this year alone, Ohio joined 14 other states that have passed such legislation which allows taxpayers to pick up the tab for tuition at private and religious schools.
But universal vouchers haven’t happened yet in Texas, despite Gov. Greg Abbott’s strong advocacy of spreading public money around to unaccountable non-public schools.
Opposition to vouchers comes from the state’s vast rural areas, where there are few private and religious schools to choose from. That same anti-voucher argument was made in Ohio during the past legislative session, where families in rural counties would not have the same level of access for those living in metropolitan areas.
But if there is one person in the Buckeye State who almost singlehandedly pushed through the voucher bill despite spirited opposition, it would be Senate President Matt Huffman, whom Statehouse watchers have described as the bully- in-chief of Ohio politics and an aggressive champion of conveying public funds to religious schools.
By contrast, if there is one person in Texas who has been a principled leader in championing public schools and opposing vouchers for religious schools, the Rev. Charles Foster Johnson, leader of Pastors for Texas Children, would be that positive force.
What a contrast. In Ohio, we have a schoolyard bully in the person of Matt Huffman. In Texas, we have a principled pastor using a bully pulpit, a la Theodore Roosevelt, who popularized that term. But let’s not conflate the two terms, as Pastor Johnson respects constitutional limits, unlike the Ohio Senate President.
As a bully, Huffman respects nothing, and where the word principled is not followed by the term leadership. One specific example of Huffman’s lack of respect for societal norms and conventions is the Ohio Constitution and Article VI, Section 2, which clearly states a prohibition against the use of public funds to support private and religious schools:
The General Assembly shall make such provisions, by taxation, or otherwise, as, with the income arising from the school trust fund, will secure a thorough and efficient system of common schools throughout the state; but no religious or other sect, or sects, shall ever have any exclusive right to, or control of, any part of the school funds of this state.
By contrast, Pastor Johnson and his organization on September 19 released this statement opposing vouchers for religious schools in Texas. Here are some key excerpts from the statement of Pastors for Texas Children in opposition to vouchers:
Vouchers are a clear violation of the American ideal of separation of church and state.
In an unprecedented violation of God’s law of religious liberty and the American doctrine of the separation of church and state, Governor Greg Abbott this afternoon called on ministers and pastors to use God’s pulpit to push his private school voucher program.
The use of public tax dollars to subsidize religious instruction is a sin against God.
Pastors for Texas Children stands strong for the universal education of all God’s children, provided, and protected by the public trust. We oppose all attempts to privatize it for sectarian, religious, and political reasons.
As we examine the use of the bully pulpit by a Texas pastor in providing principled leadership compared to unconstitutional and unprincipled bullying by Ohio’s senate leader, the behavior of Ohio’s Catholic bishops in joining Republicans in supporting an assault on the Ohio Constitution through their advocacy of Issue One in the recent special election is a study in contrasts with the Texas pastors.
Those critical of the church’s role in trying to make it more difficult to amend the state’s constitution and thus block a popular abortion measure on the November ballot see its strong working relationship with Ohio’s Republican leadership. That relationship resulted in a gift, the universal education voucher program funding unaccountable religious schools, embedded in the new state budget.
And the constitutional prohibition for using public funds otherwise earmarked for public schools to support religious schools? Never mind Article VI, Section 2.
“We can kind of do what we want,” Huffman famously said in 2022.
And he does. Clearly these words depict the image of the bully-in-chief, intent on destroying public education regardless of a clear constitutional mandate to use public funds to support a “system[note the singular form] of common schools.”
So while it is true that Texas was ranked last in the recent CNBC survey, it has allowed us to view the contrasts with Ohio as seen in its political and religious leaders. Greg Abbott is clearly the bully in Texas, and Matt Huffman plays that role in Ohio.
But we also see differences in religious leadership, where a group of courageous Texas pastors has taken a position found in their organization’s vision statement:
Pastors for Texas Children believes that public education is a human right, a constitutional guarantee, and a central part of God’s plan for human flourishing. When this sacred trust and provision of God’s common good comes under attack by the forces of privatization, we respond with prayer, service, and advocacy.
This vision is in sharp contrast with that of Ohio’s Catholic hierarchy, which has been working diligently with the state Republican leadership to scoop up public money for private purposes.
Again, never mind Article VI, Section 2.
While Ohio does not have a faith-based organization like Pastors for Texas Children to advocate for the separation of public and private monies for schools, Vouchers Hurt Ohio, a group of nearly 200 Ohio school districts, has united to sue the state and stop the unconstitutional voucher scheme. Fair minded Ohioans should pray for the success of groups like VHO who wish to honor constitutional government.
In the meantime, the blatant sabotage of public education, a slow-motion trainwreck precipitated by Matt Huffman and his church allies, is underway in Ohio. In the name of the rule of law and the constitution, let us pray for their total and unmitigated defeat.
But let us also pray for the success of Pastors for Texas Children. Despite the likes of Greg Abbott, Dan Patrick, and Ted Cruz, there are good people of faith working hard to preserve and protect democracy and constitutional government, and in every neighborhood, the public school is the most visible form of community and democracy.
Ohio pastors, let us learn and model civic virtue as practiced by a group of Texas pastors.
Since Governor Ron DeSantis engineered the hostile takeover of Florida’s progressive New College, the interim president was Richard Corcoran. Corcoran was a hard-right Speaker of the House of Representatives and Dtate Commissiober of Education, in which role he led the state’s attacks on public schools and the expansion of charter schools and vouchers. His wife founded a charter school and is now associated with the Hillsdale College Barney charter schools.
After a few months of deliberation, the hand-picked, stacked board decided to hire Corcoran as the permanent president of New College.
To be clear, he has no academic or scholarly credentials to be a college president.
He dropped out of the University of Florida and enrolled in St. Leo University, a Catholic college. After graduating, he received his law degree from Regent University, a private Christian university.
He has no previous experience as a professor, a college administrator, or a scholar. He is uniquely unqualified for a college presidency. Since he took charge of New College, one-third of the faculty has resigned, faculty have been denied tenure without reason, and students have protested the decisions of the board.
He has been successful in rightwing politics.
The original New College was founded as a school for creative, free thinkers, educated by faculty who were highly credentialed. The new DeSantis board intends to turn New College into the Hilllsdale of the South.
Corcoran claims to have boosted enrollment, which he did by recruiting athletes, not aesthetes or free thinkers.
The National Education Policy Center issued a report about the likely fiscal impact of vouchers, which finds that vouchers are a risky venture with no proven benefits. NEPC is noted for its peer-reviewed reports.
An NEPC Review funded by the Great Lakes Center
Key Takeaway: Tax-credit scholarship programs probably incur more costs than savings for state and school districts, placing financial strain on state budgets and driving the need for future budget cuts.
GRAND RAPIDS, MI (September 26, 2023) – A recent report from the Georgia Department of Audits and Accounts examines the monetary costs and benefits of the state’s Qualified Education Expense Tax Credit (QEEC), a voucher policy that provides a public subsidy for families to pay for private school tuition. A review of the report, however, contradicts its claim that the policy provides a net fiscal benefit to the state budget.
David Knight of the University of Washington reviewed Qualified Education Expense Tax Credit: Economic Analysis, and he found several methodological challenges that undermine the report’s conclusions and its usefulness.
One key claim in the report is that the tax credit results in $81 million of forgone state tax revenue per year. Another key claim is that the vouchers incentivize almost 20,000 students per year to choose private schools instead of public, thus removing the cost of educating those students from state and local budgets. Based largely on these two claims, the report concludes that QEEC provides a net fiscal benefit for Georgia’s state budget.
Professor Knight points to a lack of data about how many students per year do actually switch from public to private schools because of the voucher subsidy and incentive. In fact, existing private-school families have extremely strong incentives to accept the public subsidies. And if most of the vouchers are provided to support these students who were already planning to attend a private school, then the policy only subsidizes private school students with funding that could otherwise be returned to taxpayers or invested in the state’s public education system, which is open to all students.
While these calculations are all necessarily grounded in some speculation because of the unregulated elements of the voucher policy and the resulting lack of hard data, the most likely result of tax credit scholarship programs like QEEC is that the state and school districts incur more costs than savings, placing financial strain on state budgets that could require future cuts.
Because the report relies on unrealistic assumptions, its suggestion that program benefits outweigh costs is tenuous and risks misleading state education leaders. Instead, state leaders should invest educational dollars in policies that have a positive return on investment and therefore help, rather than harm, state and local budgets.
Find the review, by David Knight, at:
https://www.greatlakescenter.org
Find Qualified Education Expense Tax Credit: Economic Analysis, written by Greg S. Griffin and Lisa Kieffer, and published by the Georgia Department of Audits and Accounts, at:
https://www.audits.ga.gov/ReportSearch/download/29827
NEPC Reviews (https://nepc.colorado.edu/reviews) provide the public, policymakers, and the press with timely, academically sound reviews of selected publications. NEPC Reviews are made possible in part by support provided by the Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice: https://www.greatlakescenter.org
James Talarico is a former teacher who was elected to the Texas State Legislature in 2018. Republicans tried to push him out by redistricting, but he moved to another district and was handily re-elected. He is a staunch supporter of public schools and serves on the House Public Education Committee. In this tweet, he announces his collaboration with Moms Against Greg Abbott. The good MAGA works tirelessly to evict the tyrant Greg Abbott, who boasts about his cruelty and is determined to defund public education in Texas. Governor Abbott has vowed to call as many special sessions as necessary to get vouchers. Of course he must know that most vouchers will be claimed by students already enrolled in private schools. This gambit is a way he can reward his religious voters, the evangelical and Catholic voters who would like to have a public subsidy for their private school tuition.
Diane Ravitch's blog 