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Chicago: Can Mayor Brandon Johnson Change National Democratic Education Policy?

By dianeravitch
May 18, 2023 //
22

Retired teacher Fred Klonsky points out the stark difference between national Democratic education policy and the views of Chicago’s new Mayor Brandon Johnson. He would love to see the party follow the lead of Mayor Johnson, who was a teacher in the public schools and an organizer for the Chicago Teachers Union.

The national Democratic Party was once a strong champion of public schools, it once understood the importance of resources and funding for needy students and schools, it was once skeptical about the value of standardized testing.

All of that changed, however, after the Reagan report “A Nation at Risk.” (In a recent article, James Harvey explained how that very consequential report was distorted with cherry-picked data to smear the nation’s public schools.)

Democratic governors jumped aboard the standards-and-testing bandwagon, led by Governor Bill Clinton of Arkansas. When Clinton became president in 1993, his major education legislation was Goals 2000, which put the Democratic Party firmly into the standards-and-testing camp with Republicans. Clinton was a “third way” Democrat, and he also enthusiastically endorsed charter schools run by private entities. His Goals 2000 program included a small program to support charter start-ups. That little subsidy—$4-6 milllion—has grown to $440 million, which is a slush fund mainly for big charter chains that don’t need the money.

George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind legislation was supported by Democrats; it encompassed their own party’s stance, but had teeth. Obama’s Race to the Top rolled two decades of accountability/choice policy into one package. By 2008-2020, there was no difference between the two national parties on education. From Clinton in 1992 (with his call for national standards and testing) to NCLB to Race to the Top, the policies of the two parties were the same: testing, accountability, closing schools, choice. And let us not forget the Common Core, which was supposed to lift test scores everywhere while closing achievement gaps. It didn’t.

Democrats nationally are adrift, unmoored, while Republicans have seized on vouchers for religious and private schools that are completely unregulated and unaccountable. Despite evidence (Google “Josh Cowen vouchers”) that most vouchers are used by students who never attended public schools and that their academic results are harmful for public school kids who transfer into low-cost, low-quality private schools, red states are endorsing them.

Mayor Johnson of Chicago represents the abandoned Democratic tradition of investing in students, teachers, communities, and schools.

Fred Klonsky writes:

In his speech yesterday, Mayor Johnson addressed the issue of schools and education, an issue that as a retired career school teacher, is near and dear to my heart.

“Let’s create a public education system that resources children based on need and not just on numbers,” Johnson said.

I hope so.

Some have predicted that the election of Brandon to be mayor of a city with the fourth largest school district in the country might represent a shift in Democratic Party education policy.

Chicago under Mayors Daley and Emanuel gave the country Arne Duncan and Paul Vallas who together were the personifications of the worst kinds of top-down, one-size-fits-all curriculum, reliance on standardized testing as accountability and union busting.

Corporate school reform groups like Democrats for Education Reform and Stand for Children dominated the Democratic Party’s education agenda for two decades.

Joe Biden’s Department of Education has mostly been silent on these issues.

If Chicago’s election of Brandon Johnson does reflect a national shift, let alone a local one, it must do it in the face of a MAGA assault on free expression, historical truths and teacher rights.

None of this will be easy.

So, yes. I wish the Mayor the best and will do what I can to help.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Chicago, Clinton, Common Core, Corporate Reform, Democrats, Duncan, Arne, Education Reform, Emanuel, Rahm, Failure, Funding, Hope, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Obama, Privatization, Race to the Top, Republicans, School Choice, Standardized Testing, Supporting public schools, Turnaround Schools, Vallas, Paul, Vouchers

Resistance to The Brown Decision Launched the Voucher Movement

By dianeravitch
May 17, 2023 //
24

The Brown Decision was released by the U.S. Supreme Court on May 17, 1954, precisely sixty-nine years ago. It was a historic decision in many ways. It was the beginning of the end of de jure segregation in every aspect of American society. Of course, de facto segregation persists in schools, housing, and in many aspects of life. It would have been impossible to imagine in 1954 that the nation would elect a Black man as President in 2008 and again in 2012.

The decision was unanimous. America could not claim to be a nation of freedom, liberty, democracy, and equality when people of color were excluded from full participation in every aspect of public life and walled off from the mainstream of American society in their private lives. Segregation and discrimination were hallmarks of the American way. Black people were not only restricted in the right to vote, were not only underrepresented in legislatures and other decision-making bodies, but were excluded from restaurants, hotels, movie theaters, public transport, public beaches, and from all other places of public accommodation, as well as private commerce. Segregation was imposed by law in the South and some border states, and by custom in northern, western, and midwestern states.

The Brown Decision struck a blow against this cruel reign of prejudice and bigotry in American life. We are far, very far, from fulfilling the promise of the Brown Decision. To make progress, we must be willing to look deeply into the roots of systemic racism and dismantle the structures that condemn disproportionate numbers of Black families to live in poverty and in segregated neighborhoods. A number of Republican-led states have made such inquiries illegal.

The present movement for vouchers, which is strongest in Republican-dominated states, will not move us closer to the egalitarian goals of the Brown Decision. Vouchers are inherently a divisive concept. They encourage people to congregate with people just like themselves. Heightened segregation along lines of race, religion, social class, and ethnicity are a predictable result of vouchers.

The voucher movement began as a hostile response to the Brown decision, led by racist governors, members of Congress, legislatures, White Citizens Councils, parents who did not want their children to attend schools with Black children, and white supremacists who wanted to protect their “way of life.” They refused to comply with the Supreme Court decision. They called Earl Warren a Communist. They engaged in “massive resistance.” They quickly figured out that they could fund private academies for whites only, and some Southern states did. And they figured out that they could offer “vouchers” or “scholarships” to white students to attend white private and religious schools.

I recommend three books about the history of the ties between segregationists, the religious right, and vouchers. I reviewed all three in an article called “The Dark History of School Choice” in The New York Review of Books. Although it is behind a paywall, you can read one article for free or subscribe for a modest fee.

The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism, by Katherine Stewart

Overturning Brown: The Segregationist Legacy of the Modern School Choice Movement, by Steve Suitts

Schoolhouse Burning: Public Education and the Assault on American Democracy, by Derek W. Black

In addition, I recommend Nancy MacLean’s superb Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America. It links the voucher moment to the Koch brothers and other libertarians, including Milton Friedman. I reviewed it in the same journal. MacLean is the William H. Chafe Professor of History and Public Policy at Duke University.

Nancy MacLean wrote the following article for The Washington Post nearly two years ago. In the past two years, the voucher movement has gained even more ground in Republican-dominated states. If it is behind a paywall, you can read it here.

She wrote:

The year 2021 has proved a landmark for the “school choice” cause — a movement committed to the idea of providing public money for parents to use to pay for private schooling.

Republican control of a majority of state legislatures, combined with pandemic learning disruptions, set the stage for multiple victories. Seven states have created new school choice programs, and 11 others have expanded current programs through laws that offer taxpayer-funded vouchers for private schooling and authorize tax credits and educational savings accounts that incentivize parents moving their children out of public schools.

On its face, this new legislation may sound like a win for families seeking more school options. But the roots of the school choice movement are more sinister.

White Southerners first fought for “freedom of choice” in the mid-1950s as a means of defying the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, which mandated the desegregation of public schools. Their goal was to create pathways for White families to remove their children from classrooms facing integration.

Prominent libertarians then took advantage of this idea, seeing it not only as a means of providing private options, but also as a tool in their crusade to dismantle public schools altogether. This history reveals that rather than giving families more school options, school choice became a tool intended to give most families far fewer in the end.

School choice had its roots in a crucial detail of the Brown decision: The ruling only applied to public schools. White Southerners viewed this as a loophole for evading desegregated schools.

In 1955 and 1956, conservative White leaders in Virginia devised a regionwide strategy of “massive resistance” to the high court’s desegregation mandate that hinged on state-funded school vouchers. The State Board of Education provided vouchers, then called tuition grants, of $250 ($2,514 in 2021 dollars) to parents who wanted to keep their children from attending integrated schools. The resistance leaders understood that most Southern White families could not afford private school tuition — and many who could afford it lacked the ideological commitment to segregation to justify the cost. The vouchers, combined with private donations to the new schools in counties facing desegregation mandates, would enable all but a handful of the poorest Whites to evade compliance.

Other Southern states soon adopted voucher programs like the one in Virginia to facilitate the creation of private schools called “segregation academies,” despite opposition from Black families and civil rights leaders. Oliver Hill, an NAACP attorney key to the Virginia case against “separate but equal” education that was folded into Brown, explained their position this way: “No one in a democratic society has a right to have his private prejudices financed at public expense.”

Despite such objections, key conservative and libertarian thinkers and foundations, including economists Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek, Human Events editor Felix Morley and publisher Henry Regnery, backed the White Southern cause. They recognized that White Southerners’ push for “freedom of choice” presented an opportunity to advance their goal of privatizing government services and resources, starting with primary and secondary education. They barely, if ever, addressed racism and segregation; instead, they spoke of freedom (implicitly, White freedom).

Friedman began promoting “educational freedom” in 1955, just as Southern states prepared to resist Brown. And he praised the Virginia voucher plan in his 1962 book, “Capitalism and Freedom,” holding it up as a model for school choice everywhere. “Whether the school is integrated or not,” he wrote, should have no bearing on eligibility for the vouchers. In other words, he knew the program was designed to fund segregation academies and saw it as no barrier to receiving state financing.

Friedman was far from alone. His fellow libertarians, including those on the staff of the William Volker Fund, a leading funder on the right, saw no problem with state governments providing tax subsidies to White families who chose segregation academies, even as these states disenfranchised Black voters, blocking them from having a say in these policies.

Libertarians understood that while abolishing the social safety net and other policies constructed during the Progressive era and the New Deal was wildly unpopular, even among White Southerners, school choice could win converts.

These conservative and libertarian thinkers offered up ostensibly race-neutral arguments in favor of the tax subsidies for private schooling sought by white supremacists. In doing so, they taught defenders of segregation a crucial new tactic — abandon overtly racist rationales and instead tout liberty, competition and market choice while embracing an anti-government stance. These race-neutral rationales for private school subsidies gave segregationists a justification that could survive court review — and did, for more than a decade before the Supreme Court ruled them unconstitutional.

When challenged, Friedman and his allies denied that they were motivated by racial bigotry. Yet, they had enough in common ideologically with the segregationists for the partnership to work. Both groups placed a premium on the liberty of those who had long profited from white-supremacist policies and sought to shield their freedom of action from the courts, liberal government policies and civil rights activists.

Crucially, freedom wasn’t the ultimate goal for either group of voucher supporters. White Southerners wielded colorblind language about freedom of choice to help preserve racial segregation and to keep Black children from schools with more resources.

Friedman, too, was interested in far more than school choice. He and his libertarian allies saw vouchers as a temporary first step on the path to school privatization. He didn’t intend for governments to subsidize private education forever. Rather, once the public schools were gone, Friedman envisioned parents eventually shouldering the full cost of private schooling without support from taxpayers. Only in some “charity” cases might governments still provide funding for tuition.

Friedman first articulated this outlook in his 1955 manifesto, but he clung to it for half a century, explaining in 2004, “In my ideal world, government would not be responsible for providing education any more than it is for providing food and clothing.” Four months before his death in 2006, when he spoke to a meeting of the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), he was especially frank. Addressing how to give parents control of their children’s education, Friedman said, “The ideal way would be to abolish the public school system and eliminate all the taxes that pay for it.”

Today, the ultrawealthy backers of school choice are cagey about this long-term goal, knowing that care is required to win the support of parents who want the best for their children. Indeed, in a sad irony, decades after helping to impede Brown’s implementation, school choice advocates on the right targeted families of color for what one libertarian legal strategist called “forging nontraditional alliances.” They won over some parents of color, who came to see vouchers and charter schools as a way to escape the racial and class inequalities that stemmed from White flight out of urban centers and the Supreme Court’s willingness to allow White Americans to avoid integrating schools.

But the history behind vouchers reveals that the rhetoric of “choice” and “freedom” stands in stark contrast to the real goals sought by conservative and libertarian advocates. The system they dream of would produce staggering inequalities, far more severe than the disparities that already exist today. Wealthy and upper-middle-class families would have their pick of schools, while those with far fewer resources — disproportionately families of color — might struggle to pay to educate their children, leaving them with far fewer options or dependent on private charity. Instead of offering an improvement over underfunded schools, school choice might lead to something far worse.

As Maya Angelou wisely counseled in another context, “When people show you who they are, believe them the first time.” If we fail to recognize the right’s true end game for public education, it could soon be too late to reverse course.

Update: According to Future-Ed, citing pro-voucher EdChoice (which used to be the Milton and Rose Friedman Foundation), “Currently, 32 states provide an estimated $4 billion in subsidies to some 690,000 students through tuition vouchers, education savings accounts, and tax-credit scholarships.” Several Republican-led states are considering or have already universal vouchers, which would subsidize the tuition of all students in private schools, including the children of wealthy families. Currently, most students who use vouchers were already enrolled in private and religious schools. In one state alone, Florida, the added cost of vouchers might be as much as $4 billion a year, just for the children already in private schools.

Categories Bigotry, Charters, Civil Rights, Democracy, Education Industry, Education Reform, Equity, Extremism, History, Privatization, Race, Racism, Religion, Segregation , Racial Isolation and Integration, Vouchers

Wisconsin: Voucher Schools Openly Discriminate Against LGBT Students and Students with Disabilities

By dianeravitch
May 10, 2023 //
2

A nonpartisan journalism project called Wisconsin Watch released an alarming report about voucher schools that openly discriminate against LGBT students and students with disabilities. State law requires them to admit all who apply but not to enroll those from these disfavored groups.

State law for public schools prohibits discrimination on these very same grounds. In other words, public schools may not discriminate against these two groups, but publicly-funded voucher schools may and do.

Among the voucher schools, discrimination against gay students and families is usually on religious grounds. Voucher schools may exclude students with disabilities for any reason, such as lack of staff or resources.

Wisconsin has funds 52,000 students in 373 private voucher schools, or 6% of all students in publicly funded schools. This year the state spent $444 million on vouchers. “About one-fifth of voucher schools have 90% or more of their students on vouchers, what one scholar describes as “private in name only.” Republicans want to expand voucher availability by removing any limits, so that public funds underwrite tuition for rich kids.

Wisconsin is considered the birthplace of the “school choice” movement. The nation’s first publicly funded private voucher program began in Milwaukee in 1990. Initial restrictions, such as limiting vouchers to secular schools, have disappeared as the program has expanded. Today, 32 schools — including at least one with an anti-LGBTQ+ stance — have their entire student bodies on publicly funded vouchers.

Legal discrimination against students who are LGBTQ+ or have disabilities results from a lack of state-level protections; a federal exemption that allows religious entities to discriminate against LGBTQ+ students and another that requires schools taking federal funds to make only minor adjustments for students with disabilities; and a state education agency constrained by punctilious rules and decades of litigation.

One of the cardinal goals of publicly-funded education is equal opportunity for all. In voucher schools, it’s equal opportunity for some. We are reminded once again that “school choice” means SCHOOLS CHOOSE.

Categories Bigotry, Cruelty, Education Industry, Ethics, Extremism, Privatization, School Choice, Shame, Special Education, Vouchers, Wisconsin

Jonathan Chait: The GOP Plan to Take Over American Education

By dianeravitch
May 9, 2023 //
38

Jonathan Chait wrote an excellent article about the Republican plan to control, destroy, and censor American education. It is the cover story in this week’s New York magazine.

Chait and I have long disagreed about charter schools and will continue to do so. The article does not get into privatization, and the Republicans’ determination to divert public money to religious and private schools via vouchers. Nor does it touch on the growth and scandals of the charter industry. It’s hard to ignore privatization as a main line of attacking the public purpose of public schools, but Chait covers culture war issues only.

Chait says that, in the view of conservatives, left wing indoctrination occurs in religious schools, private schools, and charter schools, so choice will not solve the problem (the problem being the left wing capture of the culture). The answer, then, for the rightwing is to capture control of the institutions and replace left wing indoctrination with rightwing indoctrination.

The article digs into the Republican effort to destroy academic freedom, freedom to teach, freedom to learn, and to turn American schools and universities into purveyors of rightwing ideology. Two central figures in this conspiracy are Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and rightwing ideologue Chris Rufo.

Florida is indeed the model for the Republican attack on education. It is here that the Governor boasts about his Stop WOKE Act, which blocks teaching about topics that might cause discomfort (especially teaching factually accurate accounts of racist brutality in American politics); his Don’t Say Gay Act (which eliminates any instruction about homosexuality in K-3, recently amended to grades K-8); his successful capture of tiny progressive New College and to turn it into the Hillsdale of the South; his intention to take control of the state’s public colleges and universities, eliminate tenure, and purge progressive professors; and his encouragement of censorship of books about race, racism, and gender issues. Add to these DeSantis’ demonizing of the minuscule number of transgender students, as well as his bullying of drag queens, and you have a major state that has embraced fascism and scapegoating of powerless minorities. Florida is also notable for the billions it spends on lightly regulated charters and unregulated, unaccountable vouchers.

Readers of this blog are familiar with DeSantis’ war on public schools and higher education, and his control of curriculum and leadership. I can’t think of another state where the Governor has moved so aggressively to control every aspect of public education. Others have recognized the limits of their power. DeSantis does not.

We also know that Florida recently enacted universal vouchers, offering to subsidize the tuition of rich students. And that the wife of the Republican Speaker of the House, then state education commissioner, Richard Corcoran, now president of New College, started a charter. And that many legislators are financially tied to charters.

This article is about the culture wars, however, not privatization.

Chait writes:

Republicans have begun saying things about American schools that not long ago would have struck them as peculiar, even insane. Senator Marco Rubio of Florida has called schools “a cesspool of Marxist indoctrination.” Former secretary of State Mike Pompeo predicts that “teachers’ unions, and the filth that they’re teaching our kids,” will “take this republic down.” Against the backdrop of his party, Donald Trump, complaining about “pink-haired communists teaching our kids” and “Marxist maniacs and lunatics” running our universities, sounds practically calm.

More ominously, at every level of government, Republicans have begun to act on these beliefs. Over the past three years, legislators in 28 states have passed at least 71 bills controlling what teachers and students can say and do at school. A wave of library purges, subject-matter restrictions, and potential legal threats against educators has followed.

Education has become an obsession on the political right, which now sees it as the central battlefield upon which this country’s future will be settled. Schoolhouses are being conscripted into a cataclysmic war in which no compromise is possible — in which a child in a red state will be discouraged from asking questions about sexual identity, or a professor will be barred from exploring the ways in which white supremacy has shaped America today, or a trans athlete will be prohibited from playing sports…

While there have been political battles over the schools for many years, but this controversy is different. Republicans are going for the jugular. They believe that “the left” has taken over the nation’s educational institutions and is determined to indoctrinate the next generation to despise their own country. Nothing could be more ridiculous, but facts don’t get in the way of their culture war.

He writes:

The Republican Party emerged from the Trump era deeply embittered. A large share of the party believed that Democrats had stolen their way back into power. But this sentiment took another form that was not as absurd or, at least, not as clearly disprovable. The theory was that Republicans were subverted by a vast institutional conspiracy. Left-wing beliefs had taken hold among elite institutions: the media, the bureaucracy, corporations, and, especially, schools.

This theory maintains that this invisible progressive network makes successful Republican government impossible. Because the enemy permanently controls the cultural high ground, Republicans lose even when they win. Their only recourse is to seize back these nonelected institutions….

“Left-wing radicals have spent the past 50 years on a ‘long march through the institutions,’” claims Manhattan Institute fellow and conservative activist Chris Rufo, who is perhaps the school movement’s chief ideologist. “We are going to reverse that process, starting now.”

Many institutions figure in Republicans’ plans. They are developing proposals to cleanse the federal workforce of politically subversive elements, to pressure corporations to resist demands by their “woke employees,” and to freeze out the mainstream media. But their attention has centered on the schools. “It is the schools — where our children spend much of their waking hours — that have disproportionate influence over American society, seeding every other institution that has succumbed to left-wing ideological capture,” writes conservative commentator Benjamin Weingarten.

Republicans are afraid that the liberal bias of schools and colleges is turning their children into liberals, intent on advancing social justice. They feel a sense of urgency about gaining control of these agencies of indontrination.

DeSantis’ approach is straightforward: Taxpayers pay for schools. Why shouldn’t they control them? Why shouldn’t they tell them what to teach and what not to teach?

Chait errs in describing Florida’s efforts to restrict the accurate teaching of African American history. He writes:

It is possible for legislatures to restrict some of the pedagogical fads of recent years without preventing children from learning unvarnished historical truths about slavery, reconstruction, Jim Crow, and its aftermath. Reports have described bans on lessons that make students feel guilty, when they have merely restricted lessons that instruct them to feel guilty, a reasonable thing to ask. Commentators on the internet likewise depicted Florida as banning the teaching of African American history, when in fact the state merely objected to elements of the AP African American History curriculum, ultimately resulting in a revised version.

This is understating the active role that the DeSantis team played in squashing the brutal facts about African American history in Florida and the U.S. The Stop WOKE Act banned teaching “critical race theory,” which most people can’t define but assume that it refers to systemic racism. The DeSantis team has banned textbooks in math and social studies that showed any interest in “social justice.”

DeSantis and his education commissioner didn’t “merely object” to parts of the AP African American History course, they threatened to exclude the AP course and test from the state’s schools altogether, a move that would likely be followed by other deep red states. This hits the College Board where it hurts, in their revenues. DeSantis has objected not only to CRT, but to “social-emotional learning,” which he sees as indoctrination but which typically means exercises in perseverance, self-control, and other workaday approaches to collaboration and respect for others. Like what I learned in elementary school many decades ago.

Are there teachers who go too far in imposing their own beliefs (from both the left and the right)? Surely. But Chait observes:

A broader problem with the wave of conservative legislation is that it is responding to a wildly hyperbolic version of reality. In a very large country with a fragmented education system, there are going to be plenty of examples of outrageous or radical teaching in the schools on a daily basis without necessarily indicating anything about the system’s overall character. As conservatives grew alarmed about left-wing teachers, their favorite media sources started curating examples of it to stoke their outrage.

DeSantis projects Florida as a model for the nation, and he looks to Hungary as a model for Florida. Its leader Viktor Orban has tamed the universities by controlling them. Chris Rufo recently spent a month in Hungary, learning how Orban has silenced the left.

Orbán’s example has shown the government’s power over the academy can be absolute. DeSantis is simply the first Republican to appreciate the potential of this once-unimaginable use of state power to win the culture wars. Even before DeSantis’s plan has passed, Republicans in North Carolina, Texas, and North Dakota rushed out bills to eliminate tenure for professors.

I urge you to read the article in full. Aside from his leaving out privatization as the keystone of the Republican attack on public schools, the article fails to mention the big money behind the culture wars and privatization. DeVos, Walton, Koch, Yass. They are an important part of the story. And there are many more (I have a long list of billionaires, foundations, and corporations funding privatization in my book Slaying Goliath.)

Chait’s incisive analysis is a good primer for the elections of 2024. Implicit are the many reasons why Democrats must be prepared to defend teachers and professors, to protect both schools and universities from the takeovers planned by Republican legislators, to gear up for the fight against censorship, to resist incipient fascism, and to hold the line for our democratic principles.

Categories Censorship, Civil Rights, Curriculum, Democracy, DeSantis, Education Industry, Extremism, Florida, Freedom, Freedom of Speech, Freedom to Read, Funding, Gender, Privatization, Racism, Religion, Republicans, Vouchers

Denis Smith: Public Schools Unite Us. Private Schools Divide Us.

By dianeravitch
May 8, 2023 //
41

Denis Smith, a former advisor to the Ohio State Department of Education, explains the important role that public schools play in a diverse, democratic society.

He writes in the Ohio Capital Journal:

In 2011, on the 150th anniversary of the outbreak of the Civil War, the New York Times initiated a series of essays entitled “Disunion“ about a conflict the newspaper described as the time when “Americans went to war with themselves.” The series ran periodically for four years as an attempt to mirror what the paper characterized as “America’s most perilous period.”

Those who pay attention to prevailing norms and the constitutional health of our society might update those two phrases to serve as a warning for describing the present.

If Ohio residents have read the opinions of Republicans ranging from state Senators Matt Huffman and Sandra O’Brien about educational vouchers, that ominous word disunion might inevitably come to mind. In the campaign to destroy our public education system by using public funds to finance private and religious schools through vouchers, these politicians disingenuously throw out such terms as “choice” and “freedom,” seemingly innocuous words that instead have the potential to fracture our national unity.

Yet when the subject is choice and freedom, however disingenuously those words might be used, we don’t need to look any further for guidance in identifying the glue that keeps us in a state of union rather than the disunion a profligate use of public funds will bring if educational voucher legislation is approved.

That glue is the public school, whose importance is enshrined in the language of Article VI, Section 2 of the Ohio Constitution:

The General Assembly shall … 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 . …

Lest we be confused by politicians spouting their favorite hyperbolic buzzwords like choice and freedom, our constitution contains clear language, including the use of the singular form: a system of common schools, not systems. It is one educational system that the state is mandated to support, not thousands of private and religious schools that clearly aren’t eligible for public support through vouchers or other means.

Such a scheme to support private and religious schools with public funds might also be construed as socialism, as another Ohio senator, Andrew Brenner, disingenuously described public education in 2014, a classic statement that gained him national attention – and notoriety.

More than twenty years ago, one observer described the dangers of fragmenting the delivery of education in a society, as a universal educational voucher scheme would achieve. Dr. Kenneth Conklin, a professor of philosophy and educational theory, provided this warning that should be heeded by Republicans like Hoffman, O’Brien, and Brenner:

If an educational system is altered, its transmission of culture will be distorted. The easiest way to break apart a society long-term without using violence is to establish separate educational systems for the groups to be broken apart.

Note the use of the plural: systems.

Conklin provides some additional advice for us to consider as Ohio and other red states make plans to fracture the public school system, satisfy their ideological yen and garner a twofer by also destroying public employee unions in the process. He also considers the importance of culture in providing societal cohesion:

A society’s culture can survive far longer than the lifespan of any of its members, because its educational system passes down the folkways and knowledge of one generation to subsequent generations. A culture changes over time, but has a recognizable continuity of basic values and behavioral patterns that distinguishes it from other cultures. That continuity is provided by the educational system.

Note the use of the singular: system.

Make no mistake. The educational voucher scheme, fueled by dark money groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which itself helps to fuel astroturf groups nationwide that are intent on undermining public education, has enabled the pro-voucher and school privatization movement to achieve critical mass in the last few years. Currently, at least 15 states have some type of voucher program in place, and the number is expected to rise dramatically in the next few months as red state legislatures also bundle together other extreme measures, including abortion bans and voting restrictions, to further erode democracy and one of its symbols, our neighborhood public school.

If we are to continue as one society (note again the singular form), we must have one publicly funded educational system, and not thousands of other types of schools similarly funded. After all, this nation’s motto is e pluribus unum – from many, one. The Republican voucher scheme violates that very motto, in addition to not ensuring oversight and accountability for how scare public funds are spent in the task of investing in the future. Common civic values and traditions ensure the continuity of this republic as one people, with a common heritage provided by the common school.

In an essay, Senator O’Brien asks: “Why can’t parents spend their tax dollars at the school they choose for their children?”

Really? The answer is quite simple.

It’s about the constitution. It’s about the meaning of a “system” of common schools,” of e pluribus unum. It’s about democracy, where we elect our neighbors to oversee our public schools and ensure that public funds are spent for public, and not for individual, private purposes, as vouchers are purposely designed to accomplish.

Republicans: it should not be about disunion. But your promotion of educational vouchers and the erosion of the common school, the symbol and glue that brings together each community, will have that effect.

Categories Democracy, Education Reform, Ohio, Privatization, Propaganda, Vouchers

Josh Cowen: Texas Doesn’t Need Vouchers. Neither Does Any Other State.

By dianeravitch
May 6, 2023 //
11

Josh Cowen is a professor of education policy at Michigan State University. He has been involved in research on vouchers for two decades. He wrote the following article for The Houston Chronicle.

Every state has versions of Texas’ Snapshot Day: the time early in the school year when districts submit pupil counts to their state education agency. How many students go to school in each district determines how much money districts receive each year, as well as a variety of other services and programs.

Not every state is considering a school voucher program, however, and as the Texas Legislature debates that possibility (officially called an education savings account), details like pupil count are going to matter a lot more than either voucher supporters or opponents are considering right now.

Here’s how we know.

I’ve been studying school choice policy for two decades. That work includes official evaluations on behalf of state agencies, and more recent experience on the research advisory board for Washington D.C.’s federally required evaluation. I’ve also worked as a research partner to states and districts across the country. I know how little, seemingly inconsequential, technical details can have great impacts on how education programs function.

And I know those impacts can be costly — with taxpayers footing the bill.

Consider evaluations of voucher programs like the one before the Legislature right now. I’ve described elsewhere how these studies show catastrophic
academic harm to students who switch to private school with a voucher. That’s because vouchers tend to pay tuition, not at elite providers that don’t need the tax dollars, but at subprime schools needing the bailout — including those popping up to cash in on the new government subsidy.

Here’s something else those programs tell us: Although supporters often describe school choice as a long-term opportunity, the reality is that, for many kids, school choice is just a revolving door in and out of a new academic setting. And that’s especially true with vouchers.

Studies show that more than 1 out of 5 students give up their voucher every year. In some places like Florida that number is as high as two-thirds of voucher students leaving the program within two academic years. Similarly, the numbers publicly available from Indiana, Louisiana, and Wisconsin range between 20 and 30 percent annual student attrition.

These exit rates matter not only because they underscore the false promise vouchers give to at-risk students — switching from school to school is a well-understood marker of academic or economic duress — but because they imply a huge potential fiscal waste.

Voucher supporters say it’s easy: The “dollars follow the kid” (this already happens with public schools, which is why count days exist). But it’s not that simple. Public programs with price tags in the hundreds of millions of dollars never are.

Imagine a parent who spends all of the proposed $8000 of their voucher at a private school nearby. Let’s say that before the last Friday in October — Snapshot Day — she sees the school simply isn’t working for her child and withdraws him. Will that private school keep the money? Or will the “dollars follow the kid” immediately back to the public school?

Imagine that parent waits until the holiday season to make the change. And in January, she enrolls her child back in a local public classroom. Will that local school be forced to enroll her child — a refugee from the voucher program — on its own local dime for the rest of the year?

Do these answers change if instead of the parent deciding to remove her child, the private school has made that choice instead?

If the voucher school has asked or forced her child to leave — something the current legislation permits for any reason along with denying admission in the first place — will it keep her tuition dollars as long as it waits until after Snapshot Day to do so?

These 30 percent of voucher decliners aren’t just numbers. The studies from other states tell us they’re likely vulnerable: kids who are scoring lower on school exams, kids from lower income families, children of color, and children from single-mom households.

Senate Bill 8 only stipulates that parents must notify the state of their exit within 30 business days; it does not establish a process to recover those dollars. And even when state guidance on these questions is issued, who will enact them? The fiscal note on SB8 makes assumptions about staff and legal support to run the program, but the legislation itself is ambiguous on issues like tuition reimbursement, or even the authority that compliance officers have to recover state funds.

Details matter. The ballooning voucher budget in Arizona and controversial new roll-out in Arkansas warn us that making public policy by slogan — however clever “fund students, not systems” might sound — is no substitute for careful planning.

The revolving door of school voucher tuition is one such detail — one that not only affects taxpayers’ bottom-line, but more basic issues of equity and opportunity as well. The bottom line for SB8 then, based on the evidence in other states, is that school voucher-type programs are on average bad for kids and bad for taxpayers. Texas would do well to reject them now.

Categories Accountability, Disruption, Education Industry, Failure, Funding, Texas, Vouchers

Indiana: Voucher Expansion Helps the Rich

By dianeravitch
May 5, 2023 //
10

Blogger Steve Hinnefeld reports that the latest expansion of vouchers is a boon for rich families. So much for “saving poor kids from failing schools.” As we have seen in other states, 75-80% of voucher recipients are already enrolled in private and religious schools. The voucher money subsidizes those who are already paying for nonpublic schools.

He writes:

The voucher expansion that Indiana legislators approved last week constitutes a massive handout to religious institutions and a transfer of wealth from everyday Hoosiers to benefit Indiana’s elite.

Lawmakers voted early Friday to raise the income limit for families receiving private-school tuition vouchers from 300% to 400% of the level for receiving reduced-price school meals. For a family of four, that’s $220,000.

The expansion raises the cost to the state of the voucher program to $1.1 billion over the next two years. That’s up from an estimated $300 million that Indiana is spending this year on vouchers.

In fiscal year 2024, state funding for vouchers will increase by 72.3%. That compares with a 5.4% increase in state spending for traditional public schools and a 16.2% increase for charter schools.

Increases in funding in fiscal year 2024 for traditional public schools, charter schools and private school vouchers. Source: HEA 1001 and SEA 391.

State analysts estimate the expansion will grow the voucher program from its current 53,000 students to about 85,000 students next year and 95,000 the following year. The additional 30,000 to 40,000 students will come mostly from families that don’t now qualify. That is, they make more than $165,000 but less than $220,000 for four people.

A voucher is worth what the state would pay for a student to attend a local public school, typically about $7,000. A family with three children in private schools would get about $20,000 a year in state benefits.

In fiscal year 2024, over one-third of the increase in state funding for K-12 schools will go to a voucher expansion that benefits about 3% of the state’s students. We can assume that, if these families want their kids in private schools, they’re already there. The difference is, now the public will pay for it.

Please open the link and read on.

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Indiana, Vouchers

John Thompson: Oklahoma GOP Leaders Turn Childish

By dianeravitch
May 3, 2023 //
15

Historian and retired teacher John Thompson is a close observer of the state’s bizarro GOP leaders. There is a small core of “traditional” GOP legislators, who have not lost touch with reality. But the loud and boisterous MAGA faction, led by Governor Kevin Stott, inhabit an alternate universe.

Thompson writes:

Both houses of the Oklahoma legislature, the Governor, and his State Superintendent are engaged in a Battle Royal. Politicos on all sides are asking whether it is merely surreal, or a performance art tactic to gain a political victory – or deflect attention from a political defeat. But there is virtual unanimity that it is bizarre; even in a state known for crazy politics, there seems to be a bipartisan agreement that this weirdness is unprecedented.

This week, Gov. Kevin Stitt said, “I cannot, in good faith, allow another year to go by without cutting taxes and reforming education.” His education plan features tax credits (vouchers), and an extremely regressive funding formula. Then, Stitt vetoed 20 Senate bills “with identical veto messages that said he ‘will continue to veto any and all legislation authored by senators who have not stood with the people of Oklahoma and supported this plan.’”

His vetoes included legislation “intended to renew Oklahoma Education Television Authority’s (PBS’) authorization for another three years.” Stitt also questioned whether there was a reason for the OETA to survive. The Republican Senate Pro Tem’s office also criticized the veto of a bill which would have “allowed people receiving Temporary Assistance for Needy Families to own a vehicle worth more than $5,000, which is the current limit.” Other bills that had previously been routinely signed would extend agencies like the Board of Governors of the Licensed Architects, Landscape Architects and Registered Commercial Interior Designer, the Board of Chiropractic Examiners, and the State Board of Examiners of Psychologists.

Sen. Pro Tem Greg Treat responded, “Hopefully he’ll calm down and sober up,” and “look at this through the lens of policy, and not through the lens of emotion.” He also said Stitt’s vetoes were “appalling” and “beneath the dignity of the office.”

Then Treat “swiftly rejected” the nominations of Stitt’s secretary of commerce and the CEO of the Oklahoma Health Care Authority. The Republican leader explained:

“If (Stitt) continues down this road of killing policy, we will be forced to exercise our constitutional authority, as well,” … “He has chosen to exercise his veto authority. We are choosing to exercise our confirmation authority.”

Then the Senate briefly excluded the governor and house members from a discussion on education bills. So, the Tulsa World reports, “House Republicans closed shop and left in something of a huff after their Senate GOP brethren told them they couldn’t come on the floor in that chamber for awhile Thursday afternoon.” Rep. House Majority Leader Jon Echols complained that senate Republicans had thus made, “the most juvenile move I’ve ever seen” during his 11 years in the Legislature.

That week, Stitt supporter, State Superintendent Ryan Walters, also ramped up his attacks on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) which he said“is Marxist at its core.” Walters stressed “that it is a top priority of this administration to ensure that every parent has full parent choice — that parents decide for their kids where their children attend school and are the ones making those decisions that most impact their children,” Walters said. “This has to get done this session.”

So, what is happening here? Will the Republicans get out of this battle unscathed, reaching a compromise between traditional conservatives and the MAGAs? Or will these performances result in an effort to push back against this chaotic politics of destruction?

It seems to me that Republicans who abhor this rightwing campaign against the norms and principles of our democracy have remained silent because they understood how powerful emotions of hatred and fear have been helping their party. The extremists want to turn back the clock to the pre-civil rights era of the 1950s. The traditional Republicans may or may not care that, back then, Oklahoma was one of the most corrupt and most racist states in America. They don’t seem worried that Christian Nationalists are now welcoming the return of that era’s corruption, violence, and racism.

But today’s Battle Royal-style theatrics reminds me of the cruel joke played on Ralph Ellison when he grew up in Oklahoma City. (If Stitt or Walters are aware of the Battle Royal, I doubt they would want it taught in school.) Ellison was ambiguous about the actual facts he faced that inspired the story of the brutal, surreal charade presented in his novel, The Invisible Man. He tells the story of ten young Black men who “are ushered into a boxing ring. Then they are all blindfolded and instructed to fight each other all at once until only one is left standing.”

This week’s ridiculous fight, a metaphorical Battle Royal that featured affluent Whites who were funded by the super-rich, should embarrass Republicans. It echoes the previous cruelty promoted by the Robber Barons and the Ku Klux Klan that survived until I was a child. Now it’s the billionaire privatizers who are funding a destructive 21st century propaganda campaign. This week, it resulted in conservatives and Trumpians blindly humiliating themselves as political fights are being transformed into performances demonstrating that they are angry and hateful enough to get reelected.

The silliness promoted by Stitt and the House has virtually nothing to do with improving education. For instance, the combatants are much more focused on not making the mistake that the narrator (based on Ellison) made when giving his post-fight speech. There is no way that these conservatives will offend the MAGAs by accidently using the words “social equality.”

Postscript: At the end of the week, compromises were being discussed. It looks like modest increases in school funding will be distributed more fairly. The vouchers for families making over $250,000 per year will be capped at $5,000 while homeschool tax “credits” will be capped at $1,000. But the governor remains committed to income and corporate tax cuts (as well as sales tax cuts.) So it looks like the chaos was intended to be performance art to advance the agenda of the rich. The elites are on track to get what they want. But the surreal week still degenerated into a Battle Royal where even influential White men humiliated themselves in order to advance their donors’ interests.

Then, Stitt condemned OETA, which has the highest viewership of any of the nation’s PBS stations, for shows like “Clifford the Big Red Dog,” and PBS NewsHour for interviewing parents of transgender children.

He said such shows “over sexualize” children. What next? A list of banned films? More dangerous TV programs? A police investigation of every state employee’s computer to search for porn?

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Education Industry, Extremism, Failure, Lies, Oklahoma, Republicans, Stupid, Trump, Vouchers

Jan Resseger: The Unfair Attack on Randi Weingarten and Unions in the New York Times

By dianeravitch
May 2, 2023 //
37

Last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, the same publication that bravely published The 1619 Project, had a cover story about Randi Weingarten. It raised (and implied) the question of whether she is “the most dangerous person in the world.” The cover illustration had several placards, the most prominent saying “Stop Randi Weingarten.” My immediate thought, before reading the story, was that Randi’s life might be in danger, because the illustration and the title made her a target. This is no joke.

Randi has been a friend of mine for many years, and we don’t always agree. I have never persuaded her, and she has never persuaded me. We have had some strong arguments, but she’s still my friend. I believe passionately in the importance of unions, especially in a society with such deep economic inequality as ours. I wrote a letter to the editor about my objections to the article. I hope it gets published.

One important inaccuracy in the article: the author says that “only” 40% of American 8th graders are “proficient” in math, and only 32% are “proficient” in reading. This is a common error among journalists, critics, and pundits who misunderstand the achievement levels of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). “Proficient” on NAEP is not grade level. “Proficient” on NAEP represents A level work, at worst an A-. Would you be upset to learn that “only” 40% of 8th graders are at A level in math and “only” 1/3 scored an A in reading?

Jan Resseger, in one of her most brilliant articles, wrote today:

Why Randi Weingarten Is Not a Symbol of What’s Dangerous in American Politics

I felt myself getting angry as I began skimming Jonathan Mahler’s New York Times Magazine article featuring Randi Weingarten. But as I read more carefully, I realized I had to give Mahler credit for recognizing Weingarten’s strong leadership on behalf of public schools and the school teachers she leads as president of the American Federation of Teachers—even in an article framing public school policy according to the standard Republican attack against the teachers unions:

“By now, Pompeo, Tim Scott, Marco Rubio, Ron DeSantis, Donald Trump and the rest of the Republican Party were busy elevating education to a central plank in its 2024 platform…. But Weingarten was building her own case. Public education was now itself a hyperpartisan issue, and she addressed it in hyperpartisan terms in a fiery speech at the National Press Club. Calling out by name some of the people who had demonized her since the pandemic, including Betsy DeVos, she described the ongoing effort to defund public schools as nothing less than a threat to ‘cornerstones of community, of our democracy, our economy and our nation.’ She pointed to studies that have shown that vouchers don’t improve student achievement, characterizing them as a back door into private and parochial schools that are not subject to the same federal civil rights laws as public institutions and can therefore promote discrimination. ‘Our public schools shouldn’t be pawns for politicians’ ambitions… They shouldn’t be destroyed by ideologues.'”

I have myself been delighted to see Randi Weingarten out there fighting for the educational rights of our children during the pandemic, pushing against the widespread blaming of teachers, and opposing the wave of culture war attacks on teachers and on honest and accurate curricula. She has been a far better defender of public schooling than Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona.

But there is a bias in Mahler’s piece that kept me extremely uncomfortable. While Mahler gives Weingarten some credit for defending her side of the debate, he presents his analysis primarily from the point of view of of Mike Pompeo, Tim Scott, Marco Rubio, Ron DeSantis, and Donald Trump.

We learn about “pandemic learning loss” as measured in National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) scores, but we don’t learn that the drop in scores is likely temporary—a one time drop due to Covid disruption. We learn about teachers unions fighting for better protection during Covid—fighting for mask and vaccination mandates. It is implied that teachers unions were partly to blame for school closures, but we read nothing about the struggles of teachers to provide for students’ needs during remote learning, including some pretty difficult periods when many teachers were teaching kids remotely in the same classrooms where they were simultaneously working in-person with groups of kids whose families sent them to school.

Mahler implies that teachers unions are a monolith. He does not tell readers that teachers join their union locals, which operate independently from the national American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association—the two large teachers unions.

The culture wars comprise a substantial part of Mahler’s profile. He explains that Tina Descovich in Brevard County, Florida and Tiffany Justice, of Indian River County spontaneously decided to join up and create their own parents’ rights group, Moms for Liberty, but he neglects some important background: Moms for Liberty, Parents Defending Education, and No Left Turn in Education are, in fact, Astroturf fronts for a national culture war campaign being mounted by groups like the Manhattan Institute and the Heritage Foundation, with funding from DonorsTrust dark money and Charles Koch. Additionally Mahler reports that the American Federation of Teachers supported Terry McAuliffe against Glenn Youngkin, who ran a culture war campaign against honest teaching about race in American history in the campaign for Governor of Virginia. It should not be a bit surprising that, as a labor union, the American Federation of Teachers can legally endorse and support candidates, and that the AFT endorsed the candidate who stood with the American Historical Association, the American Association of University Professors, and PEN America on the issue of the school curriculum.

Mahler devotes a significant part of his report to what he describes as the “AFT’s left-wing local, the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU).” He adds that “like-minded left-wing slates have since taken control of AFT locals in several other cities, too, including Los Angeles and Baltimore.” Many supporters of public education would embrace the cause of these big-city teachers without identifying themselves as left-wing. Here is how Mahler describes CTU’s agenda: “They see public schools’ ongoing struggles to educate their students as inseparable from the larger societal and economic issues facing their working-class members and the poor communities whose children dominate their classrooms.” Mahler quotes the Chicago Teachers’ Union’s recent past president, Jesse Sharkey: “We are trying to promote a brand of unionism that goes all out in its fight for educational justice and is brave about taking on conflicts.”

The problem with Mahler’s analysis is that today’s debates about public education policy are far more complex and nuanced than a fight between Randi Weingarten as a symbol of teacher unionism and Ron DeSantis and Glenn Youngkin. Those of us who have followed the history of education policy battles through the past two decades of No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top are now watching the far right and dark money campaigns driving culture war chaos across the state legislatures as a path to the expansion of school vouchers. Without any direct connection to teacher unions, many of us share the enlightened assessment that has been articulated by the Chicago Teachers Union.

Mahler mistakes the significance of the recent election of Brandon Johnson, who is a former teacher and more recently an organizer for the Chicago Teachers Union, as Chicago’s new mayor. Mahler sees Johnson’s victory as a symbol of the power of teachers unions: “When Johnson narrowly won, it was a stunning upset…. the teachers’ unions had effectively elected the mayor of America’s third-largest city, who was himself an avowedly progressive union organizer promising to raise taxes on the rich, reform the police and increase funding for the city’s schools…. It was those who had underestimated the political power of the unions who were mistaken.” In reality the meaning of Chicago’s mayoral election was more likely a rejection of nearly a quarter of a century of mayoral governance of Chicago’s public schools, of test-and-punish school accountability, of the explosive growth of charter schools in Chicago, and of Rahm Emanuel’s 2013 closure of 49 elementary schools in Chicago’s Black and Hispanic neighborhoods.

In our alarmingly unequal society, where too frequently our children reside far apart in pockets of concentrated poverty or in pockets of wealth, we will not be able to close children’s opportunity gaps merely by improving the public schools alone. In a new book, The Education Myth, Jon Shelton, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, identifies the No Child Left Behind Act as the embodiment of a deeply flawed plan to equalize school achievement: “At root, the very premise of the bill—that punishing schools for the scores of their students would improve the schools’ performance—was simply flawed, particularly when school districts did not have the ability to raise students out of poverty or alleviate the trauma of racism…. NCLB ignored the broader economic structures that might lead a student to succeed or fail in school as well as the relationship between where a student got an education and what job would actually be available to them.” (The Education Myth, p. 173)

I am grateful that, in the cities where their members teach, some teachers union locals are working actively to support efforts to ameliorate child poverty. That is not a left-wing cause; it is instead a goal for us all to embrace. As we publicly debate the needs of our children and our public schools, it is wrong to define the conversation as a mere battle between right-wing Republicans and the teachers unions

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Corporate Reform, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Education Reform, Extremism, Freedom of Speech, Freedom to Read, Funding, History, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Privatization, Propaganda, Race to the Top, Republicans, Teachers, Unions, Vouchers

Florida: How the State Tries to Cover Up Problems in Voucher Schools

By dianeravitch
May 1, 2023 //
15

Leslie Postal and Annie Martin are star reporters for The Orlando Sentinel. In 2017, they wrote a three-part series on Florida’s voucher schools, showing the incidence of discrimination and unqualified staff, among other problems. The series, called “Schools Without Rules,” painted a devastating portrait of the low quality of the voucher sector.

This year, they sought access to the state’s records to open a new investigation. The state stonewalled them and put a high price on their access to public records. Here is their report:

One former teacher’s four-page complaint to the state urged an investigation into “the vast scope of educational neglect” taking place at the private Christian school in Osceola County. Another detailed concerns at a South Florida Jewish school. “Cleaning lady substituting for teacher,” it said.

In other complaints, parents wrote about upsetting incidents or worrisome deficiencies at their children’s private schools.

“Children of all ages are running out of classrooms screaming and hitting each other,” an Orange County mother wrote.

“They don’t provide lunch and they don’t even have a place to eat,” a Fort Lauderdale parent wrote.

“I don’t see any evidence of academics,” wrote a Panhandle parent.

These concerns were detailed in written complaints filed with the Florida Department of Education from 2015 to 2020 against private schools that take Florida school vouchers, the state scholarships that help families pay their children’s tuition bills.

In the past 18 months, at least 238 new complaints have been filed, according to the department. The Orlando Sentinel requested copies of those documents, and any related information gathered from the schools, on Jan. 24.

The request was similar to the public records requests it has made for complaints against private schools several times since 2017.

The education department said in a Feb. 15 email that it could provide copies of the complaint files for an estimated charge of $10,414.70 — an amount the newspaper considers exorbitant, out-of-line with what was charged in past years and an effort to block access to public records on a topic of public interest.

“The government isn’t supposed to be turning public records into a profit center for their agencies, and that seems to be what has developed in the last few years,” said Julie Anderson, editor-in-chief of the Orlando Sentinel and the Sun Sentinel in South Florida. “Either that, or they don’t want to fulfill the request.”

Journalists across the state are receiving excessive cost estimates in response to public records requests, said Michael Barfield, director of public access initiatives for the Florida Center Government Accountability, a Sarasota-based government watchdog group. He said he’s seen “a huge explosion and increase in fees” assessed by state agencies during the past 18 months to two years.

“I’ve been doing this for 30-plus years,” Barfield said. “It’s accurate to say that in the digital era, where everything is computerized, accessing public records has become more expensive than it was during the era when everything was on a typewriter and in filing cabinets.”

He added, “I’ve never seen fees like what we’re seeing now.”

$2 billion and growing

School vouchers are a hot topic in Florida, and across the country, this year. The complaints filed against participating private schools, the Sentinel has found, provide a window into the workings of some of the private schools that take part in the state voucher programs but operate mostly outside of state control.

The state’s current voucher programs spend nearly $2 billion to send more than 252,000 students to about 2,000 private schools. Gov. Ron DeSantis last month signed legislation making those programs, now mostly targeted to youngsters from low-income families, “universal” so that all school-age students in the state are eligible for scholarships.

State leaders predict about 80,000 additional students will take these state vouchers next school year.

In the Sentinel’s 2017 “Schools Without Rules” investigation, complaints helped the paper to document private schools that had hired teachers whose only academic credential was a high school diploma, employed instructors with criminal records, falsified fire and health inspections for their buildings and taught questionable academic lessons.

For the latest records request, the education department did not say how many pages of documents were in the 238 complaint files the Sentinel wants, but it estimated it would take 400 hours, or the equivalent of 10 work weeks, and “extensive use of resources and extensive clerical and supervisory assistance by the Department’s personnel” to fulfill it.

In 2017, the Sentinel paid $49.77 for eight complaint files, which were provided six days after the request was filed. At that rate, it would expect to pay about $1,500 for the 238 files. This year, it took the department three weeks to provide a cost estimate that topped $10,000.

The complaints typically do not lead to any action against the school. By law, the state has no control over the operations of private schools, even if they rely completely on state scholarships for their revenue.

Unlike public schools, such private schools can hire teachers without college degrees, teach whatever curricula they choose and set up in facilities — from storefronts to church meeting rooms — that do not meet Florida’s school building codes.

A parent who complained about a Miami school in 2020, for example, said it was not “providing the proper education, nutritional lunch or physical education” the family expected. The department sent the parent its standard letter saying it did not regulate private schools, but the parent “may wish to transfer your student to any other scholarship participating school.”

Typically, private schools can keep secret much of their information, from staff credentials to student success on standardized tests. But when someone files a complaint, a public record is created. If the complaint alleges violations of scholarship rules, the state can investigate and ask the school to provide documents, including employee background checks or credentials.

A single complaint the education department shared with the Sentinel in March — as attorneys for the paper and the department negotiated the scope and cost of the public records request — showed, for example, that three teachers at Downey Christian School in east Orange did not have bachelor’s degrees in October 2021, when a complaint against the school was filed.

Those instructors taught middle school math and science, high school English and high school math, the records show. The school enrolls more than 300 students who use state scholarships, bringing in more than $1.4 million, according to data from Step Up For Students, which administers most of Florida’s scholarships.

Downey’s administrator did not respond to a request for comment.

Most of the complaints from 2017 to 2020, many of them handwritten, detail the concerns of parents with children enrolled in the schools and the teachers who work there. But sometimes they include emails and documents from government officials, such as child welfare investigators or fire marshals.

‘Severe fire code violations’

In 2016, for example, the Orange County fire marshal contacted the education department about “severe fire code violations” that are “life safety critical” at a Pine Hills school.

The department said Agape Christian Academy had submitted paperwork indicating it was in compliance with fire codes, a requirement to take vouchers, but the fire marshal told state officials his office did not produce the documents.

The department revoked the school from the voucher program in 2017 after the fire code violations and other problems came to light.

That same year, a child welfare investigator raised concerns about the criminal record of a teacher at another west Orange school. Under state law, the woman should not have been hired at a school that accepted state scholarships, and the school fired her at the state’s insistence.

In 2021, the newspaper reported on the former Winners Primary School in west Orange where a teacher had been arrested on accusations of soliciting sexually explicit videos from a student. The complaint file helped document high teacher turnover, shoddy employee vetting procedures and the hiring of at least 10 teachers without college degrees as well as concerns about student safety and poor-quality academics.

“Someone needs to visit the school and see what takes place there,” wrote a parent who filed a complaint in 2019.

The school, which has since changed its name to Providence Christian Preparatory School, remains in the state voucher program, with about 170 students using scholarships, bringing in more than $570,000. The former teacher pleaded no contest to the use of a child in a sexual performance, a second-degree felony, last year.

The Sentinel’s attorney, Rachel Fugate, said she is continuing to negotiate with the department. “I’m still hopeful we reach a resolution that provides the Sentinel access to these meaningful documents at a reasonable cost,” she added.

Inflating cost estimates blocks access to records, discourages members of the public from making requests and interferes with the democratic process, Barfield said.

“We call them ‘public’ records because they belong to the public,” she said.

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Education Industry, Failure, Florida, Freedom of the Press, Religion, Separation of church and state, Shame, Vouchers
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