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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

Peter Greene: The True Purpose of Vouchers!

By dianeravitch
April 29, 2023 //
9

It is well known that the idea of vouchers was launched in response to the Brown decision of 1954. Southern states wanted to avoid desegregating their schools, so they created voucher laws so that white students would not be forced to go to school with Black students. (A useful history is Steve Suitts’ Overturning Brown: The Segregationist Legacy of the Modern School Choice Movement.) Some “credit” libertarian Milton Friedman as the godfather of the voucher movement, but his 1955 essay advocating vouchers would have disappeared into the mists of time without the legislation passed across the South.

The voucher idea was stigmatized for many years because of its association with segregation. But it was revived in 1990 by a scholarly book by John Chubb and Terry Moe called Politics, Markets, and America’s Schools, in which they theorized that vouchers were actually a panacea. (Their word.)

We now know they were wrong. As multiple studies have reported, student academic performance is worse in voucher schools than in public schools. we also know that most vouchers are used by students who were already enrolled in private and religious schools, so vouchers are an expensive subsidy for families that like the subsidy but don’t need it.

So, why is there continued advocacy for vouchers? why do voucher advocates say that “all families should have the same choice as the rich” when the value of vouchers don’t pay for elite schools attended by the rich? Why are they sold as salvation for children when they are not?

Peter Greene sees a nefarious goal behind the voucher movement. He originally wrote this post two years ago, but recently reposted it because it was prescient.

The purpose of vouchers is to abandon public schools. As choice prevails, the community sees no reason to tax itself for private choices. Bond issues will lose. Parents whose children are no longer in school will not pay taxes for other people’s children. People without children will think, “that’s not my responsibility.” People will not want to pay for religious schools for those of a different faith. Schooling will become a personal responsibility, not a civic responsibility.

Peter writes:

We need to find another way to talk about vouchers.

As the GOP mounts a multi-state initiative to implement vouchers or super-voucher education savings accounts in many states across the country, it’s becoming increasingly clear that we’ve been looking at the voucher movement through the wrong lens (which is to day, the lens that voucheristas have promoted).

Vouchers are not about freeing or empowering parents. They are about empowering private interests to chomp away at the giant mountain of education money in this country. They are about dismantling any sort of oversight and accountability; it’s striking how many of these voucher bills/laws very specifically forbid the state to interfere with the vendors in any way, shape or form.

Think of voucher programs this way.

The state announces, “We are dismantling the public education system. You are on your own. You will have to shop for your child’s education, piece by piece, in a marketplace bound by very little oversight and very few guardrails. In this new education ecosystem, you will have to pay your own way. To take some of the sting out of this, we’ll give you a small pocketful of money to help defray expenses. Good luck.”

It’s not a voucher system. It’s a pay your own way system. It’s a you’re on your own system. The voucher is not the point of the system; it’s simply a small payment to keep you from noticing that you’ve just been cut loose.

Freedom and empowerment will come, as always, in direct proportion to the amount of money you have to spend.

The voucher amount will dwindle. That amount is based on what the public school system spends to educate a child, and taxpayers will shrink that amount going forward as the schools themselves shrink to holding facilities for students who can’t find a private vendor to accept them, or whose parents can’t afford what the voucher won’t cover. And remember, we’ve seen this movie before– after Brown v. Board of Education, white families in some states moved their children into private segregation academies, and then they cut public school taxes (because why keep paying taxes on the system that your child no longer used).

Vouchers are the tail, not the dog. They are the public-facing image of privatization– and not just privatization of the “delivery” of education. Voucherization is also about privatizing the responsibility for educating children, about telling parents that education is their problem, not the community’s.

We need another term for discussing this family of policies; “voucher” doesn’t begin to capture what’s truly at stake. I can imagine a world in which charter schools are a viable, even useful part of a robust pubic education system; it’s not at all the world we currently live in, but I can imagine it. But the system that voucher proponents want is absolutely incompatible with a functioning public education system. And it has nothing to do with freedom.

Categories Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Education Reform, Evil, Extremism, Inequality, Inequity, Injustice, Privatization, Propaganda, Vouchers

Texas: Why Is Governor Abbott Pitching Vouchers Only at Private Christian Schools?

By dianeravitch
April 26, 2023 //
7

The Texas Monthly asks the question: Why is Governor Greg Abbott pitching vouchers only at private Christian schools? Could it be that he knows that vouchers are a subsidy for the tuition the family is already paying? If tuition is $12,500 per child, a voucher of $8,000 is a nice chunk of change. Maybe he knows that in other states, 75-80% of vouchers are used by students already enrolled in private schools. He knows this is a reward to his evangelical base. He doesn’t give a hoot about the 5.4 students in public schools, most of whom are not white. He cares a lot about the 300,000 kids in private schools. He criticizes public schools for “indoctrinating” students. What does he think happens in religious schools? It is spelled I-N-D-O-C-T-R-I-N-A-T-I-O-N.

Who would school vouchers really benefit?

Governor Greg Abbott is helping to answer that question, not so much through his rhetoric, which is relentlessly on-message (“educational freedom,” “parental rights,” “school choice”) as through his actions. Over the last few months, the governor has been taking his case for school vouchers on the road, traveling around the state to talk up the benefits of education savings accounts, the wonky name for a program that would offer taxpayer dollars to parents who enroll their kids in private schools.

But it’s impossible not to notice that Abbott has only visited expensive private Christian institutions—all Protestant—in front of friendly audiences of parents who have opted out of public education. Of the seven schools the governor has visited on his “Parent Empowerment Tour,” not a single one has been a public school or a secular private school or a religious school affiliated with Catholicism, Islam, or Judaism. Not even a Montessori. If the goal was to reassure critics that Abbott’s embrace of vouchers wasn’t a recipe for draining the public school system while subsidizing the children of wealthy Christian conservatives in private schools of their choice, well, none of those critics were around to hear it. The governor was quite literally preaching to the choir.

A recent appearance, at Brazos Christian School in Bryan, is representative. Brazos Christian is a private school serving kids from prekindergarten through high school, whose mission is “training, equipping, and educating students to impact the world for Jesus.” Tuition costs more than $12,500 a year for high-school students. Applicants for seventh through twelfth grade at Brazos Christian “must evidence a relationship with Jesus Christ” and provide a reference from a pastor to have a shot at acceptance. When Abbott showed up in early March, he spoke at a dais emblazoned with a sign reading “Parents Matter,” the kind of focus-group-tested slogan beloved by politicians and marketers. Hovering behind the governor’s head was the school’s cross-centric emblem.

Imagine your tax dollars supporting a school that will not accept your child because he or she does not have a “relationship with Jesus Christ.”

Categories Bigotry, Curriculum, Democracy, Education Industry, Elections, Extremism, Freedom, Religion, School Choice, Separation of church and state, Texas, Vouchers

Jan Resseger: Ohio Republicans Want More Vouchers, Eroding Public Education

By dianeravitch
April 24, 2023 //
11

Jan Resseger foresees that the Republican-dominated Ohio legislature is determined to expand vouchers for private and religious schools.

They are determined to divert more money and students away from public schools despite the compelling evidence that vouchers are harmful to students, most of whom will attend schools that are lower in quality than their public school.

Jan explains why public education is essential to our democracy, not as a consumer good, but as a civic responsibility:

If you are a supporter of public education, and in your state you face proposed legislation for school vouchers, you are unlikely to convince conservative Republicans to vote against vouchers.

The issue has become purely ideological—a matter of core belief. The late political theorist Benjamin Barber almost perfectly characterizes the divide between supporters of public institutions and the radical marketplace individualists:

“Privatization is a kind of reverse social contract: it dissolves the bonds that tie us together into free communities and democratic republics. It puts us back in the state of nature where we possess a natural right to get whatever we can on our own, but at the same time lose any real ability to secure that to which we have a right. Private choices rest on individual power… personal skills… and personal luck. Public choices rest on civic rights and common responsibilities, and presume equal rights for all. Public liberty is what the power of common endeavor establishes, and hence presupposes that we have constituted ourselves as public citizens by opting into the social contract. With privatization, we are seduced back into the state of nature by the lure of private liberty and particular interest; but what we experience in the end is an environment in which the strong dominate the weak… the very dilemma which the original social contract was intended to address.” (Consumed, pp. 143-144)

Categories Democracy, Education Industry, Ohio, Religion, Research, Separation of church and state, Vouchers

TIME: How Voucher Programs Hurt Students

By dianeravitch
April 21, 2023 //
8

Joshua Cowen, Professor of Education Policy at Michigan State University, wrote the following article for TIME magazine:

In recent months, state legislatures across the country have broadened efforts to subsidize private school tuition with taxpayer dollars. New proposals for these programs—collectively called school vouchers—have appeared in more than a dozen states and passed as major priorities for Republican governors like Kim Reynolds in Iowa and Sarah Huckabee Sanders in Arkansas. Since 2021, Arizona, Florida, Utah and West Virginia have also created or expanded voucher plans. Meanwhile, a handful states like Indiana, Louisiana, Ohio and Wisconsin have run voucher programs for years. But do school vouchers actually work? We need to focus on what research shows, and what that means for kids moving forward.

As an analyst who has studied these and other forms of school choice for nearly two decades, I’m in a good position to give an answer. And based on data from existing voucher programs, the answer is almost unambiguously negative.

Let’s start with who benefits. First and foremost, the answer is: existing private school students. Small, pilot voucher programs with income limits have been around since the early 1990s, but over the last decade they have expanded to larger statewide initiatives with few if any income-eligibility requirements. Florida just passed its version of such a universal voucher program, following Arizona’s passage in the fall of 2022. In Arizona, more than 75% of initial voucher applicants had never been in public school—either because they were new kindergartners or already in private school before getting a voucher. That’s a problem because many voucher advocatesmarket these plans as ways to improve educational opportunities for public school children.

And what about the students who do leave public schools? Some plans, like the currently proposed bill in Texas, restrict eligibility to students in public school for at least one year. But for the children who do transfer using a voucher, the academic results in the recent scaled-up statewide programs are catastrophic. Although small, pilot-phase programs showed some promise two decades ago, new evaluations of vouchers in Washington, D.C.,Indiana, Louisiana, and Ohio show some of the largest test score drops ever seen in the research record—between -0.15 and -0.50 standard deviations of learning loss. That’s on par with what the COVID-19 pandemic did to test scores, and larger than Hurricane Katrina’s impacts on academics in New Orleans.

And these harmful voucher impacts from existing statewide vouchers lasted for years, with little else on balance to show for it.

What explains these extraordinarily large voucher-induced declines? Aren’t private schools supposed to be elite educational opportunities? When it comes to private schools accepting voucher payments, the answer is clearly no. That’s because elite private schools with strong academics and large endowments often decline to participate in voucher plans. Instead the typical voucher school is a financially distressed, sub-prime private provider often jumping at the chance for a tax bailout to stay open a few extra years.

In Wisconsin, 41% of voucher schools have closed since the program’s inception in 1990. And that includes the large number of pop-up schools opening just to cash in on the new voucher pay-out. For those pop-up schools, average survival time is just 4 years before their doors close for good.

Here’s another problem: for most students, using a voucher is a temporary choice to begin with. In states that have reported data on the question–Indiana, Louisiana, and Wisconsin—roughly 20% of students leave voucher programs each year, either because they give up the payment or because schools push them out. In Florida, where vouchers just expanded, that number is even higher: around 30% per year in pre-expansion data.

That kind of turnover is bad for kids, even when they’re leaving under-performing voucher schools. Not least because kids who leave voucher programs tend to be students of color, lower income children, and kids struggling academically in the first place.

And it’s not just the academic results that call into question any rhetoric around opportunities created by vouchers. Private schools can decline to admit children for any reason. One example of that is tied to the latest culture wars around LGBTQ youth, and strengthened in current voucher legislation. In Florida, a voucher-funded school made national news last summer when it banned LGBTQ children. In Indiana, pre-pandemic estimates showed that more than $16 million in taxpayer funding had already gone to voucher schools with explicit anti-LGBTQ admissions rules.

Voucher schools also rarely enroll children with special academic needs. Special education children tend to need more resources than vouchers provide, which can be a problem in public schools too. But public schools are at least obliged under federal law to enroll and assist special needs children—something private schools can and do avoid.

When we look at all the challenges to accessing education with these programs it’s clear that actually winning admission to a particular private school is not about parental school choice. It’s the school’s choice.

That is what research on school vouchers tells us. Vouchers are largely tax subsidies for existing private school families, and a tax bailout for struggling private schools. They have harmful test score impacts that persist for years, and they’re a revolving door of school enrollment. They’re public funds that support a financially desperate group of private schools, including some with active discriminatory admissions in place.

And public support for these programs is tenuous at best, highly dependent on state contexts. Recent media reports indicate that the latest voucher push is at least partly the result of well-funded campaigns led by Betsy DeVos, the conservative billionaire and U.S. Education Secretary under Donald Trump. DeVos has championed vouchers for decades as an alternative to traditional public education in what she, Trump, and other supporters call “government schools.”

But DeVos has acknowledged the poor track record for vouchers—at least when it comes to academic impacts. Asked about the dismal results of the Louisiana voucher plan while she was a public official, DeVos avoided detailed comment, but her answer back then was as good a summary as any that a voucher expert like me could provide. That program, she said, was “not very well-conceived.”

That goes for school voucher plans today, currently spreading across the country.

Categories Accountability, Civil Rights, Democracy, Education Industry, Failure, Hoax, Inequity, Privatization, School Choice, Students, Vouchers
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