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Ohio: Two of Three Voucher Students Never Attended Public School

By dianeravitch
June 7, 2022 //
8

Stephen Dyer, former legislator, writes that two of every three voucher students in Ohio’s Edchiice program this year never attended public schools.

Yet legislators want to expand it.

No more nonsense about “saving poor kids from failing public schools.” The voucher program is simply a transfer of public funds to parents who never sent their children to public schools. It’s a giveaway of public dollars to parents whose children are in private schools.

And public schools are better than the private religious schools that get public money. The public schools have certified teachers, more advanced classes, a broader curriculum, and extracurricular activities that religious schools do not offer.

Dyer writes:

Ok. My jaw literally dropped when I read this bill analysis of House Bill 583 — a bill originally intended to help alleviate the substitute teacher shortage, but thanks to Ohio Senate Education Chairman Andrew Brenner, is now a giveaway to school privatizers.

Tucked away on page 7 of this analysis, I read this:

… (R)oughly 33% of the new FY 2022 income-based scholarship recipients entering grades 1-12 were students who attended a public school the previous year.

That’s right.

2 of every 3 EdChoice Expansion recipients this year never attended a public school before they received their taxpayer-funded private school tuition subsidy…

And remember that families up to 400% of poverty qualify. How much is that? For a family of 4, $111,000 qualifies as 400% of poverty That would qualify about 85% of Ohio households for this taxpayer funded private school tuition subsidy.

Oh yeah, the bill also eliminates the prorated voucher for EdChoice Expansion. What’s that mean? Well, until this bill, families between 250% and 400% of poverty would qualify for a subsidy, but at a reduced rate from the $5,500 K-8 voucher or the $7,500 high school voucher.

Not anymore. Under HB 583, those prorations go away. What else goes away? The recipient’s loss of a voucher if their income grows beyond 400%.

That’s right.

Someone could make $100,000 one year, qualify their kids for a full, $5,500 Grade 1 private school tuition subsidy, change jobs, make $200,000 a year or more for the next 11 years and keep the full voucher as long as their kid was in school.

Look, I don’t need to keep repeating this, but I will: In nearly 9 of 10 cases, kids taking a voucher perform worse on state testing than kids in the public schools they leave behind. Not to mention the racial segregation the program exacerbates.

Yet here Ohio lawmakers go and dump another $13 million or more of public money into a program that will undoubtedly subsidize the private school tuitions of wealthy, disproportionately white families whose kids never attended public schools.

Who loses? The 90% of kids who don’t take a voucher because the money comes out of their schools’ budget.

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Hoax, Ohio, Religion, School Choice, Separation of church and state, Teachers, Vouchers

Oklahoma: Billionaires Pushing Charter Schools and Vouchers Underwrite Salary of State Secretary of Education

By dianeravitch
May 23, 2022 //
33

Thank goodness for independent media! Oklahoma Watch published an investigative report that detailed a secret slush fund that supplements the salary of the state Secretary of Education.

(This story was produced in partnership with the Oklahoma nonprofit newsroom The Frontier.)

Gov. Kevin Stitt vetoed legislation that would have required cabinet members to file public reports to disclose their finances.

If Stitt had signed the bill last month, Oklahomans would learn that Secretary of Education Ryan Walters makes at least $120,000 a year as executive director of a nonprofit organization that keeps its donors secret. Walters is also paid about $40,000 a year by the state, according to state payroll data.

The nonprofit, Every Kid Counts Oklahoma, has refused to disclose its largest donors.

But a joint investigation by The Frontier and Oklahoma Watch has found that much of the organization’s funds come from national school privatization and charter school expansion advocates, including the Walton Family Foundation and an education group founded by billionaire industrialist Charles Koch.

As Secretary of Education, Walters serves as Stitt’s top advisor on public education policy and is the governor’s liaison for dozens of state boards and programs.

Walters’ outside employment with a nonprofit funded by advocacy groups could be a conflict of interest, said Delaney Marsco, senior attorney for ethics at the Campaign Legal Center, a nonprofit group that focuses on government transparency and accountability.

“If you are responsible for making decisions in a certain area of the government and you are being paid by an outside organization that has an interest in that, that absolutely can be a conflict of interest,” Marsco said. “If you are a public servant, your duty is to the public, and anything that kind of calls that into question, even raises the appearance of a conflict of interest, is a problem.”

Under Walters’ leadership, Every Kid Counts Oklahoma was the public face of Stitt’s program that distributed $1,500 grants to families in 2020 funded with $8 million in federal coronavirus relief money. The money was intended to buy tutoring and educational supplies. But a lack of safeguards allowed parents to use some of the funds to buy TVs, gaming consoles and home appliances, an investigation by Oklahoma Watch and The Frontier found. Emails and other recordsshow that Walters helped secure the no-bid contract with a Florida company to distribute the money. The U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Inspector General has opened an audit into how the state used those funds.

Walters, who declined multiple interview requests, is now running for state superintendent, an elected position overseeing the state Department of Education and a budget of over $3 billion. Unlike in federal elections, candidates for state office in Oklahoma are not required to fill out financial disclosures until after they are elected.

Please open the link and read on.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Dark Money, Democracy, Education Industry, Koch Brothers, Oklahoma, Scandals, Vouchers, Walton Foundation

Sweden: The Failure of Vouchers

By dianeravitch
May 20, 2022 //
6

Lisa Pelling wrote this article, which appeared in the Swedish publication Social Europe. She directs Arena Ide, a progressive think tank in Stockholm, Sweden.

Lisa Pelling explains how ‘freedom of choice’ has wrought a vicious circle of inequality and underperformance.

Think of a caricature of a capitalist couple and you can picture the front page of the leading Swedish daily, Dagens Nyheter, earlier this year. A man with a tailormade suit and an 80s style attaché portfolio. Next to him, a woman in high heels, silk skirt and large, silver fur coat. Big confident smiles.

Sadly, the portrait of Hans and Barbara Bergström was not a cartoon but an illustration of the current Swedish school system. The photo accompanied an article on what was once a cherished social institution and a source of national pride, which has become a profitable playing field for corporate interests and the creation of immense private wealth.

Barbara Bergström, founder of one of Sweden’s largest school corporations, with 48 schools across Sweden, and her husband, former editor-in-chief of Dagens Nyheter—and a long-time lobbyist for the privatisation of schools—are two of the people who have made a fortune running publicly funded schools in Sweden. When Barbara sold shares in her school empire to American investors a few years ago, she earned 918 million krona (almost €90 million). Her remaining shares are now worth another €30 million.

Voucher system

This is money made entirely from public funds. Private schools in Sweden are funded not by tuition fees, but by a ‘free choice’ voucher system introduced by a conservative government in 1992.

This year, that radical reform of Sweden’s school system turns 30. Ideologically conceivedby Milton Friedman, the system is under increasing criticism. Not only because no other country in the world has chosen to copy it, but also because the downsides have become so evident. In particular, school boards across the country are increasingly aware that the owners of private schools treat them as profitable businesses—at the expense of the public schools.

A controversial social-democrat governance reform in 1991 abolished the state-run schooling system. Since then, municipalities have been in charge of public schools in Sweden and all municipalities are by law obliged to hand out school vouchers (equivalent to the cost of municipal schools) to private schools for each pupil they accept.

Picking the most profitable

It sounds fair: all pupils get a voucher (‘a backpack full of cash’) and all get to choose. Yet individual pupils’ needs are different and, while the municipal school has to cater for all children’s needs, private schools can pick the most profitable pupils—and still receive the same funding.

Municipalities have a legal responsibility to provide children with access to education close to where they live, be that in a small town or remote village. For-profit schools do not have such an obligation and can establish themselves in the city centre.

Nor can municipalities turn pupils down. For-profit schools do this all the time: they put pupils on a waiting list and accept only a profitable quota. Since the largest costs in schools—teachers and classrooms—are more or less fixed, maximum profits stem from maximising the number of pupils per teacher and per classroom. Waiting lists allow pupils to be queued (while attending the default municipal school) until a full (in other words, profitable) classroom can be opened.

Vicious circle

This creates a vicious circle. While private for-profit schools operate classrooms with 32 pupils (with the funding from 32 vouchers), municipalities have to run schools where classrooms have one, two or maybe five pupils fewer. Less money per teacher and per classroom mathematically increases the average cost per pupil.

If the cost per pupil for the municipality rises in its schools, the private schools are legally entitled to matching support—even if their costs have not risen. Public schools lose pupils, and so funding, to for-profit schools, while their consequently rising cost per pupil delivers a further funding boon to the private schools—which, with the help of this additional support, become even more attractive. All the while public schools are drained of much-needed resources and so the downward spiral continues.

Inevitably, it is mostly privileged kids who are able to exercise their right to attend private schools, so socially-disadvantaged pupils are left in the public schools. This not only favours inequality of performance between schools but also lowers the overall average—high-performing Finland, by contrast, has very low performance gaps between its schools.

Andreas Schleicher, head of the directorate for education and skills at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, used to ‘look to Sweden as the gold standard for education’. Now, he writes, ‘the Swedish school system seems to have lost its soul’. No other country has experienced such a rapid fall in performance in the OECD’s Programme for International Assessment (PISA) league table as Sweden, paired with increasing knowledge gaps between schools. And all the while school segregation is increasing, not only in big cities, but in mid-sized towns as well.

In her seminal The Death and Life of the great American School System, Diane Ravitch describes how making ‘freedom of choice’ the ‘overarching religion’ benefits few and harms many, destroying the public school system. What should be a public service is abused by parents who seek a (white, non-working class) segregated refuge for their children.

Huge funds to spend

It might seem unlikely that the Swedish school system would be an inspiration to anyone anywhere. But Swedish private schools are highly profitable, their owners have huge funds to spend and they are eager to meet upper- and middle-class demands for social segregation by expanding their corporations abroad.

Academedia, the largest private education provider in Sweden, is established in Norway and has 65 preschools in Germany. It recently reported to investors that it was preparing to launch an apprenticeship programme in the United Kingdom and expand its preschools into the Netherlands. Barbara Bergström’s Internationella Engelska Skolan already owns seven schools in Spain.

The Bergströms’ foundation, meanwhile, has donated SEK60 million to establish a ‘professorship in educational organization and leadership’ at the Stockholm School of Economics. Friedman would have been impressed.

Categories Education Industry, Failure, For-Profit, International, Vouchers

Tennessee: Supreme Court Reverses Lower Courts and Declares State Voucher Program Constitutional

By dianeravitch
May 19, 2022 //
4

The Tennessee voucher program is very controversial. It passed by only one vote, the vote of a Knoxville legislator who won the promise that there would be no vouchers in his district. The FBI is investigating whether the legislator was promised anything else, and he has been called before a grand jury to testify about what happened. The voucher plan will be offered only in Nashville and Memphis,whose representatives opposed it.

The plan was held to be unconstitutional by two courts but the state’s highest court just ruled that it was constitutional.

Marta W. Aldrich of Chalkbeat Tennessee reports:

The reversal essentially revives Gov. Bill Lee’s education savings account program, the signature legislation of his first year in office and the source of a fierce legal battle for more than two years.

The program aims to provide taxpayer money to pay toward private education for eligible students in public school districts in Memphis and Nashville. Lee set aside $29 million in the state’s upcoming budget to pay for starting up the program in the event that the high court ruled in his favor.

Tennessee has been a battleground state in the escalating tug-of-war between those who want to use taxpayer money to give parents more education choices and others who say that approach diverts money from already underfunded public schools.

After a decade of legislative defeats, voucher legislation narrowly passed in 2019 under a GOP supermajority.

But a Nashville judge blocked the controversial program from launching in 2020 in a ruling that was unanimously upheld by the state Court of Appeals. The lower courts said the voucher law violated the state constitution’s “home rule” provision because it applied only to districts in the state’s two largest cities without their consent.

A Republican proposal to revise the embattled law to try to address the home rule issue narrowly failed in a House subcommittee in March.

In April, however, the legislature voted to replace Tennessee’s formula for funding K-12 education with a voucher-friendly one. Developed by Lee’s administration, the plan will require calculations that enable funding to easily follow a student to private schools and public charter schools, which the governor is also working to multiply. But Lee has saidhis funding plan is unrelated to vouchers or charters.

The legislature’s pivotal 2019 voucher vote continues to be the source of controversy and questions. A 49-49 tie in the House appeared to kill the bill, until then-Speaker Glen Casada held the vote open for 38 minutes and persuaded Rep. Jason Zachary, a Knoxville Republican, to flip his position in favor of the governor’s plan…

The voucher law designated about $7,300 annually to each eligible student who moves from public to private schools. The program was to start with up to 5,000 students in its first year, potentially reaching 15,000 students by the fifth year.

Attorneys representing Davidson and Shelby counties argued the change would impose a financial burden to their local school systems by diverting millions of dollars to private education.

But the state’s attorneys contended that the home rule argument didn’t apply in this case.

The state Supreme Court ultimately agreed. “The majority concluded that the ESA Act is not applicable to the Plaintiff counties because the Act regulates or governs the conduct of the local education agencies and not the counties,” the court said in a statement. “Thus, the Act does not violate the Home Rule Amendment.”

The high court’s ruling came after an unusually long review. The five-judge panel heard oral arguments last summer before Justice Cornelia Clark died in September. It then opted to rehear the case in February with Court of Appeals Judge Thomas R. Frierson sitting in for Clark’s replacement, Justice Sarah Campbell, who was appointed by Lee in January and recused herself from the voucher case because she previously worked for the state attorney general.

Categories Education Industry, Religion, Tennessee, Vouchers

Tennessee: FBI Investigates Republican in Legislature for Key Voucher Vote

By dianeravitch
May 17, 2022 //
20

The Tennessee voucher bill passed by only one vote. There was a delay in getting that last vote. Charges flew that the vote was swayed by more than reason. The FBI started an investigation, and the legislator was just called to appear before a grand jury.

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WTVF) — A Republican lawmaker who cast the decisive vote for Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee’s school voucher plan has been subpoenaed to appear before a federal grand jury next week, NewsChannel 5 has learned.

Two independent sources with knowledge of the investigation tell NewsChannel 5 Investigates that Rep. Jason Zachary, R-Knoxville, is among a group of House Republicans who were served with federal grand jury subpoenas this week. That group includes House Speaker Cameron Sexton, R-Crossville.

Zachary refused to comment as he entered the House session Thursday morning.

NewsChannel 5 Investigates was first to reveal the latest round of subpoenas delivered Tuesday…

The investigation of corruption on Tennessee’s Capitol Hill comes against the backdrop of apparently ongoing interest by the FBI in how then-Speaker Casada managed to pass Lee’s plan to create a school voucher program, known as Educational Savings Accounts, to pay for private school tuition in Davidson and Shelby counties.

In April 2019, a House vote on Lee’s voucher bill failed on a 49-49 tie vote.

Casada held the vote open for some 45 minutes while he sought the decisive 50th vote.

Zachary eventually switched his vote after Lee’s team agreed to exempt Knox County from the legislation. Zachary later denied that he was offered anything improper for his vote.

Still, in May 2019, NewsChannel 5 Investigates revealed that FBI agents had shown an interest in that vote, showing up unannounced at the home of one GOP House member.

That lawmaker, who asked not to be identified, said agents wanted to know about campaign contributions offered to support the reelection efforts of those willing to vote for the bill.

In July 2019, Rep. John Mark Windle, D-Livingston, confirmed information obtained by NewsChannel 5 Investigates that another lawmaker had overheard Casada suggesting that — in exchange for his vote — Windle could be promoted to the rank of general in the Tennessee National Guard.

Windle, an Iraq war veteran who was a colonel in the Guard, refused to switch his vote, saying in a statement that his vote was “not for sale.”

Other lawmakers told NewsChannel 5 Investigates about talk of incentives and even threats.

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

Ohio: The State Constitution Requires Funding of Common Schools

By dianeravitch
May 14, 2022 //
16

Bill Phillis, retired state education official, is campaigning relentlessly to block the expansion of the state’s voucher program. He is a staunch opponent of privatization. He frequently writes about the low academic quality of the state’s charter schools, their fiscal irresponsibility, and their drain on the state’s public schools. If you live in Ohio, you should join his organization to support public schools.

He writes:

EdChoice Voucher Scheme Does Not Align with the Intentions of the Delegates of Ohio’s 1850/1851 and 1873/1874 Constitutional Conventions Regarding the Public Common School System—Part 1*

The EdChoice voucher scheme is contrary to the intention of the Delegates’ vision of the state system of common schools. During the 1873/1874 Constitutional Convention, when a delegate proposed to alter the 1851 constitutional provision for education to fund private schools, Delegate Asher Cook stated:

Here the children of a district, and often those of an entire village, are united in one school, where all cause of strife and contention is removed, and their minds, true to the instincts with which they are endued, rich and poor, mingle together, for a loving group of little friends, who, hand in hand, march bravely up the rugged hill of science, making the ascent easy by each other’s aid, and smoothing its rugged surface by glad peals of laughter, which ring out merrily and clear over hill top, across valley and up the mountain side, until their echoes wake up a joyous community to thank God for the common schools.

The Delegates to the 1850/1851 Constitutional Convention were intentional in selecting the word “common”. Delegate Archibold expressed that the meaning of “common” at that time might change and thus, suggested the word “useful” to replace “common”. An 1828 dictionary defines “common” as “belonging equally to more than one or to many indefinitely.” Delegate Humphreville stated his belief that “common” as they intended it to function in the clause would never be misinterpreted, and thus, responded to Delegate Archibold’s concern by stating “[C]ommon schools in the future will be common schools—that is to say they will not be uncommon schools.” The inclusion of the word common was intentional.

During the 1874 debates, a discussion ensued regarding the meaning of “a system of common schools.” The discussion led to the question of whether public school funds should be provided to private religious schools. Delegate Root informed the discussion, saying, “Common schools to be successful must be the union of schools. The 1828 American Dictionary of the English Language defines “union” as, [c]oncord; agreement and conjunction of mind, with affections or interest.” Delegate Root asked:

What kind of a common school system would you have but for uniform rules and uniformity of discipline, and by whom are these prescribed? By the legislative power– the highest power in the State. They may relegate the details to certain officers, but it must come from them.

Regarding the same issue, Delegate Miner stated:

I am utterly opposed to a constitutional provision, or to any legislation, having in view the allotment of anypart of the common school fund to any schools except those established, maintained and controlled by, or under the authority of the state. The moment we consent to do so, we deal with a death blow to the system of common schools, upon which, expanded and improved by increasing experience and wisdom, more than upon anything else, it is my profoundest conviction, depends on the perpetuity and efficiency of our American institutions and government.

It is clear that those who established the Constitution language for a system of schools meant that only one system of common schools was to receive public funding for the support thereof.

*Research for this post and much of the content of it is credited to Ohio State University Moritz College of Law Juris Doctor Candidate, Kira Sharp.

Learn more about the EdChoice voucher litigation

Learn About Vouchers Hurt Ohio
8 Lies About Private School Vouchers

Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/OhioEandA

VOUCHERS HURT OHIO

William L. Phillis | Ohio Coalition for Equity & Adequacy of School Funding | 614.228.6540 |ohioeanda@sbcglobal.net| http://ohiocoalition.org

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Education Industry, Failure, Funding, History, Ohio, Resistance, School Choice, Vouchers

The Founders Wanted Public Schools, Not Charter Schools or Vouchers

By dianeravitch
May 10, 2022 //
6

This is “national charter school week,” aka “national school privatization week.” The charter lobby—the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools—has been fighting furiously to block proposed regulations by the U.S. Department of Education that would ban federal funding of for-profit charter schools and white-flight charters. They have received sympathetic editorials, repeating the falsehoods that these sensible regulations would harm all charter schools (they won’t). Their ads are even on national television (I saw one last night on a cable news station), falsely claiming that the regulations are a direct attack on charter schools (they are not).

Who knew that the charter trade association would resort to outright lies to protect low-quality for-profit charter operators and keep federal funding available to open new white-flight charters? The regulations have zero effect on existing charters. They affect only the federal funding spent to open new charters, $440 million a year, which has been recklessly spent on for-profit chains and on charters that never opened or closed soon after opening. Why waste federal money on grifters and entrepreneurs?

By their lies, you shall know them.

The charter movement is heavily subsidized by billionaires and supported by public school haters like Charles Koch and Betsy DeVos. A few Democratic Senators sent a letter to Secretary Miguel Cardona opposing the regulations that would ban for-profit charters and white-flight charters, including Cory Booker, Michael Bennett, and Dianne Feinstein. Shame on them.

The origins of school choice are well-known: resistance to the Brown decision. Derek Black in his great book Schoolhouse Burning established beyond doubt that the Founding Fathers anticipated the establishment of public schools when they wrote the Northwest Ordinances, which required new states to set aside a plot of land in every town for a public school.

A reader who calls him/herself Democracy posted the following comment:

As I’ve noted more than once previously, the Founders were advocates of PUBLIC education as the means to promote the common good, and democratic citizenship. It – the idea that public schools should teach democratic citizenship – stretches back to Aristotle:

In Book 8 of Politics, Aristotle explained the importance of public education to democratic governance. He points out the different foundational ethos of governments:

“the legislator should direct his attention above all to the education of youth; for the neglect of education does harm to the constitution The citizen should be molded to suit the form of government under which he lives. For each government has a peculiar character which originally formed and which continues to preserve it. The character of democracy creates democracy, and the character of oligarchy creates oligarchy; and always the better the character, the better the government.”

It’s worth repeating: “…the better the character, the better the government.”

What occurred from January 20, 2017 until January 20, 2021 was a steep and marked absence of democratic character in the Oval Office and the halls of Congress.

In fact, the Founders created the constitutional structure for a democratic society “in which the common good was the chief end of government.” They adopted John Locke’s view that the main purpose of government –– the reason people CREATE government –– is to protect their persons through, as historian R. Freeman Butts put it, a social contract that placed “the public good above private desires.”

The goal, then, was “a commonwealth, a democratic corporate society in which the common good was the chief end of government.” Public education was part and parcel of social contract, helping to develop and maintain the common good.

It’s precisely because of the importance of public schooling to civic education and democratic citizenship that Aristotle concluded this:

“education should be one and the same for all, and that it should be public, and not private- not as at present, when every one looks after his own children separately, and gives them separate instruction of the sort which he thinks best; the training in things which are of common interest should be the same for all. Neither must we suppose that any one of the citizens belongs to himself, for they all belong to the state, and are each of them a part of the state, and the care of each part is inseparable from the care of the whole.”

That’s worth repeating too: “…the care of each part is inseparable from the care of the whole.”

The democratic social contract – the guts of the American Republic – was under continued assault from January 20, 2017 until January 20, 2021, and was under DIRECT attack on January 6, 2021. Republican elected officials of all stripes, and Republican voters, were responsible. They refuse to take any personal responsibility; they try to evade and avoid accountability; and they redirected their efforts to undermine democratic values.

The current proxy is public schooling. At its core, the offensive against public education is an assault on democratic character and values, on the rule of law, and on equality and “liberty and justice for all.” And at its core, it relies on an ugly racism that casts whites as “the victims.”

The attack on public schools is NOT some spontaneous “parent rights” outburst. It’s orchestrated. It’s being funded and set into motion by right-wing “Christians” at the Council for National Policy, a far-right group that had tremendous influence with the Trump administration. Richard DeVos, husband of Betsy, has been president of CNP, twice. Ed Meese, who helped Reagan cover up the Iran-Contra scandal, has been president of CNP. So has Pat Robertson. And Tim LaHaye.

Current and former CNP members include Cleta Mitchell, the Trump lawyer who was on that call to the Georgia Secretary of State demanding that he find Trump more than 11,780 votes, and Charlie Kirk, head of Turning Point USA who bragged about bussing tens of thousands of people to the January 6th ‘Stop the Steal’ rally and insurrection. Two of the top people at the Federalist Society, Eugene Meyer and Leonard Leo, are also CNP members. Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, is a member.

You can read about Ginni Thomas here:

“The claim that the Justices’ opinions are politically neutral is becoming increasingly hard to accept, especially from Thomas, whose wife, Virginia (Ginni) Thomas, is a vocal right-wing activist. She has declared that America is in existential danger because of the ‘deep state’ and the ‘fascist left’… on January 6, 2021 she cheered on the supporters of Donald Trump who had gathered to overturn Biden’s election…”

You can read about Betsy DeVos here:

Right-winger Milton Friedman argued for returning to a pre-Aristotle era of schooling, saying, “In my ideal world, government would not be responsible for providing education.”

That’s what Republicans are dedicated to; destroying public schools, and stealing their funding.

My addendum: if they destroy our public schools, they will destroy public libraries, public lands, the right to vote and, in time, our democracy.

Categories History, Privatization, School Choice, Separation of church and state, Supporting public schools, Vouchers

Valerie Strauss: Gov. DeSantis’ War on Public Education

By dianeravitch
May 1, 2022 //
29

Valerie Strauss of the Washington Post recently summarized the efforts by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis to destroy public schools in his state.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) has been fighting with the Walt Disney Co. for weeks now since it angered him by criticizing a law he championed that limits discussions of gender issues in public school classrooms. But his attacks on public school districts began just as soon as he took office in 2019.

DeSantis had been governor barely a month when he offered a new definition of public education that eliminated the traditional division between public and private schools. To DeSantis and his allies, “public education” includes any school — including religious ones — that receives public funding through voucher and similar programs. “Look, if it’s public dollars, it’s public education,” he said in February 2019. “In Florida, public education is going to have a meaning that is directed by the parents, where the parents are the drivers because they know what’s best for their kids.”

That was the start of what has evolved into the most aggressive anti-public education battle waged by any governor in the country. In the past year — and especially in recent months — as he has worked to amass more than $100 million for his 2022 reelection campaign, and possibly for a 2024 Republican presidential run, he has quickened the pace of his attacks.

He has, among other things: limited what teachers can say in classrooms about race, gender and other topics and appointed anti-public education figures to his administration, including a QAnon supporter, and, as education commissioner, an employee of a charter school management organization. He has also legally empowered parents to sue school districts as part of his “parental rights” initiative and micromanaged and limited the power of local school districts.

In what his critics say is a revealing move about their educational intentions, DeSantis and Florida legislators routinely exempt charter and private/religious schools from many of the restrictions and actions they take against public school districts. For example, the law that restricts classroom discussions on gender and sex education — known as the Parental Rights in Education law — applies to a state statute dealing with school board powers, according to the Tampa Bay Times. The Florida Department of Education did not respond to a query about this.

DeSantis and his like-minded compatriots make no secret about wanting to privatize public education — arguably the country’s most important civic institution. Their “school choice” movement means expanding alternatives to public school district. They include charter schools — which are publicly funded but privately managed — as well as voucher and similar programs that use taxpayer money to pay for tuition and other costs at private and religious schools. These schools can legally discriminate against LGBTQ and other students and adults.

To these activists, public schools are not the mainstay of America’s democratic system of government that tries to instill civic values to students from different racial, ethnic and religious backgrounds. Rather, as the libertarian Cato Institute says on its website: “Government schooling often forces citizens into political combat. Different families have different priorities on topics ranging from academics and the arts to questions of morality and religion. No single school can possibly reflect the wide range of mutually exclusive views on these fundamental subjects.”
Critics say this mind-set rejects the notion that America is a melting pot that flourishes by the coming together of people from different places, backgrounds, races and religions. They also say that school “choice” efforts to use public funding for private and privately run education take vital resources away from the public districts that enroll the vast majority of the country’s schoolchildren.

They point out that the public has no way to hold private and many charter schools accountable, because their operations are not transparent. There is irony, they say, in the fact that the people pushing the “parental rights” movement seeking transparency in public school districts don’t demand it of nonpublic schools that they want funded with public funds.

Last year, DeSantis visited a Catholic school in Hialeah to sign a bill that greatly expanded voucher programs while reducing public oversight. Originally intended for students from low-income families, DeSantis’s administration now also allows vouchers to go to a family of four earning nearly $100,000.

He has also played a leading role in the right-wing movement to restrict what teachers can and can’t say in the classroom about subjects including race, racism, gender and sex education. On April 22, he signed into law the “Stop WOKE Act,” which limits how race-related topics can be discussed in public school classrooms and workplace training, while essentially accusing public school teachers of trying to indoctrinate students.

About three weeks earlier, on March 28, he signed what critics dubbed the “don’t say gay” bill that limits teachers from discussing sexual orientation or gender identity. While numerous similar bills have been considered in legislatures in years past, it was DeSantis who pushed through the first one to become law.

On April 15, his administration announced that it had rejected publisher-submitted math textbooks books for including passages his administration doesn’t like, including those it says are about critical race theory and social-emotional learning.

DeSantis’s appointments to his administration reveal his attitude about public education. On April 21, he nominated state Sen. Manny Diaz (R) — who works at an affiliate of Academica, a for-profit Miami-based charter school management firm — as the state’s new education commissioner. Diaz will almost certainly be approved by the Florida Board of Education.

Diaz — who is chief operating officer of Doral College, a private college owned by Academica — has been instrumental in the legislature in expanding charter school growth. Florida, where charter schools have virtually no oversight, has seen a raft of financial scandals related to the industry.

Ten days before appointing Diaz, DeSantis’s administration appointed Esther Byrd, an office manager at her husband’s law firm, to the Board of Education. Byrd has on social media expressed sympathy with QAnon beliefs and offered a defense of those “peacefully protesting” the confirmation of the 2020 presidential election on Jan. 6, 2021, when the U.S. Capitol was overrun by a pro-Trump mob. She has alluded to “coming civil wars.” According to the Florida Times-Union, she and her husband, state Rep. Cord Byrd (R), flew a QAnon flag on their boat.

DeSantis also appointed to the Board of Education radiologist Grazie Pozo Christie, a senior fellow for the Catholic Association who wrote an article a few years ago saying the best thing parents can do for their children is to take them out of public schools.


Last October, while discussing “parental rights” in education and touting mask-optional policies at a news conference, DeSantis invited Quisha King, a leader of the right-wing Moms for Liberty group, to join him. King has called for “a mass exodus from the public school system.”

During the pandemic, DeSantis became a leader among governors of the anti-mask movement when he issued a ban on mask mandates in public schools — and then proceeded to penalize districts that required masks in compliance with federal government recommendations. His administration withheld the salaries of some superintendents and school board members that defied him — prompting the Biden administration to promise to make up for the deficit. He has also backed a plan to withhold a total of $200 million in different funding from districts that angered him.

His wrath at local school boards that don’t do his bidding has blown apart the Republican Party’s traditional stance that local education is the business of local issues. In March, one of the bills he signed into law included a provision that limits local school board terms to 12 years — without asking local voters if that’s what they wanted.
He also established a charter school commissioner office inside the Florida Department of Education, which has the power to approve or reject applications for charter schools without local school district input. Even the National Association of Charter School Authorizers thought it was a bad idea, writing on its website:

“Once a school is approved, the Commission would have no other authorizing responsibilities and the local district would be required to do all other authorizing duties. This goes against national best practice. … This is a bad idea since research shows that an authorizer’s commitment and capacity are essential to strong charter schools.

Last June, the DeSantis administration intervened in a local decision by the Hillsborough County School Board, which met to discuss a dozen proposals to open charter schools or extend the operating agreements on others. After it voted to close four existing charters, it received a letter from the Florida Department of Education saying that unless it kept those schools open, it would lose millions of dollars in state funding.

Finally, whatever the governor’s reason, Florida was the last state to tell the U.S. Education Department how it intended to use $2.3 billion in federal American Rescue Plan funds, which had been approved by Congress to help public schools recover from the pandemic. The deadline for states to apply for the money was in June 2021. Months later, on Oct. 4, Ian Rosenblum, then deputy assistant secretary for policy and programs in the U.S. Education Department, sent a letter to the DeSantis administration noting that Florida’s delay in applying for the funding was creating “unnecessary uncertainty” for school districts that needed the cash. Florida filed it a few days later.

DeSantis’s star power in the school “choice” movement is such that one of its longtime leading figures, former education secretary Betsy DeVos — who has called public education a “dead end” — solicited DeSantis’s help to promote a petition in her home state of Michigan to establish a voucherlike program. She and her family have donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to DeSantis.

Categories Charter Schools, Education Industry, Evil, Florida, For-Profit, Funding, Racism, Religion, School Choice, Vouchers

Jeb Bush: Let’s Get Back to Destroying Public Schools

By dianeravitch
April 28, 2022 //
48

Say this for Jeb Bush: he is not dissuaded by failure. No matter how many studies show the failure of vouchers, he doesn’t care. No matter how many studies show that charter schools do not get better results than public schools, he doesn’t care. No matter how many grifters have drained millions through privatization of schools, he doesn’t care. No matter how little evidence he has for any of his proposals, he still pushes them.

His ideas are old and tired and incoherent. But count on him to package them as fresh and innovative, which they are not.

He is the male counterpart to Betsy DeVos.

He just cares about destroying public schools.

He wrote recently in The Miami Herald:

Last month marked two years since the pandemic swept across the country, causing the largest disruption to our nation’s education system in modern history. But at last, this spring brings an academic revival of sorts. Schools are remaining open, mask mandates are disappearing and plexiglass dividers between students in their classrooms are coming down.

In the rush to return to normal, we owe it to our nation’s children to emerge from this pandemic transformed, not by going backwards, but ready to forge a better future for them with all we’ve learned.

Our starting point is challenging. Prior to the pandemic, America’s public schools were struggling to serve the needs of students, and since the pandemic, a study by McKinsey found students have fallen months behind as a result of school closures and disruptions. There were severe impacts on student mental health, too. Pew Charitable Trusts found students are reporting significantly increased levels of grief, anxiety and depression.

It’s also no surprise that there’s a growing distrust in public education. A survey by Ipsos found trust in teachers declined during the pandemic, and there’s been a subsequent decrease in the number of students enrolling in public school.

Those are serious setbacks, but there are reasons for optimism. The pandemic put a spotlight on a myriad of possibilities for the future of education. Notably, it illustrated a desperate need by families for a broadened ecosystem of options for their children, with funding flexibility to create more equity in choice. And it elevated the power of parents to blaze new educational pathways for their children.

The Associated Press recently reported that homeschooling remains a popular choice for parents, despite schools reopening. And, private schools and public charter schools have witnessed increased enrollment. But choice, in and of itself, isn’t enough. Policymakers must continue to seek new ways to unbundle education systems, transforming old approaches into new and better learning options.

In Indiana, lawmakers, led by House Speaker Todd Huston, took the first step toward creating the nation’s first “parent-teacher compact” law. This innovative policy would allow parents to directly hire teachers. Educators would continue to be paid by the state and receive their health and retirement benefits, but this policy would enable parents and educators to enter into a peer-to-peer relationship to benefit individual students, without the hurdle of a district middleman. This individualized approach to education would give educators more freedom, families more flexibility and individual students the personalized experience they may need.

As we unbundle education, we need to reimagine all aspects of how education is delivered to students. One approach is enacting new part-time enrollment policies. Right now, students are defined by the school in which they’re enrolled.

Lawmakers can improve the education experience by allowing students to have more flexibility, whereby a student can enroll in their local public school and easily access a portion of their education funding to also enroll part-time in a private school, with an online provider, or engage in another learning experience that benefits the child’s education.

Another approach that complements unbundling is rethinking education transportation options. Last year, Gov. Doug Ducey awarded $18 million in grants to modernize Arizona’s K-12 transportation system, including direct-to-family grants to help close transportation gaps. In Oklahoma this year, Gov. Kevin Stitt proposed changing Oklahoma’s school transportation funding formula to expand how public school buses can serve students. And Florida’s Legislature recently passed legislation to create a new $15 million transportation grant program that encourages districts to create innovate approaches to school transportation, including carpooling and ride sharing apps, for both school-of-choice families and traditional school students.

Those are just a few examples, and we must continually look for more ways to unbundle and reimagine education. The pandemic saw an explosion of families, in all communities and from all demographics, embrace micro schools, homeschooling and customized learning pods. Rather than trying to limit these families, we should give them access to direct funds to further personalize and benefit their child’s out-of-school learning experience.

That’s what Gov. Brad Little has championed in Idaho. In response to school closures in 2020, Little used federal emergency COVID relief funds to provide direct grants to families to support students who were no longer learning in school. And this year, Little signed the Empowering Parents Grant Program into law, giving qualifying families up to $3,000 to use for tutoring, educational material, digital devices or internet connectivity….

Transforming our nation’s education system and ensuring students receive the individualized experience to unlock potential and lifelong success require continual forward momentum, especially after two years of disruptions. We have to keep moving, keep reimagining, keep transforming. This commitment to excellence is a point of pride for Florida.

Last year, Florida’s Legislature passed some of the most significant improvements and expansions to the state’s school-choice programs. And this year, lawmakers strengthened the charter school law, expanded the Florida Empowerment scholarship program, created a new financial literacy requirement for high school graduates and ensured parents are better informed of their child’s progress through online diagnostic progress monitoring and end-of-year summative tests.

This Pied Piper plays a tune meant to deceive. Ignore him.

Categories Bush, Jeb, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Disruption, Education Industry, Failure, Florida, For-Profit, School Choice, Vouchers

Ted Cruz: “School Choice is the Most Important Issue” of Our Time

By dianeravitch
April 26, 2022 //
35

The two most outspoken conservatives in Texas—Senator Ted Cruz and Governor Greg Abbott—are at odds in two races for the state legislature. Abbott is supporting the Republican incumbents. Cruz is supporting their challengers in the Republican primary.

The two grinches of the right are diverging because of one issue: school choice. Texas is already overrun with charter schools (mostly low-performing), but the legislature has opposed vouchers for private and religious schools for years.

“Sen. Cruz believes that school choice is the most important domestic issue in the country,” Cruz spokesperson Steve Guest said in a statement. “He doesn’t hesitate to endorse and support candidates in primaries that will fight for school choice across Texas.”

Some might think that climate change or the high cost of prescription drugs or high rates of child poverty was “the most important domestic issue in the country,” but not Senator Cruz.

His own children are enrolled at the elite St. John’s School in Houston, where tuition is about $30,000 annually. If Texas were to endorse vouchers, you can be sure that they wouldn’t be large enough for any student to attend St. John’s.

The broad concept of school choice is popular among Texas Republicans. In the March primary, 88% of voters approved of a ballot proposition that asked voters whether they agreed with the statement, “Texas parents and guardians should have the right to select schools, whether public or private, for their children, and the funding should follow the student.”

But the issue divides Republican lawmakers when it comes to school voucher programs, which would let parents use public money for private school education. Rural Republicans are often the most outspoken opponents, voicing concerns that such initiatives would hurt the public schools that are the lifeblood of their tightly knit communities.

The Texas House has long been a firewall against voucher proposals. During the last regular legislative session, the chamber voted 115-29 on a budget amendment to ban school vouchers, with a majority of Republicans siding with Democrats.

Our friends, Pastors for Texas Children, has led the fight against school choice, knowing that the vast majority of students in Texas are enrolled in underfunded public schools. PTC believes in separation of church and state, and they support public schools.

Categories Charter Schools, Education Industry, Texas, Vouchers
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