Archives for category: Vouchers
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

Jennifer Berkshire: Will “Parent Rights” Be a Winning Issue for the GOP?

By dianeravitch
December 15, 2021 //
35

Jennifer Berkshire wrote a fascinating article in The New Republic about the politics and history behind the “parent rights” issue. She reminds us that the issue came to a boil in the 1990s, as the GOP cynically seized upon it as a sure fire winner to motivate the base. And that it has an even longer history, as she shows.

Will it prove to be a winner for the GOP?

Republican candidate Glenn Youngkin jumped on the issue in the Virginia gubernatorial election, and he won.

Berkshire writes:

In Youngkin’s upset win, the GOP saw its path to forever rule. And it was lined with angry parents. In his election-night letter, dashed off as votes were still being counted, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy pledged to roll out a “Parents’ Bill of Rights” as a central plank of the GOP’s efforts to retake Congress in 2022 and the White House in 2024. Josh Hawley, who aspires to occupy that residence, announced his own rights bill, one that would “turn back efforts to shut parents out of their children’s education.” The Wall Street Journal made the new cause official: The GOP was now the “Parents’ Party.”

Republicans’ newfound passion for America’s parents has a straightforward explanation. As the Virginia victory demonstrated, parental rage can be mined for electoral gold. And right now parents have plenty of reasons to be unhappy. Pandemic schooling, with its arduous, unpredictable schedule of shutdowns and mandates, is in its third year, with no end in sight. Meanwhile, school districts are fumbling as they grapple with an array of contentious issues, including the appropriate way to teach about racism and how best to accommodate the needs of an increasingly diverse student body. The result has been an incendiary debate about not just what schools teach and how they’re run but whose voice really matters in those decisions.

This is not the first time parents’ grievances have been exploited for politics’ sake. Three decades ago, the GOP and a familiar line-up of conservative groups coalesced behind the same banner of parental rights. The cause even made it into the GOP’s Contract With America, the ambitious legislative agenda laid out by conservatives en route to flipping Congress in 1994. When Pat Buchanan launched his 1996 presidential bid, he declared himself the candidate of parents. “You have my solemn word,” Buchanan intoned on the stump in New Hampshire, a state he went on to win. “I will shut down the U.S. Department of Education, and parental right will prevail in our public schools again.”

And yet within a few years, the issue came to be seen as a stalking horse for the religious right’s agenda of dismantling public education, and it fizzled with surprising speed. Now, as conservatives once more wave the banner of parents’ rights, the sudden demise of a potent political issue 30 years ago offers some valuable lessons.

Once more, the GOP has grabbed the issue, this time to push their privatization agenda. If Democrats are wise, they will read Berkshire’s article and prepare for the GOP offensive. To do so, they must support public schools, unions, and public school teachers vigorously, instead of trying to cut a deal with charter schools, hedge fund donors, and enemies of unions.

Categories Elections, Parents, Privatization, Republicans, Vouchers

New Hampshire: State Commissioner Frank Edelblut Is Waging War Against Public Schools

By dianeravitch
December 9, 2021 //
12

The author of this article, Joe Shapiro, is a Democratic member of the state legislature in New Hampshire.

Conservative Republican Governor Chris Sununu appointed home-schooling parent Frank Edelblut as state Commissioner of Education. Edelblut has used his office to promote privatization, not only charters and vouchers, but for-profit schools, online schools, home schools, religious schools, and anything that anyone calls “education.”

Shapiro describes Edelblut’s latest salvos against public schools:

New post on Network for Public Education.

Joe Schapiro: Edelblut is waging war on education

Education Commissioner Frank Edelblut has been the face of a remarkable and alarming attack on public education in New Hampshire. This op-ed from Joe Schapiro outlines some of the actions of this pro-privatization official.

The commissioner gave his full-throated support to a school voucher program which, since being inserted into the budget and signed by the governor, is widely viewed as the most extreme in the country. Estimated to attract a handful of students at a minimal cost in its first year it is now 5,000 percent over budget, at a cost to taxpayers of approximately $8 million dollars for this year alone.

This fall the commissioner was the featured speaker at a meeting of the Government Integrity Project, an extreme right-wing organization that promotes unfounded reports of election fraud, organizes protests against the use of masks in schools, and disrupts school board meetings around the state.

Also this fall, the commissioner spoke to the Cheshire County Republican Committee. It is no coincidence that soon afterward, a small group of people attended the Chesterfield School Board meeting demanding all curriculum information and reading material used in classes in order to cleanse the school of teaching “divisive concepts.”

Now Commissioner Edelblut has added to the Department of Education website, a page that invites and encourages parents and students, to make complaints about their teachers under the thinly veiled guise of discrimination based on being made to feel guilty on account of being white. This is a naked act of incitement and a call to vigilantism against the very people whom we entrust to teach and care for our children.

Whether it’s defunding our schools, disrupting efforts to keep our students safe, censoring essential discussion about race, or supporting unfounded accusations against educators, Frank Edelblut supports them all.

Read the full op-ed here.

You can view the post at this link : https://networkforpubliceducation.org/blog-content/joe-schapiro-edelblut-is-waging-war-on-education/

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Deregulation, Education Industry, New Hampshire, Privatization, Religion, Vouchers

Texas: What Do Masks, Books, CRT, and Transgender Rights Have in Common?

By dianeravitch
December 9, 2021 //
105

Since this post was written in Texas by a Texan, you may have a clue about what these diverse phenomena have in common: They are sources of fear, anxiety, propaganda, and scare tactics used cynically to stir up the passions of voters. The article was written by Dr. Charles Luke of Pastors for Texas Children, a stalwart supporter of public schools.

Dr. Luke writes:

What do masks, library books, critical race theory (CRT), and transgender rights have in common? While this may sound like the beginning of a really bad joke, these are all issues that local school boards across the nation hear about frequently from their constituents. The concerns about these issues aren’t always expressed in the nicest ways, either. In fact, angry expressions over these issues have led to death threats and harassment, leading some school board members to request police protection or to resign their positions. Commonly dubbed “culture war issues” because they are highly politicized, school board disruption has gotten so bad that Saturday Night Live did a skit about it.

In Texas, it’s not just concerned citizens that are complaining. Politicians are cashing in on the fears of their right-wing base by issuing edicts, holding town halls, and leading charges against school districts. State Rep. Matt Krause, Chair of the House Committee on General Investigating, notified the Texas Education Agency that he is “initiating an inquiry into Texas school district content,” according to an article and an Oct. 25 letter obtained by The Texas Tribune. Krause included a list of 850 titles that he believes some people may find objectionable. Krause was then running for Texas Attorney General in a crowded field of candidates but has since dropped out.

Not to be outdone, Gov. Greg Abbott issued his own edict about library books – but to the wrong people. In a November 1, 2021 letter to the Texas Association of School Boards (TASB), he reminded the organization that their members have a collective responsibility to determine if obscene materials exist in school libraries and to remove any such content. When TASB Executive Director Dan Troxell informed Governor Abbott that TASB is merely a school trustee membership organization and has no regulatory authority over schools, Abbott responded by accusing the organization of abdicating their responsibility in the matter and directed the Texas Education Agency, the Texas State Library and Archives Commission, and the State Board of Education to address the issue by developing standards to “prevent the presence of pornography and obscene content in Texas public schools, including in school libraries.”

A rightwing think-tank (the Texans for Public Policy Priorities) has already sent out a fundraising appeal, hoping to raise $1.2 million dollars to institute what they call “massive education freedom reforms” by mobilizing 10,000 citizens in each of 60 legislative swing districts in order to “break the indoctrination of our children from Critical Race Theory, ‘gender fluidity’, and socialism.” TPPF claims to already have one donor that has provided $600,000 (rumored to be Tim Dunn of Empower Texans fame.

Read on to learn about the latest zany tactics of Texas Republicans, who are expert at campaigning on lies and fear.

The right-wingers have a goal: power. The power to destroy public schools and replace them with private alternatives.

These efforts in Texas follow a national push by extremist politics to take over school boards based on allegations that districts are teaching critical race theory. The Center for Renewing America, run by former Trump administration official Russ Vought, distributes a toolkit that encourages conservatives to “reclaim” their schools by taking over local school boards through campaigns focused on opposition to critical race theory. The Leadership Institute offers training on how far-right candidates can take over their school board and runs a program called Campus Reform which encourages students to “expose the leftist abuses on your campus” including the teaching of CRT.

Funded by wealthy donors and far-right-wing foundations, they seem to be having some success in Texas. In places like Cypress-Fairbanks ISD – the third-largest school district in the state – long-term and well-established trustees are being replaced over culture-war wedge issues like CRT. After a controversial “Resolution Condemning Racism” was approved by the board of trustees in September of 2020, Rev. John Ogletree – an African American – was defeated amidst allegations that the district was promoting CRT. Ogletree is the founder and pastor at the First Metropolitan Church in Houston, Texas, and the president of the board of Pastors for Texas Children (PTC) – a statewide public school advocacy group. Ogletree had been a member of the Cypress-Fairbanks ISD Board of Trustees since 2003.

Not everyone is silent about the far-right efforts. Rev. Charles Foster Johnson, Executive Director of PTC responded to the defeat of Ogletree by saying, “For Godly Christian servants like Rev. John Ogletree to be slandered with lies about his character is beyond outrageous. It is morally despicable. Rev. Ogletree is a faithful pastor who discharged his responsibility before God to call out racism. He did so with obedience and courage. It may come as a news flash to the morally confused folks at TPPF, but it is not racism to call racism for the sin it is: racism.”

According to staff writers for Reform Austin, “This appears to be a nationwide strategy by conservatives to take over school boards and cultivate a farm team of candidates for higher office.” If that’s the case, there could be plenty of opportunities for far-right candidates in 2022 to get elected. With several Texas Senators and over two-dozen House members deciding not to run again due to redistricting maps, the field could be wide open for ultra-conservative candidates launching campaigns on the back of these attacks on public schools.

What the right-wingers really want is to gin up enough anger towards public schools so that people will be willing to seek vouchers and abandon public schools. This might save money, but it would certainly be a nightmare for students and parents who want a quality education. The people stirring this pot against public schools harp on phony issues to advance privatization.

Take Governor Abbott (please). He has been Governor of Texas since 2015. Before that, he was State Attorney General from 2002 to 2015. Before that, he was on the Texas Supreme Court from 1996 to 2001. Is it credible that after 25 years in high public office, he just realized that school libraries are harboring pornography? Why didn’t he know that when he was the State Attorney General, or a member of the Supreme Court, or at some point earlier in his six years as Governor? Why, on the eve of the next gubernatorial election, did he just discover that school libraries are dangerous to young minds? Young minds are undoubtedly safer in the school library than they are at home on the Internet, where there is most certainly hardcore pornography. Will Governor Abbott tell parents to disconnect from the Internet? Of course not.

This whole propaganda campaign is a charade. It is not about making education better. It’s not about protecting youth from corrupting influences.

It is about creating a rationale to distribute public money to religious schools and private vendors.

Texans who want better education must stand up to the charlatans and drive them out of office. School boards elections are scheduled for December 13. Get out and vote for people who believe in education, reason, and thoughtfulness. Vote out the charlatans who want to destroy your schools.

Categories Education Industry, Elections, Fraud, Propaganda, Racism, Religion, Republicans, Separation of church and state, Texas, Vouchers

Steve Nelson: The Campaign to Destroy Public Education

By dianeravitch
November 23, 2021 //
24

Steve Nelson, a retired educator, describes the calculated and underhanded effort to destroy public education, a ruse that proceeds by stealth and loaded language.

He begins:

The same fine folks who brought us the Critical Race Theory (CRT) scare tactic to win the Virginia gubernatorial election are now poised to bring our public education system to its knees and then put it out of its misery.

In an alarming New York Times column, Michelle Goldberg recounts an exchange with Christopher Rufo, the manipulative wizard behind the weaponizing of CRT for broad political purposes.  Rufo gleefully admits that the CRT gambit, combined with widespread pandemic frustration, provides a perfect storm for completion of the decades-long conservative goal of weakening and effectively eliminating “government schools.”

Conservatives have similarly weaponized the phrase “government schools” as an emotional trigger intended to disingenuously characterize public schools as institutional agents of a sinister plot to indoctrinate children into a socialist, anti-religion agenda that violates parental rights, freedom of choice and traditional values.  That none of this is true is of no consequence to the likes of Rufo or other conservatives.  An example of Rufo’s propaganda landed on my desktop as I wrote this post, fresh from his Twitter account: 

Language tip: school choice advocates should always say “scholarships” instead of “vouchers.” It gives a connotation of opportunity and forces our opponents to take the unenviable position of denying scholarships to families and children.

This calculated campaign gives fresh energy to persistent efforts to divert billions of tax dollars into religious education, voucher schemes and charter schools.  Despite all the claims made by charter advocates, study after study shows that public schools do as well or better than charters, even by the relatively meaningless metric of test scores.

The pandemic has turbocharged the school choice movement by also mobilizing anti-mask and anti-vaccine sentiments.  In communities all through the nation, efforts to follow public health protocols have subjected school officials to attacks, up to and including death threats.   The few school systems that have begun to offer vaccinations are under vicious attack for supposedly sacrificing innocent children to a government campaign to impose unproven medical treatments.

These falsehoods run in tandem with local and state elections for school boards and state legislatures.  The evidence is rapidly mounting that this mandate for parental “rights” will spawn new voucher legislation and other school choice measures in unprecedented numbers.   Dissatisfaction with pandemic online programs, mask policies and the myth of CRT training has already led to drops of 4-5% enrollment in New York City and other major public school systems.  These students are migrating to the charter school of choice, Christian schools, or homeschooling, whichever is most consistent with the parents’ “beliefs,” whether rational, mythical or ignorant.  

Inform yourself! Open the link and read the rest.

Categories Charter Schools, Democracy, Disruption, Education Reform, Privatization, Vouchers

Peter Greene: Ranking States by Their Hostility to Public Education

By dianeravitch
November 21, 2021 //
32

Peter Greene realized that supporters of public education have been lacking the very thing that catches the attention of the public and the media: reports backed by data. Especially reports that rank states as “the worst” and “the best.”

Greene’s Curmudgation Institute constructed rubrics to rate the states and developed the Public Education Hostility Index. He has created a website where he defines his methodogy and goes into detail about the rankings.

The #1 ranking, as the state most hostile to public education, is Florida.

The state least hostile to public education is Massachusetts.

Where does your state rank? Open the link and find out.

Categories Accountability, Bush, Jeb, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Corruption, Disruption, Education Reform, Florida, Funding, Massachusetts, Privatization, School Choice, Standardized Testing, Teachers and Teaching, Vouchers

Michelle Goldberg: Democrats Must Fix Public Schools Or…

By dianeravitch
November 21, 2021 //
11

Michelle Goldberg is a regular columnist for the New York Times. In this post, she says that Republicans are cynically exploiting parents’ exhaustion with pandemic measures and fears of Criticsl Race Theory to undermine public schools and replace them with school choice: charters and vouchers. Democrats have traditionally been the party of public schools. Now it’s time for them to remember that.

She writes:

Last Wednesday morning, Christopher Rufo, the architect of the right-wing crusade against critical race theory, sent me a message asking if I wanted to talk, I suppose because I was one of the first people to write about his project back in February. He was feeling triumphant.

A year ago, few conservatives outside of academia had heard of critical race theory, a graduate school approach to the study of race and power. Now it’s become a central issue in Republican politics, helping to fuel Glenn Youngkin’s victorious gubernatorial campaign in Virginia.

“I’ve unlocked a new terrain in the culture war, and demonstrated a successful strategy,” said Rufo, a documentary filmmaker-turned-conservative activist. With that done, he was getting ready for a new phase of his offensive.

“We are right now preparing a strategy of laying siege to the institutions,” he said. In practice, this means promoting the traditional Republican school choice agenda: private school vouchers, charter schools and home-schooling. “The public schools are waging war against American children and American families,” he said. Families, in turn, should have “a fundamental right to exit.”

Democrats need to take this coming onslaught seriously. The school choice movement is old — it’s often dated back to a 1955 essay by Milton Friedman. But Covid has created fertile ground for a renewed push.

As many have pointed out, the reason education was such an incendiary issue in the Virginia governor’s race likely had less to do with critical race theory than with parent furyover the drawn-out nightmare of online school. Because America’s response to Covid was so politically polarized, school shutdowns were longest in blue states, and Virginia’s was especially severe; only six states had fewer in-person days last year.

“The failure of our leadership to prioritize public education in Virginia is what’s created this firestorm,” said Christy Hudson, one of the founders of the Fairfax County Parents Association, which grew out of a pro-reopening group that formed in the summer of 2020. Critical race theory, she said, “has certainly added flames to that fire,” but “this is 19 months in the making.”

Across the country, the shutdowns have contributed to an exodus from public schools. In Fairfax County, for example, public school enrollment is down by more than 10,000students since before the pandemic, a 5.5 percent decrease. Enrollment in New York City public schools declined by 4.5 percent, about 50,000 students. In California, public school enrollment decreased by 3 percent, or 160,000 students, the largest drop in 20 years. Because school budgets are partly dependent on head counts, these missing students could lead to severe cuts, making public schools even less attractive.

In an environment like this, Republican proposals to subsidize private school tuition are likely to be received gratefully by many parents. It’s a perilous situation for Democrats, the party of public schools. If they want to stanch the bleeding, they should treat the rollout of the children’s Covid vaccine as an opportunity to make public schools feel lively and joyful again.

Public schools may finally be open across the country, but in many districts, things are far from normal. In Fairfax County, an unvaccinated student identified as a “close contact” of someone who tests positive for Covid must quarantine for 14 days, no matter the results of the student’s own Covid tests. At some schools, students have been forbidden to talk during lunch. At my own kids’ school, students must be masked even during outdoor recess.

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, wants to see outdoor masking ended as a first step toward unwinding other Covid restrictions. “The C.D.C. has been clear that everyone can unmask outside unless they’re in close contact with each other,” she said. “And I believe that schools should be doing this for recess. And I believe we need to give parents and teachers a road map to what it takes to start undoing the mitigations. It was clear that vaccines for teachers helped us reopen schools. Maybe it’s vaccines for kids helping us get to unmasking of teachers and kids in schools.”

Other post-Covid problems are harder to solve than masks. In Michigan, schools have been forced to close because of staff shortages. “Workers in short-staffed departments are shouldering more work, students have been denied bus rides to get to school, special education students are going without one-to-one aides, classrooms are doubled up and principals are acting as substitutes as pools of candidates dwindle,” reported The Detroit Free Press. This is a complicated problem, but it’s up to the state’s Democratic governor, as well as the Biden administration, to solve it, for their own sake as well as that of their constituents.

Rufo readily admits that school closures prepared the ground for the drive against critical race theory. “You have a multiracial group of parents that felt like the public school bureaucracies were putting their children through a policy regime of chaos, with Covid and shutdowns, and then pumping them full of left-wing racialist ideologies,” he said. He’s right about the first part, even if the second is a fantasy.

Now Democrats have a choice. They can repair the public schools, or watch people like Rufo destroy them.

Categories Charter Schools, Democrats, Republicans, School Choice, Vouchers

Bruce Baker Reviews a Deceptive Voucher Proposal for New York

By dianeravitch
November 20, 2021 //
8

Bruce Baker, an expert on school finance at Rutgers University, dissects a proposal for vouchers (“education savings accounts”) offered by the Manhattan Institute, a rightwing think tank. Writing for the National Education Policy Center, he concludes that the proposal was poorly thought out and loaded with negative consequences.

He wrote:

The Manhattan Institute’s report promotes Education Savings Accounts (ESAs) by demonstrating that taxpayer expense would fall if the program motivated families to move children from public schools funded by the state to private schools funded primarily by families. However, the report conveniently fails to note a large body of recent, rigorous research demonstrating that similar private school choice, or “voucher,” programs have had significant negative effects on student outcomes. In addition, the report overstates short-term reductions that local districts can achieve, and it sidesteps potential long-term harm to adequate funding for them. Thus, the report provides little or no useful guidance on the broader question of whether an ESA policy is desirable or would be good policy for New York State’s children or taxpayers.

Categories Education Industry, New York, School Choice, Vouchers

Billy Townsend: Voucher Grifters, Take Mary McLeod Bethune’s Good Name Out of Your Mouths

By dianeravitch
November 19, 2021 //
19

Billy Townsend is outraged that the Florida’s voucher industry has the nerve to name its new super voucher program after one of the nation’s (and Florida’s) greatest civil rights leaders.

He writes that Mary McLeod Bethune:

…would look at Florida’s corrupt, failed, and yet lavishly-funded low income school voucher programs with disgust.

She would marvel and protest the squandered voucher billions in corporate tax shelter money and direct tax money. She would object to Doug Tuthill and Step Up for Students getting rich through massive commissions, while scamming millions of kids and building no meaningful private capacity to provide quality education to low income children — or anyone else. She would ask: how does anyone whose heavily segregated, low income voucher programs have two- and three-year drop out rates of 60 and 75 percent have a job?

Mary McLeod Bethune would look with horror at the voucher betrayal of the descendants of her first students. She would not want thousands of black Florida children chased by useless public school testing into brutally substandard, unaccredited, unsupervised, segregated “schools,” which is what Florida’s voucher programs provide. She would not want her name associated with such failure, grift, and incompetence….

Astonishingly, Step Up for Students and various Florida grifters, the people who created and maintain this colossal racist voucher grift, have made it much worse in the last year. They are now desperately trying to launder their failure and incompetence by putting Mary McLeod Bethune’s name on Florida’s disastrous new super voucher grift pot of money.

They’re trying to Bethune-wash.

But I assure you, in 2021 America, Mary McLeod Bethune would not want her good name attached to “Preparing the Way Academy” in Lakeland …

Or “A’Kelynn’s Angels Christian Academy” in Winter Haven, where the state shut down a Pre-K of the same name because it was substandard, but the voucher grift rolls on unabated….

Step Up for Students is the unelected state School Board for vouchers. But it performs no oversight — at all. It just hands out checks and pockets commission.

Last legislative session, Step Up worked closely with Florida legislators like Kelli Stargel and Gov. Ron DeSantis to destroy the well-established Gardiner and McKay voucher programs for children with disabilities. While those programs — particularly Gardiner — had some grifty problems, they also functioned a million times better than the atrocity of unsupervised grift that is Florida’s low income voucher program.

Florida’s GOP-dominated government, in its corrupt wisdom, took these functioning programs, and threw them together with low income vouchers with one giant super-voucher pot of grift.

The effect of this is to funnel tax money and tax-sheltered corporate donations away from children with disabilities and to the operators of segregated scam schools like Preparing the Way, A’kelynn’s Angels, and Endtimes Christian School of Excellence.

On top of that, Step Up has thoroughly botched implementation of the new super-voucher grift pot. Parents of kids with disabilities, who were told they would still get Gardiner and McKay-like vouchers for services, are finding Step Up is too incompetent to deliver…

William Mattox and Doug Tuthill: Critical Race Theorists

Tuthill and company want to name the super voucher pot of grift after Florida’s greatest educator and racial freedom activist. They want to use her honored memory as a shield.

Mired in a systemic meltdown entirely of their own making, reflecting their own greed and incompetence, Tuthill and Step Up are doing what they always do when they get in trouble. They’re retreating to their long-standing, hard core version of “Critical Race Theory.” It goes like this:

If you’re a parent — of any kind — who likes quality public schools or quality state-funded services for disabilities — and you don’t want resources diverted from those services so grifters can scam families of color at scale, you’re the real racist.

This CRT has worked many times for Tuthill before. It’s been the refrain of the entire Jeb Bush era. The shameless appropriation of Mary McLeod Bethune is just the latest incarnation…

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

New Hampshire: Critics Worry that New Voucher Program Lacks Accountability, Especially for Students with Disabilities

By dianeravitch
November 11, 2021 //
10

With the encouragement of Governor Sununu, the Republican-dominated legislature of New Hampshire authorized a voucher program. Critics are fearful that there is little accountability for how the money is spent. The organization that will administer the program is very pleased.

A report by InDepthNJ.org reported on a meeting of the state education board. The state commissioner Frank Edelblut is a home-schooling parent who has been advocating for vouchers since he was appointed by Sununu.

Vouchers 

The board… heard from people about the rules proposed for “education freedom accounts,” or vouchers.

Several people testifying said the rules needed to be tightened up to better address the potential for abuse, that there is little in the way of accountability for how state taxpayer money is spent.

“I hope you ensure the program is going to the purpose which you have stated,” said Manchester Board of School Committee member Jim O’Connell. “I worry about people abusing the system and use state funds for improper purposes.”

Hawkins noted there are areas where “more guardrails are needed,” adding an awful lot of authority is given to a third-party organization. The Children’s Scholarship Fund New Hampshire is administering the program.

Hawkins also raised the issue of income limits and under the current proposal, once a family qualifies, their income can increase beyond the limit and their student would still receive state aid money.

And he said the board needs to clarify what happens if someone fails a background check under the program, and he urged the board to support changes in the law to deal with its shortcomings.

Attorney Gerald Zelin, representing the New Hampshire Association of Special Education Administrators, said the rules need to clarify what rights a special education student would lose under a “parental placement” to participate in the program.

He said he knows the board is waiting for a ruling by the federal government, but its opinion has not been followed by the courts. Under the provision, special education students participating in the program would have to give up their rights to special services.

He was also concerned the rules allow families to bypass the state special education qualifying protocols, instead allowing a physician in any state to diagnose a student with a disability and be able to receive a higher amount of state aid.

The new program did have support from Kate Baker Demers, the executive director of the Children’s Scholarship Fund New Hampshire.

She praised the board and the department for getting the program up and running in such a short time so it could aid students and parents this school year.

“The rules provide rigorous guidance for operating the program,” she told the board.

While Education Commissioner Frank Edelblut predicted less than 100 children would take advantage of the program the first year, 1,635 students were approved at a cost of about $8 million. The money comes from the Education Trust Fund which is used to provide state aid to public education.

Program supporters say it will allow parents to find the most appropriate education for their child, and will, over time, save taxpayers money.

But opponents believe it will harm public schools, allow state money to be used for religious schools with little to no oversight and will allow private and religious schools to discriminate against students with greater educational needs.

Under the new law, a parent seeking to establish an account, would receive between $4,500 to $8,500 per pupil to spend on tuition to any private, religious or alternative school and on other related educational costs including home schooling, computers, books etc.

The student’s parents would receive the basic state adequacy grant of about $3,700 as well as additional money if the student qualified for free or reduced lunches, special education services, English as a Second Language instruction, or failed to reach English proficiency.

The average grant is estimated to be $4,600.

The program is open to the parents of a student in public —traditional and charter —  private or religious school, home schooling or other alternative educational programs.

Parents’ income would have to be below about $80,000 a year for a family of four to participate.

Edelblut has been a vocal supporter of the program, which also has the backing of Gov. Chris Sununu.

Garry Rayno may be reached at garry.rayno@yahoo.com.

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, New Hampshire, Vouchers

Bill Phillis: Ohio’s Slick and Dirty Trick

By dianeravitch
October 31, 2021 //
14

Bill Phillis is a retired state deputy commissioner of education who is dedicated to the preservation and improvement of public schools in Ohio. He has dedicated his retirement years to publicizing the harm that vouchers and charters do to public schools. He founded the Ohio Coalition for Equity and Adequacy. The Ohio State Constitution guarantees a uniform system of public schools, a commitment that the Republicans who control the state have repeatedly violated with impunity.

The latest gambit from the Republican privatizers called “the backpack bill,” symbolizing the idea that each child has a “backpack full of cash” to spend in any way their family chooses. They really need to see the wonderful documentary “Backpack Full of Cash.” You can rent the documentary and show it in your community.

Phillis writes:

THE OHIO UNIVERSAL VOUCHER CAMPAIGNERS USE CRITICAL RACE THEORY TO ENTICE FOLKS TO SUPPORT HB290 (UNIVERSAL VOUCHERS) IN A SLICK MAILER


The HB290 crusaders have produced and sent a fundraising mailer signed by one Aaron Baer to an undisclosed list of folks. The seven-page letter warns recipients that public schools are indoctrinating our children into radical anti-Christian ideology, “Critical Race Theory, and trans advocacy”. “They are being trained to hate America”, the letter says. They evidently combed through the classrooms of Ohio and found 4 students whose teachers were doing something that hinted at support for CRT or other controversial issues. They didn’t mention the 100,000 plus public school educators that are working selflessly to grow upstanding citizens.
The author of the letter makes such revealing statements as:

  • “…many of Ohio’s public schools have been failing our students for more than a generation.”
  • “…I initiated the Backpack Bill (HB290)…” (A couple legislators who sponsored the bill indicate they initiated the bill.)
  • “…The Backpack Bill ensures every Ohio student can have access to high quality education…”
  • The P.S. to the letter includes the statement, “Ohio students are trapped in failing public schools…”

The Backpack voucher campaigners are perpetuating the myth of the “failing public school monopoly” as a key plank in their campaign platform.

Public school advocates, who believe HB290 is too extreme to pass, need to wake up.

Follow the link to read the 8 Lies About Private School Vouchershttps://vouchershurtohio.com/8-lies-about-private-school-vouchers/

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


Photo Credit: Jeanne Melvin


The No Child Left Behind Act Has Put The Nation At RiskVouchers Hurt Ohio

William L. Phillis | Ohio Coalition for Equity & Adequacy of School Funding | 614.228.6540 |ohioeanda@sbcglobal.net| http://ohiocoalition.orgSign up for our newsletter!

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Lies, Ohio, Resistance, Vouchers
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »