 REGISTER NOW FOR 2/24 WEBINAR:Litigating Against Private School Vouchers Join Education Law Center and Public Funds Public Schools on Wednesday, February 24, from 3:00-4:30 p.m. EST for a webinar, “Litigating Against Private School Vouchers.” During the webinar, experienced attorneys will discuss lawsuits challenging private school voucher programs and other diversions of public funds to private education in state and federal courts. Moderator: Bacardi Jackson, Southern Poverty Law Center Panelists:Alice O’Brien, National Education Association Christopher Wood, Robbins Geller Rudman & Dowd Tamerlin Godley, Paul Hastings Jessica Levin, Education Law Center Register for Litigating Against Private School Vouchers If you have any questions about the webinar, please contact Nicole Ciullo at nciullo@edlawcenter.org. |
Archives for category: Vouchers
Eve Ewing is a writer and scholar whose work I very much admire. When her book Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago’s South Side was published in 2018, I called it the best book of the year. Today, however, she published an article in the New York Times about charter schools that completely misses the point about the damage that charter schools do to public schools.
Basically, she says we should be happy whenever any school–whether public or charter–provides a good education. That is what I believed when I was an advocate for charter schools from the late 1980s until about 2007. It was then that I realized that charter schools were not producing better outcomes than public schools and were diverting money and the students they wanted from public schools. The more I learned about charter operators, their billionaire benefactors, their drive for money and power, and the corruption associated with their lack of accountability, the more I realized that this nation needs a strongly resourced, equitable, and excellent public school system. After thirty years of directing funding to charter schools, we have seen no systemic change of the kind that both Eve and I want.
The overwhelming majority of children in the United States attend public schools (only 6% attend charter schools). Public schools in many states are underfunded and have been since at least 2008–and some for even longer. When states authorize charter schools, they do not increase education funding. The funding pie does not grow. It is divided.
Some districts are in danger of being obliterated by charter operators: think New Orleans, which no longer has any public schools. New Orleans is supposedly the North Star of the charter lobby, but New Orleans today is as segregated and stratified as it was before Hurricane Katrina, and its academic performance is below the state average in one of the nation’s lowest performing states on NAEP.
Eve’s is the first article I have ever seen that celebrated the CREDO finding that only 19% of charter schools get higher test scores than public schools. She says, “Good for the 19%!” But what about the 81% of charter schools receiving public funds that are worse or no better than public schools? Those children and their parents were lured by false promises.
Her article does not acknowledge that many of the most “successful” charter schools are notorious for their disproportionately low numbers of students who are English language learners or have special needs. Nor does it note the high attrition rates or entry standards that winnow out the hardest-to-educate students, like the BASIS schools in Arizona and Texas, which regularly top lists of “best high schools” in the nation. BASIS requires its students to pass multiple AP exams in order to graduate and has high numbers of white and Asian-American students in a state with large numbers of Hispanic and Native American students. When Carol Burris reviewed the BASIS charters in Arizona in 2017, she found that the students at its 18 schools were 83% white and Asian in a state where those groups were 42% of the students in the state.
Eve completely ignores the recent explosion of voucher legislation in Red states. In the 2020 election, Republicans strengthened their control of state legislatures, which have now prioritized creating or expanding vouchers to pay for private and religious schools, for-profit schools, homeschooling, and whatever else parents want to spend public money on. Charters encourage consumerism, making schools a consumer choice rather than a civic good that we are all responsible to fund equitably. Charters pave the way for school choice, including vouchers.
Vouchers in Florida are subsidizing religious schools to the tune of $1 billion a year; voucher schools are completely unaccountable and they are allowed to discriminate against gay students and families and any other group they don’t like. Their textbooks teach creationism, racism, and religious dogma.
The photograph that accompanies her article–for which she is not responsible–features a KIPP school and says that KIPP runs more than 250 schools. Do we really want our public schools to be run by private corporations? Should parents who are unhappy with their school be satisfied to be told “leave and choose a different school”?
As I said at the outset, Eve today is expressing the same views I held 20-30 years ago, so I understand where she is coming from. She wants every school to be a great school. So do I.
She writes that parents:
want their kid to learn a language, study the arts, have a clean building, and books in the library.
What would it look like if we built an education policy agenda dedicated to ensuring those resources for all students? Not just the students who win a lottery, but the students who lose, or who never get to enter because they’re homeless or their families are dealing with substance abuse, and the adults in their lives don’t have the information or resources to participate in a school choice “market?” What if our system was built not to reward innovation for the few, but rights for the many?
What if we insisted that all our schools, for all our children, should be safe and encouraging places? What if our new secretary of education, Miguel Cardona, focused on a plan as audacious as the New Deal, as well-funded as the war on drugs, dedicated to an all-hands-on-deck effort to guarantee every child an effective learning environment? What if we as a society pursued the dream of great schools not through punishment (as in No Child Left Behind), and not through competition (as with Race to the Top) but through the provision of essential resources?
Are we likely to reach those goals if states are funding charter schools, voucher schools, home schooling, for-profit corporations, virtual charter schools, and education entrepreneurs? That in fact is where the current drive for more choice is heading. Multiple state legislatures are solely focused on school choice, not funding. Red states in particular start with charters, then move on to some form of public subsidy for religious and private schools. The U.S. Supreme Court is poised to approve the public funding of religious schools and to obliterate the “wall of separation between church and state.” Will the states increase their funding to account for the funding of all students now attending non-public schools?
Eve Ewing has a powerful voice. I wish she would rethink her message and acknowledge that the only way to achieve her vision is by funding and improving the only schools that admit all children and that are subject to civil rights laws and public accountability: Our democratically governed public schools.
Curt Cardine of the Grand Canyon Institute has calculated the cost of the proposed Arizona voucher proposal, which would give public money for private choices to the overwhelming majority of students in the state. If the proposal passes, even if relatively few students take vouchers, it will defund every school district in the state. The public schools of Arizona, already underfunded, will take yet another hit from a state that refuses to pay to educate its children.
Cardine has a 45-year career in education; he has worked in both public and charter schools. He has documented the ripoff of public school funding by unscrupulous entrepreneurs. Please read his book Carpetbagging America’s Public Schools: The Radical Reconstruction of American Public Education. And his book Schooling Alone: The Cost of Privatizing Public Education.
In the attachments, Cardine shows how much money each school district in Arizona is likely to lose, using the most conservative estimates.
Politicians in New York City and New York State eagerly seek the endorsement of the ultra-orthodox Hasidic community because it tends to vote as a bloc, favoring whoever supports their interests. One of their highest goals is to make sure that their religious schools are free of any state mandates. Andrew Yang has emerged as the leading defender of the yeshivas and their “right” not to provide a secular education.
An investigation of yeshivas by New York City officials that started in 2015 wasn’t completed until 2019. The investigation was prompted as a result of complaints by a group of yeshiva graduates called YAFFED (Young Advocates for Fair Education), led by Naftuli Moser. YAFFED said that some yeshivas failed to teach basic secular subjects such as English, science, and mathematics, leaving their students unprepared to enter secular society. YAFFED accused Mayor de Blasio of slowing down the investigation to placate his allies in the politically powerful Orthodox Jewish community.
In 2018, the New York Times ran an opinion piece by a graduate of a yeshiva complaining that all of his schooling had been taught in Yiddish or Hebrew, leaving him with no skills for the modern economy.
I was raised in New York’s Hasidic community and educated in its schools. At my yeshiva elementary school, I received robust instruction in Talmudic discourse and Jewish religious law, but not a word about history, geography, science, literature, art or most other subjects required by New York State law. I received rudimentary instruction in English and arithmetic — an afterthought after a long day of religious studies — but by high school, secular studies were dispensed with altogether.
The language of instruction was, for the most part, Yiddish. English, our teachers would remind us, was profane.
During my senior year of high school, a common sight in our study hall was of students learning to sign their names in English, practicing for their marriage license. For many, it was the first time writing their names in anything but Yiddish or Hebrew.
When I was in my 20s, already a father of three, I had no marketable skills, despite 18 years of schooling. I could rely only on an ill-paid position as a teacher of religious studies at the local boys’ yeshiva, which required no special training or certification. As our family grew steadily — birth control, or even basic sexual education, wasn’t part of the curriculum — my then-wife and I struggled, even with food stamps, Medicaid and Section 8 housing vouchers, which are officially factored into the budgets of many of New York’s Hasidic families.
Leonie Haimson, executive director of Class Size Matters, reported that the yeshivas “receive hundreds of millions of dollars in government funding, through federal programs like Title I and Head Start and state programs like Academic Intervention Services and universal pre-K. For New York City’s yeshivas, $120 million comes from the state-funded, city-run Child Care and Development Block Grant subsidy program: nearly a quarter of the allocation to the entire city.”
When the state or city says that the yeshivas should provide an education for their students that is “substantially equivalent” to secular education, their leaders cry “separation of church and state!” But, inconsistently, their representatives in the legislature actively lobby for tuition tax credits and vouchers. They want the state’s money but not its oversight of the education they provide.
Only two out of 28 yeshivas investigated by the city’s Department of Education were deemed to be providing an education “substantially equivalent“ to that given at secular public schools, with another nine on their way to providing it, according to the city’s report on the long-delayed investigation into failing yeshivas.
The group Young Advocates for Fair Education, or YAFFED, lodged complaints against 39 yeshivas it deemed failing in 2015, which is when the city ostensibly began its investigation. After years of delay, the city narrowed its scope to only 28 of the schools. The DOE finished its visits to those schools this year, according to a letter schools Chancellor Richard Carranza sent to Shannon Tahoe, the interim state education commissioner, on
Out of those 28 schools, the DOE said only two were found to be substantially equivalent to legally mandated secular education standards; nine schools were found to be moving toward substantial equivalency; 12 were cited as “developing in their provision of substantially equivalent instruction,” and another five were deemed “underdeveloped in demonstrating or providing evidence of substantially equivalent instruction.
Some yeshivas refused to allow the investigators to enter.
Now comes an election for Mayor in 2021, and Andrew Yang is a prominent candidate.
Yang has made a point of siding with the Orthodox community and defending their “right” to ignore state curriculum standards (e.g., teaching secular subjects like mathematics and science in English, not Hebrew or yiddish). Consequently, he has become a favorite among the leaders of the Ultra-Orthodox community. Yang has made a point of his support for parent’s freedom to choose any kind of education they want.
As other candidates danced around the subject, Yang offered a blunt defense of the embattled Jewish private schools. “I do not think we should be prescribing a curriculum unless that curriculum can be demonstrated to have improved impact on people’s career trajectories and prospects,” Yang said.
He added, pointing to his own month-long Bible course at a Westchester prep school: “I do not see why we somehow are prioritizing secular over faith-based learning.”
The stance rankled some education advocates, who pointed to a 2019 report that found just a fraction of yeshivas were providing students with adequate secular instruction. Other observers described the comments, which echoed a similar answer recently given to The Forward by Yang, as a transparent attempt to curry favor with the Hasidic voting bloc.
This is a transparently disingenuous response, since studying the Bible as literature for a month is very different from religious indoctrination and studying almost all subjects in Hebrew or Yiddish. Certainly this does not prepare young people to enter the modern economy with the skills they need. (Apparently, Yang attended public high school in Somers, New York, in Westchester County, then the private Phillips Exeter in Massachusetts.)
“It’s like a horse race where one horse comes from last to near the top,” one leader in the Orthodox community, who asked for anonymity in order to speak candidly, told Gothamist. While Eric Adams and Scott Stringer were previously seen as the front-runner candidates, “nobody expected we’d even look at this guy,” the source added of Yang. “All of a sudden it’s ‘Whew!’ He’s certainly in that first tier pool of candidates.”
On Twitter, both the Satmar and Bobov, two of Brooklyn’s most influential Hasidic dynasties, have referred to Yang’s comments as “refreshing.” The head of New York government relations for Agudath Israel, an umbrella organization for Haredi Orthodox synagogues, also commended the candidate on Thursday.
The recent comments mark a shift from an answer Yang gave to Politico last month, in which he suggested that schools not meeting baseline standards should be investigated. In the time since, the outlet noted, the campaign has hired the Borough Park District Leader David Schwartz as director of Jewish Community Outreach.
“The things he’s saying echo with great precision what the pro-yeshiva groups are saying,” another source in the Orthodox community told Gothamist. “He’s very carefully putting these talking points out there.”
Yang defended his stance at a forum moderated by Randi Weingarten:
Gracie Mansion hopeful Andrew Yang on Thursday mounted an extraordinary defense of the Big Apple’s embattled yeshiva schools, telling a Jewish mayoral forum that the city has little business “prescribing” secular curriculum to the religious institutions.
Yang made the comments during a virtual New York City mayoral forum hosted by the New York Jewish Agenda after moderator Randi Weingarten asked him: “As mayor, how would you ensure that every child receives what the New York state Constitution calls a sound basic education on secular topics, including not just the public schools, but including the yeshivas and other religious schools.”
“When I looked at the yeshiva question, Randi, the first thing I wanted to see were — what were the outcomes, what is the data,” Yang responded.
The tech entrepreneur and a leading Democratic front-runner in the mayoral race, continued, “I do not think we should be prescribing a curriculum unless that curriculum can be demonstrated to have improved impact on people’s career trajectories and prospects afterwards.”
Yang’s remarks fly in the face of a damning 2019 report by the Department of Educationon yeshiva schools in the city that found that just two of 28 provided adequate secular education to their students.
“If a school is delivering the same outcomes, like, I do not think we should be prescribing rigid curricula,” said Yang who then spoke of his experience in high school.
“I will also say that when I was in public school we studied the Bible for a month. Bible as literature,” he said. “If it was good enough for my public school, I do not see why we somehow are prioritizing secular over faith-based learning.”
Andrew Yang is a cynical opportunist.
The New Hampshire House decided to hold off for a year with the universal voucher bill, that would funnel public money to religious schools, home schoolers, and anyone else who wants public money. However, the State Senate is barreling ahead with the same legislation.
On Thursday, February 18, the House Education Committee unanimously voted to retain HB 20, the statewide voucher bill, delaying further action until next year.
Moments later, the Senate announced a public hearing for SB 130, a nearly identical bill, on Tuesday, March 2, 2021. Both bills would create the most expansive voucher program in the country, and SB 130 would cost the state $100 million in new state spending in its first year alone.
The public fiercely opposed HB 20 during the public hearing, noting that the bill included no protections for students, less transparency and oversight of taxpayer dollars, and almost no accountability for ensuring that programs funded by taxpayer dollars would be used appropriately or effectively.
Altogether, 5,218 people signed on in opposition to the bill and 1,107 signed on in support over the course of the two-part hearing, which began on February 2 and had to continue the following week due to unprecedented turnout.
SB 130 is nearly identical to the original HB 20, and would give families between $3,700 and $8,400 per student per year in taxpayer-funded “Education Freedom Accounts,” or vouchers, to pay for private school tuition, homeschooling expenses, computers, and other education-related costs.
“Our communities continue to struggle under the weight of an inequitable and inadequate school funding system, but this legislature continues to pursue an agenda that will divert resources away from our public schools and communities,” said Christina Pretorius, Policy Director at Reaching Higher NH. “Granite Staters have made it clear that they would rather be talking about expanding opportunities for all of our children, offering property tax relief, and investing in our communities, instead of siphoning off state funds for private education and downshifting costs to cities and towns,” she said.
The public hearing for SB 130 will be held on Tuesday, March 2, 2021 at 9 AM. Members of the public can register their support or opposition, and register to testify, using this link.
HB 20: Historic Opposition and Last Minute Amendments
During a day-long executive session on Wednesday, House Education Committee members combed through a new amendment to HB 20 that attempted to address concerns that were brought up in the public hearing, but did not go far enough and in many cases, made the bill worse, according to Committee members.
The amendment included income eligibility requirements and accountability measures, but did not address broader concerns with regard to discrimination against students and famillies, the potential for fraud and misuse of funds, and the fundamental concern with diverting public tax dollars to fund private and home school programs.
The marathon executive session also revealed critical technical errors in the bill, particularly around the funding of the program. “A bill of this significance needs to be right. This Committee [is] the folks to do that, this is a good move to pause and reflect and get this done the way it should be,” said Representative Jim Allard (R-Pittsfield).
Proponents of the bill are quick to point out that this doesn’t mean the conversation around HB 20 is over. Committee members will take the rest of the year to work on the bill, and have the opportunity to re-introduce it next year.
“I think that if it’s going to be done, it’s going to be done correctly, we have to have bipartisan support and it has to be proven it has to be beneficial to everyone, to taxpayers, children, mostly for the children,” said Committee member Barbara Shaw (D-Manchester).
About the amendment
The amendment created an income cap for eligible students, stating that only families with household incomes at or less than 375% of the Federal Poverty Limit would be eligible. For a family of four, that number would be about $99,375, which is higher than the median household income in New Hampshire.
Even with the change, HB 20 would be the most expansive voucher program in the country, and could cost New Hampshire roughly $50 million in new state spending its first year alone.
The Granite State is known to be parsimonious in spending on schools but the sky’s the limit when it comes to vouchers for religious schools and home schoolers.
The West Virginia legislature is rushing–like other red states–to pass voucher legislation. They know that very few students will apply for vouchers but that the cost will be enormous. West Virginia Republicans want to have the most expansive voucher bill in the nation (they are competing with New Hampshire and Arizona to supply everyone with the chance to use public money to attend a private or religious school).
However, the House Republicans decided to slow down when they saw how much their proposal would cost. And, they also noted that students can get a voucher not to “escape failing public schools,” but to pay for the religious school they already attend. In other words, the “voucher program” would be simply a subsidy to the 25,000 students already in private/religious schools and in home school. And it would cost $112 million a year to subsidize students whose parents are currently paying for them. And this money would be diverted from the state’s public schools, which enroll the vast majority of students.
Ryan Quinn of the Charleston Gazette-Mail writes:
After passing what could be the nation’s least-restrictive nonpublic school vouchers bill Thursday — one that would give every family in West Virginia money to private- and home-school their children if they want to remove them from public schools — the West Virginia House of Delegates recalled the bill.
On Friday, in a voice vote with no dissent heard, the Republican-controlled House recanted its passage vote of the day before. Delegates then sent the legislation (House Bill 2013) back to the House Finance Committee.
The West Virginia Senate had yet to pass the bill. House leadership indicated that it plans to fix issues with the bill and pass it again.
House Finance Chairman Eric Householder, R-Berkeley, said the reason for the move was a fiscal note he saw Thursday night.
“That’s why I decided to let people know what I discovered, what I read,” he said. “And now we’ve also asked [the Department of] Education to prepare a fiscal note, too. So, just trying to do the right thing, cover our bases, make sure everything is right.”
However, the state Division of Regulatory and Fiscal Affairs said the note was posted on the Legislature’s website on or before 11 a.m. Wednesday — so lawmakers could have seen it before voting Thursday.
Fiscal notes estimate how much bills will cost, but Republicans had rushed this bill to passage by just the end of the second week of this year’s legislative session.
The problem Householder cited is connected to the fact that the bill doesn’t specify how long parents must have their students enrolled in public schools to be eligible to receive the estimated $4,600 per-student, per-year to withdraw them and start private- or home-schooling.
“Based on our interpretation of the eligibility criteria, a parent of a student currently in private- or home-schooling could enroll their child in a summer public school program, making them eligible to apply for the Hope Scholarship Program,” the fiscal note said, referring to another name for the bill. “Alternatively, they could enroll their child in the public school system to become eligible. As this would introduce new students into the eligible population, it has the potential to substantially increase costs.”
The voucher for that amount is required to go to educational expenses, although that term is very broad in the bill.
Lawmakers had allowed for this cost increase by making the bill ultimately pay the $4,600 per-student, per-year for families who were currently home-schooling or private-schooling anyway. But they had added a provision saying those payments wouldn’t happen until fiscal year 2026-27 — the fiscal note said such costs could arrive much earlier.
“Based on data from the National Center for Education Statistics, there have been an average of 14,285 private-school students in West Virginia from 2003 to 2017, with no clear increase or decrease over time,” the fiscal note says. “For home-schooled students, we estimate approximately 10,000.
“Assuming current private- and home-school enrollment is similar, and assuming all of these students use one of these methods for becoming eligible for the Hope Scholarship, this could increase the cost of the program to the state by $112,300,882.65 per fiscal year, again assuming no increase in statewide average net state aid allotted per pupil.”
The note points out another potential problem with the likely unprecedented scope of the voucher program. Householder didn’t mention this issue, which is more fundamental to the bill.
The note said its participation estimates of 1% to 3% of current public school students that it used for calculating costs, even if the other problem were fixed, are based on the five states that have this kind of voucher program.
As a result of strong opposition, Republicans who control the New Hampshire legislature decided to postpone consideration of their “number one priority,” school vouchers. Under consideration was the most sweeping voucher bill in the nation. Thousands of people signed up to testify against the legislation.
A bill to create a school voucher-like system in New Hampshire is poised to be kicked to 2022, after Republicans on the House Education Committee said that it needed more time.
In a 20-0 vote Thursday, the committee recommended that the bill be retained, a move that if approved by the full House next week would put off any decision-making until next year’s session.
House Bill 20, named the “Richard ‘Dick’ Hinch education freedom account program” after the late House speaker, was a top priority for House Republicans this year. The proposal would allow parents to withdraw their children from public school and take the per-pupil state money with them.
Under the bill, that state funding, which amounts to $3,700 to $8,000 per student depending on the school, could then be used by the parents for a number of alternative expenses, such as private school tuition, college preparatory courses, school supplies, or transportation.
But a deluge of opposition to the bill from public school advocates and Democrats had slowed down its progress, resulting in contentious hearings and deliberative sessions that stretched through the day. Opponents argue the bill would drain resources from public schools and prompt cutbacks and increased property taxes; proponents say that it would provide new opportunities to families whose public schools aren’t working for their children.
Despite numerous tweaks and amendments, the bill didn’t have the votes to pass out of the GOP-controlled committee.
It is unclear if the committee would have had the votes to pass the bill even if the amendments were drafted correctly. Last week, NHJournal reported James Allard (R-Pittsfield) was likely to vote against the measure.
House insiders tell NHJournal that had a vote on the bill been held, the best-case scenario would have been a 10-10 tie vote in the committee, sending the bill to the floor with no recommendation. That would have set up a heated floor battle.
Attempts to sway Allard and other concerned Republicans included adding income-caps to the EFA eligibility formula. The cap would limit participation to those earning less than 375 percent of the federal poverty limit — roughly $99,000 for a family of four. That proposed income-cap would cut the number of eligible students in half.
Democrats on the Education Committee were pleased with the outcome.”HB 20 contains no protection for students against discrimination, little oversight, and is ripe for fraud…and would act as a tax-dollar giveaway to wealthy families. There has never been as much vocal opposition to a piece of legislation in NH,” Democrat leader on the committee Mel Myler said in a press release Thursday morning.
There’s still an Education Freedom Account bill in the Senate, giving supporters hope the legislation can still be amended and passed this year. In 2017-2018, the Senate passed SB193 – an education savings account program. That bill died in the House, after being heavily amended. The Senate then scrapped a separate bill and reintroduced SB193, the original version. Again, the proposal failed in the House.Democrats and teachers unions argued EFAs would increase property taxes, defund local district schools, and wreak havoc on New Hampshire’s education system. They celebrated Thursday’s win.
It has been well documented that students who leave public schools for voucher schools lose ground academically. Vouchers will not only hurt the state’s poorly funded public schools, it will hurt the children who use vouchers. It is a lose-lose for everyone except the religious schools that win public funds.
Civil rights groups, led by the Southern Education Foundation, are opposing the voucher legislation proposed by Republicans in Georgia.
SEF leads opposition to education savings account bill introduced in Georgia legislature
One of the first pieces of legislation introduced in the Georgia legislature in 2021 was the Georgia Educational Scholarship Act (HB60), a bill that would divert taxpayer dollars to private schools. In February, SEF and nine other education and equity-focused organizations sent a letter to the Georgia House Committee on Education expressing concerns that HB60 would divert funds from public education at a time when schools can least afford to lose it, and further perpetuate inequities.
SEF prepared analysis of the bill and a backgrounder on academic outcomes and participation requirements for similar tax credit scholarship programs across the country.
SEF’s Legislative and Research Analyst also provided testimony to the Senate Education and Youth Committee on SB47, a proposed expansion of the state’s existing special needs voucher program.
The Education Law Center has developed an excellent presentation on the shortchanging of public education in the years since 20008. The great majority of states did not keep up with the costs of educating their children. Only a handful did: Wyoming, Alaska, Illinois, Connecticut. The rest saw a sharp drop in their effort to fund the education of their children.
The two absolutely worst states, as judged by their failed effort to fund their schools, were Arizona and Florida, followed by Michigan. It is not coincidence that these are states that have put their efforts into choice, as a substitute for funding.
The report from ELC begins:
In the decade following the Great Recession, students across the U.S. lost nearly $600 billion from the states’ disinvestment in their public schools. Data from 2008-2018 show that, if states had simply maintained their fiscal effort in PK-12 education at pre-Recession levels, public schools would have had over half a trillion dollars more in state and local revenue to provide teachers, support staff and other resources essential for student achievement. Further, that lost revenue could have significantly improved opportunity and outcomes for students, especially in the nation’s poorest districts.
The states dramatically reduced their investment in public education in response to the 2007 Great Recession. Yet as economies rebounded, states failed to restore those investments. As our analysis shows, while states’ economic activity — measured as Gross Domestic Product (GDP) — recovered, state and local revenues for public schools lagged far behind in many states.
This “lost decade” of state disinvestment has put public schools in an extremely vulnerable position as the nation confronts the coronavirus pandemic. Once again, state budgets are strained by declining revenues. And once again, school districts across the country are bracing for state aid cuts and the potential for reduced local support.
This report builds on our Making the Grade analysis of the condition of public school funding in the 50 states and the District of Columbia. Instead of a one-year snapshot, this report provides a longitudinal analysis of the effort made by states from 2008 to 2018 to fund their public education systems. We measure that effort using an index that calculates elementary and secondary education revenue as a percentage of each state’s economic activity or GDP.
A key goal of this report is to give advocates data and information to use in their efforts to press governors and state legislatures not to make another round of devastating “pandemic cuts” to already underfunded public schools.
Open the report to see where YOUR state ranks in its effort to educate its students.
Arizona and Florida are the two most shameful states in their neglect of the future of their children.
Jim Swanson and John Graham, both CEOs in Arizona, wrote a stern warning against the legislature’s proposed voucher expansion, which would make almost all students in the state eligible for public funding to spend in a private or religious school. One of the authors is on the Arizona State Board for Charter Schools. Arizona is a state that likes low taxes; it does not fund its public schools adequately or equitably. Under the leadership of Governor Doug Ducey (who promised the Koch brothers a few years ago that he would drive taxes down as low as he could), the state is offering choice instead of adequate funding to its schools. Arizona has consistently underfunded its public schools and pretends to “reform” them by offering charters and vouchers.
They wrote:
The current, aggressive push to expand Empowerment Scholarship Accounts (ESAs) does nothing to address the systemic education challenges we face in Arizona.
It is a dangerous attack on our public education systems and our state’s economic future. As a business community, our priority is to ensure that all students have access to a top-quality school that meets students’ needs and interests.
Arizona leaders should focus on effectively funding public education and supporting innovative programs that improve academic outcomes.
The time is now. Public education is the single most powerful economic development tool we have as a state.
ESAs were originally designed to serve a small population of students – they were never meant to replace public education or to serve all students.
A full expansion of ESAs is nothing more than a boutique scheme to address a non-existent need for private school subsidies.
While being marketed as a solution for low-income students and students of color – the students whom data tells us need the most wide-scale, institutional support – SB1452 is the most offensive of the private school voucher bills proposed this session. The bill would make roughly 700,000 Arizona students eligible for ESAs – a 280% increase in a single move. This is nothing more than a bold attempt to privatize education.
There’s a lot wrong with this bill, but the worst is the fact that rather than focus on supporting low-income students of color, many of whom are already eligible, SB1452 will make many more middle- and high-income white students eligible for taxpayer-subsidized vouchers, exploiting the impoverished communities in favor of further subsidizing the tiny fraction (as few as approximately 5%) of Arizona families choosing to home-school, private and parochial schools.
Greater Phoenix Leadership, Southern Arizona Leadership Council and Northern Arizona Leadership Alliance, representing more than 200 CEOs across Arizona, have made it clear that they are against the expansion of vouchers in Arizona and have voiced support for our public education systems, from early childhood to higher education. Business leaders and voters are like-minded – we have consistently come together for public education with a focus on equity and access. Instead of proposing unsustainable ways to make 70% of students eligible for private school vouchers, we need to make the public schools better, stronger and more successful.
What our state needs is crystal clear – an equitable, fully funded, high-quality public education system that serves all students across Arizona, no matter the zip code or income level. We have fallen too far behind and the only way we catch up – the only way we move the needle and bring Arizona to a competitive, robust and morally conscionable state – is to focus on the public education funding formula. Programs like private school vouchers have a long history of excluding and segregating our communities rather than including and supporting them. ESAs don’t get us where we need to be.
We need to put our heads together – across the business, education and political realms – and finally execute big changes to the funding formula and other mechanisms that have proven inefficient and worse, inequitable. Now is the time to focus on what moves all our students forward – working together to properly fund the schools serving 95% of Arizona students.
Question: Will the legislature listen to Arizona business leaders or to Charles Koch and Betsy DeVos?
Diane Ravitch's blog 