Archives for category: Vouchers
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Tom Ultican: D.C.’s Very Expensive, Ineffective Charter Sector

By dianeravitch
September 9, 2019 //
5

Tom Ultican, retired teacher of advanced mathematics and physics, has written a series of posts about the Destroy Public Education Movement. In this comprehensive post, he reviews the unimpressive but very expensive charter sector in the District of Columbia. Many charter operators have made big salaries and the British testing corporation Pearson has been enriched, but charter performance has lagged behind that of the public schools for the past two years. The District continues to have the biggest achievement gaps between racial groups of any urban district in the nation.

The District has had an intense love affair with Broadies. Mayor Muriel Bowser, who completely controls the schools, prefers Broadies, despite their continued failures.

The Mayor has almost dictatorial control over the school system with very little input from teachers, students or parents. When Muriel Bowser was elected Mayor in 2014, she inherited school Chancellor, Kaya Henderson. Bowser appointed Jennifer Niles as her chief education advisor with the title Deputy Mayor for Education. Niles was well known in the charter school circles having founded the E. L. Haynes Charter School in 2004. Niles was forced to resign when it came to light that she had made it possible for Chancellor Antwan Wilson to secretly transfer his daughter to a preferred school against his own rules.

Bowser has an affinity for education leaders that have gone through Eli Broad’s unaccredited Superintendents Academy. She is a Democratic politician who appreciates Broad’s well documented history of spending lavishly to privatize public-schools. When Kaya Henderson resigned as chancellor in 2016, Antwan Wilson from the Broad Academy class of 2012-2014, was Bowser’s choice to replace her. Subsequent scandal forced the Mayor to replace both the Chancellor and the Deputy Mayor in 2018. For Chancellor, she chose Louis Ferebee who is not only a member of Jeb Bush’s Chiefs for Change, but is also a graduate with the Broad Academy class of 2017-2018. The new Deputy Mayor chosen was Paul Kihn Broad Academy Class of 2014-2015.

With the control Mayor Bowser has over public education, she has made the DCPS webpage look more like a vote for Bowser publication than a school information site.

Ultican describes the high levels of segregation in the charter schools, as well as the high salaries.

Mayor Bowser has handed control of the charter board over to the charter industry, which guarantees no oversight or accountability.

In the 2018-2019 school year Washington DC had 116 charter schools reporting attendance. Of that number 92 or 82% of the schools reported more than 90% Black and Hispanic students. Thirty charter schools or 26% reported over 98% Black students. These are startlingly high rates of segregation.

Of the 15 KIPP DC charter schools, all of them reported 96% or more Black students. According to their 2017 tax filings seven KIPP DC administrators took home $1,546,494. The smallest salary was $184,310.

Along with this profiteering, the seven people Mayor Bowser appointed to lead the Public Charter School Board seem more like charter industry insiders than protectors of the public trust.

*Rick Cruz (Chair) – Chief Executive Officer of DC Prep Public Charter School; formerly at the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship, Teach for America and America’s Promise Alliance. Currently, he is Executive Director of Strategic Partnerships at The College Board

*Saba Bireda (Vice Chair) – Attorney at Sanford Hiesler, LLP, served under John King at the U.S. Department of Education.

*Lea Crusey (Member): Teach for America, advisory board for KIPP Chicago, worked at StudentsFirst, and Democrats for Education Reform.

*Steve Bumbaugh (Treasurer) – Manager of Breakthrough Schools at CityBridge Foundation.

*Ricarda Ganjam (Secretary) – More than 15 years as Management Consultant with Accenture; consulted on KIPP DC’s Future Focus Program.

*Naomi Shelton (Member) – Director of Community Engagement at KIPP Foundation.

*Jim Sandman (Member): President of the Legal Services Corporation.

Shouldn’t it be a conflict of interest to place members of the charter industry on the board in charge of supervising them?

Categories Accountability, Broad Foundation, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, District of Columbia, Education Industry, Privatization, Testing, Vouchers

The Walton Plot to Privatize the Public Schools of Arkansas

By dianeravitch
September 4, 2019 //
22

The headquarters of the Walton/Walmart billionaires is in Bentonville, Arkansas, so it is not surprising that the Walton Family Foundation and the members of the family (net worth: $100 billion) have decided to privatize the public schools of Arkansas.

Arkansas is a poor state. It doesn’t have an abundance of private schools that are as good as its underfunded public schools but the Waltons want every child to have a voucher or a charter school to attend.

Legislators are easy to buy in a poor state. The Waltons own quite a few.

The Arkansas Education Association did the research and described the empire that the Waltons have constructed in service to their goal of owning and privatizing the public schools of Arkansas. In the Walton plan, there will be no “public schools,” only privately managed charter schools and vouchers for religious schools.

The AEA report lays out the Walton Empire of Privatization in detail, with their bought and paid for think tanks and academics.

Although this report includes a lot of names, it is just one slice of the nationwide effort to plunder our public schools. These organizations have a vast infrastructure and deep pockets that can seem daunting, but our students are counting on us to stand up and speak out.

While they may have more cash, we have the power of numbers and common sense. Arkansas’s taxpayers and students would be better served by investing our scarce resources to improve our neighborhood public schools and helping all of the students who attend them.

Our public schools are the anchor of our communities, and the best way to expand opportunity for all. This idea does not require twisted statistics, or market tested language to trick people into supporting it. It’s as old as the country itself.

Do you think any member of the Walton Family ever feels ashamed of the damage they are wreaking on our democracy?

What about their minions? Have they no shame?

Categories Accountability, Arkansas, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Privatization, Shame, Vouchers

Lubienski and Malin: School Vouchers Actually Harm Children

By dianeravitch
September 3, 2019 //
32

Researchers Christopher Lubienski and Joel Malin note that a growing number of states have adopted voucher plans on the assumption that vouchers will “help poor kids escape failing public schools,” but the reality is that a substantial body of evidence finds that vouchers actually harm student academic performance.

After two decades of choice advocates arguing that school vouchers in particular improve academic achievement for poor children, Trump elevated Betsy DeVos, one of the leading voucher proponents, as his secretary of Education. State policymakers have also massively scaled-up school vouchers and voucher-like programs such as education savings account programs across the country. However, over the last four years, researchers have consistently found insignificant or, more often, substantially negative impacts on learning for the children whose parents have enrolled them in these programs. Such negative impacts are largely unprecedented in evaluations of educational interventions, raising questions about the ethics of experimenting on children through these programs.

When plans to use taxpayer funds for private schooling were first introduced into American education in the early 1990s, they were pitched as a way to give poor and urban children a chance to leave failing public schools for better learning opportunities in what were thought to be more effective private schools.

Indeed, there are reasons to expect school vouchers would work, such as the facts that choosing a school might allow for better matching between a child’s preferred learning style and a school’s educational program, or that private schools tend to have smaller classes.

But it has never been clear that using vouchers to choose private schools leads to better educational outcomes for students.

When vouchers were first studied, researchers fought vicious battles over relatively minor differences in academic achievement. Voucher advocates like DeVos embraced any evidence of learning gains for students using vouchers to switch to private schools, and a number of think tanks and large philanthropies like the Walton Family Foundation also lined up to support this education reform. Some even saw vouchers as the key for reducing achievement gaps between white and minority students. But while most researchers found that any gains were rather negligible overall, advocates argued that vouchers were at least not harming students’ academic achievement.

Recently though, there has been a sea-change in the results.

As city-based pilot programs in places like Cleveland and Milwaukee were eclipsed by statewide programs in Ohio, Indiana, Louisiana, and elsewhere, researchers are consistently seeing large, significant, negative impacts — outcomes almost unheard of in evaluations of education interventions.

Studies have converged on the failure of vouchers. Parents may be satisfied, but their children are not learning more.

For instance, research on Louisiana’s program indicates that when some children performing squarely in the average range use a voucher to enroll in a private school, their scores fall almost to the lowest performing quartile of students overall. And initial hopes that those losses were temporary have not panned out.

Stated simply, students using vouchers to attend private schools are falling behind their peers in learning. That is, DeVos and her allies are promoting programs that hurt children.

Do no harm might be a good guideline for school interventions. If it were, all the voucher programs enacted in the past 30 years would be canceled.

Categories Betsy DeVos, Education Industry, Privatization, Vouchers

ALEC Controls State Government in Arizona

By dianeravitch
September 1, 2019 //
11

Read this article by E.J. Montini in the Arizona Republic to learn how the Koch-funded ALEC controls Governor Doug Ducey and the state legislature in Arizona. ALEC was behind the voucher legislation that was overturned by voters earlier this year.

He writes:

About 30 of Arizona’s Republican state lawmakers, along with Gov. Doug Ducey, attended the annual convention of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) in Austin, Texas, this month.

For the politicians, membership in ALEC is like joining one of those meal kit delivery services, only in this case lawmakers are presented with ready-made, easy to introduce legislation guaranteed to satisfy the special interests who came up with the political recipes, and to give regular citizens indigestion.

Earlier this year an investigation by USA Today, the Arizona Republic, and the Center for Public Integrity found that from 2010 to 2018, bills based on ALEC legislation were introduced nearly 2,900 times across all 50 states.

Arizona ranked second among states for the highest number of ALEC bills introduced and passed during those years, with more than 200 bills introduced and 57 enacted. Only Mississippi had more.

‘Chefs’ are lobbyists and executives

ALEC is the HelloFresh of politics, except what they cook up isn’t good for you. Instead the group produces ready-to-introduce legislation for politicians more interested in serving special interests and promoting their own careers than in serving their constituency

Categories ALEC, Arizona, Education Reform, Koch Brothers, Vouchers

ALEC: Advocate for Charters and Vouchers and Scourge of Teachers’ Unions

By dianeravitch
August 31, 2019 //
22

What do you know about the American Legislative Exchange Council or ALEC?

It is right now the single most influential private organization in the nation.

This article, though three years old, gives a good overview of the ALEC education goals, mainly to privatize public funding for schools and to eliminate teachers’ unions. This is not surprising, because the DeVos Foundations and the Koch Foundation are among its most important funders.

ALEC opposes any regulation. It opposes gun control and regulation of the oil and gas industry. It opposes the public sector having any power over corporations.

ALEC is a rightwing “bill mill.” Its staff drafts model state legislation.

About 2,000 state legislators belong to ALEC.

They attend its posh meetings at elegant resorts and return home with fully developed bills that they can introduce in their own states, simply writing in the name of their state on an ALEC bill.

Then they can attend the next ALEC meeting and boast about their accomplishments.

If you want to know more, read Gordon Lafer’s fine book The One Percent Solution: How Corporations Are Remaking America One State at a Time, which nails the ALEC approach and shows that its purpose is to lower expectations.

As  you read the article noted above, you will see a proliferation of voucher plans under many names. Each of them is a camel’s nose under the tent. Pass one and soon there will be demand for another and another. The rightwing oligarchs are not interested in poor children or in education; they are interested in power and in killing the public sector that belongs to all of us.

Categories Accountability, ALEC, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Koch Brothers, Privatization, Unions, Vouchers

Tennessee: Pro-Voucher Republican Replaced by Anti-Voucher Republican as Speaker of House

By dianeravitch
August 27, 2019 //
19

Great news from Tennessee!

The Speaker of the House, Glenn Canada, who rammed through a voucher bill, was replaced by Cameron Sexton, an anti-voucher Republican.

https://www.chalkbeat.org/posts/tn/2019/08/22/tennessee-is-about-to-replace-its-voucher-friendly-house-speaker-with-a-voucher-opponent/

Marta W. Aldrich of Chalkbeat reports:

The House overwhelmingly elected Rep. Cameron Sexton on Friday as its speaker to replace Glen Casada, who stepped down earlier this month. While both men are party loyalists, Sexton voted against the voucher bill that Casada strong-armed through the chamber before a series of scandals rocked him out of his leadership job….

Sexton has strong ties to public education. He attended schools in Knox County before graduating in 1989 from Oak Ridge High School in neighboring Anderson County, where he had access to foreign languages, advanced placement courses, and early college credits before heading to the University of Tennessee. His mother was a kindergarten teacher for more than 30 years, and his grandfather was a principal. He and his wife, Lacey, have chosen public schools for their own children.

That family history, he said, was likely a factor behind his consistent votes against voucher bills, but he cites philosophical reasons, too.

“We should do everything we can to improve all public schools in the state of Tennessee so they can be successful,” he said. “I would rather go that route than the voucher route.”

Pastors for Tennessee Children have been working alongside parents and teachers to protect public schools and separation of church and state. Hallelujah.

Categories Education Reform, Separation of church and state, Tennessee, Vouchers

Louisiana: The Failure of Vouchers

By dianeravitch
August 26, 2019 //
6

When I first started writing this blog in 2012, Louisiana’s then Governor Bobby Jindal was crowing about his new voucher plan. He and his state commissioner John White insisted that vouchers were a wonderful innovation. They would save poor children from failing public schools. They would give poor children the same choices that rich children have. All the DeVos baloney was served up.

We now know that none of this was true. Most of the voucher money went to backwoods evangelical church schools that did not have certified teachers or a real curriculum. Some of the voucher schools relied on the state money to keep their doors open. The “opportunity” was not for the students, but for the schools, which were glad to have the money from the state.

Now an organization called The Center for Investigative Reporting reveals what we anticipated: most students who use vouchers attend schools that are rated D or F by the State Education Department that funds them. The state is subsidizing no-quality education.

Read the article here.

The vouchers are an expensive hoax. They are not saving poor children from failing schools. Most of them ARE failing schools.

This story was produced by FOX8 WVUE, NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune and WWNO New Orleans Public Radio as part of Reveal’s Local Labs initiative, which supports lasting investigative reporting collaborations in communities across the United States.

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal beamed with pride in April 2012, as he signed into law one of the most sweeping school choice expansions in the nation.

The law was lauded by the American Federation for Children, then chaired by future Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, and other school choice advocates. Like Jindal, they said it would free countless lower-income children from the worst public schools by allowing them to use state tax dollars in the form of vouchers to pay tuition at private schools, where they would ostensibly receive a better education.

“Our children do not have time to wait,” Jindal had said as he spent some of his waning political capital on what he felt would become a major part of his political legacy in Louisiana. “They only grow up once, and they have one shot to receive a quality education.”

Seven years later, however, the $40 million-a-year Louisiana Scholarship Program has failed to live up to its billing. The nearly 6,900 students who’ve left public schools have instead been placed into a system with numerous failing private schools that receive little oversight, a monthslong examination by a coalition of local and national media organizations has found.

Two-thirds of all students in the voucher system attended schools where they performed at a D or F level last school year, according to a data analysis by NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune, WVUE Fox 8 News, WWNO and Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting.

Categories Failure, Hoax, Louisiana, Vouchers

Jan Resseger: Ohio Expands Vouchers at Expense of Public Schools

By dianeravitch
August 21, 2019 //
26

In the latest Ohio state budget, there are big giveaways to religious and private schools. The Legislature expanded the state’s voucher programs. Originally, vouchers were supposed to “save poor kids from failing public schools,” but in the new expansion, vouchers are available to high school students who never attended a public school. That is, they subsidize students in religious and private schools. Period.

In the only evaluation of the Ohio voucher program, sponsored by the rightwing Thomas B. Fordham Institute, students who used vouchers fell behind students who stayed in the public schools.

These programs are simply a transfer of public dollars frompublic schools to private schools, with no benefit to students.

Jan Resseger writes here about the latest betrayal of the people of Ohio and the public schools that most children attend, despite the availability of many charters and vouchers.

She begins:

Ohio has five voucher programs. Two of them are for students with autism and other disabilities, and their enrollment depends on the incidence of these conditions and parents’ awareness of the availability of voucher funds to pay for private programs. A third voucher program—the Cleveland Scholarship Program—one of the oldest in the country—is for students in Cleveland.

This blog post will focus on the last two—EdChoice and EdChoice Expansion. They are statewide Ohio school voucher programs designed specifically, according to the Republican lawmakers who have designed and promoted these programs, to enable students to escape so-called “failing” schools. It is important to remember that those same legislators have failed adequately to fund the public schools in Ohio’s poorest school districts, and those same legislators have looked at state takeover as another “solution” (besides expanding vouchers and charter schools) for the students in those districts. Ohio education policy for school districts serving very poor children is defined by punishment, not support.

EdChoice and EdChoice Expansion vouchers rob the public schools of essential dollars needed to educate the majority of Ohio’s students who remain in public schools. And the vouchers are used primarily by students enrolled in religious schools. Through EdChoice and EdChoice Expansion vouchers, the state is sending millions of tax dollars out of the state’s public education budget and out of the coffers of local school districts to fund the religious education of students who would likely never have enrolled in public schools in the first place.

The problem just got worse this summer when the Ohio Legislature passed a two year budget which radically expands both programs. The Ohio Association of School Business Officials (OASBO) recently published an update on its website to inform school treasurers about what just happened. OASBO reports: “HB 166 (the new state budget) expanded the EdChoice Scholarship program in multiple ways.”

Changes in the EdChoice voucher program: Although legislators have always said the purpose of vouchers is to provide an “escape” from so-called failing schools, the new budget provides that high school students are no longer required to have been previously enrolled in a public school to qualify for the voucher. OASBO explains: “Generally, students wishing to claim a voucher under the original EdChoice voucher program must have attended a public school in the previous school year. However, HB 166 codifies in law… (that) students going into grades 9-12 need not first attend a public school. In other words, high school students already attending a private school can obtain a voucher.”

Ohio was one of the leading states in the 19th century “Common school movement,” which created the American public school as a guarantee of free public education for every child. It is now leading the movement to demolish that promise and renounce the state’s proud history. It should go without saying that the state’s Republican leaders have never put a referendum on the ballot to ask the people of Ohio whether they approve of this massive diversion of public funds to religious and private schools. They know it would be rejected.

The Ohio State Constitution, Article 6, Section 2 and 3

Text of Section 2:
School Funds

The General Assembly shall make such provisions, by taxation, or otherwise, as, with the income arising from the school trust fund, will secure a thorough and efficient system of common schools throughout the state; but no religious or other sect, or sects, shall ever have any exclusive right to, or control of, any part of the school funds of this state.

Text of Section 3:
Public School System, Boards of Education

Provision shall be made by law for the organization, administration and control of the public school system of the state supported by public funds: provided, that each school district embraced wholly or in part within any city shall have the power by referendum vote to determine for itself the number of members and the organization of the district board of education, and provision shall be made by law for the exercise of this power by such school districts.

Categories Accountability, Education Reform, Failure, Ohio, Religion, Separation of church and state, Vouchers

Why I Do Not Support Cory Booker

By dianeravitch
August 10, 2019 //
19

Cory Booker has a long and well-documented record of disparaging public schools and enthusiastically supporting charters, even vouchers. Now, he says he will dedicate himself to public schools and stop privatization, as if he had not been one of the leading cheerleaders for both charters and vouchers for the past two decades.

Valerie Strauss wrote here about his deep ties over the years to Betsy DeVos. 

Booker began his advocacy for vouchers twenty years ago.

“In 1999, Booker was a member of the Municipal Council of Newark and worked with conservatives to form an organization that sought to create a voucher program and bring charter schools to New Jersey.”

He helped Dick and Betsy DeVos try to sell vouchers in Michigan in 2000. Fortunately, they were unsuccessful. As Jennifer Berkshire pointed out in her article about Booker’s help for the DeVos voucher campaign, the DeVos family spent millions, but the people of Michigan rejected vouchers by a vote of 69-31%.

When Booker ran for mayor of Newark in 2001, the DeVos family contributed $1,000 to his campaign. Cheapskates.

Veteran journalist Dale Russakoff wrote a book called The Prize about Cory Booker’s alliance with Republican Governor Chris Christie and their determination to turn Newark into the “New Orleans of the North” by privatizing as many public schools as possible. Booker was a favorite of Wall Street and philanthrocapitalists, and he and Christie persuaded Mark Zuckerberg to put up $100 million to spur privatization in Newark.

Regular readers of this blog have read the many posts by blogger Jersey Jazzman (Mark Weber) about the statistical legerdemain that Newark charters play, the cream-skimming they do to get the students they want and exclude those that might pull down their test scores..

If you open the link at NPE Action, you will see that Booker’s campaigns have drawn the campaign funding of the usual billionaires and Wall Street hedge funders who have done their best to undermine public education.

Booker was feted by rightwing think tanks like the Manhattan Institute and named a “champion of charters” by the National Alliance for Public [sic] Charter Schools in 2017.

But his support for vouchers was not long, long ago.

In 2012, he endorsed Governor Chris Christie’s voucher proposal.

In 2016, he addressed Betsy DeVos’s American Federation for Children to express his support for their mission of replacing public schools with charters and vouchers.

Due to his contempt for one of our most important public, democratic institutions, I cannot support Cory Booker.

If he is the Democratic candidate, which seems unlikely, I will hold my nose and vote for him, because any Democrat is better than Trump. Even Cory Booker.

 

 

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Democrats for Education Reform, Education Industry, New Jersey, Newark, Privatization, School Choice, Vouchers

Cory Booker Promises to Abandon His Past Support for Charters and Vouchers

By dianeravitch
August 9, 2019 //
34

 

Cory Booker has been a devoted promoter of charters and vouchers for many years.

He worked closely with Republican Governor Chris Christie and together they persuaded Mark Zuckerberg to pony up $100 million to promote the charterization of Newark. He often boasts about what he accomplished by privatizing public schools.

But now that he wants to be president, he has suddenly decided that he will be a champion for public schools, not charters or vouchers. 

Could it be that he did the math and realized that 85-90% of students attend public schools. Only 6% attend charter schools. And he may have noticed that despite the efforts of his former dear friend Betsy DeVos, voters don’t like vouchers. They don’t want public dollars to underwrite religious schools.

Some of his allies are not at all happy about the new Cory.

It just goes to show where the wind is blowing: in  favor of public schools, not charters or vouchers.

 

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, New Jersey, Newark, Privatization, Vouchers
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