Archives for category: Vouchers
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Tom Ultican: Jeb Bush’s Disastrous Florida Education Mess

By dianeravitch
May 16, 2019 //
24

 

You may hear choice zealots boasting about Jeb Bush’s “Florida Model.” As Tom Ultican explains here, they are delusional or  just making stuff up (to put it politely). 

Ultican relies on Sue Legg’s excellent report and digs down to show that the motivation behind Jeb’s so-called A+ plan was profits and religion, not education.

Jeb Bush and his friends have made Florida into a low-performing mess that can’t attract or retain teachers. But it has become a magnet for profiteers, grifters, and fundamentalists.

Ultican writes:

When the A+ Program was adopted in 1999, Florida had consistently scored among the bottom third of US states on standardized testing. The following two data sets indicate no improvement and Florida now scoring in the bottom fourth…

Last year, 21 percent of Florida’s students were enrolled in private and charter schools. The Florida tax credit scholarships (FTCS) went to 1,700 private schools and were awarded to over 100,000 students. Most of those students are in religious schools. Splitting public funding between three systems – public, charter and private – has insured mediocrity in all three systems.

Privatization Politics and Profiteering

To understand Florida’s education reform, it is important to realize that its father, Jeb Bush, is the most doctrinal conservative in the Bush family. He fought for six years to keep feeding tubes inserted into Terri Schiavo, a woman in a persistently vegetative state. Jeb was the Governor who signed the nation’s first “Stand Your Ground” self-defense law. During his first unsuccessful run for governor in 1994, Bush ‘“declared himself a ‘head-banging conservative’; vowed to ‘club this government into submission’; and warned that ‘we are transforming our society to a collectivist policy.”’

This is a deeply researched and eye-popping post.

Read it to arm yourself against rightwing propaganda.

The Florida Model is an abject failure.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Florida, For-Profit, Hoax, Privatization, Vouchers

GREAT NEWS: Nebraska Says NO to Vouchers Again!

By dianeravitch
May 15, 2019 //
5

Nebraska loves its public schools!

It remains one of the few states to reject vouchers, charters, and the Common Core.

Nebraska’s Legislature said NO again to vouchers!

 

From: Stand for Schools <info@standforschools.org>
Date: Wed, May 15, 2019 at 2:46 PM
Subject: With your help, we defeated LB 670!

 
Thank you.  
For the third year in a row, with your help, we did it. 

On Monday, Senator Linehan’s tax-credit scholarship bill, LB 670, had its floor debate. Senators from across the state spoke out in strong opposition and successfully filibustered another effort towards school privatization. 

This is an achievement worth celebrating. Nebraska remains one of only a handful of states without charter schools, vouchers, or tax-credit scholarship programs despite study after study demonstrating just how harmful they are.

We at Stand For Schools are proud of the hard work by many this legislative session to protect our state’s excellent public schools and advance public education in Nebraska. Please know your calls and emails have made a difference. Thank you!

Thank you also to the many, many senators who listened to you and engaged in such a respectful and robust debate Monday afternoon.

Together, we did it!

We hope you’ll keep Stand For Schools in mind during Omaha Gives and Give to Lincoln Day! (Or click the button below to make a donation now.)

We couldn’t do this important work without the generous support of our donors.
Donate Now

 

 

Categories Accountability, Education Reform, Nebraska, Supporting public schools, Vouchers

Sue M. Legg: The Failure of Jeb Bush’s A+ Plan in Florida

By dianeravitch
May 14, 2019 //
66

Sue M. Legg is a scholar at the University of Florida, a leader in Florida’s League of Women Voters, and a new board member of the Network for Public Education. She has written an incisive and devastating critique of Jeb Bush’s education program in Florida, which began twenty years ago. Bush called it his A+ Plan, but by her careful analysis, it rates an F. Advocates of school choice tout Florida’s fourth-grade scores on NAEP, which are artificially inflated by holding back third graders who dontpass the state test. By eighth grade, Florida’s students rank no better than the national average. Note to “Reformers”: a state that ranks “average” is NOT a national model.

Twenty Years Later, Jeb Bush’s A+ Plan Fails Florida’s Students. 

Sue Legg explodes the myth of the Florida miracle in her well documented report:  Twenty Years Later: Jeb Bush’s A+ Plan Fails Florida’s Students. She has compiled the research over twenty years showing the negative impact of privatization in Florida.  The highly touted achievement gains of retained third graders are lost by eighth grade.  Top ranked fourth grade NAEP scores fall to the national average by eighth grade. One half of twelfth graders read below grade level.  The graduation rate is above only 14 states.

The A+ Plan was a great slogan, but its defects resulted in a twenty-year cycle of trial and error to fix the problems.   School grades are unreliable.  A school receiving a ‘B’ grade one year has about a thirty percent chance of retaining the grade the following year. Invalid grades occur so frequently that State Impact reports that Florida made sixteen changes to the school grade formula since 2010.  It was thrown out but the new version is no more stable.  What it means to be a failing school, moreover, is consistently redefined to make more opportunity for charter school takeovers.  

Florida touts improving academic achievement in the private sector that is not supported by research.  The CREDO Study reams Florida’s for-profit charter industry.  According to a Brookings Institution study, low quality private schools are on the rise, and the LeRoy Collins Institute’s 2017 study, Tough Choices, explains that there are twice as many severely segregated Florida schools (90% non-white students) than there were in 1994-5.  The legislature ignores the problem in part because key legislators have personal interest in charter and private schools.  “Florida suits him” said Roger Stone, recently indicted in the Mueller investigation.  The New York Times article: Stone Cold Loser: quoted Stone’s admiration for Florida when he said “…it was a sunny place for shady people”.  A Miami Herald series “Cashing in on Kids” reported a list of questionable land deals and conflicts of interest by for-profit charter school management. The federal government began an investigation in 2014.  Last year a  charter management firm faced criminal charges, and Florida charters have the nation’s highest closure rate.

WalletHub reports that Florida is 47th of 50 states in working conditions for teachers.  As a result, the Florida Education Association projects 10,000 vacancies next fall. Teacher shortages are not only related to money, they are due to a deliberate attack on the profession in order to break teacher unions and impose a political ideology.  As Steve Denning in a Forbes magazine article explains: “The system” grinds forward, at ever increasing cost and declining efficiency, dispiriting students, teachers and schools alike”. The thinking, he says, is embedded in the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and Race to the Top policies.   The A+ Plan is an extension of these policies that includes increased testing and rewards and punishments related to results.

Florida’s teachers are not allowed to strike.  Parents may have to.  The legislature recently approved small raises for teachers but expanded the unconstitutional voucher program.  The governor is not concerned; he appointed three new judges to the Florida Supreme Court.  In the May 3rd 2019 Senate session, Senator Tom Lee chastised his fellow Republicans.  He has supported charter schools for years, but said ‘the industry has not been honest with us...first they wanted PECO facility funds, then local millage; now they want a portion of local discretionary referendum funds’.  He called the current supporters ‘ideologues who have drunk the kool-aid‘.

The full report is published on the NPE-Action website.

Categories Accountability, Bush, Jeb, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Corruption, Education Industry, Failure, Florida, For-Profit, Fraud, Privatization, Testing, Vouchers

Nebraska: Stop Vouchers Now! Save Your Public Schools!

By dianeravitch
May 14, 2019 //
4

 

As rhe evidence for the failure of vouchers accumulates, its friends push harder to enact them before the word gets out that they actually harm children.

Nebraska is the target now. Voucher advocates are pushing a tax credit there that would divert millions from public schools. The vast majority of students would suffer loss of funding so a tiny number could enroll in schools nowhere as good as the public schools.

If you live in Nebraska, call your state legislator today and urge him or her to vote NO on LB 670.

Categories Accountability, Privatization, Vouchers

North Carolina: Voucher Program is Unaccountable, Nontransparent

By dianeravitch
May 13, 2019 //
7

 

Stuart Egan writes that members of the General Assembly seek adjustments to the state’s voucher program to make it even less transparent and less accountable than at present. 

The General Assembly has committed to spend nearly $1 billion on this program by 2026-2027 even though the schools that get the vouchers have no standards for academics or for teacher qualifications.

93% of the voucher schools are sectarian.

In 2018, a study hailed academic gains but critics (including the editorial board of the state’sleading newspaper) quickly pointed out that the study oversampled established Catholic schools, which are a small fraction of the voucher schools. A review of the NC study by the National Education Policy Center found it to be so methodologically flawed as to be useless.

Ever since the Tea Party fringe of the Republican Party took control of the General Assembly, its leaders have been determined to shift funding to charter schools and vouchers for religious schools.

As in Florida, the politicians believe in tough scrutiny of public schools and no scrutiny at all for voucher schools.

Categories Accountability, Funding, North Carolina, Vouchers

Peter Greene, Van Schoales: Education “Reform” Is Dead, but Zombie Ideas Persist

By dianeravitch
May 12, 2019 //
41

Peter Greene, retired teacher (thirty-nine years in the classroom and blogger extraordinaire) and Van Schoales (Colorado reformer) agree: education reform as we know it now is over.

Greene reminds us (as if we need reminding) that not so long ago, charter schools were considered a bipartisan reform; today, with Donald Trump and Betsy DeVos singing the praises of charter schools, there is a widespread recognition that charter schools are a big step on the path to privatization. First charters, then vouchers.

Van Schoales participated in the reform ferment in Colorado, which consumed much money and energy and produced very little. Schoales writes:

The education reform movement as we have known it is over. Top-down federal and state reforms along with big-city reforms have stalled. The political winds for education change have shifted dramatically. Something has ended, and we must learn the lessons of what the movement got right—and wrong.

The era of inspiration, edicts, and coercion from Washington to improve our public schools is in the past. The Every Student Succeeds Act is a paper tiger with no new funds or accountability for results. The U.S. Department of Education under Betsy DeVos has dismantled efforts to push states to improve school systems while tainting all education reform with a far-right agenda for vouchers as it defunds public education. Yet, a growing number of high school graduates are not prepared to work or to continue their education.

The era of the nontraditional “no excuses” urban superintendents is finished. Michelle Rhee, Joel Klein, and Tom Boasberg have all moved on. There are few comparable replacements. The vision of a radically transformed public education system with virtual schools, new charter models, and online personalization has crashed on the shores of reality.

He continues to have some hope for “portfolio districts” like Indianapolis and San Antonio but it is only a matter of time until he realizes that they too are a mirage, just shifting students from public schools to charters changes nothing.

Peter Greene understands that all the shiny promises have failed to produce the transformation that was supposed to happen. It didn’t.

After twenty years, almost every trick in the education reform tool box has been tried, including charters and choice. When your product has failed, you have more than just a branding problem, and for the nominally lefty-tilted education reformers, the current administration provides none of the protective cover that Obama and Duncan did.

Van Schoales says it is time to listen to those closest to the problems—teachers, principals, students, families, and community leaders—to build a movement that is focused on preparing most or all of our students for the world that they live in, that promotes lasting change. 

Frankly, for reformers, that is a new idea, because they have spent twenty years imposing mayoral control, state control, so as NOT to listen to anyone but themselves.

Peter Greene has another idea, not so very different from that of Van Schoales:

Instead of asking, “How can we convince more left-leaning folks to support the privatization of public education,” maybe progressives could ask, “If charters and choice really aren’t the answer, what are some better ways to improve U.S. public education?” Maybe someone could build a coalition around that.

Unfortunately, the billionaires do not know as much as either Greene or Schoales. They are still dishing out hundreds of millions to professional “reformers” to create groups like the City Fund ($200 million on the day it opened) to continue promoting charter schools in a dozen or so urban districts. The Walton Family Foundation will spend hundreds of millions to prop up failing charter schools. Betsy DeVos will have another $400 million to hand out to well-funded corporate charter chains next year. Charles Koch has announced that he will pick five unlucky cities to target as “low-hanging fruit” for his dreams of voucherizing everything in sight. And legislatures like those in Florida, Kentucky, and Tennessee are still diverting money to voucher programs, even though there is no hope that they will provide better education.

Reform as we have known it is dead, but the zombie continues to terrorize our cities, even our suburbs and rural districts.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization, Vouchers

Tennessee: The FBI Is Investigating to See Whether Voucher Vote Was Bought

By dianeravitch
May 11, 2019 //
33

Tennessee passed Governor Bill Lee’s voucher bill by one vote, and the FBI is investigating whether the change of that vote at the last minute was the result of an illegal bribe. 

At the time, it appeared that the incentive for the one lawmaker was a promise not to offer vouchers in HIS district.

FBI agents have begun interviewing Tennessee lawmakers about whether any improper incentives were offered to pass Gov. Bill Lee’s school vouchers bill in the state House, NewsChannel 5 Investigates has learned.

That vouchers legislation narrowly passed the state House last month on a 50-48 vote. The vote was initially deadlocked 49-49, and House Speaker Glen Casada kept the vote open for 40 minutes until he convinced Rep. Jason Zachary, R-Knoxville, to switch his vote.

NewsChannel 5 has learned that agents are interested in discovering whether anything of value – such as campaign contributions – were offered by anyone in return for votes.

I must confess that my first reaction to this story was ho-hum; I couldn’t believe that the FBI is investigating whether state legislators vote because of incentives, since we often see them doing it in the open. And then there was the FBI raid on Gulen offices in Ohio, where they carried away boxes of papers. And nothing more was heard of it. And then there was the federal indictment of Ben Chavis of the American Indian Model Charter Schools in Oakland, who was alleged to have diverted $3.8 million from the schools’ bank account to his own businesses, as well as using federal charter funding to pay himself rent; and those charges were recently dropped on grounds that there was no material damage.

Categories Accountability, Tennessee, Vouchers

Jeff Bryant: How Progressives are Fighting the Plot to Gut Public Education

By dianeravitch
May 8, 2019 //
2

As the reputation and fortunes of the corporate reform movement sag, its allies are redoubling their efforts to spread charters and vouchers, as we have seen in recent attacks on public education in Florida, Texas, and elsewhere.

Jeff Bryant writes here about the successful resistance to privatization in Milwaukee, which has had vouchers and charters for decades, with nothing to show for it but three low-performing sectors.

He writes:

Despite the decades-long effort to privatize Milwaukee’s local school, recent events in that community have revealed how public school advocates can successfully fight back against the forces of privatization.

In Milwaukee’s recent school board election, a slate of five candidates swept into officeunder a banner of turning back years of efforts to privatize the district’s schools. The win for public schools was noteworthy not only because it took place in a long-standing bastion of school choice, but also because the winning candidates were backed by an emerging coalition that adopted a bold, new politics that demands candidates take up a full-throated opposition to school privatization rather than cater to the middle.

Unsurprisingly, the coalition includes the local teachers’ union, who’ve long been skeptical of charters, vouchers, and other privatization ideas, but joining the teachers in their win are progressive activists, including the Wisconsin chapter of the Working Families Party, and local civil rights advocacy groups, including Black Leaders Organizing for Communities and Voces de la Frontera.

Unifying this diverse coalition was an uncompromising political argument about what makes public schools truly public and why that distinction matters.

 

 

 

Categories Charter Schools, Education Reform, Milwaukee, Resistance, School Choice, Vouchers

Montana Supreme Court Struck Down Voucher Program

By dianeravitch
May 7, 2019 //
2

Somehow I missed this important story when it happened last December. The Montana Supreme Court struck down a tuition tax credit program as a transparent effort to violate the state constitution’s prohibition of sending public funds to religious schools.  Other states have adopted such devious strategies to send public money to religious schools, despite their state constitution. Florida is a leader in ignoring its state constitution.

“The Montana Supreme Court delivered a win for church-state separation and public education last week when it struck down the state’s private school voucher program.

“Americans United, joined by other civil-rights organizations, had urged the court through a friend-of-the-court brief to prevent the voucher scheme – called a tuition tax credit program – from funding private, religious education. Our brief explained that the program violated the “no-aid” provision in Montana’s constitution, which protects residents’ religious freedom by ensuring taxpayer money isn’t used for religious purposes – including religious education.

“The Montana Supreme Court agreed with us: “We ultimately conclude the Tax Credit Program aids sectarian schools in violation of Article X, Section 6, and that it is unconstitutional in all of its applications,” wrote the court majority.

“Montana taxpayers should never be forced to fund religious education – that’s a fundamental violation of religious freedom,” said AU president and CEO Rachel Laser. “The Montana Supreme Court’s decision protects both church-state separation and public education. It’s a double win.”

“The state’s legislature passed the tuition tax credit program in 2015. It allows “donors” to give money to organizations that pay for students’ private school tuition, then the state gives the “donors” a full credit on their tax bills – so it’s not really a donation after all. This is essentially a voucher program because it funnels public money to private schools.”

Categories Montana, Vouchers

SPLC: This Is What Vouchers Really Mean

By dianeravitch
May 4, 2019 //
18

In a statement posted last month, the Southern Poverty Legal Center clearly described the high price paid by students and citizens for vouchers.

Public schools serve all students, no matter their backgrounds. Private schools do not – they can cherry-pick which children they serve.

What’s more, when families take a private school voucher, they lose known academic standards, certified teachers, civil rights protections, services and accessibility for disabled students, free and reduced lunch options, building code regulations, and free transportation.

The Legislature passed the bill to create a fifth voucher plan, despite the fact that the state already spends $1 Billion a year to send children to voucher schools where they abandon their civil rights protections, have no guarantee of services if they are disabled, are likely to have uncertified teachers, and are likely to learn science from the Bible. Eighty percent of voucher schools are religious. Their students are not prepared to live in the modern world.

Why is the Florida GOP determined to miseducate the rising generation? Is it religious fervor? Greed? Stupidity?

When they say that “parents always know best,” are they aware of the near daily stories of parents who abused, tortured, murdered their children? Did A.J.’s parents “know best,” the parents in Illinois who abused and murdered their five-year-old? Did the parents of 13 children in California who abused them over many years also “know best?”

The voters of Florida elected these fools. They will have to take responsibility and replace them with people who care about the children and the future of their state.

 

 

Categories Civil Rights, Florida, Parents, School Choice, Stupid, Vouchers
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