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Tulane Research Center Funded by Charter Advocates Will Study National Impact of Charter Schools

By dianeravitch
December 13, 2023 //
21

When Betsy DeVos was Secretary of Education, she gave $10 million to establish a research center on school choice; she chose carefully. Given who she is, she was not likely to give the money to academics likely to throw cold water on her life’s work. She gave the grant to Tulane, smack dab in the middle of the only city that has no public schools. The organization she funded is called the National Center Research on Education Access and Choice (REACH), led by economist Douglas Harris.

REACH has not been a cheerleader for choice but neither has it been notably critical. The all-charter New Orleans district has not offered much to cheer about. Just days ago, the Orleans Parish School Board closed The Living Charter, which has a large proportion of English learners, because of its test scores. It was the ninth charter school closed in New Orleans since 2018.

Two of the nation’s most active funders of charter schools just awarded nearly $1 million to REACH: the Walton Foundation and the City Fund.

Walton is the single largest private funder of charter schools in the nation. The City Fund was created by billionaires Reed Hastings (Netflix) and John Arnold (ex-Enron) specifically to spur the growth of charter schools.

Tulane announced:

The latest research on school choice suggests that the availability of charter schools alongside other options is producing impacts across entire school systems. However, what works in New Orleans may not work in Arizona. How can we better understand variations across contexts in order to design more effective policies at the system-level?

The National Center for Research on Education Access and Choice (REACH) at Tulane University received a total of $975,964 in funding from both the Walton Family Foundation ($485,914) and City Fund ($490,050) to jointly support a three-year research project on the system-level effects of charter schools at the national level. The goal is to learn how charter schools improve student outcomes and better understand the role of policy in fueling these changes.

Is it too much to suggest that their sponsorship is akin to cigarette companies funding research on the benefits and risks of nicotine?

Harris implied in his comments on the grant that a district with 100% market share was subject to “diminishing returns.” Does he mean that it’s useful to have some public schools to take the students that the charters don’t want?

According to REACH Director and Tulane School of Liberal Arts Professor of Economics Douglas Harris, “This funding will help us improve the functioning of the charter sector by better understanding the roles played by factors such as access to quality teachers and the design of charter policies, including charter school funding. We will also learn about the various mechanisms throughout which charter schools affect students, including indirect effects on traditional public schools. Finally, places like New Orleans have gone 100% charter, but we see some evidence of ‘diminishing returns’ to charter market share.” He added, “We are thankful to both The Walton Family Foundation and City Fund for their generous support of our work.”

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, New Orleans, Privatization, Research, School Choice, Walton Foundation

Carol Burris: The Think Tank That the Charter Industry Relies On

By dianeravitch
August 6, 2023 //
53

Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education, wrote in The Progressive about the role of the conservative Hoover Institution as a reliable advocate for charters, vouchers, and all kinds of school choice. (When I was a conservative, I was a Senior Fellow at Hoover.)

Burris writes:

One of the original intentions of creating charter schools was to improve student learning—which is why it’s telling that proponents of “school choice” now justify charter-school and school-voucher expansion by saying they are necessary to provide parents with options other than traditional public schools.

Choice for choice’s sake—originally a secondary rationale for charters—has become the go-to line of charter school proponents. Meanwhile, measures of academic performance have faded into the backgroundas a justification for school options. Nevertheless, for years, the question of whether or not charter schools academically out-perform traditional public schools has gnawed at the industry like an annoying uncle who insists on having the last word in every family debate.

The latest attempt to prove the supposed superiority of the charter industry comes from the Center for Research for Education Outcome, or CREDO, which has taken prior stabs at the question with results that were far from convincing.

“Remarkable” was how Margaret “Macke” Raymond, CREDO’s director and author described the results of CREDO’s latest national charter school study. Her enthusiasm was infectious. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board proclaimed that CREDO’s new evidence showed charter schools are now “blowing away their traditional school competition.”

But despite the headlines that popped up in pro-charter media, the only thing “blown away” was the truth. Like prior national studies, CREDO’s latest report, “As a Matter of Fact: The National Charter School Study III,” shows tiny average differences between charter and public school students—0.011 standard deviations in math and 0.028 standard deviations in reading. These are differences so small that the Brookings Institution’s Tom Loveless once likened them to standing on a few sheets of paper to increase one’s height.

And CREDO knows it. The organization characterized nearly identical differences in their 2009 national study as inconsequential—referring to them as “meaningless,” “small,” and possibly derived from “measurement error.”

How could “meaningless” suddenly become “remarkable” once a tiny statistical tilt in outcomes favors charter schools? The answer lies in who runs CREDO, who funds it, and the methodological problems inherent in its reports.

We tackle these points in our new Network for Public Education report, “In Fact or Fallacy? An In-depth Critique of the CREDO 2023 National Report.” Here’s a brief summary.

Who runs CREDO?

Although reporters refer to CREDO at Stanford University or Stanford’s CREDO, the relationship between CREDO and the prestigious university is complicated.

CREDO is based in the conservative, pro-charter Hoover Institution, a private think tank on the Stanford University campus. The Hoover Institution governs and finances itself without oversight or control by the university. In fact, Hoover has a “long and fraught relationship” with Stanford’s faculty and students who have objected to its lack of diversity, controversial scholarship, and conservative ideology.

What all of these funders have in common is a vested interest in charter schools and—at least in Pearson’s case—profit.

Expanding school choice is a focus of the Hoover Institution. For example, in 2021, Hoover hosted Betsy DeVos in a stop on her book tour. Secretary DeVos was introduced and praised by Raymond, who, along with her role at CREDO, refers to herself as the education program director at Hoover in the video.

Please open the link and read the rest of the article.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Education Industry, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Privatization, School Choice, Walton Foundation

Tom Ultican: CREDO Charter School Claims Demolished

By dianeravitch
July 26, 2023 //
9

Tom Ultican, retired teacher of physics and advanced mathematics in California, wrote a devastating critique of the latest CREDO charter school study, based on the analysis by the Network for Public Education.

He wrote:

The Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) just released another pro-charter school study, “CREDO also acknowledges the Walton Family Foundation and The City Fund for supporting this research.” It is not a study submitted for peer review and is so opaque that real scholars find the methodology and data sets difficult to understand. Carol Burris and her public school defenders at the Network for Public Education (NPE) have provided an in-depth critical review.

With the new CREDO study, Education Week’s Libby Stanford said that “charters have drastically improved, producing better reading and math scores than traditional public schools.’’ Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal declared charter schools are now “blowing away their traditional school competition.” Burris retorted with “despite the headlines, the only thing ‘blown away’ is the truth.”

Putting a CREDO Thumb on the Scale

CREDO uses massive data sets, unavailable to other researchers, getting minuscule differences which are statistically significant. No one can check their work. They employ a unique and highly discredited statistical approach called “virtual twins” to compare public school with charter school testing outcomes. Instead of reporting the statistical results in standard deviations, CREDO uses their “crazy pants” days of learning scheme.

NPE discovered that the “blowing away” public school results amounted to 0.011 standard deviations in math and 0.028 standard deviations in reading. The minuscule difference is “significant statistically but is meaningless from a practical standpoint” according to CREDO. In a 2009 report showing public schools with a small advantage, CREDO declared, “Differences of the magnitude described here could arise simply from the measurement error in the state achievement tests that make up the growth score, so considerable caution is needed in the use of these results.”To give these almost non-existent differences more relevance, CREDO reports them as “days of learning”instead of standard deviation. “Days of learning” is a method unique to CREDO and generally not accepted by scholars. They claim charter school math students get 6 more “days of learning” and English students, 16 days.

Please open Tom Ultican’s post to see why he considers the CREDO report to be “sloppy science” and “unfounded propaganda.”

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Deregulation, Disruption, Education Industry, Fake News, Hoax, Network for Public Education, Walton Foundation

NPE Releases Bombshell Report on Latest CREDO Study!

By dianeravitch
July 19, 2023 //
117

The Network for Public Educatuon just released a careful analysis of the latest CREDO study, which claimed that charter schools get better results than public schools.

Not so fast, writes Carol Burris, executive director of NPE. Burris reviewed the data and methodology and found multiple problems with both. The statistical differences between the two sectors, she saw, were the same in 2023 as in CREDO’s first charter study in 2013, which were then described as insignificant.

Even more troubling, CREDO’s work is funded by pro-charter billionaires. How is this different from a study of nicotine safety funded by the tobacco industry? And yet mainstream media accepted the CREDO report without questioning its data, its methodology, or its funders.

Billionaires behind the bias: Unmasking CREDO’s agenda

The Network for Public Education released a response to CREDO’s third national report, revealing the true agenda of a research arm of the conservative Hoover Institution. In its report, CREDO uses cherry-picked charter management chains and flawed methodology that embellishes results and discredits public schools and “mom and pop” charter schools.

NEW YORK, NY — Today, the Network for Public Education released ‘In Fact or Fallacy? An In-Depth Critique of the CREDO 2023 National Report a well-researched response that traces the funders and the bias in CREDO’s data, reporting methods, and conclusions.

CREDO’s report is meant to compare test score growth in math and reading for students in charter versus public schools. But once the curtain is pulled back, the conclusions are dangerously misleading to the public as well as policymakers who depend on accurate research to make informed education-related decisions and policies.

Carol Burris, Executive Director of NPE and the report’s author, says: “CREDO is not a neutral academic institution. They are an education research arm of the pro-charter Hoover Institution, and it’s time they are treated as such. We call on policymakers, the general public, and parents to disregard the results of CREDO studies that take tiny results and blow them up using CREDO-invented “Days of Learning.” Their studies are becoming nothing more than propaganda for the charter industry.”

CREDO’s latest report identifies two nonprofits as underwriters of the latest study – The City Fund and The Walton Family – which gave CREDO nearly $3 million during the years of the study. The City Fund is bankrolled by pro-charter billionaires, including John Arnold, Reed Hastings, and Bill Gates. They have a well-established history of supporting the expansion of charter schools and funding agendas to break up school districts and turn them into a patchwork of “portfolio districts.” The goal of the City Fund is to transform 30-50% of city public schools into charter schools.

CREDO also masks its connections to the conservative think tank the Hoover Institution, but the CREDO report authors’ current biographies and resumes link the organizations. CREDO’s Director and the report’s first author is the Education Program Director for Hoover.

NPE says it is time for state agencies to end their research relationship with CREDO and offer detailed student data to credible and independent research organizations instead.

The NPE report takes an honest look at CREDO’s report with the following key sections:

  • A history of CREDO and its connection to the Hoover Institution.
  • Scholarly critiques of CREDO methodology.
  • Trivial differences exaggerated by the CREDO-created construct, ‘Days of Learning’
  • Bias in the “Virtual Twin” methodology.
  • Serious errors in the identification of schools run by Charter Management Organizations.

According to Diane Ravitch, the President of the Network for Public Education, “CREDO and the billionaires who fund them are trying to discredit public schools to persuade the public that public schools are inferior to privately-managed schools. How is this different from the tobacco industry funding research on cigarette safety?”

“It is clear the CREDO reports are now part of a long-game strategy to undermine, weaken, and defund public education. Why does CREDO consider differences that favor public schools in their first report as “meaningless” and “small” but characterize nearly identical differences favoring charters in its third report to be “remarkable”? Same outcomes. Different characterizations,” Ravitch said.

In light of our findings, The Network for Public Education asks CREDO the following question:

Does CREDO represent the interest of its funders and the pro-school choice Hoover Institution or the interests of the public, who deserve an unbiased look at real outcomes for our nation’s charter and public school students?

“Unless CREDO is held accountable, its reports will continue to move from “in fact” to misleading fallacies. And that does a disservice to the charter and public school sectors alike,” concludes the NPE report. 

The Network for Public Education is a national advocacy group whose mission is to preserve, promote, improve, and strengthen public schools for current and future generations of students.

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Categories Accountability, Bias, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Dark Money, Data, Disruption, Education Industry, Funding, Research, Walton Foundation

Jan Resseger: Consumerism Is Destroying the Commons

By dianeravitch
April 2, 2023 //
9

Jan Resseger spent her waking years as a warrior for social justice in her church. Now she writes a brilliant and thoughtful blog.

Her recent post made me reflect on the fact that groups like “Moms for Liberty” and “Parents Defending Education” create turmoil and chaos over the issue of the day (masking, vaccines, school closings, trans kids, books about race or gender identity), then use the issues and conflict they created to demand vouchers to send their kids to schools with like-minded parents.

These Astroturf groups are funded handsomely by the Walton Family Foundation, Charles Koch, Betsy DeVos, and other billionaires to act as shock troops for their paymasters.

Jan Resseger wrote recently:

I cannot even keep track of all the press coverage I have seen in the past couple of weeks about school privatization proposals under discussion in the state legislatures. And in almost all of the articles I read, the move to privatize schools is accompanied by descriptions of culture war fights about book banning, interference with curricular standards, and elimination of programs that encourage “diversity, equity, and inclusion” in public schools and public universities. I have a stack of very recent articles about Florida, Ohio, Virginia, Texas, Missouri, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, and New Hampshire, and I am sure I have missed others.

What is the cause of today’s attack on public schools and the kind of programming that many of us believe is essential to help our children live well in our diverse society?

In her Washington Post piece about a battle between two parent groups, Concerned Taxpayersand Support Education, in Mentor, Ohio——Hannah Natanson blames COVID for the controversy: COVID Changed Parents’ View of Schools—and Ignited the Education Culture Wars.

And in a powerful report from the Network for Public Education, Merchants of Deception, political scientist Maurice Cunningham identifies the role of Astroturf parents’ groups that present themselves as though they are a spontaneous welling up of parent outrage. Even though financial support for these groups is untraceable dark money, here is how Cunningham tracks evidence that these supposedly local groups are well connected from place to place and supported by powerful, far-right political interests: “First we should watch for groups that have “grown at a pace that only a corporation’s monetary resources could manage.” Then we should identify the group’s allies to “get a better idea of the real powers behind” the organization. Additionally: “We’ll use another tool to draw telling inferences about these fronts: identification of their key vendors, such as law firms, pollsters, and public relations firms, which we’ll see are often instruments of conservative… networks… Another recurring clue… is the ‘creation story.’ A new non-profit group bursts forth with some version of claiming that two or three moms began talking over what they see as problems in schools and resolve to start a nonprofit to take on the teachers’ unions, administration, or school board. By some form of miracle, they almost immediately receive hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars in funding from billionaires. Next, they find themselves gaining favorable coverage on right-wing media—Daily Caller, Breitbart, and Fox News…. ”

Of course both the disruption COVID thrust upon our communities and the use of parents by far-right groups trying to ban “WOKE” policies represent what many of us have been watching in the past couple of years. But on a deeper level, it is not a coincidence that the outrageous school board disruptions and the attempts by the far right to scrub the textbooks, and the legislatures considering parents’ bill of rights legislation also seem to be happening in places where slate lawmakers are also pushing vouchers, and not merely the old-fashioned tuition vouchers for private schools, but the new Education Savings Account universal programs to provide wider parental “freedom” and lack of oversight of the public dollars being diverted to these plans. These new vouchers are being designed to give parents the ultimate latitude in school choice—homeschooling and micro-schools where parents put their vouchers together to pay for a teacher for several families. Lack of regulation is a key ingredient in most of these plans. In every case the worldview underneath the proposals involves extreme individualism along with marketplace consumerism.

In her new book, The Teachers: A Year Inside America’s Most Vulnerable, Important Profession, Alexandra Robbins describes parents who view themselves and their children as the customers teachers must please: “At a candidate forum during the COVID pandemic, a Maryland school board member called students the ‘customers in our school system,’ as if teachers existed to satisfy students rather than to educate them… On a broader level, the student-as-customer attitude has contributed to a growing politicized movement pushing for parents to have authority over what is taught in schools.” (pp. 66-67) Believing your child is the client who must be pleased by services rendered is a very different conception of the parent-teacher relationship than believing that the teacher is a professional whose expertise and cooperation you can and should consult for guidance about your child’s education.

Please open the link and read the remainder of this very important post.

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Billionaires, Corruption, Curriculum, Dark Money, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Extremism, Fake, For-Profit, Fraud, Hoax, Koch Brothers, Privatization, School Choice, Segregation, Teachers, Vouchers, Walton Foundation

Maurice Cunningham: The Strange Disappearance of the 2023 “National Parents Union” Elections

By dianeravitch
March 19, 2023 //
17

Maurice Cunningham is a retired professor of political science in Massachusetts. He is an expert on Dark Money in education issues. His revelations about the money behind a state referendum to expand the number of charters indefinitely in Massachusetts in 2016 helped to defeat the referendum. I wrote about his role in my book Slaying Goliath.

What Happened to Election Day at National Parents Union?

There I was on the edge of my seat in front of the television waiting for Steve Kornacki to break down the numbers in the election for the hotly contested highest offices in the National Parents Union. Could Keri Rodrigues be re-elected to another three year term? Might Alma Marquez, elected secretary-treasurer three years ago before mysteriously disappearinglaunch a comeback bid? Would the networks call a winner before my bedtime?

But no, nothing. No network call. No Steve Kornacki. No election at all.

That was a huge disappointment because on January 27, 2020, Beth Hawkins of The74 reported “Founders Keri Rodrigues and Alma Marquez were voted into three-year terms as inaugural president and secretary-treasurer, respectively.”

So I waited three years for the next election. If you can’t get reliable information about a Walton Family Foundation franchise like NPU from a Walton Family Foundation publication like The74, where can you look?

I’m kidding. I knew there would be no election, just like I knew the Hawkins piece was corporate puffery, and just as I knew there was no real election in 2020 where Rodrigues and Marquez “launch[ed] the National Parents Union on Jan. 16, when they … [held] an inaugural summit in New Orleans with 125 delegates from all 50 states, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico.” For one thing, Rodrigues signed NPU’s incorporation papers on April 4, 2019 as president. Then on the 2020 annual report Rodrigues signed as president with a term ending December 31, 2025. Tim Langan (later to marry Rodrigues, in 2022) replaced Marquez as treasurer. There has never been any accounting of what happened to the duly elected treasurer and apparently zero curiosity about her from the “125 delegates from all 50 states, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico” who presumably left New Orleans thinking they had elected her to a three year term.

Still, an election for a part-time job that pays $232,000 for twenty hours per week would seem attractive enough to draw some opposition. (Source: National Parents Union Form 990 tax return for 2021)

The $180,000 is from a related organization, the Walton Family Foundation franchise Massachusetts Parents Union, also a 20 hour per week gig. (Source: Massachusetts Parents United Form 990 tax return for 2021)

Reading over The74 article I’m struck by how important it was for the Waltons to portray NPU as something like a real union. But it isn’t. For one thing unions elect their leadership democratically. Rodrigues promised Fox News that NPU would “be creating a national parent council and a board of advisers. We will assemble delegates, agree on by-laws, vote on ratification, and form our union.” The parent council has never materialized, no by-laws have been made public, and ratificationwas about as valid as the treasurer’s vote. But they did appoint delegates! Then NPU killed off all the delegates. They were replaced with a 7 person parent “advisory council.” Keep your bags packed, councilors.

Who would vote if NPU did hold an election? Rodrigues recently tweeted “Just held our last @NationalParents Union leadership meeting where @TafshierCosby announced we have now grown to almost 1,000 affiliated organizations in all 50 states, Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico.”

There are no parent organization affiliates. The only verifiable affiliated organizations are those, as I wrote in Dark Money and the Politics of School Privatization, that are in the charter school industry or related privatization fronts. Cosby is identified at the NPU website Senior Director of the NPU Center for Organizing and Partnerships and “also the CEO of Parent Impact.” Parent Impact is apparently part of the KIPP charter school business. Itwas recognized by the IRS as a tax exempt organization only on September 10, 2020. IRS placed Parent Impact on the auto-revocation list for not filing tax returns on May 15, 2021.

I didn’t let the popcorn go to waste on election night but I sure did miss Steve Kornacki.

Maurice T. Cunningham is author of Dark Money and the Politics of School Privatization. As a (now retired) educator in the UMass system, he is a union member.

Categories Accountability, Corporate Reform, Dark Money, Education Industry, Elections, Fake, Funding, Hoax, Parent Groups, Walton Foundation

Josh Cowen: I Was Never a Member of a Teachers’ Union—Until Now

By dianeravitch
March 12, 2023 //
32

Josh Cowen is a Professor of Educational Policy at Michigan State University. He has spent many years as a voucher researcher and recently concluded that vouchers are a failed experiment, based on a multitude of research studies.

As soon as anyone becomes a critic of charter schools or vouchers, the choice lobby attacks them and claims they are paid by the teachers’ unions. I know this from personal experience. A few years ago, a choice lobbyist accused me of taking union money to buy the house I lived in; I assured her that I paid for my home all by myself.

Funny that the shrill well-paid lobbyists act as though unions are criminal enterprises, when in reality they have historically enabled poor and working class people to gain a foothold in the middle class, to have job security, health benefits, and a pension. They also give public schools a voice at the table when governors propose larger classes, lower standards for new teachers, or decreased funding for schools. I believe we need unions now, more than ever. Whenever I hear of a charter school unionizing or of workers in Starbucks or some other big chain forming a union, it makes my day.

Josh Cowen has undoubtedly been subject to the same baseless criticism from the same union-haters whose salaries are paid by plutocrats. He shares his thoughts here about teachers’ unions.

Here in Michigan, the Democratic legislature just re-affirmed our state’s longstanding commitment to working families by removing anti-labor provisions from state law. The move doesn’t apply to teachers and other public employees, because the conservative U.S. Supreme Court sided a few years back with Right-wing activists in their efforts to hinder contributions to public sector unions, but it’s still good news for the labor movement overall.

And I wanted to use their effort—alongside Republican efforts in other states to threaten teachers for what they say in classrooms—to make a simple point.

We need teachers unions. Other folks more prominent than me, like AFT’s Randi Weingarten, have made this point recently too. But I wanted to add my own voice as someone who has not been a union member, and someone who—although I’ve appeared with Randi on her podcast and count many union members as friends—has never been an employee or even a consultant.

If you want to talk dollars, The Walton Family Foundation once supported my research on charter schools to the tune of more than $300,000. Arnold Ventures supported my fundraising for a research center at Michigan State–$1.9 million from them. And the US Department of Education awarded my team more than $2 million to study school choice—while Betsy DeVos was secretary.

Think about that when I say school vouchers are horrific. And understand, I’m getting no support from teachers’ unions.

Instead it is I who supports them.

I’ve been studying teacher labor markets almost as long as school vouchers. Mostly my research has looked at teacher recruitment and retention. But I’ve also written about teachers’unions specifically. There’s a debate among scholars on what unions do and whether their emphasis on spending translates into test score differences. In the “rent seeking” framework economists use, the concern is that dollars spent on salaries don’t have direct academic payoffs.

There is no question that spending more money on public schools has sustained and generational impacts on kids. Research has “essentially settled” that debate, according to today’s leading expert on the topic.

But I want to branch out from dollars and cents and test scores to talk about teacher voice.

And I want to do that by raising a few questions that I’ve asked myself over the last couple years:

Why should the voice of a billionaire heiress from Michigan with no experience in public schools count for more than the voices of 100,000 teachers in my state’s classrooms every day?

Why should the simple fact that they work with children made by other people mean that teachers surrender their own autonomy and judgment not just as professionals but as human beings?

Why should educators have to work under what amounts to gag orders, afraid to broach certain topics or issues in the classroom? Some states are setting up hotlines to report on teachers as if they’re parolees, and a bill in New Hampshire would essentially give the fringe-Right Secretary of Education subpoena power to haul teachers in front of a special tribunal for teaching “divisive concepts.” This, after a Moms for Liberty chapter put out a bounty on New Hampshire teachers who were likewise divisive on an issue. Read: an issue of race or gender.

It’s not just threats to teacher employment. We know this. There are threats to teachers’ lives. How many teachers have died alongside their students—other people’s children—over the years in school shootings?

Why does the Right claim to trust teachers enough to arm them with guns in response to those shootings, but not enough to let them talk about race, gender, or any other “divisive concept?” Even some conservative commentators have worried publicly that we’re asking teachers to do too much. Why are we asking them to be an armed security force too?

‘In her recent history of “The Teacher Wars”, The New York Times’ Dana Goldstein noted that teachers formed unions, and fought for teacher tenure, to protect themselves not just professionally but personally. For free speech. To prevent harassment from supervisors—then as now, teachers were mostly professional women—and to keep from being fired for pregnancy or marital status.

So really, attacks on teachers are nothing new. Instead, teachers seem to be one of the few professions that it’s still acceptable in political conversation—even a mark of supposed intellectual sophistication in some circles—to ponder the shortcomings of the educators who work with our kids every day.

There’s nothing sophisticated about attacking hardworking, thoughtful, and dedicated people. And the only result of doing so will be the further erosion of our public, community schools. And that’s really the point. Just a few days ago, we learned that the big data that I and many others have gotten used to working with finally caught up to the on-the-frontlines warnings of educators everywhere: teachers are exiting the profession at unprecedented rates.

I’ve taken no money from teachers’ unions for any of the work I do. I’ve never been a member of a union—teachers’ or otherwise. Until now. Because after writing this today, I made a donation to my state’s primary teachers’ union and became a general member: a person “interested in advancing the cause of education…not eligible for other categories of membership.”

There’s a word for that in the labor movement. You hear it a lot here in Michigan, where I grew up and now teach future teachers in a college of education. That word is Solidarity.

Sign me up.

Categories Academic Freedom, Accountability, Budget Cuts, Charter Schools, Class size, Courage, Democracy, Education Reform, Equity, Freedom, Funding, Health, History, School Choice, Teacher Shortage, Teachers, Unions, Vouchers, Walton Foundation

What You Need to Know About Fake Parent Groups: An NPE Report

By dianeravitch
January 25, 2023 //
22

Maurice Cunningham, retired professor of political scientist, has written an exposé of the well-funded fake “parent groups” that spring up overnight to disrupt school board meetings and demand control of books, curriculim, and COVID protocols. Who is behind them? Read the latest report from the Network for Public Education: “Merchants of Deception: Parent Props and Their Funders.”

They show up shouting at school board meetings with endless complaints. The press interviews them as though they are some “regular moms” looking out for their children, but they are not. They are a well-funded facade for the Koch, Walton, and DeVos families to disrupt and destroy public education.

In our new report, author and academician Maurice Cunningham pulls back the veil on the players, tactics, and funders. This must-read report identifies the who, how, and why behind “Merchants of Deception: Parent Props and Their Funders.”

Cunningham is author of the new book Dark Money and the Politics of School Privatization.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Dark Money, Disruption, Education Industry, Elections, Extremism, Fake, Koch Brothers, Walton Foundation

Why Do Rightwing Foundations Fund Emily Oster’s Work on COVID and Parenting?

By dianeravitch
January 4, 2023 //
65

Early in the pandemic, an economist at Brown University named Emily Oster gained extraordinary media attention for the advice she offered. She wrote multiple articles declaring that it was safe to open schools even without the funds needed to pay for extra safety precautions. She wrote, she was written about, she became the go-to person with “evidence” that schools were safe from COVID.

Oster’s research is funded by leading rightwing and libertarian foundations, organizations, and individuals. As the linked article by epidemiologists Abigail Cartus and Justin Feldman explains, Oster’s emphasis on individualism and personal choice ring sweetly in the ears of the rightwing philanthropists.

They write:

Oster’s influence on the discourse around COVID in schools is difficult to overstate. She has been quoted in hundreds of articles about school pandemic precautions and interviewed as a guest on dozens of news shows. Officials from both parties have used her work as justification for lifting public health measures. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis cited her study while announcing an executive order banning school mask mandates, while CDC Director Rochelle Walenksy referenced Oster’s research in anticipation of relaxing classroom social distancing guidelines. Oster also co-authored an influential school reopening guidance document that was released in early 2021.

But despite its prominence, Oster’s work on COVID in schools has attracted little scrutiny—even though it has been funded since last summer by organizations that, without exception, have explicit commitments to opposing teacher’s unions, supporting charter schools, and expanding corporate freedom. In addition to grantsfrom the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the Walton Family Foundation, and Arnold Ventures, Oster has received funding from far-right billionaire Peter Thiel. The Thiel grant awarded to Oster was administered by the Mercatus Center, the think tank founded and financed by the Koch family.

Although she claimed that her work was evidence-based, the authors show that her evidence was never as conclusive as she argued.

Cartus and Feldman draw a straight line between Oster’s views about COVID and the billionaire-funded attack on public schools. It is no accident that the same people who support charter schools and vouchers also support Oster.

What’s in it for the billionaires? Oster spreads the gospel of choice, they write, a philosophy of looking out for #1, and ignoring social responsibility.

They write:

Oster is far from the only person to apply an economic style of reasoning to the U.S. education sector. There exists an entire ecosystem of “education reform” organizations that have spent decades attempting to subject schools to market conditions, promoting “school choice”, (i.e., charter schools, some of which are for-profit). This necessitates, among other stances, taking a harder line against organized labor. When the pandemic arrived, billionaires and right-wing interests invested in neoliberal “education reform” saw an opportunity to advance their interests: breaking unions, promoting charter schools, and undermining public education. Oster’s preference for individualism, the rhetoric of choice, and economic reasoning over structural and collective justice-based conceptions made her—as an impeccably credentialed and high-profile economist prior to the pandemic—a valuable “expert” ally in their crusade to reshape U.S. education. Indeed, when the pandemic began, these groups promptly expressed interest in funding her work on COVID in schools….

Throughout the pandemic, Oster’s advocacy has helped make the “data-driven” case for peeling away successive layers of COVID mitigations: first ending remote instructionin favor of hybrid learning, then ending hybrid learning in favor of a full return to in-person instruction, then eliminating quarantine for those exposed to the virus. The direction of her vision for schooling during the pandemic ultimately involves abandoning universal public health measures altogether, turning masking and vaccination into individual, personal choices that can be decided through cost-benefit calculations.

The irony of the Rightwingers’ support for Oster and her “data-driven” approach to COVID is that it stands in sharp contrast to their total disregard for data or evidence about charter schools and voucher schools. The evidence favoring charter schools over district schools is scanty; the evidence of the failure of vouchers is overwhelming. But the funders don’t care.

The bitter struggle over COVID in schools, conducted with the rhetoric of “choice,” opened up space for an alliance between affluent white liberal parents and a right-wing propaganda infrastructure devoted to destroying unions and public schools. For instance, John Arnold, the former Enron executive behind the eponymous Arnold Ventures (which funds Oster), has used the pandemic to attack teacher’s unions and further his goal of dismantling public pension funding, much of which is allocated to unionized public school teachers. The pandemic also provided an opportunity to increase charter school usageat the expense of public school enrollment. It gave plutocrats like the Waltons yet another chance to attack teachers’ unions by painting their demands for safer working conditions as irrational. By advocating reopening in a seminar at Bellwether Education Partners (another Walton grantee) during a period when the Chicago Teachers Union was campaigning for stronger COVID rules, Oster helped the Waltons do precisely that.

To see all the links and read the full article, open the link.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Economics, Funding, Health, School Choice, Science, Walton Foundation

Josh Cowen: A Citizen’s Guide to the Researchers and Funders Behind Vouchers

By dianeravitch
November 29, 2022 //
22

Josh Cowen is a veteran voucher researcher, having worked in the field for more than 20 years. He is a professor of education policy at Michigan State University. After two decades as a researcher, he concluded that vouchers are a disaster for the children who use them.

Today, he writes an inside guide to voucher research. All pro-voucher research is actually disguised advocacy for vouchers, especially if it funded or produced by the organizations listed here.

I hope you will share this post with your friends on social media, post blogs about it, and get it into the hands of journalists. The public deserves transparency.

Josh Cowen writes:


The entire base of evidence to support school vouchers comes from a small, interconnected and insular group of research-activists with direct ties to Betsy DeVos, Charles Koch, the Waltons and other privatization financers.

If you stopped reading this post right now, that’s the take-home message right there: the case for vouchers relies entirely on data and evidence contributed by what amounts to industry-funded research and advocacy on behalf of the cause.

But if you’re a journalist, an educator, or just a committed public school supporter (thank you!) and you want the links and the details, read on.

WHO’S WHO IN THE VOUCHER RESEARCH/ADVOCACY WORLD?

If you’re a professional journalist either in the education space or a broader policy/politics issue, you’ve probably heard of some of these people and certainly their institutions before. But you’re busy, you’ve got deadlines to meet and editors to approve your copy, and it’s not always easy to connect some of the important dots in this area.

But they need to be connected. The single most difficult task I’ve found in my writing on school vouchers has been to explain to journalists how the question of whether vouchers “work” for kids is not some obscure academic ivory-tower debate in which both sides have a nuanced, complicated and reasonably well-founded point.

There is credible research on one side—that vouchers are largely a negative force for student outcomes—and politically oriented reports on the other. That’s it.

So the next time you see a press release, or are given a quote, or talk off record to a voucher supporter saying that vouchers work, try this little exercise and see what you find for yourself:

STEP 1: DOES THE RESEARCH COME FROM ONE OF THE FOLLOWING ORGANIZATIONS?

• American Federation for Children: the 501(c)(4) advocacy organization co-founded by Betsy DeVos to lobby for vouchers. DeVos was so close to this group she had to recuse herself as Secretary of Education from contact with the group in her first year in government.

• Cato Institute: A Right-wing advocacy think tank co-founded by Charles Koch (although Koch later sued for lack of direct control of the group).

• EdChoice: Formerly the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, named for conservative economist who first proposed vouchers. Enough said.

• ExcelInEd: The advocacy group founded by Jeb Bush to expand vouchers and other conservative education priorities from the model Bush developed while he was governor of Florida.

• Goldwater Institute: A self-described libertarian think tank in Arizona that is chiefly oriented toward litigation on behalf of a number of different conservative policy priorities—most recently school vouchers.

• Harvard University Program on Education Policy and Governance (PEPG): A research center at Harvard run by Professor Paul Peterson, also of the Hoover Institution, and the father of modern-day pro-voucher research.

• Heritage Foundation: the most influential Right-wingthink tank in the country, devoted in part to privatizing schools and exploiting culture wars. Also directly tied to voter suppression efforts, per deep reporting by The New Yorker.

• University of Arkansas Department of Education Reform: A university-based doctoral training department responsible for producing nearly all of the currently active voucher research-advocates working at the institutions above today. This department was founded by a $10 million gift from the Walton Family Foundation in the early 2000s.

STEP 2: IS THE AUTHOR, CO-AUTHOR OR SOURCE FOR BACKGROUND OR ATTRIBUTION ONE OF THE FOLLOWING PEOPLE?

The Original Voucher Research-Advocates

• Jay P. Greene Currently Senior Fellow at Heritage, former founding head of the University of Arkansas Department of Education Reform, received his PhD under Paul E. Peterson.

• Paul E. Peterson Currently Professor at both Harvard and the conservative Hoover Institute at Stanford University, and the primary intellectual force behind the original positive voucher studies of the late 1990s.

Their Students, Colleagues and Acolytes

• Lindsay Burke Currently at the Heritage Foundation and a member of GOP Governor Glenn Youngkin’s transition team.

• Corey DeAngelis Currently Research Director for DeVos’s American Federation for Children group. But so much more: a regular Fox News contributor and active campaigner with far-Right governors like Kari Lake in Arizona and Kim Reynolds in Iowa.

• Greg Forster Currently at EdChoice and a co-blogger with Jay Greene.

• Matthew Ladner Currently at ALEC, EdChoice, Goldwater, and the Charles Koch Institute.

• Martin Lueken Currently a research director at EdChoiceand former PhD student of Jay Greene and Patrick Wolf at University of Arkansas.

• Mike McShane Currently a research director at EdChoiceand former PhD student of Jay Greene and Patrick Wolf at University of Arkansas.

• Neil McCluskey Currently “Director of Education Freedom” at the Cato Institute and a member of the editorial board for the Journal of School Choice—a publication edited by Robert Maranto of the University of Arkansas.

• Patrick Wolf Currently interim-head of the University of Arkansas Department of Education Reform, former colleague of Jay Greene and a former PhD student of Paul Peterson.

Not all of these organizations or individuals occupy the same problematic position. For example, I happen to make a point of reading everything McShane publishes, for example, because I respect his writing and the way he talks about the world even though I fundamentally disagree with his conclusions.

And the University of Arkansas group also includes a robust and insightful group of researchers examining the needs of teachers in the Ozarks and other high-poverty areas. I’m a great admirer of Professor Gema Zamarro and her students, who are doing some very important work on the role that the COVID0-19 pandemic played in teacher workforce conditions.

For that matter, some of what we know about the devasting effects of vouchers in Louisiana actually comes from Patrick Wolf’s reports. I’ve written with him myself on studies like one showing how critical strong oversight is to voucher program performance. Wolf is in fact the only person on the list abovewith a long and commendable history of publishing negative voucher impacts in top academic journals. The point here is not to disparage the individuals but to judge the insular and self-citing base of research that supports vouchers.

The point here is to be critical consumers of this line of research. Think of it this way: no news editor would release a story on an explosive topic going on the say so of a single source. At minimum that editor would require two and usually more sources. The problem for voucher advocacy research is that it is usually the only source for positive voucher impacts available. And it’s been that way for a decade or more.

What’s the take home point? It’s this: not all voucher advocates publish exclusively pro-voucher studies, but all pro-voucher studies come almost exclusively from pro-voucher advocates.

STEP 3: WHO FUNDED THE WORK YOU’RE READING OR THE SOURCE YOU’RE CITING?

One or more of the following funders—the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the Kern Family Foundation, the Koch Family Foundation, and the Walton Family Foundation—funded the original studies supporting school vouchers.

The Bradley and Koch Foundations—along with Heritage—are directly involved in Big Lie, election denialism, and voter-suppression funding, as reported by Jane Mayer of the New Yorker in painstaking detail last summer.

The next time you read a report, or talk to a source for attribution, ask first about their funding sources. If they decline to provide those sources, consider declining to report their results or their viewpoint. It is common for philanthropists to request non-disclosure of their donations—that is their right. But it is your right as a reporter, and certainly the right of your readers, to decline to print their material.

Transparency is just the name of the game for credible research. You can see my own research funding right here. You can see that I once upon a time also received grant funding from the Walton Foundation. And from Bloomberg, and the Laura and John Arnold Foundation. My only current active funding comes from the U.S. Department of Education Institute for Education Sciences—awarded to my research team while Betsy DeVos was education secretary!

Do I believe those organizations swayed my earlier research? Of course not. And the advocates above would say the same thing. But I don’t get to decide what to think and neither do they. That’s for the reader to judge, and that can’t happen without full transparency.

WHAT DOES ALL THIS MEAN?

This all may seem like inside baseball. A bunch of current and former voucher researchers arguing about who’s who and what’s what. A bunch of annoying and self-centered PhDs.

But in some sense that’s the entire point.

Whether an educator, reporter, researcher, policymaker or just avid reader of Diane’s blog here, you would be hard-pressed—if not find it absolutely impossible—to find a single study of voucher participant effects (how vouchers impact outcomes) that did not come from one of the few organizations or few individuals listed above, or a handful of others with direct ties to Greene, Peterson, or Arkansas.

That’s a problem, because what that means is that hundreds of millions of dollars, and hundreds of thousands of school children are being affected every day by the advocacy of a small group of people. In many cases advocacy disguised as objective and credible research.

As a counter point, consider this humble list of studies showing far more nuance and at times outright negative results from voucher programs. To create that list, I made a simple rule: no studies from organizations listed in Step 1 above. Notice the variety of names and the diversity of venues and outlets. That’s what a credible research base looks like.

A LITMUS TEST: IS THE PRO-VOUCHER EVIDENCE I’M READING POLITICAL/IDEOLOGICAL?

If at this point you’re still not convinced that the entire structure of pro-voucher research amounts to industry-funded research—think the Sacklers funding research on oxycontin’s addictive properties, or ExxonMobil funding research on fossil fuel environmental effects—there is also this:

Many of the organizations and individuals noted above also contribute to other areas of politically engaged conservative education reform.

Consider that Greene alone has published in the last 12 months studies arguing against the provision of gender-affirming care, against “wokeness”, and against Diversity, Equity and Inclusionoffices in both K12 and higher education.

Greene even put right in print for you to see that these culture war issues are useful to Right wing activists pushing the privatization of schooling.

In other words, pro-voucher research exists right alongside—and is often published by—the same people and organizations pushing other far-Right education outcomes. You need to know that to have a full picture of what voucher research truly says.

Pro-voucher research is pro-voucher advocacy, and pro-voucher advocacy is part of the larger effort to undermine public education, undermine a more humane approach to tolerating difference and diversity in our schools, and in many cases undermine free embrace of democracy itself.

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Bias, Bush, Jeb, Dark Money, Data, Education Industry, Koch Brothers, Research, Vouchers, Walton Foundation
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