Two Billionaires in Texas Want to Make America a Christian Nation

By dianeravitch
October 17, 2024 //
8

ProPublica published an article about the two Texas billionaires who are spending freely to achieve their goal. They want to turn America into a Christian nation. Never mind that the U.S. was never a Christian nation.

Of course, one of their most potent goals is get Texas to adopt vouchers so as many students as possible attend religious schools. They are close to Governor Greg Abbott, who is happy to take their money and lead the fight for vouchers.

The two are Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks. They made their fortunes in the oil industry. They are both preachers. Together they have created the most powerful political machine in Texas. They have used their money to run far-right Republicans against moderate Republicans, knocking them off until there is no one left in the Legislature who questions their goals.

In the party primaries in the spring, candidates funded by Dunn and Wilks defeated long-time members of the Legislsture from rural districts who had defeated vouchers because their communities didn’t want them. Abbott had decided that this was the year he would finally get vouchers approved but those pesky Republican moderates blocked him, as they had in prior sessions.

The so-called “moderates” were not really moderate. In fact, they were fully conservative. One of them, rancher Glen Rogers, had first been elected in 2021; since then, he had sponsored “legislation that allowed Texans to carry handguns without a permit, supported the Heartbeat Act that grants citizens the right to sue abortion providers and voted to give the police the power to arrest suspected undocumented migrants in schools and hospitals.” But the pro-voucher forces labeled him a RINO (Republican in name only) and distributed flyers calling him ” a closet liberal who supported gun control and Shariah law.” He was attacked by shell groups with names like “Texans for Fiscal Responsibility, Texas Gun Rights and Texas Family Project.”

Glen Rogers and other Republicans who opposed vouchers were defeated in the Republican primaries. The money to beat them came from Dunn and Wilks, and also Betsy DeVos and Jeff Yass (the richest man in Pennsylvania.

The onslaught worked. Rogers lost his seat by 27 percentage points, and more than two dozen statehouse candidates backed by the two billionaires prevailed this spring. These challengers received considerable support from Dunn-and-Wilks-backed allies like Miller, the agricultural commissioner, as well as from GOP heavyweights like Gov. Greg Abbott. “You cannot overstate the absolute earthquake that was the March 5 primary,” says Matt Mackowiak, a political consultant and chair of the Travis County GOP.

The morning after his routing at the polls, Rogers published an editorial in The Weatherford Democrat. Commendably short on self-pity, it argued that the real loser in his race was representative democracy. “History will prove,” he wrote, “that our current state government is the most corrupt ever and is ‘bought’ by a few radical dominionist billionaires seeking to destroy public education, privatize our public schools and create a theocracy.”

Texas, which has few limits on campaign spending, is home to a formidable army of donors. Lately Dunn has outspent them all. Since 2000, he and his wife have given more than $29 million to candidates and PACs in Texas. Wilks and his wife, who have donated to many of the same PACs as Dunn, have given $16 million. Last year, Dunn and his associated entities provided two-thirds of the donations to the state Republican Party…

The duo’s ambitions extend beyond Texas. They’ve poured millions into “dark money” groups, which do not have to disclose contributors; conservative-media juggernauts (Wilks provided $4.7 million in seed capital to The Daily Wire, which hosts “The Ben Shapiro Show”); and federal races. Dunn’s $5 million gift to the Make America Great Again super PAC in December made him one of Donald Trump’s top supporters this election season, and he has quietly begun to invest in efforts to influence a possible second Trump administration, including several linked to Project 2025….

Dunn and Wilks are often described as Christian nationalists, supporters of a political movement that seeks to erode, if not eliminate, the distinction between church and state. Dunn and Wilks, however, do not describe themselves as such. (Dunn, for his part, has rejected the term as a “made-up label that conflicts with biblical teaching.”) Instead, like most Christian nationalists, the two men speak about protecting Judeo-Christian values and promoting a biblical worldview. These vague expressions often serve as a shorthand for the movement’s central mythology: that America, founded as a Christian nation, has lost touch with its religious heritage, which must now be reclaimed.

Exactly what this reclamation would look like is up for debate. Some Christian nationalists advocate for more religious iconography in public life, while others harbor grander visions of Christianizing America’s political institutions. Those on the extreme end of this spectrum are sometimes called Dominionists, after the passage in Genesis in which man is given “dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.”

David Brockman, a nonresident scholar at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy, has extensively reviewed the speeches and donations of Dunn and Wilks and believes the two men to be thoroughgoing Dominionists. Zachary Maxwell, a Republican activist who knows the Wilks family personally and used to work for Texas Scorecard, a media group associated with Dunn and Wilks, agrees. “They want to get Christians in office to change the ordinances, laws, rules and regulations to fit the Bible,” he told me. According to Texas Monthly, Dunn once told Joe Straus, the first Jewish speaker of the Texas House since statehood, that only Christians should hold leadership positions. (Dunn has denied the remark.)…

Unlike most billionaires, Dunn and Wilks are also pastors. Friends and critics alike described the pair as conspicuously down-home and devout. “They love God, they serve God,” said Jerry Maston, an evangelical pastor and Wilks’ brother-in-law. Dunn, who is 68, has served on the “pulpit team” of a nondenominational church in Midland. Wilks, who is four years older, practices a form of Christianity that hews closely to the Old Testament at the Assembly of Yahweh, a church his family founded outside of Cisco, a town in Central Texas. When I saw him preach there earlier this year, he warned his followers that “absorption in bounty makes us forgetful of the giver.” The two men may differ on certain points of doctrine — Wilks doesn’t celebrate Christmas, considering it a pagan holiday — but they share the same vision of a radically transformed America.

Many of their ideas have been shaped by David Barton, a former teacher in Aledo, Texas, and the closest the Christian nationalist movement has to an in-house intellectual. Barton has been advancing the same revisionist thesis for decades: The founders intended for the barrier between church and state to protect Christianity from the government, not vice versa. “‘Separation of church and state’ currently means almost exactly the opposite of what it originally meant,” explains the website for WallBuilders, Barton’s advocacy group, to which Wilks has donated more than $3 million.

This view, dismissed by historians but increasingly common among white evangelicals, has been encouraged by recent Supreme Court decisions reinterpreting the establishment clause and embraced by prominent Republicans, most notably the speaker of the House, Mike Johnson. Johnson lauded Barton at a 2021 WallBuilders event, citing his “profound influence on me and my work and my life and everything I do.” The day after Johnson was elected speaker, Barton said on a podcast, “We have some tools at our disposal now we haven’t had in a long time.”

It is no accident that Dunn and Wilks have concentrated their energies on infusing Christianity into education. Many far-right Christians trace the country’s moral decline to Supreme Court rulings in the 1960s and early 1970s that ended mandated prayer and Bible reading in public schools. Texas recently proposed an overhauled reading curriculum that strongly emphasizes the Bible “in ways that verge on proselytizing,” according to Brockman, the scholar at the Baker Institute; The 74, a nonprofit newsroom, reported that the state’s educational consultants contracted with the Texas Public Policy Foundation, whose board Dunn has served on since 1998. Wilks and his brother, Dan, have given around $3 million to PragerU, a video platform co-founded by Dennis Prager, the conservative radio host. It is not an accredited university; instead it provides “a free alternative to the dominant left-wing ideology in culture, media and education.” Public school leaders in Arizona, Florida, Louisiana, New Hampshire, Oklahoma and South Carolina have recently approved PragerU’s teaching materials. One lesson shows an animated Frederick Douglass explaining that slavery was a compromise the founding fathers made to “achieve something great.”

Predictably, these attempts to control what happens in the classroom trigger local culture wars, which, in turn, lead Christian nationalists to contend that religious values are under siege. “They’re going to be things that people yell at, but they will help move the ball down the court,” Barton said in a 2016 conference call with state legislators that was later made public. The ultimate aim of these skirmishes is to end up with a religious liberty case before an increasingly conservative Supreme Court.

Last year, researchers at the Public Religion Research Institute and the Brookings Institution found that more than half of Republicans support Christian nationalist beliefs, including that “being a Christian is an important part of being truly American,” that the government should declare the United States a Christian nation and that “God has called Christians to exercise dominion over all areas of American society.” They have also found that Christian nationalists were roughly twice as likely as other Americans to believe that political violence may be justified. Those who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 with wooden crosses and Christian flags did not see themselves as insurrectionists overturning democracy but as patriots defending the will of God. They had been spurred on by years of rhetoric that recast political debates as spiritual battles with apocalyptic stakes.

In 2016, Trump received a higher share of the white evangelical vote than any presidential candidate since 2004, but the sociologists Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry have found that Christian nationalist beliefs were an even better predictor of support for his candidacy than religious affiliation. The slogan Make America Great Again can be interpreted, not unreasonably, as a dog-whistle to make it Christian Again, too. During the same speech in which he boasted that he could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue without losing voters, Trump warned that Christianity was “under tremendous siege” and pledged that when he was president, “Christianity will have power.” This June, he promised a Christian coalition “a comeback like just about no other group,” and in July, he encouraged Christians to vote “just this time” because in four years “you won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians.”

Dunn has placed himself in a favorable position to guide a second Trump administration — and transform the nature of the federal government. He helps fund America First Legal, a conservative law firm headed by the former Trump senior adviser Stephen Miller that represents itself as the MAGA movement’s answer to the ACLU, as well as the Center for Renewing America, a far-right policy group led by the former Trump budget director Russell Vought. According to documents obtained by Politico, the Center for Renewing America has explicitly listed “Christian Nationalism” as one of its top priorities. Both groups have played a role in shaping Project 2025, an extreme policy agenda, published by the Heritage Foundation, that proposes consolidating executive power and remaking the federal bureaucracy, agency by agency.

“Eighty percent of my time is working on the plans of what’s necessary to take control of these bureaucracies,” Vought said in a video captured in August by undercover reporters from the Centre for Climate Reporting. “I want to make sure that we can say we are a Christian nation.” Vought has publicly defended the Christian nationalist label as “a rather benign and useful description for those who believe in both preserving our country’s Judeo-Christian heritage and making public policy decisions that are best for this country.”

Since 2021, Dunn has also been a founding board member of the America First Policy Institute, yet another group assembled by Trump loyalists to prepare for his possible return to the White House. One of its papers, “Ten Pillars for Restoring a Nation Under God,” discusses how America was “founded as a self-governing nation on biblical principles” — a favored Dunn talking point. Brooke Rollins, a former domestic policy adviser in the Trump administration who worked with Dunn at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, recruited him to the institute. “We wanted to create a national organization similar to what we built in Texas,” she told The Wall Street Journal. “This is a 100-year play….”

At first glance, what’s most striking about Dunn and Wilks’ political giving, apart from its unprecedented scale, is its low rate of return. For more than a decade, their PACs and the lawmakers they supported won a handful of proxy wars — obstructing legislation, forcing retirements, generating scandals — but they were snubbed by the establishment Republicans who controlled the statehouse. In 2022, according to The Texas Tribune, 18 out of the 19 candidates backed by the group lost their races.

Political strategists have attributed this poor showing to the group’s uncompromising approach. Luke Macias, a longtime consultant to Dunn-and-Wilks-backed campaigns, has refused to work with candidates who support exceptions for abortion bans. (Macias did not respond to a request for comment). “My job is to communicate a candidate’s beliefs to a broader audience,” a consultant who worked with Macias on an Empower Texans-funded campaign told me. “His job is to find people who believe exactly what they believe and try to get them elected. From a financial perspective, Luke is the worst possible investment you can make, because he doesn’t seem to make decisions based on the facts, polls or strength of the opposition, but that right there tells you something about the strength of Tim Dunn’s ideology: Loyalty and fidelity are more important to him than short-term outcomes like winning.”

Dunn and Wilks, however, are focused on the long term. Gerrymandering has meant that most Republicans in Texas only fear for their seat if they’re challenged in a primary election — the Texas equivalent of term limits, Dunn has said. The tactical brilliance of Empower Texans has been to transform the political climate of Austin into a perpetual primary season. A dark money subsidiary, Texans for Fiscal Responsibility, warns legislators about how upcoming votes will affect their conservative rankings on its index, while a separate media arm, Texas Scorecard, publishes editorials, podcasts and documentaries to hound incumbents it disapproves of out of office. “The irony is that most of the incumbents they attack agree with them on 95% of the issues,” Jon Taylor, a political scientist at the University of Texas at San Antonio, said of Dunn and Wilks. “I’m not sure how to explain the purity test they demand, except that it comes down to wanting people they can completely control.”

Some donors might hesitate to back a losing candidate, but Dunn and Wilks’ PACs often resurrect their challengers as though they are fighters in an arcade game. “They find candidates with an exceptionally high pain tolerance,” said a Texas House staff member who has worked for an incumbent opposed by Empower Texans. “They might not beat you on the first go, but they slowly chip away at your support and keep you under a microscope by hammering you with the same guy 52 weeks a year.” Shelley Luther, a beautician who was jailed for refusing to close her hair salon in Dallas during the pandemic, won the primary for a House seat this March after two failed campaigns supported by Dunn and Wilks. For Bryan Slaton, a former youth pastor and Empower Texans-backed candidate, the third time was the charm, though he was later unanimously expelled from the House after an internal investigation found that he got a 19-year-old aide drunk and had sex with her.

The political muscle of Christian nationalism is driving a growing share of attacks on Republicans across the country. Since 2010, a historically high number of Republicans have been defeated by primary challengers in the most evangelical House districts, according to an analysis posted on Substack by Michael Podhorzer, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. The former Texas Gov. Rick Perry recently expressed his concerns about the internecine warfare consuming the state party. “If we continue down this path pointing our guns inside the tent,” he told The Texas Tribune earlier this year, “that is the definition of suicide.”

David Pepper, the author of “Laboratories of Autocracy: A Wake-Up Call From Behind the Lines” and the former chair of the Ohio Democratic Party, calls this trend the Texas Lesson. “It’s a tragic case study in how statehouses have flipped from serving the public interest to serving the far-right interests of private donors,” he told me. “These billionaires have been relentless and systematic about punishing moderates — ” Pepper paused and corrected himself. “Actually, I wouldn’t even call these lawmakers ‘moderate.’ These are simply officials who maybe, on one occasion, will stand up for the best interest of their district.”

Dunn and Wilks have accumulated power by supporting winning candidates and by striking fear into others who might be challenged in the future if they stray from white Christian nationalist ideas. The Legislature has passed permitless carry of guns, banned abortion, restricted LGBT RIGHTS, and kowtowed to the Wilks-Dunn agenda.

What’s left?

The most far-reaching of these efforts to consolidate power may be the Convention of States Project. A highly controversial effort, partly funded by Dunn, it represents one of the best hopes for Christian nationalists, among other interested parties, who want to transform the laws of the land in one fell swoop. “When we started the Convention of States — and I was there at the beginning — I knew we had to have a spiritual revival, a Great Awakening and a political restoration for our country to come back to its roots,” Dunn said at a 2019 summit for the group, where he spoke alongside Barton. “What I did not expect is that the Convention of States would be an organization that would trigger that Great Awakening.”

The Convention of States Project takes its cues from Article V of the Constitution, which proposes two paths for constitutional amendments. The familiar path — a two-thirds vote in each chamber of Congress to be ratified by three-fourths of states — has been deployed successfully 27 times. The other path, which involves two-thirds of states passing resolutions to call for a constitutional convention, is rarely discussed and has never been used.

Wilks and Dunn have supported the goal of rewriting the Constitution. A horrifying thought. Imagine it: No Thomas Jefferson. No Benjamin Franklin. No James Madison.

A convention dominated by delegates selected by two Texas billionaires.

Categories Elections

Texas: State Agency Clears Mike Miles of Charges

By dianeravitch
October 16, 2024 //
3

Several months ago, Texas journalists reported that millions of dollars were transferred from charter school accounts in Texas to charter school accounts in Colorado. Their stories said that Houston superintendent Mike Miles was bolstering the finances of one of his Colorado charter schools.

Miles was appointed as superintendent of the Houston Independent School District as part of a hostile state takeover of HISD. State Commissioner of Education Mike Morath was installed by Governor Greg Abbott, and Morath imposed Miles on HISD.

When Miles came under fire for financial irregularities, the state investigated. Who is the state? Mike Morath, the same guy who appointed Miles.

Guess what? The state report cleared Mikes.

Are you surprised?

The Texas Tribune reported today:

The Texas Education Agency has cleared acting Houston school district Superintendent Mike Miles of wrongdoing after he was accused of improperly diverting millions of dollars in state funds to his Colorado charter school system.

After reporting from Spectrum News and The Texas Observer prompted calls for an investigation earlier this year, the education agency concluded on Tuesday that neither Miles — who the agency picked to lead the state’s largest school district last year — nor his charter school network, Third Future Schools, “violated any applicable Texas laws,” according to the 29-page investigation report.

The investigation found, in part, that checks directed from a partnering Texas school district to Third Future Schools’ Colorado address went there because the Colorado location handles accounting services for the network’s Texas branch, which is run independently. But, the checks were eventually deposited in the Texas branch’s bank account.

“Based on the evidence obtained and analyzed during the investigation, there is no merit to the allegations contained in the media reports that state funds were being inappropriately diverted from public school students in Texas,” the report notes.

The agency is closing the investigation, and “no further action will be taken” at this time, the report says.

In an email sent to the Houston school district community on Tuesday, Miles called the earlier reporting “a baseless distraction and an attempt to undermine and discredit the good work happening” in the schools.

“Now we can do what we always do and move forward on behalf of our students,” Miles said.

Earlier this year, Spectrum News reported that the Texas branch of Third Future Schools — which receives funding from multiple Texas school districts to run campuses in the state — was potentially using public funds from its school in Odessa to offset financial losses at a sister school in Colorado.

The Texas Observer later reported that it had identified “additional irregularities” related to the disclosure of expenses by the charter network.

Miles denied wrongdoing and accused the previous reporting of mischaracterizing “common place financial arrangements between charter schools and the charter management organizations that support them” and welcomed an investigation into the network’s activities.

The state’s investigators agreed with Miles, saying they found no evidence that Texas school districts deposited funds into the bank account of Third Future Schools in Colorado. Third Future Schools-Texas reimburses the Colorado location for administrative services it provides to all of the charter network, the report says.

Categories Administrators, superintendents, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Houston, State Takeover, Texas

Michael Podhorzer: The Electoral College Is Legal But Not Legitimate

By dianeravitch
October 16, 2024 //
20

https://open.substack.com/pub/michaelpodhorzer/p/the-electoral-college-legal-but-not?r=rls8&utm_medium=ios

One reaction to my last post, “Kamala Harris Will Win the Popular Vote,” has been some variation of a smug suggestion that I take a civics class because the next president will be decided by the Electoral College. Another has been a bit less condescending, something like, “Sure, but what matters is the Electoral College.” 

I have a respectful suggestion for anyone who had those kinds of reactions (other than “read the post”). I ask you to consider what it means that we collectively shrug off such an anti-democratic structure as “just the way it is.”   

Because when we do that, we align ourselves with those who in their times scoffed at the abolitionists, the Radical Republicans, the suffragists, the modern civil rights movement, and those who called for the direct election of senators and “one person, one vote” in legislative districts. All of these people had the courage in their own time to call out the ways in which American elections were legal but not legitimate, either by universal standards of democracy or even by the Declaration of Independence’s central claim – that governments depend on the consent of the governed, legitimately ascertained. 

Legal but not Legitimate

All democracies have to be prepared to deal with the question of what to do when something may be legal, but is plainly not legitimate, as when anti-democratic actors compete in democratic elections. Emerging out of the rubble of World War II, the leaders of the European democracies were freshly aware of the catastrophic damage done by fascist and totalitarian communist regimes that came to power through putatively democratic processes, and fashioned constitutions and laws to safeguard against anti-democratic hijacking. 

We have confronted the same challenge twice. In the aftermath of the War of Rebellion (aka the Civil War), Congress enacted several measures designed to safeguard democratic freedoms for all, including the Civil Rights Act of 1866, Section 3 of the 14th Amendment (the Insurrection Clause), and the Enforcement Acts (1870 – 1871). And nearly a century later, in response to Jim Crow and racist terrorism that effectively prevented African Americans from voting, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act (1965).¹

Unlike in Europe, however, America’s anti-democratic faction maintained enough social and political power to thwart or undermine both of these efforts. The MAGA faction, now firmly in control of the Republican Party, as well as the state governments in which half of America lives, as well as the Supreme Court, following in the footsteps of its Jim Crow and Confederate predecessors, deploys “states’ rights” to exempt its antidemocratic actions from scrutiny, and further whitewashes these actions’ fundamental illegitimacy through its control of the Supreme Court. 

When we treat all of this as “just the way it is,” we revert to the kind of learned helplessness that Martin Luther King, Jr. warned against in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail: 

“We should never forget that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was ‘legal’ and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was ‘illegal.’ It was ‘illegal’ to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler’s Germany.”

Today, we have lost the clarity we had 57 years ago when the VRA passed. Because we’ve given up on expecting our most important national institutions to do what is right, and because we’ve given up on expecting active democratic citizenship from ourselves and each other, our “democracy” has shriveled to the point that the outcome of partisan bloodsport now passes for the consent of the governed. 

In America, this century of accelerating democratic crisis has been supercharged by the exploitation of the anti-democratic features of our Constitution and traditions. Consider that: 

  • In two of the last six presidential elections (one third!) the results of the Electoral College overturned the popular vote, and in one instance (2000), that result depended not only on the Electoral College but on five partisan Supreme Court justices swooping in to prevent all the ballots in Florida from being counted. 
  • Five of the six Republicans on the Supreme Court were confirmed by senators representing less than half of the US population.
  • Republicans have held the Senate majority for five of the last twelve Congresses despite representing a majority of the US population only once in that span.

Minority Rule

The typical response to objections about the anti-majoritarian features of the Constitution, or our present system more generally, hearken back to the original reasoning for checks and balances. Those features were meant to prevent the rule of the mob, or frequent lurches that disrupt the need of citizens to have a set of consistent laws that they can rely on. That’s captured in the (likely apocryphal) quote attributed to George Washington that “We pour legislation into the senatorial saucer to cool it.”

With that in mind, let’s begin by looking at an idea that most readily agree to, which is the need for the system to protect the rights of those in minority groups. I think we would all agree, for example, that preventing any group of people from voting, or any other right generally enjoyed, is indefensible. Unfortunately, that foundational precept has been rhetorically hijacked to contend that the system must protect minorityinterests. 

Thus, especially over the last twenty years, our system has proved less the sturdy bulwark on behalf of the rights of minority groups and more the driving force on behalf of the very much minority interests of plutocrats and theocrats than at any time since the end of Reconstruction.

Let’s look at just how much this is the case, as reflected in our foundational institutions. 

The Senate

Let’s begin with the “saucer,” which, if it was meant to be chilling in 1789, has become positively cryogenic since. 

As the next graph shows, Republicans have held Senate majorities in five of the last twelve Congresses, despite representing a majority of the population only once, in the 109th Congress (2005-2006).²

Let’s consider two “best case” scenarios for 2025, based on a 50-50 Senate in 2025, in which either Harris or Trump is president.³ The difference between the red and blue bars visually represents the democracy gap in the US Senate. Note that if Harris is president, the 50 senators needed to pass a continuing resolution or confirm judges will represent nearly as much of the population as Senate rules envisioned would constitute the supermajority necessary to break a filibuster – while if Trump is president, he will be able to do the same with senators who represent a minority of the population – just barely enough to block cloture, if they represented the same proportion of senators. 

The Supreme Court

Since the founding, 116 jurists have been confirmed to the Supreme Court. Only five were confirmed by senators representing less than half of the US population – Clarence Thomas, Sam Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. The following graph shows how far off from representing democratic legitimacy the present Roberts Court is from even the SCOTUS that delivered Bush vs Gore. And, of course, depending on how you measure it, either three or five of them were nominated by presidents who did not win a majority of the popular vote themselves.⁴ 

For more on how the plutotheocratic coalition behind the Federalist Society captured the Court and became the de facto legislative branch of government, see “Breaking the Law: Trump Is the Means, Not the End” and “To the Supreme Court, the 20th Century Was Wrongly Decided.”  

This Is Not Who We Are

Barack Obama and Kamala Harris have both talked with patriotic pride about how theirs is a “story that could only be written in America.” 

But, thanks to the Electoral College, so too is Donald Trump’s a story that could only be written in America. Absent the Electoral College, he could not have become president, nor could he persist for so long as such an asphyxiating, toxic cloud over all of our politics. Indeed, Trump stands the original justification for the Electoral College on its head. The founders felt an Electoral College representing the most responsible Americans might be needed someday as a check against popular passions which might someday elect an antidemocratic demagogue. In reality, it has done the opposite – installing an antidemocratic demagogue the people rejected.

But it’s even worse than that. Reimagine November 3rd, 2020, without an Electoral College. By the next day, Biden would have been seen as the winner, ahead by millions of votes. None of what followed would have happened, as there would have been no serious ways for Trump to have questioned the outcome in any other than the most outlandish terms. No bullying calls to Brad Raffenperger to find 11,780 votes; no Stop the Steal rally, no riot on the Capitol grounds, because that ministerial procedure would not even be a thing. 

In other words, the Electoral College process was the precondition for January 6th because of how long it delays the peaceful transfer of power, and because of how many democratically frivolous opportunities it offers bad faith losers to corrode public confidence in the election and even organize violent resistance. 

Indeed, whatever the outcome on November 5th, 2024 the fact that Harris will all but inevitably win the popular vote by a comfortable margin – and yet it will still be as “close” as it was in 2016 and 2020 in key states – all but guarantees a rerun of 2020’s post election confusion and crisis. 

We spend an exhausting amount of time and effort asking what it says about the American people that Donald Trump became president and could be again, searching for answers almost exclusively in the individual psychology, morality, or life circumstances of the individual people who vote for him, when we should be asking what it says about the American systemthat continues to produce these outcomes. Especially when for the last twenty years or more the American people routinely insist that the system is not serving them and that they have no confidence in it in general, and the Electoral College in particular. 

Notably, dissatisfaction with the Electoral College was bipartisan until 2016, when Republican voters realized its “benefits.” Now, a bit more than 70 percent of Democrats and Independents want to “amend the Constitution to base the presidential winner on the popular vote.”

But, as long as systematic reform is so easily swatted away merely by embarrassing those who would wish otherwise as being too naive or insufficiently “realistic,” we’ll bounce around the room like a Roomba, with serial diversions like “Democrats need a better message.”

This is as true now as it was in the 1960’s when James Baldwin wrote:

“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” 

Which is why I would rather count myself with those who, in their times, had to acknowledge that enslavement, the disenfranchisement of women, the indirect election of senators, egregious gerrymandering, and Jim Crow were legal – but never conceded that they were legitimate. 

Footnotes:

1. Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act required covered jurisdictions to preclear changes to their voting laws, even if those changes were to be made by elected representatives. Section 5 was essential because we understood that without preclearance, the racist faction legally in control of the machinery of the state in those jurisdictions would continue to use their illegitimate authority to deny Black people their citizenship rights. We understood the need to take aggressive, facially anti-democratic actions to prevent “democratically” elected state governments from enacting new laws or rules to continue to disenfranchise African Americans. In other words, we rejected that faction’s claim to the benefit of the doubt that it was acting in democratic good faith. Moreover, it did not occur to anyone at the time to consider the enactment of the Voting Rights Act as intended to give one party or the other an advantage in future elections. 

2

Percent of the population is computed as the share of each Republican senator’s state of the United States population. For example, the population of Texas is 9.2 percent of the US population. Since both Texas senators are Republicans that would count as 9.2 percent in this calculation. If only one senator was Republican, that would count as 4.6 percent of the population. Using this method, if states were of equal population, the number of senators would equal the percent of the US population. 

3

By “best case” I mean that Democrats hold their current seats except West Virginia. In order to compute the percentages of the population represented by senators, the procedure is to begin with the smallest states until the number of indicated votes are reached. 

4

Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Coney Barrett were nominated by Trump, who lost the popular vote. Roberts and Alito were nominated by George W Bush who reached the White House after losing the popular vote in 2000, but who won the popular vote in 2004, the term in which he nominated Roberts and Alito.

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Elections

The American Prospect: AI is Shredding the Social Safety Net

By dianeravitch
October 16, 2024 //
10

Amid pitched discussions of whether artificial intelligence–powered technologies will one day transform art, journalism, and work, a more immediate impact of AI is drawing less attention: The technology has already helped create barriers for people seeking to access our nation’s social safety net.

Across the country, state and local governments have turned to algorithmic tools to automate decisions about who gets critical assistance. In principle, the move makes sense: At their best, these technologies can help long-understaffed and underfunded agencies quickly process huge amounts of data and respond with greater speed to the needs of constituents.

But careless—or intentionally tightfisted and punitive—design and implementation of these new high-tech tools have often prevented benefits from reaching the people they’re intended to help.

In 2016, during an attempt to automate eligibility processes, Indiana denied one million public assistance applications in three years—a 54 percent increase. Those who lost benefits included a six-year-old with cerebral palsy and a woman who missed an appointment with her case worker because she was in the hospital with terminal cancer. That same year, an Arkansas assessment algorithm cut thousands of Medicaid-funded home health care hours from people with disabilities. And in Michigan, a new automated system for detecting fraud in unemployment insurance claims identified fivefold more fraud compared to the older system—causing some 40,000 people to be wrongly accused of unemployment insurance fraud.

Categories Technology

Racism, Hate, Division, Lies: Another Day in the Trump Campaign

By dianeravitch
October 16, 2024 //
47

I follow whatever is posted by the Meidas brothers. They do a great job of pulling together clips from the campaign, to show you what’s happening.

This series of clips is an eye opener. It’s frankly disgusting to see the racist, anti-immigrant appeals that Trump and his surrogates deliver to the voters.

We used to pride ourselves on being a nation of immigrants. Now Trump wants us to see immigrants as murderers, rapists, and criminals.

He says he will invoke a law passed in 1798 to round-up millions of immigrants and deport them. Is this The Final Solution?

Can he be elected by serving up a steady diet of hatred and fear?

Categories Bigotry, Corruption, Cruelty, Democracy, Elections, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Immigration, Lies, Trump

Joe Biden Spoke in Pennsylvania today: He’s Sounding Great!

By dianeravitch
October 15, 2024 //
26

President Biden spoke today in Pennsylvania.

He fumbled a few words, as most of us do every day.

But it’s very clear that he is sharp and energized.

It’s a good speech, no doubt written by a speechwriter. But you can see him interjecting asides. He is not senile. He is not afflicted with Alzheimer’s.

He’s terrific.

Categories Biden, Elections

Georgia: Judge Overturns Hand Count of Votes

By dianeravitch
October 15, 2024 //
3

The State Election Board in Georgia, controlled 3-2 by Trump partisans, recently adopted a requirement that local officials to perform a hand-count of ballots cast on November 5. This, of course, would cause lengthy delays in reaching a result.

Robert C. McBurney is a judge of the Georgia 5th Superior Court District Atlanta Circuit. He was first appointed by Republican Governor Nathan Deal and was subsequently elected. Just days ago, he overturned Georgia’s abortion ban.

The New York Times reported:

A county judge in Georgia on Tuesday blocked a new rule mandating a hand count of election ballots across the state. Enacting such a sweeping change for the November election, he said, was “too much, too late.”

Judge Robert C.I. McBurney did not, however, knock down the rule outright; his decision was confined to the current election, halting the rule from taking effect for 2024 while he further weighs its merits.

The rule, passed last month by the State Election Board, would have required poll workers across Georgia to break open sealed containers of ballots and count them by hand to ensure that the total number of ballots matched the total counted by tabulating machines. (It would not have required officials to tally for whom the ballots were cast.)

But Judge McBurney agreed with challenges from several county election boards that the rule was made too close to the election.

Categories Elections, Georgia, Trump

Jennifer Rubin: The Lies of Donald Trump

By dianeravitch
October 15, 2024 //
25

Jennifer Rubin of the Washington Post wrote a summary of Trump’s lies. No one can detail all of them, there were so many. During Trump’s term in office, the Post’s fact-checker used to keep count. He–Glenn Kessler–attributed more than 30,000 lies to Trump during his presidency. Since then, Trump has had four years to lie some more.

Here is Rubin’s overview of “The lies of Donald Trump.”

What caught my eye

Trump is a master liar. There are his insulting lies (Vice President Kamala Harris is “mentally disabled”). Then there are his xenophobic (“They are eating the dogs, the people that came in. They’re eating the cats.”) and antisemitic (saying Jews will be responsible if he loses) lies.

There are his economically ignorant falsehoods (e.g., foreign countries pay tariffs). There are his lies to raise resentment and anger at the current administration (e.g., it is denying aid to hurricane victims, crime is rising, tens of thousands of migrant murderers are running loose). There are his lies to deflect blame (e.g., former House speaker Nancy Pelosi is responsible for the attack on Jan. 6, 2021; sexual assault victim E. Jean Carroll, who successfully sued Trump for defamation twice, was lying). There are his lies about Democrats (e.g., they favor infanticide).

Trump also recycles numerous lies about the American people (e.g., everyone wanted to repeal Roe v. Wade, women love him) and his own record (e.g., his economy was the “greatest” ever, he had a perfect callwith Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, troops under his command suffered only “headaches” from an Iranian attack). He even lies about what he said (e.g., denying he ever signaled openness to restricting contraception). His lies undermining democracy might be the most dangerous (e.g., he won in 2020, millions of illegal immigrants are registering to vote).

We should not forget the “merely” ludicrous assertions of his own powers. (e.g., Hamas would not have attacked Israel if he were president, he could “settle” the Ukraine war) and dystopian predictions if he loses (e.g., we won’t have a country, there will be a “bloodbath”). And his absurd conspiracy theories can never be disproven (e.g., the Deep State). His exaggerations about his wealth, his physical health and his cognitive performance are among the most cringeworthy.

His lies are so prolific, they prompt some to question whether he knows he is lying. But like many authoritarian leaders, Trump uses his go-to tactic to bend reality and bamboozle the public. He lies to conceal his own abject failures, criminality, incompetence, disloyalty and ignorance — and the lies are made more potent when the right-wing media echoes his lies and the mainstream media presents his distortions as he said-she said disputes. For him, it’s better to be called a liar (and rely on the public’s suspicion that “all politicians lie”) than acknowledge his manifest faults and failures.

There are psychological explanations for his lying. There are historical and political explanations for his lying. But the consequences of his lies — stoking fear, hatred and distrust of democratic elections — are disastrous for democracy, which depends on a shared understanding of reality.

Categories Lies, Trump

Colorado: Vote to Save Public Education from Voucher Vultures!

By dianeravitch
October 15, 2024 //
4

Colorado voters, beware! On the November 5 ballot: an amendment to the State Constitution to protect school choice.

If you want to support public schools and a raid on the state’s treasury by privatizers, defeat it!

This proposed amendment is weird. Ever since the founding of this nation, states have had explicit pledges in their constitution to protect public schools, open to all. Colorado’s state Constitution includes such language as well as language explicitly rejecting public funding for religious schools.

Article 9, Section 2 of the Constitution says:

Section 2.  Establishment and maintenance of public schools. The general assembly shall, as soon as practicable, provide for the establishment and maintenance of a thorough and uniform system of free public schools throughout the state, wherein all residents of the state, between the ages of six and twenty-one years, may be educated gratuitously.

Article 8, Section 7 of the Constitution says:

Section 7.  Aid to private schools, churches, sectarian purpose, forbidden. Neither the general assembly, nor any county, city, town, township, school district or other public corporation, shall ever make any appropriation, or pay from any public fund or moneys whatever, anything in aid of any church or sectarian society, or for any sectarian purpose, or to help support or sustain any school, academy, seminary, college, university or other literary or scientific institution, controlled by any church or sectarian denomination whatsoever; nor shall any grant or donation of land, money or other personal property, ever be made by the state, or any such public corporation to any church, or for any sectarian purpose.

Now, the privatizers want to cancel that language and replace it with language chartering what was previously forbidden.

Mike DeGuire urges Colorado voters to defeat this pernicious amendment.

He writes in the Colorado Times Recorder:

On November 5, 2024, Colorado voters will weigh in on a hot topic in education today: school choice. Amendment 80 would make the concept of “school choice” a guaranteed right in the Colorado constitution. The text of the amendment reads as follows:

(1) PURPOSE AND FINDINGS. THE PEOPLE OF THE STATE OF COLORADO HEREBY FIND AND DECLARE THAT ALL CHILDREN HAVE THE RIGHT TO EQUAL OPPORTUNITY TO ACCESS A QUALITY EDUCATION; THAT PARENTS HAVE THE RIGHT TO DIRECT THE EDUCATION OF THEIR CHILDREN; AND THAT SCHOOL CHOICE INCLUDES NEIGHBORHOOD, CHARTER, PRIVATE, AND HOME SCHOOLS, OPEN ENROLLMENT OPTIONS, AND FUTURE INNOVATIONS IN EDUCATION. (2) EACH K-12 CHILD HAS THE RIGHT TO SCHOOL CHOICE.

According to University of Southern California Professor Guilbert Hentschke, “school choice has become a catch-all label describing many different programs that offer students and their families alternatives to publicly provided schools.” Since school choice covers many options, it can be confusing, and it is often the “subject of fierce debate in various state legislatures across the United States.” The critical distinction to make regarding school choice is often whether it affects public or private schools.

School choice has been the mantra for voucher-systems currently enacted in at least twenty states. School choice with voucher-type legislation entails using taxpayer dollars for education savings accounts, opportunity scholarships, tax credits, or actual vouchers so families can choose any type of  schooling for their child — private, public or home schooling. This idea represents an emphasis on “funding students instead of funding school systems.” 

The focus on school choice has resulted in increased enrollment in charter schools, private schools, and home schooling. At the same time, the school choice movement has also created instability, competition, ideological curricula, resource inequities, increased segregation, loss of community, and reduced funding for public neighborhood schools. In Colorado, of all eligible school-age children, about 76% attend public schools, 15% attend charter schools,  8 percent are in private schools,  and 1% are homeschooled. 

Advance Colorado is the conservative think tank organization that developed the language for Amendment 80, and they coordinated the expensive signature gathering to secure approval for the measure, originally titled Initiative 138. The backers acknowledge that parents already have the right in state statute to “send their kids to a neighborhood school, charter school, private school, home school, or across district lines.”  

However, Kristi Burton Brown, executive vice president of Advance Colorado, believes that school choice needs to be in the state constitution to guarantee “that legislators in the future can’t attack our rights and take them away.”  She acknowledged that Colorado would be the “first state in the nation to allow voters to put the right to school choice in our state constitution.”  

Michael Fields, president of Advance Colorado, also highlighted the organization’s reason for this measure on X, stating that “out-of-touch legislators are just going to keep going after charter schools. That’s why we need to put school choice in our Colorado Constitution this November.”  

Brown’s and Fields’ comments relate to efforts last April by three Colorado legislators to enact a charter school accountability act, a bill supported by the Colorado Education Association (CEA) and other pro-public education groups. In their report on why they initiated Amendment 80,  Advance Colorado stated that the proposed charter bill would have “destroyed school choice for charters.” 

Advance Colorado’s solution to the “problem” of legislators promoting charter accountability is to put “the right to school choice in the Colorado Constitution” which they assert will give school choice “legal advantages a normal statute does not have.” Over fifty highly paid lobbyists were assigned to kill the charter accountability bill which was publicly opposed by Governor Polis, and was defeated in the House committee. 

Even though Advance Colorado states its goal is to protect the charter schools from future legislative interference, Amendment 80 encompasses “private and home schooling” options. Including “private schools as a guaranteed right” is a plan promulgated by Americans for Prosperity and other conservative think tanks in several red states where voucher bills have been passed or expanded. Fields said he thinks “parents should be in charge of education,” adding “I think it’s easier when they have resources to send their kid to the school that they want to.” 

The largest lobbying group against the charter accountability bill worked for Americans for Prosperity. Americans for Prosperity (AFP) is an arch-conservative organization funded by the Koch network; one of its goals is to “destabilize and abolish public education.” Michael Fields worked with AFP prior to several other positions he held with conservative organizations.

AFP has been active in Colorado for years promoting vouchers and education savings accounts for families to use for any school of their choice. Last January, AFP joined with the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and the Heritage Foundation to form the Education Freedom Alliance, an organization that ALEC initiated to promote parents’ rights to have public money to attend a private, charter, home or public school of their choice. Funded with nearly $80 million primarily from the Koch Industries, the Americans for Prosperity political action group has also supported far-right candidates for decades.  

Colorado State board of education members Lisa Escárcega and Kathy Plomer wrote in a September 11 op-ed that Amendment 80 is “not just about school choice.” They cautioned that “Amendment 80, brought by wealthy, in and out-of-state organizations, is part of a nationally coordinated master plan to go around voters in states where voucher proponents have been unsuccessful in passing state voucher laws.” They pointed out that in Colorado, “voters turned down three education voucher ballot initiatives in the 1990s.Voucher and private school proponents then tried the legislative route. The Colorado legislature has turned down any type of voucher or education savings account 18 times just since 2016.”  While the amendment doesn’t mention vouchers, the state board members expressed their concern that “If parents have a right to send their children to private schools, then shouldn’t the state pay for it?”

Using public taxpayer dollars for children to attend private schools or for home schooling is not legal in Colorado, nor is it currently popular. (They can get some indirect support.) Kevin Welner of the National Education Policy Center stated that “it would be hard to persuade voters or politicians that Colorado should join the ranks of states that provide taxpayer subsidies for private schools or homeschooling.”

Even though Fields insists this amendment “is not paving the way for a voucher program in Colorado,” the far-right conservative groups providing the money to promote Amendment 80 have tried to enact vouchers in Colorado for years. 

Vouchers are not necessarily an effective system to improve student learning and according to recent research, they can hinder state budgets significantly. Josh Cowen, senior fellow at the Education Law Center, pointed to decades of evidence showing private school vouchers have led to some of the steepest declines in student achievement on record. He added that measures similar to Amendment 80 passed in Arizona, Florida and Ohio have led to serious budget cuts.

Who is funding this effort to enshrine “school choice” in the state constitution?

In an op-ed about Advance Colorado last year, Colorado Newsline editor Quentin Young wrote that “Coloradans don’t know who’s supplying its money or their true motivations, because nonprofits don’t have to disclose their donors.” Advance Colorado is the same “dark money group” that gathered signatures for Initiative 108, which would have forced over $3 billion in cuts to services to citizens.  

Advance Colorado started as “Unite for Colorado” in 2019, which bankrolled almost every major Republican effort in Colorado in 2020. Unite for Colorado spent over $17 million in 2020 on Republican candidates, and they have “become the most important fundraising entity for conservatives and for Republicans,” said Dick Wadhams, a former chairman of the Colorado GOP. Unite for Colorado changed its name to Advance Colorado Action in 2021 due to questionable conflicts over its spending practices, which are still in litigation.

As a “dark money group,” Advance Colorado receives grants from many sources, most of which are unknown, yet there is evidence that connects Advance Colorado to several conservative organizations. There are also reports that tie the group to Phillip Anschutz, Colorado’s richest billionaire.  According to Cause IQ, between 2020-2023, over $28 million was funneled to Unite Colorado/Advance Colorado from the Colorado Stronger Alliance.

Michael Fields is also the principal director at the Colorado Opportunity Foundation, which received grants from High Hopes and the Bradley Impact Fund. High Hopes has received grants from the Walton Family Foundation. According to historian Nelson Lichtenstein, the Walton Family Foundation is considered “the single largest source of funding for the ‘school choice’ movement and a powerful advocate of charter schools and voucher initiatives.” 

Using public taxpayer dollars for children to attend private schools or for home schooling is not legal in Colorado, nor is it currently popular.

Grants were also funneled between Advance Colorado and several other conservative organizations: Ready Colorado and Colorado Dawn. Ready Colorado supports Amendment 80 and has promoted vouchers in Colorado for years. A board member with Ready Colorado, Luke Ragland served as its President and worked to enact vouchers in Colorado for many years. He is also the Vice-President of the conservative Daniels Fund, which announced in 2023 their goal to fund more opportunities for students to attend “secular or religious private schools, publicly funded charter schools, or “micro-schools’ in Colorado.”

Colorado Dawn was formed in 2021 to “support organizations who further the efforts to educate the public about western values and economics,” and it has received over $3 million from Unite Colorado (Advance Colorado). Tax records from the Colorado Dawn’s 2022 990’s list state Board of Education member Steve Durham as chairman, Senator Paul Lundeen as Vice-chairman, and Michael Fields as Treasurer. Lundeen announced in 2022 his hopes that Colorado would enact a voucher program after the Supreme Court “cleared the way for public dollars in a Maine tuition assistance program to flow to private religious schools.” The Colorado Secretary of State’s office indicates that  Colorado Dawn spent over $1.3 million to collect signatures for Amendment 80.

The following organizations have also announced their support of Amendment 80: the Common Sense Institute, which is tied to the libertarian State Policy Network and the American Legislative Council (ALEC), “the Colorado Catholic Conference, and the Colorado Association of Private Schools.” Given the vast resources of these conservative organizations, groups that oppose this amendment may have an uphill battle to communicate their side of this issue.

On Sept 13, 2024, the CEA announced its opposition to Amendment 80 at a press conference in Denver. A coalition of various representatives from across the state, the National Education Association, and the ACLU described their main reasons for opposing Amendment 80. 

The speakers at the press conference emphasized that the amendment is unnecessary because school choice is already protected in law and has been for 30 years. In addition, they stated that the amendment opens the door to taking money from public schools to fund private schools. Speakers stressed that funding private schools would drain money away from rural public schools, private schools pose significant civil rights concerns, and they don’t belong in the Constitution.

In interviews with Chalkbeat, several education experts weighed in on the wording in Amendment 80, indicating it could create years of “litigation” order to interpret the amendment’s misleading language, which Kristi Burton Brown also acknowledged in her interview with KOA radio.  

Opponents of Amendment 80 also expressed concerns about the cost effects of potential vouchers. CEA President Kevin Vick stated that “Arizona’s voucher program was projected to cost $64 million, and it ballooned to $550 million in year one. In 2024, it’s expected to reach $900 million.” 

 Currently, the following groups are opposing the measure: ACLU of Colorado, AFT Colorado, Colorado Fiscal Institute, CEA, The Colorado Association of School Executives (CASE), AFSCME, Advocates for Public Education Policy, Business and Professional Women of Colorado, Colorado Immigrant Rights Coalition, League of Women Voters Colorado, Soul 2 Soul Sisters, Bell Policy Center, Colorado PTA, One Colorado, United for a New Economy, Colorado Democratic Party, American Association of University Women, Colorado WINS, Colorado AFL-CIO, Stand for Children, and New Era Colorado Action Fund.

Colorado voters will need to decide which rationale they support regarding this school choice amendment. Will they agree with Advance Colorado that a constitutional amendment is necessary to ensure that the legislature will not update current charter school laws? Or will they believe that Colorado does not need to go the route of other states and create a pathway to use public funding for private and home schools? 

************************************

Mike DeGuire, Ph.D., has been a teacher, district level reading coordinator, and a principal in the Denver metro area for most of his education career.

Categories Bigotry, Charter Schools, Colorado, Democracy, Education Industry, Elections, History, Privatization, Vouchers

Why Charter Schools Fail: An Analysis of Charter Closures from 1998-2022 by the Network for Public Education

By dianeravitch
October 15, 2024 //
6

This morning the Network for Public Education released a new study called “Doomed to Fail” that examines charter school closures from 1998-2022. This is the first time that anyone has performed a comprehensive study of charter school failures.

The charter lobby has created a mythology that charter schools are more successful than public schools. As the study shows, the mythology is not true. What parent would choose a school that is likely to close in a few years?

Parents want to know if they can depend on a school being there not only when their children start but also when they finish. Based on a marketplace model with fewer regulations, the charter school sector is far more unstable than local public schools. 

While the fate of each school cannot be predicted, we can show trends.

Doomed to Fail: An analysis of charter school closures from 1998-2022 uses data from the Common Core of Data, the primary database on non-private elementary and secondary education in the United States, to determine charter school closure rates and the number of students affected when closures occur. The report analyzes charter school closures from 2022 to 2024 to determine the reasons why schools close and how much notice families receive. 

Charter schools come with no guarantees. And, as this report shows, in far too many cases, these schools were doomed to fail from the very start.

Here are some of the key findings of the report:

       -By year five, 26% of charter schools have closed

       -By year ten, nearly four in ten charters fail, rising to 55% by year twenty.

       -More than one million students have now been stranded by charter closures

       -Eight states have closure rates that exceed 45%. 

        -The inability to attract and retain students is the primary reason for failures.

     -The second most frequent reason is fraud and gross mismanagement.

     -Forty percent of closures are abrupt, giving insufficient warning.

      -School operators, not authorizers, initiate the majority of closures (blowing a hole in the “accountability” myth.. 

The report includes some pretty startling examples of charter shutdowns during the last two years, exposing corruption, mismanagment, and operators who did not bother to tell parents the school would be closing until just before it happened. There is also a section written by Gary Rubenstein on the failure of the Tennessee Achievement District. The report can be found here and the Executive Summary here.  

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Closing schools, Education Industry, Ethics, Failure, Network for Public Education, Privatization, Research
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