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.
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.
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
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 bitmore 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 authoritarianleaders, 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.
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.
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.”
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
As a historian of forced population movements and as an American, I don’t think we are taking the consequences of the Trump-Vance deportation plan seriously enough. The reality will be much more personal and awful, and the politics more transformative and durable, than we might think.
I will write this up soon; but I was moved to do a recording by the urgency of this, and by the desire to catch the end of Hispanic Heritage Month.
Please listen and please share.
You might find it useful to read my thoughts about the thousands or tens of thousands of detention camps that would be needed in every state.
Diane Ravitch's blog 