Arizona: New Private Schools Open to Take Advantage of Universal Vouchers

By dianeravitch
August 2, 2023 //
8

The Arizona Republic reported an increase in new private schools that opened in response to the state’s expanded voucher program. All children, regardless of family income, can now get vouchers to spend for religious schools, private schools, online schools, or home schooling. The voucher funding will decrease funding for public schools, which enroll the vast majority of students in the state. The voucher program in Arizona was expanded despite a state referendum in 2018 in which 65% of voters opposed voucher expansion.

The story focuses on Majestic Grace Christian Academy, which opened with an enrollment of 10 or 12 students. It hopes to double its enrollment next year. Christian values infuse the teaching in every subject.

As a small private school that sprang up just this past school year, Majestic Grace exemplifies the private school revolution stemming from the universal expansion of school vouchers. It is one of many recently launched private schools taking advantage of newly available public money. But while Majestic Grace and other private schools accept public funds in the form of school vouchers, there is little public oversight of what students are learning, whether they are achieving at their grade level and the training their instructors receive…

All the students attending Majestic Grace last year were school voucher recipients, said school founder Jed Harris, the retired banker. Majestic Grace is not the first school Harris has helped open in Arizona. He also worked to launch Tipping Point Academy, a private school in Scottsdale that promises to integrate a Biblical worldview into every lesson….

Grand Canyon Private Academy, an online school for students in grades K-10 that opened this past school year, notes prominently on its website that the Arizona school voucher program will cover all of the school’s tuition, which is up to $6,500 for the full year. …

Before the 2022-23 school year began, the Empowerment Scholarship Account program served about 12,000 students. Now, more than 60,000 students receive funding through the program for private school tuition, tutors or educational materials.

While it is unclear how many of those students receive funding for private school tuition rather than special therapies or at-home learning supplies, the voucher vendor list includes many private schools.

As the school voucher program has grown so have concerns about public money supporting private schools that are poorly understood beyond their physical or virtual walls. Gov. Katie Hobbs’ office released a memo in July estimating the school voucher program will cost more than $950 million in the current budget year, leading to a budget shortfall of nearly $320 million.

Voucher opponent Beth Lewis, who heads the public school advocacy group Save Our Schools, wonders whether private schools serve students better or are just shielded from the scrutiny of public schools, which are legally bound to provide information for accountability’s sake.

“Arizona’s ESA program is the least accountable in the entire country,” said Lewis. “Public dollars are going to strip mall private schools, popping up with zero accreditation and no requirements that they adhere to curriculum or state standards. In a public school, you need to have all of those things.”

State law requires the Arizona Department of Education to give every public school — district and charter — an A through F letter grade. It is based on factors including statewide assessment tests and graduation rate.

In contrast, Arizona law’s academic requirement for a family’s acceptance of a school voucher is that “a portion of the ESA must be used in at least the subjects of reading, grammar, mathematics, social studies and science,” according to the 2023-24 school voucher parent handbook. Those subjects must also be taught in private schools under Arizona law.

Those demands do little to alleviate Lewis’ concerns about academic accountability for private schools accepting taxpayer dollars.

“If you spend five minutes writing a sentence about grammar, that is not putting together a robust education,” Lewis said.

Furthermore, students lose legal protections when they leave public schools to accept a school voucher. For instance, private school students are not protected under a federal law that governs special education, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, like public school students.

Private schools also have less rigorous legal requirements for staff.

Most public school employees are required by law to undergo a form of background check to ensure they don’t have a criminal history that would disqualify them from working with children. That’s not required for private schools or vendors accepting voucher dollars.

In addition, full-time, permanent classroom teachers in public schools must have at least a bachelor’s degree. There’s no similar requirement for private schools, and the voucher program only requires vendors, like tutors, to have a high school diploma when it’s related to the service they’re providing.

With school vouchers, private schools and other educational vendors are answerable to the parents, according to the head of the program, who recently resigned. While the state provides a list of vendors and schools approved to receive voucher money, it is the parent’s responsibility to ensure a provider has satisfactory credentials and provides adequate services.

The voucher schools are exempt from state testing requirements. They are not accountable to the state.

Categories Accountability, Arizona, Education Industry, Privatization, Religion, Separation of church and state

Robert Hubbell: An Unprecedented Indictment

By dianeravitch
August 2, 2023 //
61

Yesterday was a momentous day in American history. A former President was charged with the crimes of conspiracy to overturn the election that ousted him. We watched the events of January 6, 2021, unfold on national television. We did not know all the details of the conspiracy, which happened in secrecy. But independent counsel Jack Smith interviewed people who were in those secret sessions. Some of them blabbed.

Robert Hubbell summed up the dramatic events of last night. Open the link and keep reading.

Hubbell writes:

At 7:14 PM EDT on August 1, 2023, special counsel Jack Smith strode to a lectern in Washington, D.C., opened a folder, and said, “Today, an indictment was unsealed . . . .” With those plain words, Jack Smith announced the most remarkable legal proceeding in the history of our nation. The indictment (US v. Trump) alleges that a former president of the United States attempted to prevent the peaceful transfer of power between presidents—the hallmark of American democracy.

          Smith cut to the quick of the indictment in his brief remarks, saying:

The attack on our nation’s Capital on January 6, 2021, was an unprecedented assault on the seat of American democracy. It was fueled by lies, lies by the defendant.

          And the indictment cuts to the quick of the injury inflicted by Trump: It alleges that Trump engaged in a conspiracy “against the right to vote and to have one’s vote counted.”

          There it is: Trump attempted to deny the American people the right of self-determination. If that right is abrogated, a free people become vassals of an authoritarian state that exists to perpetuate itself rather than serve the people.     

          In its economy and focus, the indictment lays bare Trump’s betrayal of the Constitution and the American people. In damning Trump with words of one syllable, it seeks to persuade the jury that will determine his guilt and the American people who will determine his fate.

          The indictment is the product of deep strategic thinking. Jack Smith seeks a conviction before the 2024 presidential election. To increase the likelihood of that outcome, the indictment charges a single defendant—Donald Trump. The indictment alleges that Trump was assisted by six un-indicted co-conspirators—five attorneys and one political consultant who can (and will) be tried later.

          In charging a broad conspiracy involving six un-indicted co-conspirators, Smith will be able to use the statements of the seven co-conspirators against one another. The indictment bristles with incriminating admissions and confessions of guilty knowledge by inept and clueless amateurs whose proximity to the presidency caused them to take leave their senses.

          The indictment deftly seeks to hold Trump accountable for the violence on January 6th without assuming the burden of proving he incited the violence. Rather, the indictment alleges that Trump exploited the violence by using it as an excuse to justify the unlawful delay necessary for the false electors plot to succeed.

          The indictment focuses on the false electors’ plot, one of the most straightforward and easily provable elements of Trump’s attempted coup. The indictment does not seek to hold Trump directly accountable for inciting the violence—a difficult proposition to prove.

          On August 2, 2023, Americans who yearn for justice and accountability should feel buoyed by the powerful indictment against Trump. We have much to be grateful for, including the following:

  • That Merrick Garland chose Jack Smith to prosecute Trump;
  • That Jack Smith and his staff (attorneys and FBI agents) acted with the urgency and dispatch appropriate after an attempted coup—and before a threatened second coup.
  • That former Speaker Nancy Pelosi had the foresight to proceed with a select committee to investigate the events of January 6th over objections from House Republicans.
  • That the dedicated members of the House J6 Committee (and their staff) presented an overwhelming case of Trump’s guilt to the American people.
  • That state prosecutors and civil litigants in Georgia and New York pursued justice against Trump when it appeared that federal prosecutors temporized.
  • That the men and women who defended the Capitol on January 6th were able to hold the line long enough for the coup plotters to lose their nerve. As Jack Smith said of the law enforcement officers who defended the Capitol, “They are patriots and they are the best of us.”

          The indictment is momentous. It should speak for itself and deserves to be read in full by you. Indeed, it is your civic duty to do so. The indictment is here: US v. Trump. It is eminently readable. To whet your appetite, here is the introduction:

1.    The Defendant, DONALD J. TRUMP, was the forty -fifth President of the United States and a candidate for re-election in 2020. The Defendant lost the 2020 presidential election.

          2. Despite having lost, the Defendant was determined to remain in power. So for more than two months following election day on November 3,2020, Defendant spread lies that there had been outcome-determinative fraud in the election and that he had actually won. These claims were false, and the Defendant knew that they were false. But Defendant repeated and widely disseminated them anyway to make his knowingly false claims appear legitimate, create an intense national atmosphere of mistrust and anger, and erode public faith in the administration of the election.

          3. The Defendant had a right, like every American, to speak publicly about the election and even to claim, falsely, that there had been outcome-determinative fraud during the election and that he had won. He was also entitled to formally challenge the results of the election through lawful and appropriate means, such as by seeking recounts or audits of the popular vote in states or filing lawsuits challenging ballots and procedures. Indeed, in many cases, the Defendant did pursue these methods of contesting the election results. His efforts to change the outcome in any state through recounts, audits, or legal challenges were uniformly unsuccessful.

Early analysis of the indictment by legal commentators.

          We will spend months and years reviewing the indictment. The early analysis started to arrive on Tuesday evening. A good place to start is with the question of whether it is in the interest of the nation to prosecute a former president for resisting the peaceful transfer of power. It is. See Ruth Marcus op-ed in WaPo, Prosecuting Trump is perilous. Ignoring his conduct would be worse. Marcus writes,

There is a reasonable argument to be made that Trump is already facing criminal charges for his behavior in other matters and proceeding against him on the suite of election-related offenses is unwise and unnecessary.

I disagree, and reading Tuesday’s indictment bolsters that conviction. The Mar-a-Lago indictment charges a separate set of crimes: illegal retention of national defense information and obstruction of justice. These are serious allegations, but to say that their existence obviates the need to prosecute Trump for his efforts to prevent the peaceful transfer of power is akin to arguing that it is not essential to bring murder charges if the putative defendant is already accused of armed robbery.

Prosecuting Trump on these charges is a grave, even perilous, step. Condoning his behavior by ignoring it would be far worse.

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Elections, Trump

Private Equity Is Buying Up Doctors and Healthcare

By dianeravitch
August 1, 2023 //
42

I never thought I’d see this story in the New York Times: Who Employs Your Doctor? Increasingly, a Private Equity Firm. Until two years ago, my personal physician was a solo practitioner. She retired early, in part because of the burden of dealing with multiple insurance agencies, private and public. Solo practitioners like her are increasingly rare.

Something new has been added to the world of medical providers: private equity firms that are buying up medical practices.

The New York Times reported on this new trend:

In recent years, private equity firms have been gobbling up physician practices to form powerful medical groups across the country, according to a new report released Monday.

In more than a quarter of local markets — in places like Tucson, Ariz.; Columbus, Ohio; and Providence, R.I. — a single private equity firm owned more than 30 percent of practices in a given specialty in 2021. In 13 percent of the markets, the firms owned groups employing more than half the local specialists.

The medical groups were associated with higher prices in their respective markets, particularly when they controlled a dominant share, according to a paper by researchers at the Petris Center at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, a progressive think tank in Washington, D.C. When a firm controlled more than 30 percent of the market, the cost of care in three specialties — gastroenterology, dermatology, and obstetrics and gynecology — increased by double digits.

Source: Nicholas C. Petris Center on Health Care Markets and Consumer Welfare, University of California, Berkeley; Washington Center for Equitable Growth

The paper, published by the American Antitrust Institute, documented substantial private equity purchases across multiple medical specialties over the last decade. Urology, ophthalmology, cardiology, oncology, radiology and orthopedics have also been major targets for such deals….

The higher prices paid by private insurers contribute to high insurance premiums, and may increase out-of-pocket costs for patients.

Private equity firms, which pool funds from institutional investors and individuals to form investment funds, tend to purchase companies using debt, with an eye to reselling them in a few years. The industry has turned to health care fairly recently, but it has begun purchasing doctors’ practices at a steady clip, combining smaller practices to form larger companies.

When a private equity arm of a Canadian pension fund, OMERS Private Equity, bought Gastro Health, a large gastroenterology medical group, in 2021, it proceeded to acquire nearly a dozen smaller practices, according to the researchers, who say the group is now dominant in markets including the Miami area. The company now operates in seven states, employing over 390 doctors. The researchers saw similar patterns in other markets, where a firm would buy one large practice, then increase its market share by adding nearby smaller practices in the same medical specialty.

Historically, doctors’ practices have been relatively small, and owned by doctors themselves. But that model has been rapidly declining as the business of medicine has become more complex and the insurance companies that negotiate with doctors over prices have become bigger. Nearly 70 percent of all doctors were employed by either a hospital or a corporation in 2021, according to a recent analysis from the Physicians Advocacy Institute.

“We’re seeing a fundamental change in how medicine is being practiced in the U.S.,” said Richard Scheffler, a professor of health economics and public policy at Berkeley and director of the Petris Center.

Hospitals and insurance companies have also bought out many independent physicians’ practices. Optum, an arm of the publicly traded UnitedHealth Group, which also owns one of the nation’s largest insurers, employs roughly 70,000 physicians. Studies have shown that these types of concentrated ownership of doctors in a given market are also associated with higher prices.

Open the article and read on.

Categories For-Profit, Health

“School Choice”: Who Chooses? The School or the Family?

By dianeravitch
August 1, 2023 //
2

Teachers College Press released this description of recent research on school choice.

Does School Choice Mean Parents or Schools Do the Choosing?

Dr. Barbara Ferguson
Research on Reforms, Inc.


In their book on school choice, the authors ponder the question: “Does School Choice Mean Parents or Schools Do the Choosing?”

The book is published by Teachers College Press at Columbia University* and its authors, Wagma Mommandi and Kevin Welner, begin by citing the driving force behind school choice, which is to remove the “government monopoly on schools and let families choose the school for their children.”

But, through their decades of research, the authors conclude that “charter schools often play an outsize role in shaping enrollment.” They cite an assortment of practices that charter schools have implemented to deter the enrollment of certain groups of students. And they conclude, “even when parents are able to enroll their child in their preferred school of choice, academic requirements and disciplinary policies may prevent enrollment in subsequent years.”

These same conclusions were reached by Dr. Barbara Ferguson and published in her book: “Outcomes of the State Takeover of the New Orleans Schools” (2018). Dr. Ferguson uses the term “selective admission” for charter schools with enrollment practices that deter the enrollment of certain groups of students. The term “selective retention” is used for charter schools that have policies that prevent continued enrollment.

Charter schools are public schools, and they are supposed to be distinguished from the traditional public schools only by the governance structure. Charter schools are governed by private boards and traditional schools are governed by public boards. Yet, in New Orleans, the charter schools are allowed to enact admission and retention rules like those enacted by private schools..

“Selective Admission” allows charter schools to select the best and the brightest, and the wealthiest. Lycée Français charter school, in 2011-12, had a paid preschool program with a tuition of $4,570 and those preschool students gained automatic entry into the elementary charter school. They bypassed the lottery, which is required by federal law to be used when there are more applicants than spaces available in the school.

Benjamin Franklin, Lusher and Warren Easton were three successful magnet high schools that became charter schools and were allowed to keep their selective criteria for admission.“Selective Retention” allows charter schools to selectively remove underachieving and disruptive students:
• To continue their enrollment at Franklin and Lusher, students had to earn an overall 2.0 grade point average, and at Warren Easton an overall 1.5.

• At Hynes charter school: “Students with chronic attendance/tardy issues or with three or more suspensions will be ineligible to re-register.”

• At Mays charter school: “A student who misses ten or more consecutive days of school without notifying Mays Prep …is subject to being unenrolled at Mays Prep.”

• At Priestley charter school: “Students must maintain a 2.5 grade point average during the school year. Failure to do so will result in academic probation…and/or an invitation not to return the following year.”


• At Lake Forest Elementary charter school: “Failure to complete volunteer hours or participate in the mandatory fund raisers may result in loss of placement for your child.”This list can go on and on. The above information is taken from each school’s handbook and cited in Dr. Ferguson’s book.Perhaps the most egregious “Selective Retention” charter school scheme is expelling students for offenses for which they previously could not be expelled. Charter schools are allowed to develop their own rules for expulsion.


• At Miller-McCoy charter school, students can be expelled for “not attending tutoring, homework center…, misbehaving on the school bus, disrupting class….”


• At Arise Academy charter school, students can be expelled for “offenses, such as, disrespect, out of uniform, chewing gum…”


• At New Orleans College Prep charter school, students can be expelled “for repeated and fundamental disregard of school policies and procedures.”


• At Lafayette Academy charter school, students can be expelled for “unexcused or excessive absenteeism; cheating; failure to report to detention.”The list can go on and on. The above information is taken from each school’s handbook and cited in Dr. Ferguson’s book.

Charter schools not only developed their own rules for expulsion, but they could expel directly from the site level. Thus, a more tragic outcome was the aftermath of the expulsion. Previously, schools had to make a recommendation for expulsion to the district level. If the district office expelled the student, the district was then required to reassign the expelled student to another school. But charter schools were allowed to expel directly from the site level with no obligation to ensure that the student was re-enrolled in another school. Thus, the parents of the expelled student had to find another school which was almost impossible since charter schools can cap enrollment.

Constitutionally, each state has an obligation to educate all students to a given age which is established by the state. But that obligation is circumvented when no entity has the responsibility to ensure that a student expelled from a charter school is re-enrolled into another school. When the New Orleans School Board regained some control of the charter schools, they reversed the charter school site-level expulsion mandate, now requiring charter schools to recommend students for expulsion to the district office. If expelled, the district office then places the student into another school. However, two New Orleans high schools still retain language in their handbooks which state that they expel from the site level.

“Does school choice mean parents or schools do the choosing?” The Louisiana charter school law was intended for parents, especially parents of “at-risk” children and youth, to remove their students from “failing” schools and to choose a school with a higher rating. But the written law has not become the implemented law. New Orleans “at-risk” children and youth remain in the poorest performing schools.


________________________________Endnote:


*School’s Choice: How Charter Schools Control Access and Shape Their Enrollment (Teachers College Press, 2021) Authors: Wagma Mommandi and Kevin Welner.

Comments to bferguson@researchonreforms.orgResearch On Reforms Website

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Charter Schools, Disruption, Education Industry, Parents, Privatization, School Choice, Students

Texas: Why Governor Abbott Keeps Losing on Vouchers

By dianeravitch
August 1, 2023 //
6

Josephine Lee of The Texas Observer conducted the following interview with the leaders of Pastors for Texas Children, Dr Charles Foster Johnson and Dr. Charles Luke.

The Texas Observer is a wonderful publication.

This year, Governor Greg Abbott made “school choice,” or vouchers, one of his top legislative priorities. He counted on riding the wave of “parent rights” crusades into the national political arena. But Texans didn’t buy it.

Since 1995, the Coalition for Public Schools in Texas has assembled a broad spectrum of religious, child advocacy, and education organizations, now with 50 groups representing some 4 million Texans. Its member organizations range from the American Civil Liberties Union to the Texas Baptist Christian Rights Commission. For 28 years, the coalition has beaten repeated efforts to privatize public schools through a voucher system. This year’s regular legislative session was no different.

Abbott and the state Senate made multiple attempts to implant vouchers—after the House voted not to use public dollars for private schools—including offers to buy off rural school districts, back-door deals to vote without any hearing, and busing in a scant showing of supporters at the governor’s expense. These were countered by thousands of emails and phone calls and dozens of opposition rallies featuring coalition members. Still, Abbott has promised a future special session on vouchers. The Texas Observer spoke with Charles Luke, who coordinates the coalition, and the Rev. Charles Johnson, who leads the member organization Pastors for Texas Children, who together suggest that Abbott give up and focus on Texans’ real needs.

TO: Can you describe Abbott’s attempts to convince rural residents to support vouchers and pit them against urban communities?

Charles Luke: There was a measure that would have given districts $10,000 for each student on a voucher if that district had less than 20,000 kids. It would be a period of two years and then after that it was upped to five years. Also, the lieutenant governor, when he was running for office and doing his tour of Texas, said he was going to bracket out the rural districts from the voucher programs. He got a lot of pushback from people saying, “If this is such a good idea, why are you leaving us out of it?” So he quickly changed his opinion and even reportedly told senators who were also using that as a talking point in their campaigns to stop talking about vouchers because it’s not popular.

What are the conditions in rural schools?

Charles Johnson: The big headline is we’re sitting on a $33 billion pot of money. And the governor wants the money to go to private schools instead of public schools. That’s the nub of the matter right there. So we didn’t get the classroom support we needed; we didn’t get the teacher salary increases, even though our classes are too full. And with teacher retention so low, you have fewer teachers working harder, longer hours without the fair pay associated with that extra effort. All this time, we have money in the bank; we have all these infrastructure needs, and we’re spending all our time using the voucher issue to hold hostage school finance.

Luke: The other issue that hasn’t been talked about is that schools are trying to make it under double-digit inflation. Everything they’re purchasing, from construction materials to food for the cafeteria, has gone up since COVID. So they’re doing all of this without any extra money. At the same time, we’re limiting their ability to raise local taxes.

Why did Abbott’s fearmongering about “critical race theory” and other efforts fail?

Johnson: Because it’s ludicrous. When [rural Texans] really look around the school, they see their family members and their church members. For example, the Baptist preacher’s wife is the principal or their teacher is the mayor’s daughter. In a rural community, where people know each other and have organic relationships, this is the key. They’ve grown up together, the children have been in school together. There are cross-racial relationships. The teacher who harbors a humanistic concern for the well-being of every child is going to guard the freedom and dignity of the child’s religious expression. But there are shrill and well-funded political interests in this country that do not want to have that kind of diversity. It does not advance a particular right-wing political agenda.

Do you think the anti-”critical race theory” narrative is on its way out then?

Johnson: Absolutely. We’re addressing all these manufactured crises that don’t have any real direct existential connection to where Texans live and what they need: a great public school for ranch kids, roads to get products to market, broadband, water. All those things are very important. That’s what we ought to be addressing here in Austin.

Luke: I think the people of Texas are just worn out. They’re angry and frustrated, and then there’s this narrative that keeps on coming up, this baloney narrative that we don’t really see happening anywhere. After decades of being in the schools, I can count on one hand the number of times somebody taught something that shouldn’t be taught. But here’s the problem: A lot of these people, who are pushing this problem and pushing the privatization of public schools, haven’t been inside a public school in years. And every time I hit a pothole that didn’t get filled in because the state spent money fighting “critical race theory,” well, that’s a frustration for me.

What should religious liberty look like in the public schools?

Johnson: This is our number one objection to the privatization of public education. The public school is the laboratory of American democracy, where children learn to respect each other across all kinds of differences. And the protection of religious liberty is a fundamental human right. Government has no proper authority over religion. Period. Now our children can already express themselves religiously in schools in all kinds of ways. They can have a silent prayer. Religious organizations can meet on their own time before or after school or during lunch hour for a prayer group. Principals spend a good bit of their time protecting individual religious expressions of children and teaching tolerance to children for all the diverse expressions of religion. One of the foundational pieces of curriculum in a public school is tolerance, respect, and anti-bullying. It is the social and emotional support that children need to grow up into full adulthood. So, it is an egregious violation of human rights for public dollars to advance a religious doctrine.

Dr. Luke gave the best response this session to [Republican state] Senator Mayes Middleton.

Luke: Mayes Middleton had asked me [during a Senate Education Committee hearing] to explain a tweet from Pastors for Texas Children: “The governor is leading in the indoctrination of children by promoting vouchers.” Well, if you’ve got a child in a religious school, be it Christian, Muslim, Jewish, or whatever, they’re gonna teach that child their religious doctrines and that’s the dictionary definition of indoctrination.

What do you foresee for Abbott’s special session on vouchers?

Johnson: If Abbott calls a special session to get a voucher program, we’ve been told by a lot of House members that the opposition to a voucher program will increase. This has already been quite an embarrassment for Abbott. Now, he wants to call the legislature back into session, after what they’ve been through these past 140 days, just to once again vote on something that they have defeated time after time after time for the last 28 years.

Categories Accountability, Education Reform, Funding, Religion, Separation of church and state, Texas, Vouchers

Florida Adopts Curriculum to Indoctrinate Students in Rightwing Views

By dianeravitch
August 1, 2023 //
46

Ana Cenallos of The Orlando Sentinel reports that the state of Florida adopted curriculum materials created by rightwing talk show host Dennis Prager with the explicit purpose of indoctrinating students to accept rightwing views of controversial topics.

Gov. Ron DeSantis repeatedly says he opposes indoctrination in schools. Yet his administration in early July approved materials from a conservative group that says it’s all about indoctrination and “changing minds.”

The Florida Department of Education determined that educational materials geared toward young children and high school students created by PragerU, a nonprofit co-founded by conservative radio host Dennis Prager, were in alignment with the state’s standards on how to teach civics and government to K-12 students.

The content, some of which is narrated by conservative personalities such as Tucker Carlson and Candance Owens, features cartoons, five-minute video history lessons and story-time shows for young children. It is part of a brand called PragerU Kids. And the lessons share a common message: Being pro-American means aligning oneself to mainstream conservative talking points.

“We are in the mind-changing business and few groups can say that,” Prager says in a promotional video for PragerU. He reiterated this sentiment this summer at a conference for the conservative group Moms for Liberty in Philadelphia, saying it is “fair” to say PragerU indoctrinates children.

“It’s true we bring doctrines to children,” Prager told the group. “But what is the bad about our indoctrination?”

The bottom line message: The US is the best place ever. Its history is unblemished by any troubling episodes. Slavery was practiced in many societies, and white people should be credited with ending it.

PragerU is not an accredited university and it publicly says the group is a “force of good” against the left. It’s a nonprofit organization based in Los Angeles that produces videos that touch on a range of themes, including climate policies (specifically how “energy poverty, not climate change” is the real crisis), the flaws of Canada’s government-run healthcare system (and how the American privatized system is better), and broad support for law enforcement (and rejection of Black Lives Matter).

In some cases, the videos tell kids that their teachers are “misinformed” or “lying.”

Categories Academic Freedom, Accountability, Bigotry, Censorship, Civics, Curriculum, Education Industry, Extremism, Fake, Florida, History, Lies, Propaganda

North Carolina: Why Tricia Cotham Betrayed Voters and Gave GOP a Supermajority

By dianeravitch
July 31, 2023 //
22

Last April, newly elected Democrat Tricia Cotham announced that she was switching from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party. This was after she had campaigned as a supporter of abortion rights, an opponent of school vouchers, and a loyal Democrat. Her betrayal of voters in her blue district shook up the state’s politics, because it meant that the hard-right Republicans in the state legislature (the General Assembly) could override the vetoes of Democratic Governor Roy Cooper.

Everyone who saw the damage wrought by Cotham wondered why she did it. She claimed that Democrats didn’t appreciate her enough. That’s a strange reason to flip positions on big issues.

The New York Times reporters Kate Kelly and David Perlmutt found out why she switched: she was wooed by powerful Republicans, encouraged to run, and flipped knowing full well that she lied to her voters.

When Tricia Cotham, a former Democratic lawmaker, was considering another run for the North Carolina House of Representatives, she turned to a powerful party leader for advice. Then, when she jumped into the Democratic primary, she was encouraged by still other formidable allies.

She won the primary in a redrawn district near Charlotte, and then triumphed in the November general election by 18 percentage points, a victory that helped Democrats lock in enough seats to prevent, by a single vote, a Republican supermajority in the state House.

Except what was unusual — and not publicly known at the time — was that the influential people who had privately encouraged Ms. Cotham to run were Republicans, not Democrats. One was Tim Moore, the redoubtable Republican speaker of the state House. Another was John Bell, the Republican majority leader…

Three months after Ms. Cotham took office in January, she delivered a mortal shock to Democrats and to abortion rights supporters: She switched parties, and then cast a decisive vote on May 3 to override a veto by the state’s Democratic governor and enact a 12-week limit on most abortions— North Carolina’s most restrictive abortion policy in 50 years…

More perplexing to many Democrats was why she did it. Ms. Cotham came from a family with strong ties to the Democratic Party, campaigned as a progressive on social issues and had even co-sponsored a bill to codify a version of Roe v. Wade into North Carolina law…

Late in March, just a few days before switching parties, she skipped a pivotal gun-control vote, helping Republicans loosen gun restrictions in the state. After she became a Republican, she sponsored a bill to expand student eligibility for private-school vouchers, voted to ban gender-affirming care for minors and voted to outlaw discussions of race or gender in state job interviews.

“This switch has been absolutely devastating,” said state Representative Pricey Harrison, a Democrat from Greensboro.

Ms. Cotham received a standing ovation at North Carolina’s state Republican convention in June. She was invited to meet privately there with Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida and former Vice President Mike Pence.

“She’s a rock star among the Republican Party activists and voter base,” said U.S. Representative Dan Bishop, a Republican who said he encouraged Ms. Cotham to join his party and who stood behind her when she announced the decision.

There were clues that should have raised suspicions. In an earlier stint in the legislature, Cotham was loud in demanding greater accountability for charter schools. After she left the legislature, she was a lobbyist for the charter school industry. When she returned this year and flipped parties, she led the Republican demand to transfer control of charters from the State Board of Education to the General Assembly.

The move would, at first, shift independent oversight of charter schools from a board largely appointed by the governor to a board largely appointed by the General Assembly….

Cotham, a former teacher, has been a supporter of school choice. She was the president of a corporation that ran charter schools. Cotham is one of three chairs of the House Education Committee, a role she’s held since the start of the session when she was a Democrat, a rare position for a Democrat in the GOP-controlled chamber.

Real Democrats support public schools, not corporate charter chains or vouchers.

Categories Accountability, Democrats, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Hypocrisy, Lies, North Carolina, Republicans, Scandals, Vouchers

Dana Milbank: House GOP Discovers Aliens Among Us

By dianeravitch
July 31, 2023 //
71

Dana Milbank, a regular columnist for the Washington Post is always insightful and sees the humor in the antics of politicians. In this account of recent hearings about UFOs, he hits it out of the park. He explains why Trump supporters are avid believers in the presence of mysterious aliens: they believe the Deep State is hiding what it knows. Another conspiracy. The missing link in their conspiracy: why didn’t Trump release all this secret stuff during his four years in office? Milbank casts doubt on whether outer space aliens are real; I can answer him. They are; a few of them have been posting on this blog recently.

Milbank writes:

The aliens have landed. And they have a gavel!

That is as plausible a takeaway as any from this week’s House Oversight Committee hearing on unidentified anomalous phenomena, the curiosity formerly known as UFOs. The panel’s national security subcommittee brought in, as its star witness, one David Grusch, a former Defense Department intelligence official who now claims:

  • That there are “quite a number” of “nonhuman” space vehicles in the possession of the U.S. government.
  • That one “partially intact vehicle” was retrieved from Italian dictator Benito Mussolini in 1933 by the United States, acting on a tip from Pope Pius XII.
  • That the aliens have engaged in “malevolent activity” and “malevolent events” on Earth that have harmed or killed humans.
  • That the U.S. government is also in possession of “dead pilots” from the spaceships.
  • That a private defense contractor is storing one of the alien ships, which have been as large as a football field.
  • That the vehicles might be coming “from a higher dimensional physical space that might be co-located right here.”
  • That the Roswell, N.M., alien landing was real, and the Air Force’s debunking of it a “total hack job.”
  • And that the United States has engaged in a nearly century-long “sophisticated disinformation campaign” (apparently including murders to silence people) to hide the truth.

I’d tell you more, but then they would have to kill me.

Alas, Grusch has no documents, photos or other evidence to corroborate any of his fantastic claims. It’s classified, you see.

Maybe everything he says is true, even the claim that “the Vatican was involved” in pursuing extraterrestrials, and Grusch has just exposed the best-kept secret and most sprawling conspiracy in the history of the universe. Or maybe Grusch himself is a conspiracy theorist, or he’s just having a lark at the subcommittee’s expense. Easier to discern was the motive of several Republicans on the panel: They greeted his out-of-this-world claims with total credulity, using them as just more evidence that the deep-state U.S. government is lying to the American people, covering up the truth and can never be trusted. Their anti-government vendetta has gone intergalactic.

“There has been activity by alien or nonhuman technology and/or beings that has caused harm to humans?” asked Rep. Eric Burlison (R-Mo.).

Grusch said what he “personally witnessed” was “very disturbing.”

“You’ve said that the U.S. has intact spacecraft,” Burlison continued. “You’ve said that the government has alien bodies or alien species. Have you seen the spacecraft?”

Grusch said the nonclassified setting prevented him from divulging “what I’ve seen firsthand.”

“Do we have the bodies of the pilots?” Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) wanted to know.

“Biologics came with some of these recoveries, yeah,” Grusch told her, and the remains were “nonhuman.”

Mace asked whether, “based on your experience,”Grusch believes “our government has made contact with intelligent extraterrestrials.”

Classified, Grusch replied.

Just over a year ago, a House Intelligence subcommittee held a similar hearing on “unidentified aerial phenomena” but with dramatically different results. The panel’s bipartisan leadership said the matter should be taken seriously to protect pilots and to make sure enemies don’t develop breakthrough weapons. But they assured the public there was no evidence of “anything nonterrestrial in origin,” and they cautioned against conspiracy theories. In addition, Sean Kirkpatrick, the head of the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, where Grusch worked, testified to senators in April that his UAP-hunting office “has found no credible evidence thus far of extraterrestrial activity, off-world technology or objects that defy the known laws of physics.” NASA has said likewise.

At the start of this week’s hearing, Rep. Robert Garcia (Calif.), the subcommittee’s ranking Democrat, reminded colleagues of Kirkpatrick’s testimony. One of the other witnesses, David Fravor, a retired Navy commander, told the subcommittee that the government is “not focused on little green men.” But this Republican majority has yet to meet a conspiracy theory it wouldn’t amplify, so it was only a matter of time before it landed on Roswell and Area 51.

There’s only one reason Trump failed to release the top-secret documents about extraterrestrials: he is part of the Deep State too! Shhhhhh.

Categories Ignorance, Politics, Republicans, Trump

Arizona: Expanded Voucher Program Blows a Hole in State Budget

By dianeravitch
July 31, 2023 //
10

Despite the public’s overwhelming rejection of vouchers in a state referendum in 2018 (by a margin of 65-35%), the Republican Legislature and then-Governor Doug Ducey ignored the vote and passed a program of universal vouchers. This meant that the state would pay for every student, regardless of family income, to attend a private or religious school or homeschool or whatever the family considered an educational expense.

The claim that vouchers would “save poor kids from failing public schools” was exposed as phony, since most students who claimed vouchers never attended public schools. Quite simply, the voucher program was a transfer of public money from public schools to students in non-public schools.

The cost of the voucher program soared to nearly $1 billion. It’s two top administrators resigned. The new Governor Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, said that the voucher program was unsustainable.

Two of the top administrators in charge of a controversial school program in Arizona that has seen cost estimates swell to well beyond expectations have abruptly resigned, leading to more questions about the program and how it is being operated.

The program, known at the ESA Program, was expanded last year by the Republican-backed legislature and has seen its costs swell to enormous heights as students around the state quickly applied for the $7,000 vouchers made available by the program.

ESA Leaders Abruptly Resign

Two of the top administrators with the Empowerment Scholarship Accounts program in Arizona abruptly resigned on Monday, with the remaining members of the program giving few details as to why the two may have left.

An Arizona Department of Education spokesman acknowledged Tuesday that Empowerment Scholarship Account Director Christine Accurso and operations director Linda Rizzo had resigned from the ESA program, according to KPNX-TV.

“Christine Accurso has explained to the department that she took the ESA position to clean up the program and having successfully done that she has chosen to move on,” according to the statement…

ESA Causing Huge Deficit to State Budget

The ESA program has now cost the State of Arizona approximately $943 million, prompting what Governor Katie Hobbs says will be a $319 million budget deficit for the state, largely caused by the bloated spending of the program.

Categories Arizona, Education Industry, Funding, Privatization, Vouchers

Matt Barnum: Pundits and Politicians Despair about Public Schools, But Parents Are Happy with Them

By dianeravitch
July 31, 2023 //
53

“This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at ckbe.at/newsletters”.

Matt Barnum of Chalkbeat summarized recent polls about public schools and noticed a sharp contrast between parents of public school students and non-parents.

Parents who have children in public schools are satisfied with them, based on their experience. But the general public swallows the negative narrative spewed by the mainstream media and rightwing politicians and thus has a sour view of public schools. This gap in perception has persisted for many years but seems to be increasing as Republican politicians like Texas’s Greg Abbott and Florida’s Ron DeSantis amp up their attacks on public schools.

Since it is not newsworthy to report that most parents are satisfied with their children’s public schools, the media loves to publish stories about crises and failure. Eventually, it becomes the conventional wisdom.

We have heard scare stories about the public schools with great intensity since the publication of the ominous “A Nation at Risk” report in 1983. That report, we now know, was purposely distorted to make public schools look bad. The commission that released that hand-wringing report had cooked the books to generate a sense of crisis. And they succeeded. The Reagan administration was alarmed, the nation’s governors were alarmed, the media stoked their fears. And for 40 years, the nation bought the lie.

But one group did not buy the lie: public school parents.

Barnum wrote:

The polling company Gallup has been asking American parents the same question since 1999: Are you satisfied with your oldest child’s education? Every year though January 2020, between two-thirds and 80% said yes.

The pandemic upended many things about American schooling, but not this long-standing trend. In Gallup’s most recent poll, conducted late last year, 80% of parents said they were somewhat or completely satisfied with their child’s school, which in most cases was a public school. This was actually a bit higher than in most years before the pandemic. A string of other polls, conducted throughout the pandemic, have shown similar results.

“Contrary to elite or policy wonk opinion, which often is critical of schools, there have been years and years worth of data saying that families in general like their local public schools,” said Andy Smarick, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank.

Categories Education Reform, Extremism, Fake News, Media, Opinion Polling, Parents, Politics, Privatization, Propaganda, Supporting public schools
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