David Dayen: Biden Delivers on Program to Limit CorporatePower

By dianeravitch
February 10, 2023 //
11

David Dayen writes in The American Prospect about President Biden’s efforts to limit corporate power and spur competition.

Dayen begins:

On July 9, 2021, President Joe Biden signed one of the most sweeping changes to domestic policy since FDR. It was not legislation: His signature climate and health law would take another year to gestate. This was a request that the government get into the business of fostering competition in the U.S. economy again.

Flanked by Cabinet officials and agency heads, Biden condemned Robert Bork’s pro-corporate legal revolution in the 1980s, which destroyed antitrust, leading to concentrated markets, raised prices, suppressed wages, stifled innovation, weakened growth, and robbing citizens of the liberty to pursue their talents. Competition policy, Biden said, “is how we ensure that our economy isn’t about people working for capitalism; it’s about capitalism working for people.”null

The executive order outlines a whopping 72 different actions, but with a coherent objective. It seeks to revert government’s role back to that of the Progressive and New Deal eras. Breaking up monopolies was a priority then, complemented by numerous other initiatives—smarter military procurement, common-carrier requirements, banking regulations, public options—that centered competition as a counterweight to the industrial leviathan.

It’s been a year and a half since Biden signed the executive order; its architect, Tim Wu, has since rotated out of government. Not all of the 72 actions have been completed, though many have. Some were instituted rapidly; others have been agonizing. Some agencies have taken the president’s urging to heart; others haven’t. But the new mindset is apparent.

Seventeen federal agencies are named specifically, tasked with writing rules, tightening guidelines, and ramping up enforcement. I wrote to each agency, asking how they have complied with the order; all of them answered but one (the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, whose role is admittedly tangential). Even Cabinet departments that weren’t mentioned wrote in to explain their approach to competition. Clearly, agencies are aware of the emphasis being put on reorienting their mission.

Bringing change to large bureaucracies is often likened to turning around a battleship. One way to get things moving is to have the captain inform every crew member of the intention to turn the battleship around, counseling them to take every action from now on with that battleship-turning goal in mind. The small team that envisioned and executed the competition order put the weight of the presidency behind it, delivering a loud message to return to the fight against concentrations of power. It’s alarming and maybe a little disconcerting that you have to use a high-level form of peer pressure to flip the ship of state. But that battleship is starting to change course.

TIM WU WAS THE FIRST OF THE TRIUMVIRATE of Wu, Khan, and Kanter (a motto emblazoned on mugs by advocates) to actually get appointed in the Biden administration, joining the National Economic Council (NEC) to work on competition policy in early March 2021. Hiring the author of The Curse of Bigness signaled the administration’s strong anti-monopoly thrust. Khan (Lina, chair of the Federal Trade Commission) and Kanter (Jonathan, heading the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division) would arrive later.

The competition order was released four months after Wu’s appointment, but in reality, it was laid out over the previous five years. In that time, a collection of policymakers, journalists, lawyers, politicians, and experts, sometimes known as the New Brandeis movement, warned of the dangers of economic concentration. Wu, Khan, and Kanter were part of this crusade, and prior to the 2020 election, they and others strategized about how to reinvigorate competition policy if Democrats took the presidency.

This is an unusual story about an accomplishment or series of accomplishments that have gone unnoticed. Read on to the end.

Categories Biden, Democracy, Economics, Economy

Here’s Everything You Need to Know About Vouchers in Texas

By dianeravitch
February 10, 2023 //
9

This article by Dominick Anthony Walsh in Houston Public Media is an excellent, even-handed description of the voucher debate in Texas. The issues and arguments could apply to any other state. He interviewed Josh Cowen, who spent close to 20 years as a voucher researcher but has since become a voucher critic. He also interviewed several voucher researchers who continue to support them.

Joshua Cowen is a Professor of Education Policy with Michigan State University. He’s spent years studying vouchers, and eventually announced that he opposes the policies.

“They were small programs — a couple thousand kids at the most,” he said. “Those studies did tend to show some small benefit to kids academically.”

As vouchers expanded, research results began to expose problems.

“Once you got to the real ballgame and created the fully scaled up voucher programs, the results were really catastrophic,” Cowen said.

Researchers found that voucher programs in some states led to worse test score results than natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina and even the COVID-19 pandemic.

To sum it up: early voucher studies with small sample sizes showed mostly positive results, while the past decade or so of statewide results have largely shown poor outcomes, especially around test scores.

School choice research can be difficult to parse because there’s a lot of money and ideology involved.

Cowen worked on some of the early studies with Patrick Wolf, Distinguished Professor of Education Policy and the 21st Century Endowed Chair in School Choice in the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas.

The former collaborators disagree about how to interpret findings.

Wolf has found some positive results around high school graduation and college completion. He also pointed to the effects of competition in Florida, where he said public schools’ test scores improved after they were forced to compete for students. But he has also observed negative impacts on test scores, including in Louisiana.

It’s worth noting that Patrick Wolf’s department and chair are funded by the Walton Family Foundation, the biggest private funder of school choice programs. when he cites high school graduation rates, he fails to mention the very high attrition rates in voucher schools. If 100 students enter a voucher program but only remain to 55 graduate from high school and 45 go to college, is the graduation rate 45/55 or 45/100?

Governor Greg Abbott’s voucher proposal would cost the state hundreds of millions, perhaps billions. And most of the money will fund students already enrolled in private and religious schools, as it does in every other state that has a voucher/ESA program.

Towards the end of the month, Governor Greg Abbott clarified for the first time what he means by school choice.

He spoke in Corpus Christi at a “parent empowerment night” hosted by Annapolis Christian Academy, where the high school tuition is almost $11,000 per year.

“Schools are for education, not indoctrination,” he said, to a round of applause.

“Now is the time to expand ESAs to every child in the state of Texas,” he continued.

He put his stamp of approval on a specific form of vouchers — education savings accounts, where families who pull students out of public education receive money. One bill in the legislature would give families about $10,000 a year that they can spend or hold on to.

The policy would mean that the Annapolis Christian Academy parents Abbott was speaking to could use taxpayer dollars for their kids’ religious private school tuition.

Now, where do you think students are more likely to be indoctrinated? At the Annapolis Christian Academy or the local public school?

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Education Industry, Privatization, Religion, Research, Rural Schools, Texas, Vouchers

Indiana: Parents Are Satisfied with Their Schools

By dianeravitch
February 10, 2023 //
5

Steve Hinnefeld reports on a recent Gallup Poll that shows high patent satisfaction with public schools. Parents are not seeking “choice,” yet the legislature keeps enhancing legislation to create more school choice.

He reports:

  • Indiana parents are happy with their children’s schools. A remarkable 88% said they were satisfied with the quality of their child’s school. Figures were even higher for some groups: 90% for parents of elementary children and 96% in rural areas and small towns.
  • Parents know what schools are teaching and support it: 81% say they know what their children are learning in school, and 78% say they agree with it.
  • Those who disagree with what schools are teaching are a tiny minority of parents. Only 7% don’t approve of what the schools teach, and two-thirds of those admit they don’t know what that is. In other words, “I don’t know what they’re teaching but, whatever it is, I don’t like it.”

Yet a tiny and uninformed minority – much of it unconnected to schools — seems to have the ear of Republicans, who keep pushing legislation to restrict what schools can teach about race, gender, sexuality and other made-up controversies. They’ve also promoted “curriculum transparency” bills, apparently in the idea that schools are keeping parents in the dark.

Categories Censorship, Charter Schools, Curriculum, Democracy, Education Reform, Fake News, Hoax, Indiana, Opinion Polling, Parents, Propaganda

New York: Schools Lose $1.8 Billion Per Year to Corporate Tax Breaks

By dianeravitch
February 10, 2023 //
10

An organization called Good Jobs First released a study about the economic impact of corporate tax breaks on public schools. They are working with state legislators to stop this harmful practice. Investing in better schools is key to economic development and social capital. Unfortunately, politicians get campaign contributions when they give generous corporate tax breaks.

Contact: Ron Deutsch at 518-469-6769 or rdeutschnyff@gmail.com

Greg LeRoy at goodjobs@goodjobsfirst.org or 202-494-0888

NYS Schools Lose $1.8 Billion Per Year to Corporate Tax Abatements, Far More than Any Other State

Economic Development Committee Chairs Senator Sean Ryan and 

Assemblyman Harry Bronson Introduce Legislation to Stop Such Abatements 

 

Washington, DC — Schools in New York State lost at least $1.8 billion in fiscal year 2021 to corporate tax abatements. That makes New York schools by far the biggest known losers to abatements, more than three times second-place South Carolina.

The study arrives as NYS legislators introduce a bill(S.89/A.351) that would prohibit Industrial Development Agencies (IDAs) from abating the school share of property taxes.

This study’s findings were enabled by a new government accounting rule that requires — for the first time ever — that most school districts, cities and counties disclose how much revenue they lose to such corporate tax breaks.

The study was released today by Good Jobs First, a Washington-based non-profit group focusing on economic development tax policy. The new reporting rule is Governmental Accounting Standards Board (GASB) Statement 77 on Tax Abatement Disclosures.

The $1.8 billion in revenue losses are spread among 318 of the state’s 685 public school districts. In all but five of those 318 districts, the losses are reported directly by the independent school district. In the “Big Five” cities (New York, Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse and Yonkers), the school losses are computed as a share of overall city losses.

Tax abatements cost an average of $541 per pupil per year among the affected school districts, which puts New York in the country’s top five. But that average masks a wide range. For example, losses are just $3 per student per year in West Genesee, where the student body is 85% white, but over $5,000 for Peekskill, where nearly nine out of ten students are of color and over three-quarters qualify for free or reduced-price lunches. And from $5 per student per year in Hoosick Falls, which is almost all-white, to $2,000 per student for Uniondale where almost all attendees are of color.

 

“Our findings are the latest evidence of New York State’s failed economic development system,” said Greg LeRoy, executive director of Good Jobs First, which led the campaign to win the accounting reform. “When governments disinvest education in the name of economic development, they actually harm their business climates. If New York aspires to be a ‘sticky’ place for promising companies in the 21st century, it must have a highly educated workforce.”

State Senator Sean Ryan, Chair of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Economic Development and Small Business, said, “We all know that our state’s schools are engaged in a constant battle for the resources they need to provide our children the quality education they deserve. What most people would be surprised to learn is that property taxes are their primary source of revenue. When IDAs promise to waive a corporation’s property taxes, they are stealing money meant for school districts and exacerbating budget gaps. This forces us to increase school funding to close those gaps and sticks taxpayers with the bill. Prohibiting IDAs from waiving school taxes will support education, lower New Yorkers’ tax bills, and prevent corporations like Amazon from playing IDAs around the state against one another to get the best deal.”

Assemblymember Harry Bronson, Chair of the Assembly Standing Committee on Economic Development, Job Creation, Commerce and Industry, said: “Public education is key to opening opportunities; that is why I have fought so hard to secure funding for our schools and for our children. Public education is largely funded through real property taxes. Schools rely on this revenue, yet they lose it when IDA’s reduce business property tax obligations. These deals made by the IDAs may benefit business, but any supposed benefit is on the backs of our students, and all too often students of color. The report from Good Jobs First shows the damage to school funding and the educational process when school districts are excluded from the IDA negotiating process. The report is a clarion call to action, and I am pleased to sponsor this vital legislation introduced with Senator Ryan.”

 

“Our students, communities and educators deserve to receive the funds that are due to them so we can focus on what is our most important goal: educating the next generation,” said Andy Pallotta, president of New York State United Teachers, a statewide union with more than 600,000 members in education, human services, and health care. “As pointed out by Good Jobs First’s research, this is an issue of equity and we support efforts to make sure all of New York’s students have the opportunity for a world-class education. Education is not only the great equalizer, it is the real economic driver into New York’s future.”

“We strongly support the Ryan/Bronson bill. IDA tax breaks are a triple whammy of terrible tax policy. They do not work, they are unfair to other taxpayers, and they take funding away from public schools. IDA tax breaks aren’t free money. Economists call them ‘tax expenditures’ because they are a form of off-budget spending that takes public funding away from schools and other basic services,” said Dr. Elizabeth Marcello, Senior Research Analyst for Reinvent Albany.

 

Ron Deutsch, director of New Yorkers for Fiscal Fairness noted, “This groundbreaking report from Good Jobs First should be a wake-up call for legislators and parents alike. Nearly $2 billion in property tax revenue is being diverted from our schools and provided to wealthy corporations with highly dubious outcomes and benefits to the community. Kudos to Senator Ryan and Assemblymember Bronson for introducing legislation that would prevent IDA’s from doling out school revenue like candy and giving away our kids future.”

 

“State lawmakers need to take action: it’s time to stop wasteful giveaways by local IDAs that defund our local schools and drive-up property taxes,” said Michael Kink, executive director of the Strong Economy For All Coalition. “We call on the Senate and Assembly to include the Ryan-Bronson legislation in their one-house budget bills and make them a top priority for this year’s state budget, due April 1.”

“The State is finally fully funding Foundation Aid to conclude a 30-year legal and legislative fight. It’s rather unfortunate that all this time, it’s been giving billions away in the form of unnecessary local IDAs. All this money could be better spent in our public schools, to expand early childhood education, not as giveaways that return nothing to the local community,” said Jasmine Gripper, Executive Director of Alliance for Quality Education. “Senator Ryan and Assemblymember Bronson’s bill will ensure schools and teachers have the public funds necessary to support every student’s well-being. It’s time for New York’s long history of prioritizing corporations over communities to end.”

“There are far more beneficial ways to foster economic development than giving 1.8 billion away from our public schools for corporate tax breaks. A better approach is to keep our public schools strong and well-funded so that communities are more attractive to corporations wanting to relocate or remain in the community. Our children should not become unwitting philanthropists for ill-conceived economic development projects. Moreover, homeowners, who pay the highest property taxes in the nation, expect municipalities to be good stewards of the tax dollars they receive and do not look kindly on the upward pressure placed on their tax bills from unwarranted corporate tax breaks,” said the Reverend Peter Cook, Executive Director, New York State Council of Churches.

Note: Good Jobs First is a non-profit, non-partisan policy research center founded in 1998. See more about GASB Statement 77 at https://goodjobsfirst.org/tax-abatement-disclosures/ .

 

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1380 Monroe St NW 405, Washington, DC 20010 ·202.232.1616 · goodjobsfirst.org

Categories Accountability, Economy, Funding, New York

The College Board Lied about Black Studies AP Course. It Had Frequent Exchanges with Florida Officials

By dianeravitch
February 9, 2023 //
49

Governor Ron DeSantis and his Education Commissioner Manny Diaz Jr. denounced the new AP African American Studies course in January. They listed specific objections to the syllabus. When the College Board released its final draft on February 1, everything that Florida opposed had been deleted.

The College Board insisted that it did not bow to political pressure because the revisions were made before Florida officials denounced the original.

The New York Times reported that the College Board and Florida officials were in frequent contact between September and February 1. The first attack on the AP course was written by Stanley Kurtz and published in the National Review on September 12. Kurtz warned that the AP course was “NeoMarxist” and takes “leftist indoctrination to a whole new level.”

About the same time, the College Board and Florida officials began negotiations.

The Times said today:

While the College Board was developing its first Advanced Placement course in African American studies, the group was in repeated contact with the administration of Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, often discussing course concepts that the state said it found objectionable, a newly released letter shows.

When the final course guidelines were released last week, the College Board had removed or significantly reduced the presence of many of those concepts — like intersectionality, mass incarceration, reparations and the Black Lives Matter movement — though it said that political pressure played no role in the changes.

The specifics about the discussions, over the course of a year, were outlined in a Feb. 7 letter from the Florida Department of Education to the College Board.

The existence of the letter was first reported by The Daily Caller, aconservative news site. A copy of the letter was posted on Scribd. Its authenticity was verified by a spokeswoman for the Florida Department of Education, which released a copy early Thursday.

The College Board responded to the letter with one of its own, released on Thursday, saying that Florida’s concerns had not influenced any revisions to the course, which had been shaped instead by feedback from educators.

“We provide states and departments of Education across the country with the information they request for inclusion of courses within their systems,” the letter said, adding, “We need to clarify that no topics were removed because they lacked educational value. We believe all the topics listed in your letter have substantial educational value.”

The discussions between the College Board and the state took place as right-wing activists across the country were increasingly taking aim at school lessons that emphasize race and racism in America. Governor DeSantis, who has presidential ambitions, has cast himself as the voice of parents who are fed up with what he has called “woke indoctrination” from progressive educators.

The back and forth between Florida and the College Board is sure to add to the controversy over the Advanced Placement curriculum, which has prompted a debate among academics in the fields of Black studies, U.S. history and beyond. It has also cast suspicion on the College Board, long criticized for producing exams that seemed to favor white and affluent students.

Supporters of the new A.P. course — which can yield college credit for high school students who do well in it — say it encourages the study of Black history and culture, which have often had only a limited place in high schools. They see another advantage as well, saying that the class will attract Black and Hispanic students, who have not enrolled in A.P. classes as frequently as white students, enriching their study skills and potentially enabling them to amass college credit.

The Florida letter suggests discrepancies with the College Board’s account of events. Florida publicly announced that it had rejected the A.P. course in January, a few weeks before the College Board released its final guidelines — too little time, the board said, to make any politically motivated revisions. But according to the letter, the state informed the College Board months before, in September 2022, that it would not add the African American Studies class to the state’s course directory without revisions.

The Florida letter also outlines a key Nov. 16 meeting to air differences between the state and the College Board over the course. In the meeting, the state claimed that the A.P. African American Studies course violated regulations requiring that “instruction on required topics must be factual and objective and may not suppress or distort significant historical events.”

According to the state, the College Board acknowledged that the course would undergo revisions, while pushing back against the state’s request to remove concepts like “systemic marginalization” and “intersectionality,” which the College Board saw as integral to the class.

Nevertheless, by the time the course’s final framework was released on Feb. 1, those terms had largely been removed, except that intersectionality was listed as an optional subject for the course’s required final project, in which students can choose their area of focus.

In its response to the Florida letter, the College Board said, “We are confident in the historical accuracy of every topic included in the pilot framework, as well as those now in the official framework.” The board has also said that students and teachers could still engage with ideas like intersectionality through optional lessons or projects and through A.P. Classroom, a free website that will serve as a repository for important texts for the class.

Even so, many scholars have noted the omission of terms that, according to the College Board’s own research documents, are considered central to African American Studies as it is taught on college campuses.

Intersectionality, for example, is an influential theory first laid out by the legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989. It posits that race, class, gender, sexuality and other forms of identity intersect in ways that shape individuals’ experience of the world.

Professor Crenshaw’s work is important to several disciplines, including African American studies, gender studies and legal studies. She is also closely associated with critical race theory, a concept that has become a lightning rod among conservative curriculum activists, who object to schools emphasizing the concepts of racism or white privilege.

Ron DeSantis threw his weight around, and the College Board capitulated. He is now the official arbiter of what history may be taught to advanced students in American high schools.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Curriculum, DeSantis, Failure, Florida, Race, Racism

Study: Hundreds of Thousands of American COVID Deaths Were Avoidable

By dianeravitch
February 9, 2023 //
33

From June 27, 2021, to March 26, 2022, the US would have averted 122 304 deaths if COVID-19 mortality matched that of the 10 most-vaccinated states and 266 700 deaths if US excess all-cause mortality rate matched that of the 10 most-vaccinated states. If the US matched the rates of other peer countries, averted deaths would have been substantially higher in most cases (range, 154 622-357 899 for COVID-19 mortality; 209 924-465 747 for all-cause mortality).

An article published in the Journal of the American Medical Association estimated the number of people who died of COVID, unnecessarily.

The JAMA article was summarized by Faye Flam in Bloomberg News, as “The Tragedy of Avoidable COVID Deaths.”

She writes:

As early as the fall of 2020, statisticians were looking at all-cause mortality to try to figure out whether official Covid-19 deaths were overcounted or undercounted. But today, the death data are more complete, and cover enough time to make revealing comparisons between different periods and regions. While researchers are still figuring out which factors swayed these death statistics, a few conclusions are becoming clear: First, that Covid has been a global tragedy, causing millions of deaths. Second, that vaccines have saved countless lives. And third, that during the omicron and delta waves, the value of any non-pharmaceutical mitigation measures — masking, distancing, closing businesses and schools — was probably not nothing, but vaccination rates mattered far, far more.

Categories Accountability, Health, International, Science

Florida: Legislature Wants to Loosen Gun Control Law

By dianeravitch
February 9, 2023 //
50

Florida leaders want to remove requirements to register and get a permit to carry a concealed weapon. In the ideal libertarian state, there would be no gun control at all. More murders, more killing. Does Florida have a minimum age requirement? That will be next to go.

Florida House Speaker Paul Renner is pushing a measure that would allow people to carry concealed firearms without a permit and without training, saying he wants to remove the “government permission slip.”

Renner had previously said that he wanted a permitless carry bill — something Gov. Ron DeSantis has also advocated for — during this year’s legislative session, which starts March 7.

He announced the legislation during a news conference Monday, surrounded by the bill’s sponsors and Florida sheriffs.

Standing alongside Renner, Hernando County Sheriff Al Nienhuis, president of the Florida Sheriff’s Association, endorsed the legislation. “I think we can assume that our citizens are gonna do the right thing when it comes to carrying and bearing arms,” he said.

Twenty-five states already have what supporters call “constitutional carry” measures, meaning they don’t require a permit to carry a concealed firearm.

Read more at: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/politics-government/state-politics/article271838402.html#storylink=cpy

However, gun lovers complained that the proposed bill doesn’t go far enough. They want every Floridian to be able to carry their gun in the open. They call it “constitutional carry,” because the Constitution doesn’t say anything about background checks, training or any of the other requirements sought or imposed by gun control advocates.

The red states are competing, it seems, to see who can go farthest to erase any limits on gun ownership and use.

The opposition to Florida’s proposed legislation to allow Floridians to carry concealed firearms without a permit or training was expected from gun safety advocates.

But at a Tuesday hearing on the bill, there were just as many disgruntled Second Amendment supporters, who said the bill didn’t go far enough because it doesn’t allow for open carry, the visible carrying of a firearm.

Only a few of the dozens of public commenters told legislators they were happy with the measure as written.

But Republican members of the House Constitutional Rights, Rule of Law & Government Operations Subcommittee passed the bill out of the committee on a 10-5 vote along party lines.

The bill now only has one other committee hearing to move through before it goes to a vote on the House floor. House Speaker Paul Renner has expressed strong support for the bill, holding a news conference last month with uniformed sheriffs to announce its filing.

Senate President Kathleen Passidomo has also expressed her support for the measure, though no matching legislation has yet been filed in the Senate. Sen. Jay Collins, R-Tampa, has said he will be the bill’s sponsor.

‘CONSTITUTIONAL CARRY’ IN PLAY

Permitless carry, often called constitutional carry by supporters, allows people within certain legal parameters to carry weapons without having to go through the permitting process.

In Florida, that includes a background check, fingerprinting, a payment of $97 for a new application and the completion of a training course, which includes firing a live round in front of an instructor. Gun carriers would be required to carry a personal ID.

Some of those gun rights advocates said Florida’s proposal is not true “constitutional carry” because it applies only to people being able to carry a concealed weapon; it doesn’t permit open carry of weapons in public and still restricts gun possession for people under the age of 21 and on college campuses.

“To call this bill constitutional carry is an insult to our intelligence,” said Bob White, the chairman of the Republican Liberty Caucus of Florida. Luis Valdes, Florida director of Gun Owners of America, said the bill is a step in the right direction compared to prior years when similar bills didn’t make it out of committees.

But he said it doesn’t go far enough. “The governor has pledged he wants constitutional carry, he didn’t pledge that he wants permitless concealed only,” Valdes said.

Should there be any age limit for purchasing or owning or carrying guns? Is 10 years old okay? How about 6? Should guns be okay in schools? How about in the legislature? Why not let prisoners carry guns? Why should they lose their “constitutional rights”?

Read more at: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/politics-government/state-politics/article272248473.html#storylink=cpy

Categories Florida, Guns, Safety

Carol Burris: Running a Charter School for Profit Should Be Illegal

By dianeravitch
February 9, 2023 //
6

Carol Burris, executive director of the Betwork for Public Education, writes in The Progressive that it should be illegal to run a charter school for profit, just as it is illegal to run a public school for profit. Since the charter school lobby claims that charter schools are “public schools,” they should insist on banning for-profit charters.

Please open the link. This is an important article.

Burris writes:

From insider deals to real estate flips, the problems with charter schools run by for-profit corporations can’t be ignored. And growth in this sector is accelerating as operators use lax regulations and complicated corporate schemes to harvest public dollars from publicly-funded charter schools.

Those are the findings of a new report, Chartered for Profit II: Pandemic Profiteering, from the Network for Public Education (NPE), the organization I lead. We determined that for-profit corporations operate nearly 17 percent of all charter schools. And because many are online schools with high enrollments, one in five charter school students attended a for-profit run charter during the 2021-2022 school year.

In some states, the percentage of students in for-profit-run schools is staggering. More than 50 percent of all Florida charter school students are in schools run by for-profit companies; in Ohio, the percentage tops 60 percent. In Michigan, a startling 72 percent of all of the state’s charter school students attend a school run by one of forty-five corporations.

And this is not in the best interest of children. Students of charters run for profit graduate at lower rates and have more adverse academic outcomes as the number of charter services managed by for-profit operators increases. That conclusion, by the way, comes from a report published by the pro-charter Thomas B. Fordham Institute, an Ohio charter school sponsor.

Students of charters run for profit graduate at lower rates and have more adverse academic outcomes.

Some of these schools are part of large national chains. Four of the five largest for-profit chains now run their schools with sweeps contracts, meaning that 90 percent or more of the public dollars coming into the school are “swept” into for-profit-controlled bank accounts. The largest, Academica, which runs a private online international school that gives out American high school diplomas, manages 205 charter schools in nine states. Thirteen for-profit chains run twenty or more schools or campuses. Nearly half of all 110 for-profit operators in the United States run only one or two schools. These micro-education management organizations exist solely to shield financial transactions and owner profits from the public.

The charter industry downplays the prevalence of charter schools being run for profit because the mission of for-profit companies is to maximize profits, which puts the focus on financial gain, not students.

Open the link, please.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Corruption, Education Industry, For-Profit

New Hampshire: AFT State Leader Protests Book Bans and Censorship

By dianeravitch
February 8, 2023 //
43

We are living in a perilous that demonstrates the need for tenure and unions. With so many astroturf parent groups making spurious charges against public schools and their teachers, who will dare to stand up to bullies? In New Hampshire, it’s the president of the state AFTDeb Howes.

Contact:
Deb Howes
president@aft-nh.org
603-930-9248


AFT-NH Statement on Bill on ‘Obscene Materials’ in K-12 and Higher Education Classes, Public Libraries

CONCORD, N.H.—The following is a statement from AFT-New Hampshire President Deb Howes on HB 514, a bill to provide a procedure for people to complain about so-called obscene materials in K-12 and higher education classes and public libraries but that does not even clearly define what would be considered obscene:

“For all intents and purposes, this legislation about the dissemination of obscene materials is a book ban bill. Incredibly, the bill’s sponsors don’t even have the guts to clearly define what would be considered obscene, so it’s really meant to intimidate teachers and deprive students—both school-aged and adults—of books that one person who files a complaint deems objectionable. It practically begs parents or guardians to complain about a particular book to their local school board in the case of public schools, opening the way to a chaotic free-for-all. For public universities, public libraries and museums, it adds the Department of Education to the agencies that can initiate legal hearings to find material ‘obscene’ after receiving anonymous citizen complaints. Higher education faculty actually could be arrested, charged and indicted if they are found to be using a book that is judged to be obscene, whatever that means.

“This is disgusting and meant to censor students’ education and deprive them of quality books. Book bans have no place in New Hampshire K-12, public libraries or higher education classes. We will fight vigorously to ensure that our students have the books they need to receive a well-rounded, honest education. We also will stand firm for the right to access the whole world of ideas through public libraries and universities.”

# # #

Categories Censorship, Disruption, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Freedom of Speech, Lies, Literacy, New Hampshire, Unions

Great News! Virginia Legislature Turns Down Vouchers!

By dianeravitch
February 8, 2023 //
4

Yesterday, both houses of the Virginia Legislature rejected Education Savings Accounts, aka Education Scam Accounts.

The Virginia Mercury reported:

All four bills put forward by Republicans this year to let parents use state education funding to cover the costs of educational opportunities outside the public school system failed to make it through this year’s General Assembly.

One bill carried by Sen. Amanda Chase, R-Chesterfield, died in the Democrat-controlled Senate. Two others carried by Dels. Phillip Scott, R-Spotsylvania, and Marie March, R-Floyd, failed in Republican-controlled House Education subcommittees

The most promising, House Bill 1508 from Del. Glenn Davis, R-Virginia Beach, initially cleared the House Education Committee, which Davis chairs, but ran into trouble later in the legislative process.

That bill, which gained the support of numerous Republicans including Lt.-Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears, would have created the Virginia Education Success Account Program, a proposal that would allow parents to set up a savings account funded with state dollars that could be used to cover educational expenses outside public schools in Virginia. Funds could be used for costs like tuition, deposits, fees and textbooks at a private elementary or secondary school in Virginia.

Last month, Davis estimated that an average of $6,303.25 could have been available per student. The program would only have applied to students previously enrolled in public school or who were starting kindergarten or attending first grade for the first time….

Davis said when the bill reached the House Appropriations Committee Friday, he was one vote short of what he needed to pass the legislation and agreed to send it back to the Education Committee in hopes of fast-tracking it through the approvals it still needed. He told the Mercury he considered adding a delayed enactment clause to the proposal to skirt concerns about the current budget cycle but said the committee was “one day short” of exercising that option.

But that bill died in committee.

Democrats opposed all of these measures, because they would take funding away from public schools.

Categories Democrats, Education Industry, Funding, Privatization, Religion, Republicans, Separation of church and state, Supporting public schools, Virginia, Vouchers
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