Texas: The Hoax of Charter Schools

By dianeravitch
August 1, 2025 //
10

This article appeared in The Dallas Weekly.

The Charter Trap: How Texas’s Approval System Fuels Inequity in Public Education

This feature investigates how Texas’s charter school approval system — combined with growing voucher programs — is reshaping public education funding, access, and accountability. Drawing on insights from State Board of Education Member Dr. Tiffany Clark, the piece explores how state policies are accelerating the growth of charter schools while defunding traditional public districts, particularly those serving Black and Latino students. It highlights the unequal standards between public and charter schools, the impact of school closures, and the erosion of community voice in education policy. As public schools work to innovate under pressure, the state continues to shift resources toward less regulated alternatives — raising urgent questions about equity, transparency, and the future of public education in Texas.

In Texas, the promise of school choice has become a defining feature of the state’s education strategy. Charter schools are marketed as innovative alternatives to traditional public schools, especially in districts that serve predominantly Black and Latino students. But the way these charters are approved, and who ultimately benefits, reveals a system riddled with disparities.

Every year, the Texas Education Agency (TEA) reviews applications from prospective charter school operators. Those that make it through the cumbersome process are recommended to the State Board of Education (SBOE), which votes to approve or deny the applications. While this process is meant to support innovation and improve outcomes, the evidence suggests that it is doing the opposite in many communities.

We are approving the same systems that have failed our students over and over again. DR. TIFFANY CLARK, SBOE MEMBER DISTRICT 13

One of the clearest voices highlighting these disparities is State Board of Education member Dr. Tiffany Clark, representing District 13, which includes parts of Dallas and Tarrant counties. Earlier this month, Dr. Clark released a public letter explaining her decision to vote against two new charter proposals in her district. In her letter, she pointed to the approval of charter schools with ties to historically underperforming models, often led by alumni of the same charter incubator programs, such as Building Excellent Schools (BES).

In an interview with Dallas Weekly, Dr. Clark described how charter applicants are not required to have experience as superintendents or demonstrate a successful track record with similar student populations. “You don’t need to be a certified superintendent to apply,” she said. “You just need a compelling idea. There’s no pilot requirement. The model hasn’t had to prove itself in Texas or in similar communities.”

Her concerns are not isolated. They point to broader issues in the state’s charter school authorization process, particularly regarding performance, equity, and accountability. According to the Texas AFT, charter schools in Texas have a 30-34% closure rate. Worse, most of these closures occur within five years of opening. Some have even closed during the school year, leaving parents and students scrambling to find new options.

A Troubling Track Record

Of the 21 charter schools approved between 2016 and 2021, 17 received D or F accountability ratings by 2023. Many of these schools were launched by leaders trained through the same national pipelines, like the Building Excellent Schools (BES) program, that continue to produce new charter applicants in Texas, often with limited changes to their model.

Despite this underperformance, state approval rates remain high. In many cases, new charter proposals are approved without substantial evidence that the academic model works or that the leadership team has the experience to run a successful school. 

Financial Fallout for Public Schools

The impact on traditional school districts is severe. Fort Worth ISD, for example, has lost more than $635 million in state funding and over 20% of its student population in the past five years. Dallas ISD has experienced an even greater loss of revenue (approximately $1.7 billion) over the same period. This decline is directly linked to students transferring to charter schools. The result: public school closures, staffing reductions, and diminished services for the students who remain.

Chart from Fiscal Impact of Charter Expansion DALLAS ISD

When a neighborhood school closes, it often creates more barriers for families rather than expanding their choices. Many charter schools do not provide transportation, leaving parents, especially those working multiple jobs, with limited options. The vision of equitable access is undermined when choice is only accessible to families with time, resources, or flexibility.

The situation is further complicated by the state’s growing push for private school vouchers. These programs allow families to use public funds for private tuition, even though private schools are not required to accept all students, provide transportation, or meet the same accountability standards as public schools. For districts already losing enrollment to charters, the addition of vouchers creates yet another drain on funding, with even fewer protections for equity or transparency. It adds another layer to a system in which public schools, especially those in historically under-resourced communities, are expected to serve every child, but are continually shortchanged by state policy.

Two Systems, Two Standards

As Texas accelerates its charter school approvals, public schools, especially in urban districts like Dallas ISD and Fort Worth ISD, are being forced to do more with less. While many of these districts have launched dual-language academies, early college programs, STEM pathways, and arts-focused schools to meet family demand, they continue to face declining enrollment and shrinking budgets as students are siphoned off by charters. This drain leads to real-world consequences: campus closures, longer commutes for families, and a loss of critical resources, particularly for students with disabilities, English learners, and low-income communities.

Charters, by contrast, are not held to the same accountability standards. In fact, more charter schools have their operating licenses revoked than the number approved each year. But until then, they can cap enrollment, lack transportation, and often underserve or under-identify special education students, yet they receive public funding with fewer regulatory obligations. Public schools must serve every student who walks through their doors. Charters do not. And as the state continues to invest in new charters while underfunding existing public systems, it is creating two separate and unequal school systems, one with oversight, obligation, and community accountability, and one without.

Approval Without Accountability

Charter schools in Texas operate with significantly fewer accountability measures than their public counterparts. Their boards are not elected. Their meetings are not required to be public. They can expand without reapplying or justifying need. If a campus underperforms, it can take up to three years before the state considers intervention, and even then, it’s typically the individual campus that’s closed, not the entire charter network.

Moreover, schools labeled as “high-performing entities” in other states are often allowed to skip critical parts of the approval process, such as interviews or community review. But success in Florida or Arizona doesn’t guarantee results in Fort Worth or Dallas. Without a clear performance baseline or pilot requirement, the state risks importing models that are unfit for the local context.

A Call for Systemic Change

Dr. Clark advocates for more rigorous standards in charter school approvals, including requiring pilot programs, stronger oversight of operator qualifications, and elevating community input through impact statements.

She also emphasized the importance of transparency around which charter entities are being approved and why. “We can’t keep approving ideas. We need to approve proven solutions, especially when our most vulnerable students are involved,” she said.

Her perspective underscores the need for the SBOE and TEA to be more deliberate in assessing not only whether a proposed school is innovative, but whether it is likely to succeed where others have failed.

We can’t keep approving ideas. We need to approve proven solutions, especially when our most vulnerable students are involved.

According to Dr. Clark, Texas’s current charter approval system claims to promote equity and access, but its structure too often reinforces the opposite. Without stronger performance standards, leadership requirements, and accountability mechanisms, the state risks continuing to approve underperforming schools at the expense of public education.

Community voices, particularly in Black and Latino neighborhoods, deserve to be at the center of education policy decisions, not on the sidelines. If school choice is to be more than a slogan, it must come with real transparency, proven outcomes, and respect for the public systems already serving our children.

Meanwhile, public schools across Texas are already evolving, expanding STEM tracks, dual-language programs, and career pathways to meet diverse student needs. Yet instead of supporting these systems, the state continues to siphon funding away and invest in charter operators with unproven records. The result is a two-tiered system where innovation is rewarded only when it comes from outside the public sector. 

Until that changes, students of color will continue to bear the weight of a policy agenda that undercuts the very schools built to serve them.

Categories Charter Schools, Education Industry, Failure, Texas

Colorado: Aeronautics Charter School Closes Suddenly, Two Weeks Before Start of Semester

By dianeravitch
August 1, 2025 //
5

A charter school in Colorado shocked parents and students by announcing its closure two weeks before school opened.

CENTENNIAL, Colo. — Colorado Skies Academy, a Centennial-based charter school with a focus on aviation and aerospace education, abruptly announced its closure on Friday, just 16 days before the start of the school year. 

The announcement, which came in an email on Friday at 8:17 p.m., leaves parents scrambling to find alternative schools for their children. 

The school cited financial challenges as the reason for the immediate closure. A spokeswoman for the Colorado Charter School Institute, which serves as the school’s authorizer, said there were  “unanticipated financial developments” over the summer which, caused the school’s viability to “rapidly deteriorate.”

CSI acknowledged the sudden closure was not ideal, but said it supported the board’s decision to close now, rather risk closing mid-school year which would have been more challenging.

Still, the timing of the announcement has particularly frustrated parents, who received the closure notice hours after the school posted on Facebook about an upcoming back-to-school night event. 

“They posted in the morning, come join us for back-to-school night. Then they send an email in the evening saying sorry, there’s gonna be no school at all,”  parent Erin Hess said. Her son Connor was set to attend sixth grade at the 6-8 school. 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Closing schools, Colorado, Failure

NPE: Charter Schools in Decline: A National Report

By dianeravitch
August 1, 2025 //
9

The National Center for Charter School Accountability, which is a project of the Network for Public Education, released the first of a three-part series of a national report on the decline of the charter school sector.

Written by NPE Executive Director Carol Burris, the report will be released in three sections. The first one, Decline, documents the startling halt in charter school growth. Once heralded as the salvation of American education, charter schools are no longer growing. Despite the lack of demand for new charters, the Trump administration recently increased the annual appropriation to the federal Charter Schools Program from $440 million every year to $500 million a year.

The report will be released in three parts: Decline, Disillusionment, and Costs. This is the first part.

Burris begins:

In 1992, City Academy — the nation’s first charter school — opened in St. Paul, Minnesota. Created and led by experienced teachers, it was designed as an alternative school for students struggling in traditional settings. With just 53 students, City Academy embodied the original vision for charter schools: small, teacher-run schools within public districts that tested innovative strategies to reach hard-to-teach kids.

When successful, those strategies would inform and strengthen public education as a whole.

That was the idea supported by American Federation of Teachers President Al Shanker in 1988.

But by the early 1990s, Shanker had become disillusioned. As his wife Edith later explained, “Al became increasingly critical of charter schools as they moved further from their original intent.

He warned that without well-crafted legislation and public oversight, business interests would hijack the charter school concept, ‘whose real aim is to smash public schools.’”

His warning proved prophetic. In the decades since, real estate investors, for-profit management companies, and corporate charter chains have taken over what began as teacher-led experiments. Today, more than fifty charter trade associations—some state-based, others national—lobby aggressively to block charter school oversight and resist any legislative reform. The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools reported over $26.5 million in income in 2023, with more than $28 million in assets. The California Charter Schools Association reported nearly $13 million in revenue that same year. These organizations are not only advocates but powerful lobbyists, intent on protecting all existing charters and promoting unlimited growth.

During the Obama years, federal initiatives like Race to the Top fueled charter expansion with strong bipartisan support. But that coalition has since un-raveled. While Republican enthusiasm for any alternative to public education— charters, vouchers, homeschools — has surged, Democratic support has eroded, particularly as concerns grow over transparency, equity, and privatization.

Today, the charter sector stands at a reckoning point. Growth has slowed.

For-profit models are expanding. The push to create religious charter schools has fractured the movement from within. Meanwhile, charters are now competing not just with public schools and each other, but with a growing network of voucher-funded private schools and publicly subsidized homeschools.

This report, released in three parts — Decline, Disillusionment, and Costs —examines the trajectory of the charter school movement. It contrasts the promise of its early days with its complex, often troubling reality today.

As the charter experiment enters its fourth decade, the question is no longer what charter schools were meant to be — but whether they can still be reformed in order to serve the public good….

Burris questions why the federal government–which claims to be cutting costs and cutting unnecessary programs–continues to send $500 million every year to a sector that is not growing and does not need the money. DOGE eliminated most employees of the U.S. Department of Wducation but left the federal Charter Schools Program untouched.

The charter school sector stands at a critical juncture. Once heralded as a bold experiment in innovation and opportunity, it is now characterized by stagnation, retrenchment, and rising school closures. Between 2022 and 2025, growth has nearly halted, and closures — often sudden and disruptive— are accelerating. Federal investment, rather than adapting to the sector’s shifting realities, has ballooned to half a billion dollars annually, funding schools that never open, quickly fail, or operate with minimal oversight and accountability.

As the data show, under-enrollment is the primary driver of failure. There is no crisis of unmet demand. Hundreds of charter schools, according to NCES data, can’t fill even a single classroom. The frequently cited “million-student waitlist” has been thoroughly debunked, yet continues to be invoked to justify ever-increasing taxpayer support.

Meanwhile, mega-charters and online schools like Commonwealth Charter Academy siphon vast sums of public dollars while delivering dismal academic outcomes. Others, like Highlands Community Charter School, have defrauded taxpayers and exploited students under the guise of second chances.

With enrollment stagnating and oversight failing, taxpayers should ask: Why are we continuing to fund with federal dollars an expansion that isn’t happening? It is time for Congress and the Department of Education to reassess the Charter Schools Program. Federal dollars should no longer subsidize a shrinking and troubled sector. Instead, they must be redirected toward accountable, transparent, and student-centered public education.

Part II of this report, Disillusionment, to be published this fall, will further explain the reasons behind the sector’s decline.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Closing schools, Disruption, Education Industry, Funding, Network for Public Education, Privatization

Paul L. Thomas: There Is No Reading “Crisis!

By dianeravitch
July 31, 2025 //
14

Paul L. Thomas was a high school teacher in South Carolina for nearly twenty years, then became an English professor at Furman University, a small liberal arts college in South Carolina. He is a clear thinker and a straight talker.

He wrote this article for The Washington Post. He tackles one of my pet peeves: the misuse and abuse of NAEP proficiency levels. Politicians and pundits like to use NAEP “proficiency” to mean”grade level.” There is always a “crisis” because most students do not score “proficient.” Of course not! NAEP proficient is not grade level! NAEP publications warn readers not to make that error. NAEP proficient is equivalent to an A. If most students were rated that high, the media would complain that the tests were too easy. NAEP Basic is akin to grade level.

He writes:

After her controversial appointment, U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon posted this apparently uncontroversial claim on social media: “When 70% of 8th graders in the U.S. can’t read proficiently, it’s not the students who are failing — it’s the education system that’s failing them.”

Americans are used to hearing about the nation’s reading crisis. In 2018, journalist Emily Hanford popularized the current “crisis” in her article “Hard Words,” writing, “More than 60 percent of American fourth-graders are not proficient readers, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, and it’s been that way since testing began in the 1990s.”

Five years later, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof repeated that statistic: “One of the most bearish statistics for the future of the United States is this: Two-thirds of fourth graders in the United States are not proficient in reading.”

Each of these statements about student reading achievement, though probably well-meaning, is misleading if not outright false. There is no reading crisis in the U.S. But there are major discrepancies between how the federal government and states define reading proficiency.

At the center of this confusion is the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a congressionally mandated assessment of student performance known also as the “nation’s report card.” The NAEP has three achievement levels: “basic,” “proficient” and “advanced.”

The disconnect lies with the second benchmark, “proficient.” According to the NAEP, students performing “at or above the NAEP Proficient level … demonstrate solid academic performance and competency over challenging subject matter.” But this statement includes a significant clarification: “The NAEP Proficient achievement level does not represent grade level proficiency as determined by other assessment standards (e.g., state or district assessments).”

In almost every state, “grade level” proficiency on state testing correlates with the NAEP’s “basic” level; in 2022, 45 states set their standard for reading proficiency in the NAEP’s “basic” range. Therefore, it is inaccurate to say that nearly two-thirds of fourth-graders are not capable readers.

The NAEP has been a key mechanism for holding states accountable for student achievement for over 30 years. Yet, educators have expressed doubt over the assessment’s utility. In 2004, an analysis by the American Federation of Teachers raised concerns about the NAEP’s achievement levels: “The proficient level on NAEP for grade 4 and 8 reading is set at almost the 70th percentile,” the union wrote. “It would not be unreasonable to think that the proficiency levels on NAEP represent a standard of achievement that is more commonly associated with fairly advanced students.”

The NAEP has set unrealistic goals for student achievement, fueling alarm about a reading crisis in the United States that is overblown. The common misreading of NAEP data has allowed the country to ignore what is urgent: addressing the opportunity gap that negatively impacts Black and Brown students, impoverished students, multilingual learners, and students with disabilities.

To redirect our focus to these vulnerable populations, the departments of education at both the federal and state levels should adopt a unified set of achievement terms among the NAEP and state-level testing. For over three decades, one-third of students have been below NAEP “basic” — a figure that is concerning but does not constitute a widespread reading crisis. The government’s challenge will be to provide clearer data — instead of hyperbolic rhetoric — to determine a reasonable threshold for grade-level proficiency.

What’s more, federal and state governments should consider redesigning achievement terms altogether. Identifying strengths and weaknesses in student reading would be better served by achievement levels determined by age, such as “below age level,” “age level” and “above age level.”

Age-level proficiency might be more accurate for policy and classroom instruction. As an example, we can look to Britain, where phonics instruction has been policy since 2006. Annual phonics assessments show score increases by birth month, suggesting the key role of age development in reading achievement.

In the United States, only the NAEP Long-Term Trend Assessment is age-based. Testing by age avoids having the sample of students corrupted by harmful policies such as grade retention, which removes the lowest-performing students from the test pool and then reintroduces them when they are older. Grade retention is punitive: It is disproportionately applied to students of color, students in poverty, multilingual learners and students with disabilities — the exact students most likely to struggle as readers.

Some evidence suggests that grade retention correlates with higher test scores. In a study of U.S. reading policy, education researchers John Westall and Amy Cummings concluded states that mandated third-grade retention based on state testing saw increases in reading scores.

However, the pair acknowledge that these were short-term benefits: For example, third-grade retention states such as Mississippi and Florida had exceptional NAEP reading scores among fourth-graders but scores fell back into the bottom 25 percent of all states among eighth-graders.

The researchers also caution that the available data does not prove whether test score increases are the result of grade retention or other state-sponsored learning interventions, such as high-dosage tutoring. Without stronger evidence, states might be tempted to trade higher test scores for punishing vulnerable students, all without permanent improvement in reading proficiency.

Hyperbole about a reading crisis ultimately fails the students who need education policy grounded in more credible evidence. Reforming achievement levels nationwide might be one step toward a more accurate and useful story about reading proficiency.

The article has many links. Rather than copying each one by hand, tedious process, I invite you to open the link and read the article.

As I was writing up this article, Mike Petrilli sent me the following graph from the 2024 NAEP. There was a decline in the scores of White, Black, and Hispanic fourth grade students “above basic.”

70% of White fourth-graders scored at or above grade level.

About 48% of Hispanics did.

About 43% of Blacks did.

The decline started before the pandemic. Was it the Common Core? Social media? Something else?

Should we be concerned? Yes. Should we use “crisis” language? What should we do?

Reduce class sizes so teachers can give more time to students who need it.

Do what is necessary to raise the prestige of the teaching profession: higher salaries, greater autonomy in the classroom. Legislators should stop telling teachers how to teach, stop assigning them grades, stop micromanaging the classroom.

Categories Data, Fake News, Hoax, Lies, Literacy, NAEP

Accell Schools–For-Profit and Online–Hires Bill Bennett as Provost of Its New Classical Academies

By dianeravitch
July 31, 2025 //
7

Accell Schools, a network of for-profit online charter schools, announced that Bill Bennett has been hired to serve as Founding Provost of a new chain of online Classical Academies. Bennett will also serve as provost to two brick-and-mortar charter schools, one in Toledo, Ohio, the other in Clarksburg, West Virginia.

The founder of Accell Schools is Ron Packard, who has played a prominent role in the for-profit, virtual charter school industry for years.

You may recall Ron Packard. I have written about him in the past. His background is in finance and management consulting. He worked for Goldman Sachs and McKinsey. He was never a teacher or principal, which I suppose makes him an ideal education entrepreneur, unbound by tradition, open to innovation, and alert to profit making opportunities.

When he was CEO of K12, Inc., the leader in virtual charter schools, he was paid $5 million a year. K12 dealt with numerous lawsuits and controversies in relation to low test scores, low teacher pay, low graduation rates, and other issues. In 2020, K12 Inc. became Stride, which continues to be a leader in the virtual charter industry.

In 2014, Packard founded Accell as a charter chain. His company bio describes his experience:

Ron previously founded and was CEO of K12 Inc., where he grew the company from an idea to nearly $1B in revenue, making it one of the largest education companies in the world. Under his leadership, revenue compounded at nearly 80%. Prior to K12, he was CEO of Knowledge Schools and Knowledge Learning Corporation, and Vice President at Knowledge Universe, one of the largest early childhood education providers in the U.S.

He has also played a pivotal role in investments across the education sector, including LearnNow, Children’s School USA, LeapFrog, TEC, and Children’s Discovery Center. Earlier in his career, Ron worked in mergers and acquisitions at Goldman Sachs and served clients at McKinsey & Company.

Bill Bennett was U.S. Secretary of Education under President Reagan. He championed vouchers and morality during his tenure.

Until he became chair of the board of K12, he was known as a skeptic of computers in the classroom.

He wrote in his book “The Educated Child,”

“There is no good evidence that most uses of computers significantly improve learning.”

— from his 1999 book The Educated Child

Bennett said in a February 2001 Bloomberg interview:

“From what I’ve observed in schools, we’d be better off unplugging the computers and throwing them out.” 

He abandoned his skepticism when he joined the K12 company.

His new role as a “founding provost” of online “classical academies,” calls upon his background as a moralist. His wildly popular “The Book of Virtues” made millions of dollars and established Bennett as the nation’s most moral man.

But this was a standing he lost years ago when it was revealed that he had a serious gambling habit.

The New York Times wrote that the “relentless moral crusader” was also a “relentless gambler.” It estimated that in 2003 that he had lost more than $8 million in Las Vegas.

Mary McNamara wrote in the Los Angeles Times:

It is just too delicious — the image of the man who wrote not only “The Book of Virtues” but “The Children’s Book of Virtues” pulling into Las Vegas in his comped limo, bags whisked to his comped high-roller’s suite while he heads into the blaring, bleating belly of the beast to spend hours pumping thousands of dollars into the slots.p. Turns out William J. Bennett, who considers passing judgment on the personal lives of our leaders a moral duty and who all but called for President Clinton’s head on a platter in “The Death of Outrage,” is a high-stakes gambler. The pulpit bully who took down the moral predilections of single parents, working mothers, divorced couples and gays in “The Broken Hearth,” the man who, despite rather formidable personal girth, preaches against those “ruled by appetite,” has, according to Newsweek and the Washington Monthly, dropped as much as 8 million bucks in high-stakes gambling over the last 10 years.

How much fun is that ?

Bennett’s fall from grace was camera perfect, and no doubt he’ll get big points from the judges for the spin of his attempted recovery. Gambling is legal, he quickly pointed out, at least where he did it. And he never put his family in danger. And it wasn’t $8 million, it was “large sums of money.” Furthermore, he always paid taxes on his winnings and, Atlantic City and Las Vegas being the charitable institutions they are, he pretty much “always broke even.”

If that weren’t intoxicating enough for his many detractors, within minutes of serving up this layer cake of denial, Bennett made a public vow that his gambling days are over because “this is not the example I want to set.”

Or as Kenny’ll tell you, you gotta know when to walk away, and know when to run .

Bennett got into hot water in 2005 when he made a comment on his radio show that was widely denounced by both parties:

Speaking on his daily radio show, William Bennett, education secretary under Ronald Reagan and drugs czar under the first George Bush, said: “If you wanted to reduce crime, you could, if that were your sole purpose; you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down.”

He went on to qualify his comments, which were made in response to a hypothesis that linked the falling crime rate to a rising abortion rate. Aborting black babies, he continued, would be “an impossible, ridiculous and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down”.

So, despite these handicaps, now 20 years past, Bill Bennett is making a comeback. Everyone deserves a chance to rehabilitate themselves. Even Bill Bennett.

Categories Disruption, Education Industry, Ethics, For-Profit, On-Line Education, Virtual Charter Schools

Indiana: College Enrollment Declines from 65% to 51.7%

By dianeravitch
July 30, 2025 //
6

Casey Smith of Indiana Capital Chronicle reported on data that the Indiana Commission on Higher Education quietly posted on its website, without issuing a press release, perhaps hoping that no one would notice. The percentage of high-school graduates who entered college declined to only 51.7%. As recently as 2015, the rate of students going from high school to college was 65%.

The figures, posted to the agency’s website earlier this month, reflect concerns state leaders have long expressed about Indiana’s declining college-going culture, especially as the state shifts focus toward career credentials and work-based learning.

“The startling drop in our college-going rate yet again can be credited to the lack of two things: money and morale,” said Rep. Ed DeLaney, D-Indianapolis, in a statement released Wednesday.

“While our governor has been taking a victory lap for getting our state universities to freeze tuition, he has failed to guarantee that his move will not decrease financial aid and scholarship opportunities,” DeLaney continued. “Any lack of opportunity for tuition support will lead to more Hoosiers not being able to afford college and being forced to choose a different path.”

The 2023 numbers come just six months after the State Board of Education commission approved sweeping changes to Indiana’s high school diploma, set to take effect statewide in 2029, that emphasize work-based learning and career readiness over traditional college preparation…

DeLaney maintained that Republican leaders “have been devaluing the opportunities that our colleges and universities can offer students.”

“At the same time, the supermajority has made attacking colleges and universities the centerpiece of their culture war agenda — from policing what can be taught in the classroom, to forcing institutions to eliminate hundreds of degree options, to creating an entirely new high school diploma that emphasizes the path directly into the workforce,” the lawmaker said.

“Trying to bury this report in a website and not send a press release is a telling sign that the Commission on Higher Education knows this does not look good, and does not act to fix it,” DeLaney added. “It simply isn’t important enough to them. They are busy eliminating college courses and creating new tests. This is what the legislature has asked them to do….”

Indiana’s college-going rate has dropped more than any other state tracked by the National Center for Education Statistics over the past 15 years.

Previously, Indiana reached a college-going rate of 65%.

“We set a goal to get it back when it slumped,” DeLaney recalled. “Now, it doesn’t seem like we care to address the issue. That is a shame for our students, a shame for our economy, and a shame for our state.”

Earlier this year, Republican lawmakers passed additional legislation requiring public colleges to eliminate low-enrollment degree programs. So far, Indiana’s public colleges and universities have collectively cut or consolidated more than 400 academic degree programs.

“The supermajority has been in power for 20 years and this is their achievement,” DeLaney said. “At some point we have to ask ourselves: is a declining college-going rate not the result they want?”

Shame on the politicians of Indiana!

Categories Education Reform

Department of Justice Withdraws Decree Requiring Schools in This Louisiana Parish to Integrate

By dianeravitch
July 30, 2025 //
1

After the Brown decision of 1954, after years of delay, the administration of President Lyndon B. Johnson cracked down on districts that refused to desegregate their schools. The Department of Justice negotiated consent decrees with recalcitrant districts, mostly (but not only) in the South.

More that 100 such consent decrees are still in effect.

The Trump Department of Justice recently canceled the consent decree with Plaquemines Parish in Louisiana.

The head of the Department’s Civil Rights Division hailed this reversal of longstanding policy.

Expect more such rulings from the Civil Rights Division, dismantling protections for racial minorities, LGBT, and women. The only protected group in the Trump era is white men.

The Guardian had the story.

In late April, the Department of Justice announced that it was ending a decades-long consent decree in Plaquemines parish, Louisiana, in a school district that has been under a desegregation order since the Johnson administration in the 1960s.

The Plaquemines parish desegregation order, one of more than 130 such orders nationwide, was in place to ensure that the school district, which initially refused to integrate, followed the law. Many consent decrees of the era are still in existence because school districts are not in compliance with the law.

Some experts, including former justice department employees, say the change in direction for the department could be worrying.

These orders “provide students with really important protections against discrimination”, said Shaheena Simons, who was the chief of the educational opportunities section of the civil rights division at the justice department for nearly a decade. “They require school districts to continue to actively work to eliminate all the remaining vestiges of the state-mandated segregation system. That means that students have protections in terms of what schools they’re assigned to, in terms of the facilities and equipment in the schools that they attend. They have protection from discrimination in terms of barriers to accessing advanced programs, gifted programs. And it means that a court is there to protect them and to enforce their rights when they’re violated and to ensure that school districts are continuing to actively desegregate.”

The justice department ended the Plaquemines parish desegregation order in an unusual process, one that some fear will be replicated elsewhere. The case was dismissed through a “joint stipulated dismissal”. Previously, courts have followed a specific process for ending similar cases, one in which school districts prove that they are complying with the court orders. That did not happen this time. Instead, the Louisiana state attorney general’s office worked with the justice department in reaching the dismissal.

“I’m not aware of anyone, any case, that has [ended] that way before,” said Deuel Ross, the deputy director of litigation of the Legal Defense Fund (LDF); the LDF was not specifically involved with the Plaquemines parish case. “The government as a plaintiff who represents the American people, the people of that parish, has an obligation to make sure that the district has done everything that it’s supposed to have done to comply with the federal court order in the case before it gets released, and the court itself has its own independent obligation to confirm that there’s no vestiges of discrimination left in the school district that are traceable to either present or past discrimination.”

Despite the district not proving that it is compliant with the order, the justice department has celebrated the end of the consent decree.

“No longer will the Plaquemines Parish School Board have to devote precious local resources over an integration issue that ended two generations ago,” Harmeet K Dhillon, assistant attorney general of the justice department’s civil rights division, said in a statement announcing the decision. “This is a prime example of neglect by past administrations, and we’re now getting America refocused on our bright future.”

But focusing on the age of the case implies that it was obsolete, according to Simons, who is now the senior adviser of programs and strategist at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. “The administration is trying to paint these cases as ancient history and no longer relevant.”

In 1966, the Johnson administration sued school districts across the country, particularly in the South, that refused to comply with desegregation demands. At the time, Plaquemines parish was led by Leander Perez, a staunch segregationist and white supremacist.

Perez had played a large role in trying to keep nearby New Orleans from desegregating, and once that effort failed, he invited 1,000 white students from the Ninth Ward to enroll in Plaquemines parish schools. By 1960, nearly 600 had accepted the offer. Perez was excommunicated by Archbishop Joseph Francis Rummel for ignoring his warning to stop trying to prevent schools run by the archdiocese of New Orleans from integrating.

Perez attempted to close the public schools in Plaquemines parish, and instead open all-white private academies, or, segregation academies, which became a feature of the post-integration south. An estimated 300 segregation academies, which, as private schools, are not governed by the same rules and regulations as public schools, are still in operation and majority white.

Students and teachers working in school districts today might be decades removed from the people who led the push for desegregation in their districts, but they still benefit from the protections that were long ago put in place. Without court oversight, school districts that were already begrudgingly complying might have no incentive to continue to do so.

According to the Century Foundation, as of 2020, 185 districts and charters consider race and/or socioeconomic status in their student assignment or admissions policies, while 722 districts and charters are subject to a legal desegregation order or voluntary agreement. The justice department currently has about 135 desegregation cases on its docket, the majority of which are in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia.skip past newsletter promotion

“Separate but equal doesn’t work,” said Johnathan Smith, former deputy assistant attorney general in the civil rights division at the justice department. “The reality is that students of color do better when they are in integrated classrooms … We know that the amount of resources that are devoted to schools are greater when there are a higher number of white students. So to have students attend majority-minority school districts means that they’re going to be shut out, whether that’s from AP classes, whether that’s from extracurricular activities. All the activities that make it possible for students to fully achieve occur when you have more integrated classrooms.”

“Public education isn’t just about education for the sake of education,” he added. “It’s about preparing people to be citizens of our democracy and to be fully engaged in our democratic institutions. When you have students that are being shut out from quality public education, the impact is not just on those communities. It’s on our democracy writ large.”

Smith, the current chief of staff and general counsel for the National Center for Youth Law, said that the decision “signals utter contempt for communities of color by the administration, and a lack of awareness of the history of segregation that has plagued our nation’s schools”.

Expect more reversals from the Civil rights Division of the Justice Department. Harmeet K Dhillon has spent years litigating against civil rights of minorities.

Categories Education Reform

Trump Assaults Academic Freedom in Universities

By dianeravitch
July 30, 2025 //
6

Trump’s hatred of universities continues to wreak vengeance, especially on elite institutions. Columbia University was the first to feel his wrath and the first to capitulate. The administration cut off $2 billion in research grants, allegedly as punishment for Columbia’s failure to police anti-Semitism. Columbia negotiated and agreed to pay the federal government $200 million as a fine and accept a federal “monitor.”.

This agreement threatened the independence of the university.

The Washington Post wrote:

Columbia University agreed to pay more than $200 million to settle allegations of civil rights violations from the Trump administration. It agreed to a long list of changes on campus. But one concession struck some observers as particularly troubling: an outside monitor to ensure the school complies.

To critics, the deal represents an unprecedented governmental intrusion into the affairs of a private university that could erode the independence of universities across the country. The White House has said it sees this agreement as a template for other schools that it is investigating for allegations of antisemitism and racial discrimination.

Much of the oversight will relate to diversity, equity and inclusion, as the Trump administration seeks to stamp out any effort by Columbia to increase racial diversity in its student body, faculty or staff. The monitor will also be charged with assuring that university programs do not promote “unlawful DEI goals” — a term that is not defined.

This agreement clarifies the administration’s goal: to stamp out any efforts by the university to increase racial diversity. Every appointment of a nonwhite or female faculty member will set off alarm bells. Every student who increases diversity will be suspected of being DEI.

Trump continues his unpredicted assault on Harvard, threatening to remove its accreditation, threatening to bar foreign students, withholding billions in research grants. It has been rumored in the press that Harvard is close to making a deal to pay $500 million to settle with the Trump administration.

Other colleges and universities are under investigation and subject to painful cuts. John’s Hopkins has been threatened. The latest is Duke University and its health center. What sense does it make to stop funding research on deadly diseases to punish anti-Semitism? None. Zero. Zilch.

Make no mistake: these demands and payoffs have nothing to do with anti-Semitism. if anything, they increase anti-Semitism as “the Jews” are seen as a Trump-favored, protected class and as complicit with Trump’s vicious war on DEI.

What Trump really wants is to narrow the path to higher education for students of color.

Categories Academic Freedom, Higher Education, Trump

A Purge Sweeps Away Veteran Columnists at Washington Post

By dianeravitch
July 29, 2025 //
10

Jeff Bezos, the billionaire owner of The Washington Post, decided it was time to change the political orientation of the opinion section of the newspaper. The purge actually began shortly before the 2024 election, when Bezos forbade the editorial board from publishing an endorsement. The board had already written its endorsement of Kamala Harris. It never was published.

Some members of the editorial board quit. Over 200,000 subscribers canceled their subscriptions. Some of the Post’s best-known columnists quit, including Jennifer Rubin, Eugene Robinson, and Ruth Marcus. Some of its leading reporters quit and were quickly hired by other journals, including Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer, senior national political correspondents, who left to join The Atlantic;  Tyler Pager, White House reporter, who moved to The New York Times;  Josh Dawsey, investigative politics reporter, joined The Wall Street Journal;Philip Rucker, National Editor at The Post, joined CNN as Senior VP of Editorial Strategy;  Matea Gold, managing editor, was hired by The New York Times.

The Post had a reputation for journalistic excellence and defense of democratic values. When Trump was first elected in 2016, the Post adopted the motto “Democracy dies in darkness.” The motto proclaimed its defiance of any efforts by Trump to stifle democratic values and institutions.

Nine years later, democracy is under threat, and the defiant tone of 2016 is gone. Bezos now says he wants the editorial section to champion personal liberties and economic freedom. Those vague words mean different things to different people. They are by no means defiant.

With Trump determined to monopolize power, to rewrite the Constitution or ignore it, to crush academic freedom, to break democratic norms and laws, the threats to democracy have never been greater.

Bezos wants to be Trump’s friend.

Oliver Darcy, a media critic, described the purge of the opinion section:

Over the past several days, an astonishing exodus from The Post’s opinion section has taken shape. Jonathan Capehart, Philip Bump, Catherine Rampell, Perry Bacon, and Eduardo Porterhave all—in one way or another—announced their departures. Separately, Dana Milbank and Karen Tumulty have opted to return to the newsroom. While the circumstances of their moves differ (they had been in motion prior to O’Neal’s entrance), the cumulative effect has been unmistakable: a significant brain drain inside one of the paper’s most high-profile departments.

Even Monica Hesse, a columnist focused on gender and society—whose role, I’m told, was requested by Bezos himself during the height of the #MeToo movement—is no longer on solid footing. O’Neal informed her over the last several days that her column does not align with his editorial vision, according to people familiar with the matter. Whether she will remain at The Post in some capacity or accepts a buyout remains unclear. But the fact that her column is no longer desired by management is yet another marker reflecting the shifting nature of Bezos as well as the newspaper he leads.

And it’s not just the columnists heading for the exits. Editors, too, are taking the hint. Michael Larabee, a deputy opinion editor who has worked at the newspaper for two decades, is departing, according to people familiar with the matter. Alyssa Rosenberg, who has overseen letters and community engagement, is also leaving. Stephen Stromberg, another deputy opinion editor, is said to be weighing his options, though his plans have yet to be finalized.

A spokesperson for The Post declined to comment.

Democracy dies in darkness.

Categories Censorship, Democracy, Disruption, Elections, Ethics, Freedom of the Press

John Thompson: Oklahoma’s Ryan Walters Protects Students from “Radical Leftist Ideology”

By dianeravitch
July 29, 2025 //
14

John Thompson, historian and retired teacher in Oklahoma, writes about the latest effort to impose MAGA ideology on the students of Oklahoma by State Superintendent Ryan Walters. Walters is worried that Oklahoma might be flooded with teachers from “woke” states like California and New York, who would bring their “leftist ideology” with them. To guard against that possibility, he has hired PragerU to create a test for teachers to determine whether they have the correct patriotic ideology.

Mr. Walters has set himself up as the moral exemplar for the state. Meanwhile, as we learned in the last few days, Mr. Walters apparently watches porn on his office TV.

Thompson writes:

I’ve been wondering how recent events, like the attacks on Iranian nuclear plants, will be taught in History classes. Will state standards require teaching that President Trump was “right about everything,” and thus deserved the Nobel Peace Prize because he completely “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear capacity?

Rules for how the Israel-Iran war should be taught were immediately issued by Oklahoma schools Superintendent Ryan Walters. In a memo about teaching about the ongoing Israel-Iran conflict, (which, confusingly, initially had the subject line of “Student Transfer Page Now Open”), Walters wrote, “There will be zero tolerance for a Liberal, pro-terrorist agenda indoctrinating Oklahoma students.”

The Oklahoman reported on Superintendent Walters’ demands:

“Oklahoma kids will be taught facts, not indoctrination,” reads the memo, issued via email on Tuesday, June 24. “That means presenting the history of Israel and their fight to rightly exist in the world, including the atrocities of the Holocaust and the current struggle with Iran, in a way that is historically grounded, intellectually honest, and free from antisemitic bias.”

Walters had been explicit in protecting public school students from the “indoctrination” higher education students supposedly received in terms of equivalency between Israel and Hamas. He thus made it clear that the K-12 curriculum would teach that Hamas is a terrorist organization.

Of course, Iranian and Hamas leaders are terrorists who I would never defend. But Walters has previously made it clear that a teachers’ union is a “terrorist group.”

It must be remembered when studying the historic differences between democracies and terrorists that Walters doesn’t believe that our system is perfect. After all, he snuck this into the state’s history standards:

Identify discrepancies in 2020 elections results by looking at graphs and other information, including the sudden halting of ballot-counting in select cities and in key battleground states, the security risks of mail-in balloting, sudden batch dumps, an unforeseen record number of voters, and the unprecedented contradiction of ‘bellwether county’ trends. 

But, how will Walters make sure that “woke” teachers don’t defy his mandates?

The Oklahoman reported that a month before the school year will start, and despite the teacher shortage, most teachers have been hired, Walters says that a PragerU-backed assessment, will be completed and given to teachers from California and states with “progressive education policies.” And as KOSU reported, “Walters did not disclose which other states would apply to the mandate.”

But, “the assessment will test educators’ knowledge on the U.S. Constitution, American exceptionalism and the ‘fundamental biological differences between boys and girls.’”

Walters further explained, “’As long as I am superintendent, Oklahoma classrooms will be safe guarded [sic] from radical leftist ideology that California and New York have fostered.’” And, “’teacher’s [sic] who move from these states will not be receiving a teaching certificate unless they pass our new assessment.’”

Granted, Walters’ education mandates are completely unhinged, but at least his two recent orders show that he is thinking ahead, preparing for rapid historical and economic changes. After all, what would happen in Oklahoma schools, where teachers’ starting salaries are 45th in the nation, if they are flooded with California teachers whose average pay was $101,084, or $40,000 more that the Oklahoma average? If that were to happen, how could Oklahoma raise “a generation of patriots, not activists?”

Categories Curriculum, Oklahoma
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