Carson v. Makin: The Supreme Court Decision That Tears Down the Wall of Separation Between Church and State

By dianeravitch
June 23, 2022 //
24

The United States Supreme Court released a 6-3 decision called Carson v. Makin that reverses many decades of precedent. The decision requires the state of Maine to provide public funding to religious schools because the state funds private schools in areas where population is so sparse that public schools are not available.

The two religious schools at issue are Temple Academy in Waterville, Maine, and Bangor Christian Schools. Temple Academy expects its teachers to “integrate biblical principles with their teaching in every subject” and “to spread the word of Christianity.” Bangor Christian Schools seeks to develop “within each student a Christian worldview and Christian philosophy of life.” Both schools deny admission to students based on their gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, and religion. Both schools require their teachers to be born-again teachers.

Why should the state of Maine or any other state be required to fund schools that practice discrimination and violate federal civil rights laws? Why should people who do not share the religious ideas of these schools be compelled to underwrite them? Why should a Catholic or a Buddhist or a Jew or a Muslim or an atheist pay taxes for schools that will exclude their own children and will refuse to hire them or their children as teachers?

Although the conservative majority likes to claim its loyalty to an “Originalist” interpretation of the Constitution, this decision cannot be called “Originalist.” The founders were very clear about their commitment to separation of religion and the state. They were keenly aware of the centuries of bloodshed in Europe that religious strife caused. They wrote the First Amendment to the Constitution to protect freedom of religion, but also to prevent any establishment of religion by government. These two phrases have often been in tension, and the Court has typically balanced them so that everyone is free to practice their religion but without government subsidy. There is literally nothing in the Constitution that supports this majority decision. It is hard to imagine a Supreme Court decision that departs more radically from the explicit, unambiguous statements of the Founding Fathers.

Some religious groups have fought for many decades to gain government funding for their schools, which are used to indoctrinate children into the tenets of their religion. It is somewhat ironic that at the very time that so many conservatives are criticizing public schools and teachers for “indoctrinating” their children into liberal views about racism and gender, they would nonetheless enthusiastically endorse the idea of public subsidy for religious organizations that explicitly indoctrinate children into their views.

There is a simple solution to the issue at hand: Maine and other states that fund private schools should stop doing so. They should use public funds only to support public schools. Public schools should be subject to all state and federal laws governing civil rights, health, and safety. Any private or religious schools that accept public funding under this ruling should be required to comply with the same state and federal laws that apply to public schools.

Here is the full decision.

I will separately post the dissents by Justice Breyer and another by Justice Sonia Sotomayer, which of course are included in the full decision.

Categories Disruption, Elections, Extremism, History, Religion, Separation of church and state

Texas Monthly: Will We Ever Learn the Truth About What Happened at Uvalde?

By dianeravitch
June 22, 2022 //
19

Forrest Wilder of the Texas Monthly has been trying to sort out the conflicting accounts of what happened at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde. He learned that everyone in a position of authority has gone silent. Governor Greg Abbott initiated the government response by praising the courage of law enforcement; when he learned that the shooter was left alone in the classrooms for more than an hour, he said he was “livid” about being misinformed.

One authority after another offered accounts and pointed the finger of blame for the slaughter of children and teachers. The State Senate promised a thorough investigation but Lt. Governor Dan Patrick pointedly left the Uvalde representative off the committee.

Now everyone has clammed up. Answers are not likely to be forthcoming until after the Governor’s race in November. A strategically timed response. Family members want to know what happened to their loved ones. They are not likely to get answers until Greg Abbott is safely re-elected.

Wilder writes:

More than three weeks have passed since the terrible events in Uvalde. What was once a torrent of appalling facts about the police response—many of them misleading or false—has now slowed to a trickle of leaks and lawyer-mediated, self-serving narratives. Governor Greg Abbott has pivoted to talking about the border again. Texas Department of Public Safety director Steve McCraw, last seen slipping into a closed-door meeting of a state House investigative committee, has gone quiet. The Uvalde schools chief of police, Pete Arredondo, finally emerged from hiding last week, lawyer at hand, to contradict reports that he had made the call to wait around for more than an hour while the gunman lingered in the classrooms with dead and dying children and teachers; hours later, key parts of his story were contradicted by evidence reported in the New York Times.

For anyone expecting an apology, accountability, or even a clear and concise narrative of what happened at Robb Elementary School on May 24, 2022, well, you may be waiting a while longer—perhaps forever. No one has resigned, no one has been fired, and local and state authorities from the Uvalde CISD superintendent up to the governor have stopped providing updates. Local and state agencies are refusing most requests to release information they are supposed to make available under Texas’s open records law, even to the state senator who represents Uvalde. Off-duty police from around the state, as well as mysterious motorcycle clubs whose members reportedly include former police officers, descended on Uvalde to physically block reporters from talking to families and community members, even after those locals had agreed to talk—a blockade so unusual and aggressive that one veteran Texas journalist has called it “bordering on official oppression.” It’s as if those in power concluded that the answer to communicating poorly was to stop communicating altogether, and to obstruct anyone seeking answers.

Perhaps all will be revealed soon. Perhaps ongoing investigations by the Texas Rangers and the U.S. Department of Justice will bring clarity. Perhaps the Texas House committee, which is taking testimony in private, will emerge with a full report. Perhaps someone will take responsibility. But right now, it seems that authorities are biding their time, waiting for public attention to move on to the next outrage, and hoping to insulate themselves from accountability. “People in Uvalde are angry,” said state senator Roland Gutierrez, a Democrat who represents the small city. “They want answers. They’re distrusting of law enforcement. The credibility of law enforcement is at stake,” he said. “They’re good people, but they just want honesty, man.”

The inflection point—the shift from a public reckoning to a studied silence—came on May 27, just three days after the nineteen kids and two teachers were killed. That morning McCraw gave a press conference in which he announced to a stunned world that police had committed a grave “mistake.” They had not, as Abbott and McCraw had stated in the immediate aftermath of the shooting, engaged the gunman at the earliest possible moment. Instead, the DPS director said, law enforcement had waited more than an hour before breaching the classroom and killing the shooter.

At the outset of the press conference, McCraw said his only goal that day was to “report facts” and not to “criticize what was done or the actions taken.” But faced with a barrage of pointed questions from the media, McCraw did point a finger—at Arredondo. Without using his name, McCraw said Arredondo, as incident commander that day, was responsible for the dilatory response. It was his decision—a “wrong decision, period”—to treat the gunman as a “barricaded subject” rather than an “active shooter.” It was Arredondo alone who had held back all the gathered law enforcement—Uvalde city police, the county sheriff’s deputies, Border Patrol officers, and DPS state police.

Later that day, Abbott held his own press conference. The governor, not known for his emotional range, seemed eager to convey outrage. In the immediate aftermath of the shooting, he had praised law enforcement for their “amazing courage” and averred that without their actions, “it could have been worse”—the “it” referring to the 21 deaths. Abbott wanted everyone to know that he had been wronged. “I was misled. I am livid about what happened,” he said. What happened, he explained, was that in the aftermath of the shooting “law enforcement officials and non–law enforcement officials” had debriefed him on the shooting. Abbott had taken notes by hand, writing everything down “in detail” and “in sequential order.” The information he then provided the public was a “recitation” of those facts.

Who had given him such bad information? What consequences would they face? If the governor was so angry, surely heads would roll. But Abbott offered no names, no accountability. In an unusually quick turnaround after an open records request, the governor’s office released his notes this week to a Houston television station. But the nine pages of scrawl confirmed only that Abbott had been misled, not who had done the misleading.

At the May 27 press conference, Abbott signaled that he was moving on. He admonished law enforcement leaders to “get to the bottom of every fact with absolute certainty” as part of their investigations. Ever since, Abbott, McCraw, and other officials have stopped answering questions or publicly sharing information, pointing to the ongoing investigations. It’s an all-purpose excuse. Republicans in the Legislature are using the investigations as a reason to avoid calling for a special session on gun violence prevention. They’re also conveniently postponing, perhaps forever, a discussion about gun safety; as one state senator put it, “bad facts make bad law.”

The story goes one. Subscribe to The Texas Monthly and finish reading.

Categories Accountability, Fake, Guns, Lies, Texas

Uvalde: The Police In the School Didn’t Try to Open the Classroom Doors

By dianeravitch
June 22, 2022 //
21

The Houston Chronicle reports that the scores of police who responded to the Uvalde massacre did not try to open the doors of the classrooms where the shooter was killing children and teachers until more than an hour had passed. (The story was originally published in the San Antonio Express News.) The story is based on surveillance video.

When you read the story, you will see why Governor Greg Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick are trying to block any public release of official investigations until after the state elections in November. More than 100 “good guys with guns”were unable to stop one bad guy with a gun. The more we learn, the more questions are raised about the training, competence, and courage of those who were supposed to protect the students and teachers.

Surveillance footage shows that police never tried to open a door to two classrooms at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde in the 77 minutes between the time a gunman entered the rooms and massacred 21 people and officers finally breached the door and killed him, according to a law enforcement source close to the investigation.

Investigators believe the 18-year-old gunman who killed 19 children and two teachers at the school on May 24 could not have locked the door to the connected classrooms from the inside, according to the source.

Interactive timeline: Minute-by-minute reconstruction of Uvalde school shooting

All classroom doors at Robb Elementary are designed to lock automatically when they close and can only be locked or unlocked from the outside with a key, the source said. Police might have assumed the door was locked. Yet the surveillance footage suggests gunman Salvador Ramos, 18, was able to open the door to classroom 111 and enter with assault-style rifle — perhaps because the door malfunctioned, the source said.

Another door led to classroom 112.

Ramos entered Robb Elementary at 11:33 a.m. that day through an exterior door that a teacher had pulled shut but that didn’t lock automatically as it was supposed to, indicating another malfunction in door locks at the school.

Police finally breached the door to classroom 111 and killed Ramos at 12:50 p.m. Whether the door was unlocked the entire time remains under investigation.

Regardless, officers had access the entire time to a “halligan” — a crowbar-like tool that could have opened the door to the classrooms even if it was locked, the source said.

Two minutes after Ramos entered the building, three Uvalde police officers chased him inside. Footage shows that Ramos fired rounds inside classrooms 111 and 112, briefly exited into the hallway and then re-entered through the door, the source said.

Ramos then shot at the officers through the closed door, grazing two of them with shrapnel. The officers retreated to wait for backup and heavy tactical equipment rather than force their way into the classrooms.

Pedro “Pete” Arredondo, the Uvalde school district police chief and the on-scene incident commander, has said he spent more than an hour in the hallway of the school. He told the Texas Tribune that he called for tactical gear, a sniper and keys to get inside. He said he held officers back from the door to the classrooms for 40 minutes to avoid gunfire.

When a custodian brought a large key ring, Arredondo said he tried dozens of the keys but none worked.

But Arredondo was not trying those keys in the door to classrooms 111 and 112, where Ramos was holed up, according to the law enforcement source. Rather, he was trying to locate a master key by using the various keys on doors to other classrooms nearby, the source said.

While Arredondo waited for a tactical team to arrive, children and teachers inside the classrooms called 911 at least seven times with desperate pleas for help. One of the two teachers who died, Eva Mireles, called her husband by cellphone after she was wounded and lay dying.

Categories Accountability, Courage, Guns, Texas

Gary Rubinstein: The Astonishing Attrition Rates at Ember Charter School in Brooklyn

By dianeravitch
June 22, 2022 //
27

The New York State Board of Regents recently decided to permit the Ember Charter School in Brooklyn to expand and add a high school. Charter schools get permission to grow if they have demonstrated success. Gary Rubinstein checked state data and found that Ember’s greatest “success” was getting rid of students by attrition.

The Regents must know this too. Why did they vote to expand a failing charter school?

Rubinstein writes:

Currently there are 267 charter schools in New York City. In New York State the charter ‘cap’ is 460, though the cap for New York City is 267 so as of right now, no new charters can open in New York City.

Charter school supporters often complain that the cap needs to be lifted or that some of the out of NYC charter slots could be given to New York City. But there are two ways that charters can get more students even without lifting the cap. The most obvious way is for charters to reduce their attrition rates. So a network like Success Academy has about 40,000 students right now. But about 75% of their students who start in kindergarten don’t make it to graduation. Success Academy could probably increase their population to 70,000 if few of their students weren’t on the official or unofficial ‘got-to-go’ list. The other way to evade the cap is for existing charter schools to expand into more grades.

Ember charter school is a K-10 school that currently has 568 students. They were recently permitted to add high school grades based, in part, on the school’s ability to raise test scores. If you go to their website you will see a very impressive looking graph:

The light green line shows the percent of their first cohort’s math percent passing the state test from grade 3 to grade 7. It went from 28% in grade 3 down to 23% in grade 4 and then again to 14% in grade 5 Then an amazing reversal occurred and in 6th grade they shot up from 14% up to 56% and the next year they had 82% passing in grade 7. It seems to be an incredible turnaround from 14% to 82% in just 2 years.

When faced with a miracle statistic like this, there are two questions that cross my mind. The first thing I wonder is how much of this growth is based on attrition. The second is whether they were able to replicate this success for their other cohorts.

For that first cohort who finished 7th grade in 2018, I found on the New York State data site that this cohort once had 60 students when they were in first grade. By the time they got to the miracle 2017-2018 year where they got 82% passing the math test, they were down to just 28 students. Here is a graph of their percent passing math and their cohort size on the same graph.

As you can see, the two graphs are practically mirror images of each other. When they were 3rd graders, 16 out of 57 was 28%. When they were in 7th grade, 23 out of 28 was 82%. So basically they got 7 more kids to pass the test.

I made a similar chart for the second and third cohorts. The second cohort had similar attrition, they went fro 71 students down to 37 between 4th grade and 7th grade but they did not get the 82% passing by 7th grade. They only got to 43% passing, even with the nearly 50% attrition.

The third cohort was the lowest performing of all. They had almost no attrition, keeping around 65 students throughout. They only had 6% of that cohort passing in both 3rd and 4th grade. And by 6th grade they were up to 23%, well below the district.

So just like so many other charter schools, when they can’t cheat by booting out their students, their test scores are nothing special. How they get permission to expand is definitely a scandal.

Categories Charter Schools, Education Industry, Fake, New York, New York City

Texas: State Police Chief Blasts Grossly Inadequate Response to Uvalde Massacre

By dianeravitch
June 21, 2022 //
11

Drip by drip, we are learning the facts about what happened in the Robb Elementary School in Uvalde when a killer barged in. He could have been stopped. Lives could have been saved. But the incompetence of the police leadership caused an unconscionable delay in stopping the killer. Well-established protocols were ignored (stop the shooter asap, even if you don’t have enough men or equipment, stop the killer). As it happened, the police in Uvalde had more men than they needed and all the equipment they needed to stop the killer. But they didn’t.

The head of the state police called the response an abject failure. The pokice had shields and weapons. They did not need a key. They stood around and waited for 77 minutes.

AUSTIN, Texas — The head of the Texas State Police offered a pointed and emphatic rebuke of the police response to a shooting last month at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, calling it “an abject failure” that ran counter to decades of training.

In his comments before a special State Senate committee in Austin, Steven McCraw, the director of the Department of Public Safety, said that just minutes after a gunman began shooting children inside a pair of connected classrooms on May 24, the police at the scene had enough firepower and protective equipment to storm the classroom.

But, he said, the on-scene commander “decided to put the lives of officers ahead of the lives of children.” Mr. McCraw, speaking forcefully, said the same commander had delayed confronting the gunman because he “waited for a key that was never needed.”

Mr. McCraw said that the doors to the classrooms could be locked only from the outside. “There’s no way to lock the door from the inside. And there’s no way for the subject to lock the door from the inside,” he said, adding that a teacher had made a request for the locks to be fixed, believing they were broken, before the shooting.

“I don’t believe, based on the information that we have right now, that that door was ever secured,” Mr. McCraw said. “The door was unsecured.”

There were so many police officers present that no one knew who was in charge. It turns out that no one was in charge.

This is an instance where the planning was wholly inadequate.

100+ men with guns were unable to stop one bad guy with a gun.

They had the guns, the shields, and overwhelming force. And for 77 minutes, they stood by.

Categories Accountability, Safety, Texas

U.S. Supreme Court Rules That States Must Fund Tuition at Religious Schools if They Fund Other Private Schools

By dianeravitch
June 21, 2022 //
114

To no one’s surprise, the ultra-conservative Supreme Court ruled in favor of funding religious schools in states that fund other private schools. Whereas the Supreme Court has long issued rulings forbidding any state support for religious schools, the current Supreme Court has signaled its willingness to rule in favor of equal treatment of religious schools. Brick by brick, this Supreme Court is dismantling the “wall of separation” (Thomas Jefferson’s phrase) between church and state.

David Savage of the Los Angeles Times reports:

WASHINGTON — 

The Supreme Court on Tuesday extended its support for religious schools, ruling that parents who send their children to such institutions have a right to tuition aid if the state provides it to other similar private schools. 

The 6-3 decision in the Carson vs. Makin case from Maine could open the door to including religious schools among the charter schools that are privately run but publicly financed. 

In the past, the high court had said that giving public funds to church schools violated the 1st Amendment’s ban on an “establishment of religion.” 

But in the past five years, the court’s conservative majority has flipped the equation and ruled it is unconstitutional discrimination to deny public funds to church schools simply because they are religious.

Maine has an unusual subsidy program because many of its small towns do not have a high school. In such cases, students may enroll in a private school or in another public high school, and the state pays their tuition.

Since 1980, however, the state has not extended these subsidies to students in church schools, apparently fearing it would be unconstitutional to do so.

The court majority said that was a mistake. 

Among the six conservative justices in the majority, all of them attended Catholic schools except for Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., who went to public elementary and secondary schools in New Jersey. 

The conservative justices in recent years have cast aside the principle of church-state separation and argued it grew from an anti-Catholic bias in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

“It was an open secret that ‘sectarian’ was code for ‘Catholic,’” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote in 2020, describing the common state laws that prohibit sending tax money to schools affiliated with a church. These restrictions were “born of bigotry” and “arose at a time of pervasive hostility to the Catholic Church and to Catholics in general,” he said in Espinoza vs. Montana. 

The 1st Amendment forbids laws “respecting an establishment of religion,” which had been seen as barring the government from subsidizing religion. But Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil M. Gorsuch have disagreed.

“The modern view which presumes that states must remain … virtually silent on matters of religion is fundamentally incorrect,” Thomas wrote in an earlier school case. “Properly understood, the Establishment Clause does not prohibit states from favoring religion.”

Notre Dame law professor Nicole Garnett, a former Thomas clerk, predicted last year there will be a move “in the near future to permit religious charter schools,” either through the courts or the states.

If these “charter school programs are properly considered programs of private school choice,” they can take advantage of the court’s ruling forbidding the exclusion of religious schools, she said.

My comment as an historian who has studied church-state issues:

The Court is right that there was a strong anti-Catholic bias in American society throughout the nineteenth century. The so-called Blaine amendments found in many state constitutions were animated in large part by a desire to block public funding of Catholic schools. As I showed in my book “The Great School Wars,” a history of the New York City schools, the Catholic Church eagerly sought public funding in the 1840s.

But the ban on funding religious schools that has been in place nationally for more than a century applied to all religious schools, not just to Catholic schools. Schools run by Protestants, Catholics, Jews, Muslims, and other religious faiths were ineligible for public funding. This view was reinforced repeatedly by the Supreme Court in numerous rulings. The common understanding, upheld by the Court, was that public funds should not be used to indoctrinate public funds into the belief system of any religious faith.

Public schools exist to promote public purposes: literacy and judgment needed to vote, to serve on juries, to participate in civic life, to sustain a democratic polity. Religious schools exist to teach and perpetuate–and yes, to indoctrinate–the faith of adherents. Religious believers do not want to support the schools of other faiths. But under this ruling, all religious faiths will be entitled to public funding in any state that funds any private schools.

Maine should end its policy of “tuitioning” and limit public funds to public schools. Other states that subsidize any private schools should stop doing so. The path on which SCOTUS has embarked will end in publicly funding schools for every religion, of which there are scores. It threatens the principle of the common school, supported by the public and open to all children.

The next step, as the article suggests, will be religious charter schools, scooping up public funds with no accountability, no oversight, and no adherence to anti-discrimination laws. Is it not unjust to expect the public to pay for schools where their own children are ineligible to attend because of their own religion?

Betsy DeVos and Charles Koch must be celebrating right now.

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Funding, Religion, Separation of church and state

Texas Tribune: Bombshell Revelations About Uvalde Massacre

By dianeravitch
June 21, 2022 //
22

The Texas Tribune, an independent journal, has been first to report on the news about the Uvalde massacre. In this story, there are new revelations based on video footage from inside the school.

Some of our takeaways include:

  • The records show a well-equipped group of officers entered the school almost immediately. They pulled back once the shooter began firing inside the classroom. They waited for more than an hour to reengage.
  • There is no security footage that shows police officers attempted to open the classroom doors that the shooter hid behind. Law enforcement officials are skeptical, the Tribune has confirmed, that the doors were locked or that anyone physically tried to open them.
  • At least some officers on the scene seemed to believe that Arredondo was in charge inside the school, and at times Arredondo seemed to be issuing orders. That contradicts Arredondo’s assertion that he did not believe he was running the law enforcement response…

The officers in the hallway of Robb Elementary wanted to get inside classrooms 111 and 112 — immediately. One officer’s daughter was inside. Another officer had gotten a call from his wife, a teacher, who told him she was bleeding to death.

Two closed doors and a wall stood between them and an 18-year-old with an AR-15 who had opened fire on children and teachers inside the connected classrooms. A Halligan bar — an ax-like forcible-entry tool used by firefighters to get through locked doors — was available. Ballistic shields were arriving on the scene. So was plenty of firepower, including at least two rifles. Some officers were itching to move.

One such officer, a special agent at the Texas Department of Public Safety, had arrived around 20 minutes after the shooting started. He immediately asked: Are there still kids in the classrooms?

“If there is, then they just need to go in,” the agent said.

Another officer answered, “It is unknown at this time.”

The agent shot back, “Y’all don’t know if there’s kids in there?” He added, “If there’s kids in there we need to go in there.”

“Whoever is in charge will determine that,” came the reply.

Categories Accountability, Guns, Safety, Texas

Tennessee: Your Help Is Needed!

By dianeravitch
June 21, 2022 //
4

Governor Bill Lee of Tennessee is working overtime to destroy public schools in his state with charters and vouchers.

Pastors for Tennessee Children has stood up to him and the legislature, mobilizing public opinion against privatization.

PTC needs our help!

It’s a tumultuous time for public education in Tennessee. There are currently over 130 school privatization lobbyists working the legislature. Their intent is to replace public schools with charters, vouchers and homeschools. The Tennessee Public Education Coalition and Pastors for Tennessee Children have been actively working together to protect our students and teachers. These organizations blocked dangerous legislation including bills to expand vouchers, to allow charter schools to buy publicly owned properties for only one dollar, and to allow the mayoral takeover of elected school boards.

Pastors for Tennessee Children filed an amicus brief in the voucher lawsuit, which is still pending. They have shared our message in op-eds that have run in newspapers statewide and in live news interviews. They met with legislators and became active on social media. In short, They have done outsized work for an organization composed of a small number of committed volunteers who care about our public schools.

They cannot continue without your help.

Please make a donation here.

Or send a check to the following address:

Pastors for Tennessee Children to 7237 Riverfront Drive, Nashville, TN 37221

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, For-Profit, Privatization, Resistance, Tennessee

Mike Deshotels: The Failure of Charter Schools in New Orleans

By dianeravitch
June 21, 2022 //
22

Mike Deshotels is a retired educator in Louisiana, who blogs at “Louisiana Educator.” He wrote the following post about the now well-established all-charter district.

The state of Louisiana took over most public schools in New Orleans after the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. It turned them over to charter operators, who were expected to get better academic results than the underfunded public schools. The city’s experienced teachers, mostly African-American, like their students, were fired and replaced by inexperienced Teach for America recruits. Philanthropies and the federal government poured billions into the district to help privatization succeed.

Other states, impressed by the promises of privatization, pushed for more charter schools, and some for vouchers, like Arizona, North Carolina, Florida, and Ohio. Michigan created the Education Achievement Authority (which failed), Tennessee created the Achievement School District, which boldly promised dramatic increases in test scores. It failed too. Still others, like Oklahoma, Nevada, and Texas, encouraged privatization and rapid expansion of charter schools.

Billionaires like Michael Bloomberg, Bill Gates, Charles Koch, Betsy DeVos, and the Waltons continue to fund the charter idea, as does the federal government, whose Charter Schools Program doles out $440 million annually to open or expand charter schools (many of which will fail or never open).

For the billionaires and the charter lobby, New Orleans was the shining star of the corporate reform movement, promising huge academic gains by firing teachers, closing public schools, and privatizing low-performing schools. New Orleans is the foundational myth of the charter movement.

Mike Deshotels shows here that the New Orleans “miracle” was and is a vast mirage. Fully a decade ago, in a dissent to a report by the Council on Foreign Relations that endorsed privatization of public schools, Linda Darling-Hammond wrote that “New Orleans remains the lowest-ranked district in the low-performing state of Louisiana.” Billions of dollars later, New Orleans continues to be the lowest performing school district in the lowest performing state.

Here is an excerpt from Mike Deshotels’ post:

This recently released report by the Louisiana Pelican Policy Institute, a business funded “good government” group has produced a dashboard that compares the most recent data on all public-school systems in Louisiana. It provides a way for us to compare expenditures and results in public schools. We can now get a good idea about whether the school reforms in New Orleans have lived up to their promises.

It is important to note that not all public schools in New Orleans at the time of takeover had been deemed to be failures. Even though the Orleans public school system, as a whole, fell into the bottom quartile of public school systems in the state based on academic achievement, there was a group of public schools in New Orleans that were performing well, even before 2006. Several highly selective schools had been producing high academic achievement and great college prep results. So approximately one-fourth of the Orleans schools were left intact because of acceptable results. Those schools, even though now converted into charters, continue to be selective in the students they serve and continue to produce exemplary results. But there is still a major problem with the state test scores of the other three-fourths – the reformed takeover schools.

The recent study shows that taken as a whole, the New Orleans all charter system is still ranking in the bottom quartile of all public-school systems in the state. This is in a state that performs near the bottom of all states on national testing and college preparedness. For example, the new dashboard reveals that for the four academic subjects of math, reading, science and social studies, only 18% of all New Orleans public school students are now rated proficient or better. (I averaged the results of the 4 academic subjects)

In the key subjects of math and reading, Orleans performs at the 24th percentile compared to all other state school systems. This is approximately the same as the Orleans school system performed before Katrina!

What about efficiency in the use of per pupil dollars? Has the new business-oriented model resulted in more efficient use of tax and grant dollars?

One thing that the all-charter system has been successful in doing is attracting a generous flow of charitable foundation money to these new experimental schools. A sizable portion of per pupil dollars in the reformed Orleans public system come from charitable and foundation grants. So the reformed all charter school system is certainly well funded.

The Pelican Policy Institute study has provided a rough measure of how the school money in Orleans is now allocated. Total per pupil funding of the New Orleans system now adds up to $24,434 per student. For Louisiana, this is lavish funding by any measure. The state average per pupil funding is now $11,755, less than half the per pupil amount for New Orleans. How do the New Orleans schools allocate their per pupil funding compared to all other public schools? According to the Pelican Policy dashboard, New Orleans now spends 23% of all its funding on administration and 36% on classroom instruction. (Salaries of the Charter managers are not published as far as I know) The state average for other systems in Louisiana is 8% for administration and 56% for the classrooms. (All non-charter public-school administrators and teacher salary schedules are public records)

Did the increased funding allow the reformed Orleans school system to hire a better quality of teachers? The state auditor recently found that more than half of the Orleans teachers are not certified as teachers. In addition, most of the teachers now employed in Orleans are Caucasian while 90% of the students are African American. This ignores studies that show that children learn better from real role models of their own ethnic type. So much for the new business approach.

Finally, on average, the other school systems in the state have 31% of students achieving proficiency in the 4 basic subjects tested. This compares to 18% achieving proficiency in the new reformed Orleans system.

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Democracy, Education Industry, New Orleans

Texas: GOP Rejects Democracy, Embraces Theocracy

By dianeravitch
June 20, 2022 //
148

Dean Obeidallah, a regular contributor to CNN, describes the Texas GOP’s defiant rejection of democracy. In an earlier post, I pointed out that the state convention booed Senator Jon Cornyn for daring to negotiate a bipartisan gun control deal (which did not include any of President Biden’s demands). That was the mildest of their actions.

He writes:

CNN) – Disturbing video from the Texas Republican Convention this weekend shows convention-goers mocking GOP Rep. Dan Crenshaw — a Navy SEAL veteran who lost his right eye to a bomb in Afghanistan — with the term “eye patch McCain.”

Fox News’ Tucker Carlson coined the derisive nickname after the Texas lawmaker dared to express support for beleaguered Ukraine following Russia’s barbaric attack on it.

But apparently even more heinous in the eyes of some attendees is that Crenshaw rejected former President Donald Trump’s claims that the 2020 election was stolen. One man wearing a red “Make America Great Again” hat can be seen yelling in an online video, “Dan Crenshaw is a traitor!” and “He needs to be hung for treason!”

As despicable as the behavior toward Crenshaw was, even more alarming were the actions taken by the Texas GOP and the convention’s 5,000-plus delegates.

The gathering rejected the outcome of a democratic election, supported bigotry toward the LGBTQ community and imposed far-right religious beliefs on others by seeking to have them enshrined into law. And that wasn’t half of it.

In fact, the convention showed us one thing: Texas Republicans are no longer hiding their extremism. Instead, they are openly embracing it.

Even before the opening gavel, they gave us a glimpse of the party’s extremism in the Lone Star State by banning the Log Cabin Republicans from setting up a booth at the convention.

Texas Republican Party Chairman Matt Rinaldi cast the deciding vote on the move to bar the group that has advocated for LGBTQ Republicans for decades. “I think it’s inappropriate given the state of our nation right now for us to play sexual identity politics,” Rinaldi told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

Once it formally got underway, the convention took a number of appalling and un-American actions. First, delegates approved a measure declaring that President Joe Biden “was not legitimately elected.” In short, the Texas GOP — like Trump himself — is embracing a lie because it’s unhappy with the election results. Put more bluntly, the Texas GOP voted to reject American democracy.

Republican delegates also booed John Cornyn, the senior US senator from Texas, at the convention Friday because of the Republican lawmaker’s role leading negotiations to reach a Senate deal on a bill to stem gun violence. Those legislative efforts follow last month’s horrific shooting that claimed the lives of 19 schoolchildren and two teachers in Uvalde, Texas.

The platform approved at the convention called for repealing or nullifying gun laws already in place, such as the Gun Control Act of 1968, which prevents felons and other dangerous people from being able to purchase a gun legally. Apparently, the Texas GOP believes that even dangerous people should have a constitutionally protected right to buy a gun.

The Texas GOP platform also embraced ramping up anti-abortion rhetoric in public schools. For example, the platform states that “Texas students should learn about the Humanity of the Preborn Child, including … that life begins at fertilization.” It even seeks to force students to watch “a live ultrasound” and for high-schoolers to read an anti-abortion booklet that critics say “includes scientifically unsupported claims and shames women seeking abortion care,” according to The Texas Tribune.

It sounds like the curriculum that you might find in a theocratic government such as the Taliban — not one in the United States funded by taxpayer dollars. But the GOP in large swaths of this country is no longer hesitant to support laws to impose its religious beliefs — as we see with measures some Republicans champion that would totally ban abortion. The GOP convention’s document additionally urges officials “not to infringe on Texas school students’ and staffs’ rights to pray and engage in religious speech.”

The Texas GOP platform also does its best to demonize those in the transgender community. It describes transgender people as suffering from “a genuine and extremely rare mental health condition.” And it sees sexual reassignment surgery as a form of medical malpractice.

The platform takes aim at gay Americans as well with the statement that homosexuality is “an abnormal lifestyle choice.” Instructively, the Texas GOP platform did not include such language in 2018 and 2020.

This platform gives us a glimpse into the views of the Republican base on key issues that in turn will pressure GOP elected officials in Texas — and possibly beyond the state — to adopt similarly extreme positions or run the risk of a primary challenge from an even more extreme Republican.

What caused this move to the far right? Brandon Rottinghaus, a political scientist at the University of Houston, told The Texas Tribune about the state GOP’s new extreme platform, “Donald Trump radicalized the party and accelerated the demands from the base.” He added alarmingly, “There simply aren’t limits now on what the base might ask for.”

I agree — in part. I don’t think Trump radicalized the base — rather he simply gave people permission to be who they always wanted to be.

But I agree with Rottinghaus that there are now no limits for what the GOP base might seek — be it rejecting election results it doesn’t agree with to enacting more laws based on extreme religious beliefs. And that should deeply alarm every American who wants to live in a democratic republic.

The convention also issued a call to repeal the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which guaranteed the right to vote for every citizen of voting age.

The only thing the Texas GOP neglected to do was pass a resolution congratulating the shooter at Uvalde for exercising his “God-given right” to use his AR15 as he saw fit.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Censorship, Civil Rights, Democracy, Elections, Extremism, Guns, Ignorance, Politics, Republicans, Trump
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