Kentucky: Educators Dismayed by Rushed Voucher Bill

By dianeravitch
March 18, 2021 //
8

Educators in Kentucky expressed their opposition to the voucher legislation that was rushed through the Legislature without careful deliberation of its likely negative impact on the state’s public schools. Nor was there any discussion of the research showing the harm that vouchers do to the children that use them or the high attrition rates of voucher schools.

Acting Fayette Superintendent Marlene Helm on Tuesday issued a strong statement before the House and Senate approved a bill in which private school tuition in Fayette and other counties could be paid from newly created education opportunity accounts.

“Quite honestly, I am dismayed that a bill of this magnitude has been brought forward this late in the session without thorough, public discussion with various stakeholders,” Helm said.

In addition to Fayette, Jefferson and Kenton counties, House Bill 563 now adds Boone, Hardin, Daviess, Warren and Campbell counties — all with populations of 90,000 — to those in which private school tuition amounts can be paid out of the scholarship funds.

The Kentucky Senate Appropriations and Revenue committee passed the bill 6-2. Later, the full Senate approved it with a 21-15 vote as did the House 48-47 in a marathon session Tuesday, the last day of the General Assembly before the veto recess. The bill will now be sent to the Governor for signing. Lawmakers will come back on March 29 and 30 to override any gubernatorial vetoes.

“This bill is dangerous. This bill is bad education policy. It’s bad fiscal policy. And its bad public policy. It does nothing to protect our students and their families or to assure that they receive a high quality education,” Kentucky Education Association President Eddie Campbell told the committee Tuesday…

In voicing his opposition, Campbell said private schools will be charging for many of the services that their tuition already covers. The services are already provided by public schools for free under the law, he said.

Campbell said the bill prohibits oversight of the education service provider that will receive the donations to distribute to families. He said providers are not required to have credentials or background checks. He said the bill opens the door for discrimination on the basis of race, religion, ethnicity, disability, sexual orientation and other fronts…

Kentucky Education Commissioner Jason Glass said he was concerned with the bill on multiple fronts.

“It is being rushed through the legislative process with little effort at gaining input or correction of obvious flaws and predictable negative consequences which the current language contains,” Glass said after the full House vote. “This legislation is of potentially enormous consequence – which begs a more thorough approach to considering both the public school choice and tax credit aspects.”

Jim Flynn, executive director of the Kentucky Association of School Superintendents, said his group remains steadfast in their opposition to any privatization of public funds for education “–this bill provides that in the form of tax credits for education opportunity accounts.”

The lobbyist for the ultra-conservative, libertarian EdChoice organization, formerly the Rose and Milton Friedman Foundation, was delighted with passage of the voucher bill. EdChoice lobbies for privatization of public schools and th


Read more here: https://www.kentucky.com/news/local/education/article249964599.html#storylink=cpy



Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Kentucky, Privatization, Vouchers

Bad News in Kentucky: Legislature Passes Voucher Bill

By dianeravitch
March 18, 2021 //
17

Kentucky Republican legislators passed a voucher bill, which now goes to Democratic Governor Andy Bashear. The Governor will likely veto the bill, but the legislature can override his veto with a simple majority. This is the ultimate vengeance against teachers, who organized in 2018 to fight the Republican plan to change teachers’ pensions.

The rightwing group EdChoice, formerly the Milton and Rose Friedman Foundation, was thrilled:

Public school supporters normally fight back in-person when pension reform and school choice are up for votes in Frankfort. But this year, Kentucky’s Capitol is closed to the public because of COVID-19, so the halls are empty. However, the bills dealing with those issues are still moving through.

“It’s a really big day,” said Andrew Vandiver with EdChoice Kentucky, a group that supports school choice.

After years of fighting for school choice, EdChoice Kentucky hoped to see it become law Tuesday.

“It’s just about fairness,” said Vandiver. “Trying to make sure that low to middle-income families have the same choice and opportunities that upper-income families have.”

There it is: the big voucher lie. Upper-income families spend $20,000-$30,000 for private-school tuition. Children with vouchers won’t be able to pay for the same schools as those chosen by upper-income families. Vouchers in Kentucky will be no greater, and probably less, than the cost of public school, likely $5,000 or less. Families can take their voucher to a low-quality religious school with uncertified teachers and principal, where they will be taught fake history and Biblical science.

A large body of research shows that vouchers have a negative impact on student achievement.

Categories Accountability, Kentucky, Vouchers

Good News in Arkansas: House Votes Down Voucher Expansion

By dianeravitch
March 18, 2021 //
1

Max Brantley of the Arkansas Times reported good news. A proposal to expand the state’s small voucher plan was rejected by the House. Republicans joined Democrats to provide the votes to defeat vouchers. Many rural Republicans don’t want to hurt their public schools.

He writes:

After more than an hour and a half of impassioned debate, the Arkansas House today defeated a bill to double from about 500 the number of students in Arkansas who could receive state money for vouchers to attend private schools. The vote was 44-52, with two voting present and two not voting.

A motion to clinch the outcome failed, so the bill may come up again. UPDATE: Here’s the roll call.

The debate covered familiar talking points, with some legislators repeating speeches they’d given when the bill cleared a House committee 11-9 yesterday.

Proponents hammered on choice and emphasized that the bill would favor lower-income families (though the income cutoff is higher than the average family income in Arkansas.)

Opponents emphasized the loss of funding for public schools and the measure’s  open-ended growth from an initial outlay of $4 million. They talked of uncertainty about what students would be chosen and about the lack of standards for private schools. (They’d need only be approved by a private association of private schools.)

I was particularly moved by a couple of opponents.Rep. Jim Wooten (R-Beebe) said the bill would be “the final nail driven in public education in this state.” It’s a progressive nibbling away, he said. “If you think these private schools are going to take every comer that comes to their door, you are fooling yourself.”

Rep. David Tollett (R-Lexa), a school superintendent, told of the private schools in the Delta, creatures of segregation. He challenged legislators to name a minority private school in the state. “This privatizes of public education. It is a nationwide movement. It has struck many different states and not one of them has been successful.” He did the compounding of the cost: at a 25 percent growth rate, it will reach $1 billion in time.

He read from studies showing harm to students from voucher programs, particularly Louisiana where voucher students ended up in many poor quality private schools.

He said the state could have simply lifted a cap on the existing voucher program, which targets students with disabilities. Why, Tollett asked, does it take a 29-page bill to change things. “It’s a Trojan horse,” he said. “It’s not about the children.” He and Wooten both noted the money spent on scholarships ($30 million, Wooten said) by private schools to recruit athletes for prize-winning teams.ADVERTISEMENT

Tollett also said a promise of money for public schools in the fund that will finance vouchers is an empty promise because the categorical programs are already covered by federal money directed to needy districts. Tollett also commented that heard some say a vote by a Republican was a vote contrary to the party platform. He said nobody had tried to tell him that. Republicans accounted for a majority of the no votes. There are only 22 Democrats in the House.

Categories Arkansas, Courage, Republicans, Vouchers

Politico: Give Bernie Sanders’ Credit for Pushing Biden Relief Bill

By dianeravitch
March 18, 2021 //
12

Politico writes that Senator Bernie Sanders deserves credit for key features of the $1.9 trillion Biden plan and for encouraging Biden not to compromise with moderate Republicans who offered a $900 billion plan.

Politico said:

 Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) played the most dramatic role during the passage of the Covid relief bill into law. But the senator with the greatest imprint on the script itself was his colleague on the opposite end of the Democratic ideological spectrum: Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). 

Sanders’ influence on the most ambitious piece of domestic legislation in a generation is evident in several places, particularly the guaranteed income program for children, the massive subsidies for people to buy health care, the sheer size of the $1.9 trillion measure and the centerpiece of it — direct checks to working Americans. 

But the specifics of the law tell only part of the story. The calculus by which the legislation was crafted and passed — a belief that popular bills endure more than bipartisan ones — is quintessentially Sanders. And it raises a thought-provoking question: Has any elected official in American history had such a profound influence on a major political party without ever formally joining it? 

Six years ago, Democrats were in a different place. Austerity politics were still gripping parts of the party. The ambitious agenda items were more social than economic: immigration reform, gun control, police reform after Ferguson. And in a few months time, the Republican Party’s presidential nominee would make serious inroads among the white working class voters who had served as the bedrock for Democrats for decades. 

Within that landscape, Sanders was a throwback: a labor-oriented big-government liberal who seemed like more of a gadfly than a serious player. He was known for passing little-noticed amendments but also found a knack for making well-noticed public spectacles, often as acts of disagreement with the Obama White House on items like domestic surveillance laws and the extension of the Bush tax cuts. As his following picked up, a depiction of him emerged as an ideologue who valued ideological purity over progress and was content to undermine a historic president in the service of it.

That never jibed with reality. Though admittedly stubborn, Sanders voted often for major bills that fell short of his ambitions (Obamacare), cut deals that went against his ideology (VA reform), and made sure his public shows of opposition didn’t actually turn into catastrophes for the Democratic Party. When his legislative white whale (a $15-an-hour minimum wage hike) was nixed by the parliamentarian a few weeks back, he could have insisted that his fallback option be given a vote. He didn’t, calculating that it wasn’t worth jeopardizing or delaying the entire enterprise over the minimum wage. As one Sanders aide described it: “He knows when to throw down and when it’s time to get s— done…”

The Democratic Party today holds razor-thin majorities in both chambers and is helmed by a president who might have been the most moderate of the 20 or so candidates who ran in the primary. And yet every single member — save one in the House — voted for a nearly $2 trillion deficit-financed bill that sends money without strings attached to the poorest Americans, all while embracing a unionization effort targeting the biggest e-commerce giant in the world and entertaining a $4 trillion follow-up bill to revamp American infrastructure that will likely include tax hikes on the rich. If Sanders was just a touch more extroverted, we’d likely see signs of euphoria in Burlington.

Of course, credit (or, if you’re so inclined, blame) isn’t his alone. The enlarged child tax credit has been the project of countless Democrats, including Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.). The bill’s $86 billion bailout for multi-employer pensions was spearheaded by Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio). And none of it would have been possible without twin Senate wins in Georgia or Biden’s insistence that he needed to go big out the gate. 

But, it’s worth recalling, that Biden easily could have charted a bipartisan approach instead. In early December, Manchin and Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) announced the outlines of a $900 billion relief bill of their own, with a splashy Washington Post op-ed framing it as the logical step toward ideological comity. Five other senators in the Democratic caucus were on board with the idea. 

Sanders rejected the proposal out of hand. His move sent an early signal to the White House that it would have to scramble for votes even on a center-of-the-road approach. Weeks later, the Georgia election happened, Biden stuck to the script that bigger was better, and the pieces of a $1.9 trillion package — upon which the success of the Demcratic Party now hangs — fell into place.

Categories Accountability, Biden, Economy, Funding, Politics, Poverty, Sanders, Scandal, Unions

Success Academy Charter Chain Will Not Give State Tests This Year

By dianeravitch
March 17, 2021 //
4

Reema Amin, a reporter for Chalkbeat in New York, wrote on Twitter that the Success Academy charter chain will not administer the state tests this year. Do you think that any public school superintendents or principals will make the same decision and get away with it? Nah, we won’t take the state tests this year.

Categories Charter Schools, Education Reform, Harlem Success Academy, New York City

Kentucky: Legislature Passes Voucher Bill

By dianeravitch
March 17, 2021 //
13

The Kentucky legislature, controlled by Republicans, passed voucher legislation. The Governor, Democrat Andy Bashear, seems certain to veto it.

Linda Blackford of the Lexington Herald-Leader wonders why Republicans are both anti-public school and anti-teacher, since most of them graduated from public schools and send their own children there. Why are they so eager to take money away from their community schools to fund what are almost certain to be inferior choices? Is it revenge on teachers for leading protests against pension changes?

She writes:

Back in the 1990s, Kentucky was a shining model of a state that valued education. The Kentucky Education Reform Act revolutionized school funding by creating a central pot of property taxes rather than an uneven patchwork of rich and poor. There was much more: cracking down on corruption and nepotism, raising academic standards, new money for teacher training, important supports for struggling children.

But over the past two decades, the state’s politics have turned crimson and all that potential — and state support for it — is slipping away. Why do Republicans appear to dislike and distrust public schools so much? Is it because their teachers are represented by politically powerful unions that happened to get our Democratic unicorn governor elected? Is it because those unions negotiated pretty good pension promises? Is it because they resisted reopening schools? Is it because the very notion of public education recognizes that government can do good things? 

“I think what you see is a demonization of public education that’s coming from all these right wing groups,” said Nema Brewer, a co-founder of 120 Kentucky United, an education advocacy group that helped defeat Republican plans for teacher pensions and elect Beshear in 2019. “The Republican Party of Kentucky has bought into this demonization of public schools, completely forgetting the majority of them are products of public schools. It’s just amazing to me that this is what’s happened.”

Those Republicans got their political revenge on Tuesday night when they passed House Bill 563, what’s known as a “neo-voucher bill.” It hurts teachers and rural school districts, while creating more segregation and less school funding, a veritable lottery for the GOP.

By now, the research on vouchers is compelling: they don’t raise the academic achievements of students. Voucher schools are typically inferior to public schools because they are free to hire uncertified teachers and principals. They discriminate at will. Why would Republicans think it was a good idea to waste public money on low-quality religious schools or to subsidize the tuition of students already in religious schools?


Read more here: https://www.kentucky.com/opinion/linda-blackford/article249974744.html#storylink=cpy

Categories Accountability, Kentucky, Privatization, Religion, Research, Separation of church and state

Don’t Believe the “Learning Loss” Hoax

By dianeravitch
March 17, 2021 //
106

The mainstream media are filled with warnings about “learning loss” and how we must measure it and why students should go to summer school to make up for what they have “lost.” If we can’t quantify it, they say, how can we know which students are behind? This is silly. There was no “pre-test,” so there can’t be a “post-test.” A test that students take this spring can’t possibly demonstrate “learning loss,” since they can’t be compared to anything else. If you want to know where students are in their learning, ask their teacher.

Here are some good readings on “learning loss.”

Peter Greene gathered some and calls his post a “learning loss debunkery reader.” And don’t miss Peter’s personal tale of his own “learning loss.” It began right after high school graduation, when he realized he had forgotten algebra!

Russ on Reading turned “learning loss” into a Henny Penny fable, in which the wolves are trying to get into the henhouse.

“Wait a minute. Are we sure our children have lost their learning? I know a year away from the schoolhouse is concerning. And I know the online learning is not as good as beak to beak learning, but just what are we worried about here. Our children are learning lots of things. They have learned how to make the best of a bad situation. They have learned how we all need to pitch in to help each other. They have learned to wear masks in public. They have learned a lot about communicable diseases. They may have different learning this year, but is that the same as losing learning?  Before we let the foxes into the hen house, we better be sure there is a big problem.”

The Zoom meeting went silent. Goosey Loosey shut down Foxy Loxy’s Zoom feed. She said, “You know maybe we have bigger things to worry about than learning loss. I am going to go read my chicks a book.”

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, For-Profit, Standardized Testing, Students

Yong Zhao: Beware the “Learning Loss” Trap

By dianeravitch
March 17, 2021 //
12

Pay attention to whatever Yong Zhao writes. He is among the very top tier of educational thinkers in the world. I always learn when I read his work.

This post warns parents, teachers, and policy makers to beware the “learning loss” rhetoric. It is a trap, he says.

He writes:


A dangerous trap exists for educators and education policy makers: the learning loss. This trap comes with a large amount of data and with sophisticated projection methods. It presents a stunningly grim picture for education and it invites educators and policy makers to make wrong decisions and invest in wrong things. The article identifies a number of undesirable outcomes that their concerns could lead to. It also suggests several productive actions when the pandemic is controlled and schools reopen.

The trap is the so-called learning losses during the Covid-19 pandemic. A number of organizations and individuals have put out various estimates about what students have lost due to school closures and remote learning during the pandemic. For example, the global consulting firm McKinsey produced two reports about these learning losses. As late as December 8, 2020, McKinsey said, “Students, on average, started school about three months behind where we would expect them to be in mathematics” and “Students of color were about three to five months behind in learning; white students were about one to three months behind” (Dorn et al. 2020). The Center for Research on Educational Outcomes (CREDO 2020) at Stanford University issued a press release stating that “the average estimates of how much students lost in the Spring of 2020 ranged from 57 to 183 days of learning in Reading and from 136 to 232 days of learning in Math” (para. 2). Other organizations, such as the assessment company NWEA (Kuhfeld and Tarasawa 2020) and the Annenberg Institute at Brown University (Santibanez and Guarino 2020), have also published reports about learning losses. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) published a projection for the economic losses due to learning losses as $14 trillion over the next 80 years (Hanushek and Woessmann 2020).

These estimates have caught the attention of policy makers and educators. Governments, school leaders, and teachers are all concerned about the learning loss students may experience due to the Covid-19 pandemic. After all, schools have been seriously disrupted, as have students and their families. The pandemic has, in more ways than one, significantly affected learning and school operations. It seems only natural to want to know the extent of the learning loss students have experienced and then take actions to hopefully make up for the losses.

Possible mistakes

This is wherein the trap lies. There is nothing wrong with making estimates about learning losses, but the possible actions these projections can induce are worrisome because they can, at best, waste resources and, at worst, lead post-pandemic education in the wrong direction. The concerns of educators and policy makers are to be expected, but these policy makers could end up investing in unproductive educational efforts. Below are a number of undesirable outcomes that their concerns could lead to.

Governments may decide to launch standardized assessments to track students’ learning losses. It is possible that educational policy makers may be so interested in learning the extent of loss experienced by students that they will use standardized testing to assess all students. The desire to know the overall extent of loss and what achievement gaps may exist between different groups of students is completely understandable, but standardized testing can be the worst way to collect such data for two major reasons.

First, any standardized testing given to all students will have a typically limited scope, with a focus on math and reading. In other words, what will be measured is not the entirety of students’ learning but a small piece of their overall education. Even assuming that the assessments are highly accurate (which they are not), they would miss other equally and perhaps more important aspects of learning, such as confidence, self-determination, creativity, entrepreneurial thinking, and other subjects.

Education has many desirable outcomes (Zhao 2017, 2018b). These outcomes can be short term or long term, cognitive and non-cognitive, and instructional and educational. Short-term, cognitive, and instructional outcomes do not necessarily translate directly into long-term, non-cognitive, and educational outcomes. For example, test scores have often been found to have a negative correlation with students’ confidence and well-being (Loveless 2006; OECD 2019; Zhao 2018b). Test scores have also been found to have a negative correlation with economic development and entrepreneurial confidence and activities across (Baker 2007; Tienken 2008; Zhao 2012). Test scores do not predict the future of an individual’s success very well, and non-cognitive skills may play a bigger role than cognitive skills play (Brunello and Schlotter 2010; Levin 2012). Some assessments show successes that are only productive in the short term, while failures may actually be more productive in the long term (Dean and Kuhn 2007; Kapur 2014, 2016).

That’s the beginning. Read it all.


Categories Hoax, Real Education, Standardized Testing

Network for Public Education: The Scandal of For-Profit Charter Schools

By dianeravitch
March 17, 2021 //
14

Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education, authored this powerful exposé of for-profit charter schools. The report names the nation’s largest for-profit charter chains, which profit not only from skimming tuition money, but from lucrative real estate deals and financial dealings with related for-profit corporations owned by the charter operator.

Between September 2020 and February, 2021, The Network for Public Education identified more than 1,100 charter schools that have contracts with one of 138 for-profit organizations to control the schools’ critical or complete operations, including

  • management, personnel, and/or curriculum. Patterns of for-profit management companies directing schools to their related real estate and service corporations is more the rule than the exception among these schools.  Chartered for Profit: The Hidden World of Charter Schools Operated For Financial Gain  exposes how for profit education management organizations use charter schools to direct funds away from children to the pockets of profiteers. 

As the report shows, a significant number of “nonprofit” charter schools are operated by for-profit entrepreneurs.

For-profit charters operate with minimal oversight, transparency, and accountability. Like other businesses, they cultivate relationships with politicians to maintain their favored status.

Meanwhile they siphon away money needed by public schools for their high salaries, generous expense accounts, and handsome profits.

#Chartered4Profit exposes that for-profit EMOs like Academica do not exist to support the charter schools… charter schools exist to help Academica’s real estate ventures.

#Chartered4Profit One of the largest EMOs, National Heritage Academies locks schools in with sweeps contracts. All revenue is passed to the for-profit management corporation.

Categories Education Reform

Maurice Cunningham: A Tangled Web of Christian Conservatives, Economic Royalists, and the “National Parents Union”

By dianeravitch
March 16, 2021 //
5

Maurice Cunningham, a professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts, is a specialist in exposing the influence of “dark money” in our political life, especially in the area of education politics. In this post, he explores the connections among Christian conservatives, economic royalists like the Waltons and Charles Koch, and the so-called “National Parents Union,” which enjoys Walton funding.

The same people now running the NPU were funded by the Waltons, Mike Bloomberg, and other billionaires in 2016 to press for unlimited charter expansion in Massachusetts. When Cunningham exposed the money behind the “Yes on 2” campaign, the wind went out of its sails. Voters realized that the campaign was intended to divert money from their public schools to billionaire hobbies. I wrote about the fight over Proposition 2 in Massachusetts in my latest book Slaying Goliath as an example of successful parent-teacher resistance to the billionaires.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Dark Money, Disruption, Education Reform, Massachusetts, Privatization, Religion
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