CHARTER 2
8/16, see main for older
voucher included here
B3 BEUT
see parochial
merri ok
note leo 4 wants public tax money for pvt religious schools eg oklaHOMA
see yass
see hillsdale story 1 1776 fail
NOLA, Puerto rico dis cap'l
teads 420 underestimate.
bak 1 24
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disaster capitalism poster child after katrina and then covid:
chao and devos bailed out of apparent principle but chao never opposed trump on anything, covid mask fail; devos tried to use covid to push charters
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RWW
08/18/2026
by
Dominionist and MAGA activist Jim Garlow devoted his World Prayer Network call Sunday night to an attack on public education. One of the speakers, Liberty University Vice President of Strategic Partnerships and Alliances Rev. Glenn Clary, described how Liberty is planning to take advantage of a provision in the Republicans’ “big, beautiful bill” designed to funnel tax dollars into Christian schools.
Hostility toward public education is a defining characteristic of the Christian right political movement, which has fought for years to funnel public education funds into religious schools and the conservative-dominated homeschooling movement.
Televangelist Jerry Falwell, founder of Liberty University, wrote in 1979, “I hope I live to see the day when, as in the early days of our country, we won’t have any public schools. The churches will have taken them over again and Christians will be running them. What a happy day that will be!”
Garlow began Sunday’s broadcast by telling his prayer warriors, “We want to help you understand why you've got to help your children, your nephews, your nieces, and your grandkids get out of the public school.” He described public education as “rotten to the core,” and said 75 to 80 percent of students raised in the church lose their faith when they go to college because they had not been “properly grounded.”
Clary, the Liberty vice president and a former chair of the Alaska GOP, described public schools as “anti-God indoctrination centers.” He claimed that public schools are controlled by the National Education Association, an educators’ union that he said he calls the “National Evil Association,” adding, “And so I just think that we need to get the kids out of these public schools.”
An important background to this story is the history of Liberty’s rise to become a billion-dollar behemoth in among conservative Christian colleges. That wasn’t achieved by founder Falwell, but by his now-discredited son Jerry Jr., who saw early on the potential financial windfall of online education, which allowed Liberty to take tuition dollars—much of it funded by taxpayers indirectly through federal student loans—from a huge number of students that didn’t require a lot of physical infrastructure. Liberty devoted millions to high-pressure call centers to recruit tens of thousands of online students.
Liberty University Online Academy, which Clary was promoting on Garlow’s call, is the university’s online K-12 school. Clary says more than 75,000 students have gone through its program. Clary described his current mission as recruiting pastors to turn their church’s used space during the week into classrooms for students taking (and paying for) Liberty’s online classes. It’s a way, he said, for churches to create Christian schools without having to worry about hiring and managing teachers. Students who graduate from the online high school can get 50 percent off their tuition if they become a residential college student at Liberty.
For pastors who might be asking, “How would I pay for this?” Clary suggested that parents and grandparents can contribute. B
The 2025 legislation set up a scheme that allows any taxpayer to get a dollar-for-dollar reduction in taxes for any contribution up to $1,700 to a scholarship granting organization (SGO) beginning on Jan.1, 2027. The SGO in turn can use those dollars to provide “scholarships” or vouchers to pay for tuition at a private school. There is no cap on the program, which the National Center for Public Education has noted could direct “tens of billions of dollars annually towards private school education.”
Clary was enthusiastic about what this could mean for money flowing into Christian schools like Liberty's online academy:
So if you and your wife did your taxes and you owe $2,000 and you contributed $1,700 to an SGO, scholarship granting organization, you could take that $1,700 off your tax bill and you would pay $300 to the government and you have directed your tax dollars to a Christian school organization in order for a child to have a Christian education.
Clary said that Liberty is going to “stand up” its own SGO. “Liberty is going to have this and make it available to the students that come to Liberty and any of the pastors that stand up affiliate schools,” he said.
It’s worth noting that earlier this year, Sens. Mark Kelly (D-AZ) and Mazie Hirono (D-HI) introduced the Keep Public Funds in Public Schools Act, legislation that would repeal the SGO tax credit, which is essentially a federal private school voucher program. The bill was co-sponsored by 28 other Democratic senators.
After Clary spoke, Garlow turned to his next guest, Dr. Lisa Dunne, who has a similar contempt for the “anti-Christian” public education system, calling it “anti-faith, anti-family, anti-freedom—a system that hates our God, hates us, and hates our nation.”
We say education is formation and unfortunately, as you heard from Doctor Clary and you heard from Doctor Garlow, we're wasting a lot of time in the in the educational systems today forming children in a non-biblical worldview. I would say we're raising up atheist armies, and I would say that is not an--that's not hyperbolistic, that’s not an exaggeration in any way.
Dunne, who founded a Christian college and network of Christian schools, is pursuing her vision of replacing public education with church-run schools:
We've done the stats in California, and if 75% of our churches in the state of California would open their doors to 250 students, we would shut down the dysfunctional public school system in our state.
Many religious-right activists have adopted part of the worldview taught by Christian Reconstructionists that there is no biblical basis for public education because God assigned that responsibility to the family and church. Dunne made the same claim, citing Kevin Novak, a right-wing attorney who promotes the abolition of the “civil government school system,” which he calls a “tyrannical mechanism that commands our youth to think in anti-Christian terms.” Dunne called Novak a friend and said he is about to start at her Chula Vista Christian University.
And he goes through biblically, he goes through all of the Word and shows that the government, the secular pagan government, has no jurisdiction to educate our children. None. Zero. The mantle of responsibility is on our shoulders as parents. Now we can choose to partner with a trusted agency like our local church, but it is our responsibility. We will stand before the Lord for how we raised or did not raise our children.
While some religious-right activists call for the abandonment of the public school system, others are using political muscle to try to turn public schools into places to proselytize students or use charter school systems to promote taxpayer funded religious indoctrination.
And while anti-public education religious-right voices may have bigger media platforms, it’s also important to recognize that there are many Christian teachers and administrators in public schools, and many pastors and Christian parents who support the mission of public education.
On the Watchlist
Jim Garlow
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RWW
08/17/2026
Melissa Ryan @ Ctrl Alt Right Delete: Revenge of the White Supremacists
Heidi Beirich isn’t the Trump Regime’s first target, and she won’t be the last.
Hemant Mehta @ Friendly Atheist: Colorado school district dumps Bible-heavy curriculum borrowed from Texas after 3 days
Montezuma-Cortez officials abandoned the "Bluebonnet" curriculum over the religious material, apparent AI errors, and lessons irrelevant to students in Colorado
Julie Curlee @ The Atlantic: The Wrong Kind of American
I had planned to spend the rest of my career serving my country at the CIA. This White House took my calling, but it will not take my pride, or tell me that I don’t belong, or that I must disappear.
Megan O’Matz@ ProPublica: At “Quasi-Public” Private Schools, 100% of Students Get Tuition Vouchers. There’s Almost No Accountability.
Private schools — even those that are heavily dependent on taxpayer funding — often operate without the scrutiny public schools are subject to. Following the money at one Milwaukee private school reveals an opaque world with little oversight.
Matt Sledge @ The Intercept: Secret ICE Agent Tried to ‘Entice’ Minneapolis Activists into Confrontational Tactics
investigative reports that the federal government has turned over to defense attorneys show that undercover ICE agents secretly recorded at churches, libraries, and schools even when organizers stressed the importance of nonviolence.
Sarah Posner @ TPM: Evangelicals Think They’ve Found Their Post-Trump Era Leader in … Mike Huckabee?
Evangelicals’ promotion of Huckabee is a bit of a presidential primary Groundhog Day
Will Bunch @ The Philadelphia Inquirer: We need to care about Trump’s CIA murdering fishermen on the high seas
Reports that CIA drones attacked fishing boats off the Galapagos Islands may be Trump’s worst war crime yet.
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an 10 25
Nearly all state funding for Missouri school vouchers used for religious schools
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scotus?
an 5 25
GOP 'voucher scheme for the wealthy' would hand $5 billion to religious, private schools
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an 8 25
Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders and U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon toured two Arkansas schools Tuesday as part of McMahon’s “Returning Education to the States” tour.
They were joined by Arkansas junior U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton and state Education Secretary Jacob Oliva on tours of Little Rock’s Don R. Roberts Elementary School and Saline County Career and Technical Campus in Benton.
“I wanted to be in places where I could actually see some of the things that I talked about at work,” McMahon said in Saline County. “Not necessarily everybody has to go to a four-year school. There are places like this that would be sponsored from the tech field, where students can earn dual credits, go right into community college, go right to work in the field. … This is the secret sauce.”
McMahon and Cotton both alluded to the need to rid schools of red tape and bureaucracy. President Donald Trump has said he plans on shuttering the U.S. Department of Education to give states more power over education and wants McMahon to put herself out of her own job — a plan McMahon has supported.
Sanders also touted the expansion of the state’s Educational Freedom Account program to around 50,000 students in Arkansas this year. The program, which is open to all Arkansas students for the first time this fall, provides state funding for allowable education expenses, such as private school tuition.
While Sanders and McMahon focused on the positive during their two stops, a handful of protestors outside Roberts Elementary held signs criticizing the state’s LEARNS Act and McMahon. The wide-ranging 2023 law made several changes to the state’s K-12 education system, including creating the school voucher program and raising the state’s minimum teacher salary to $50,000
“The parents of [Roberts Elementary] were incredibly upset when the letter was sent home yesterday … that she would be here,” said Courtney Jackson, a mother of two. She said she didn’t want her children to find out she just stood by while public education was under attack.
“The parents of this school do not want her here,” Jackson said.
Alison Metzler, another protesting parent, said she kept her kids home from school Tuesday because she didn’t want them to be used as “political pawns” by Sanders and McMahon.
“Sarah Huckabee and McMahon are actively trying to dismantle public education, and they do not care about public education. This is all for show, and it’s, it’s just disgusting,” Metzler said. “If Sarah Huckabee really stood with public education, her kids would go to public schools. Instead, they go to the private school a mile down the road, and she’s defunding these exact schools.”
Metzler also criticized Sanders and McMahon for visiting the “whitest affluent school in the Little Rock School District, a top school in the state.” She said she loved the school as a parent with a child who attended, but that if Sanders was really committed to public education, she would be visiting struggling schools in other parts of Little Rock.
“[Roberts Elementary] is not a representation of what the whole district is as a whole,” she said.
Arkansas Advocate is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Arkansas Advocate maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Sonny Albarado for questions: info@arkansasadvocate.com.
it’s just disgusting
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AN PRO PUB 3 25
Over the last three years, the head of a small charter school network that serves fewer than 1,000 students has taken home up to $870,000 annually, a startling amount that appears to be the highest for any public school superintendent in the state and among the top in the nation.
Valere Public Schools Superintendent Salvador Cavazos’ compensation to run three campuses in Austin, Corpus Christi and Brownsville exceeds the less than $450,000 that New York City’s chancellor makes to run the largest school system in the country.
But Cavazos’ salary looks far more modest in publicly posted records that are supposed to provide transparency to taxpayers. That’s because Valere excludes most of his bonuses from its reports to the state and on its own website, instead only sharing his base pay of about $300,000.
The fact that the superintendent of a small district could pull in a big-time salary shocked experts and previewed larger transparency and accountability challenges that could follow as Texas moves to approve a voucher-like program that would allow the use of public funds for private schools.
Cavazos’ total pay is alarming, said Duncan Klussmann, an associate professor at the University of Houston Department of Educational Leadership & Policy Studies.
“I just can’t imagine that there’d be any citizen in the state of Texas that would feel like that’s OK,” Klussmann said.
Details concerning Cavazos’ compensation, and that of two other superintendents identified by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, drew a sharp rebuke from the association that advocates for charter schools across the state.
“It’s not acceptable for any public school to prioritize someone’s personal enrichment ahead of students’ best interests,” Brian Whitley, a spokesperson for the Texas Public Charter Schools Association, said in a statement. He added that any payment decisions made at the expense of students should be reversed immediately.
“The public charter school community has long embraced strong accountability and transparency. That’s what Texans deserve, both for academic outcomes and taxpayer dollars,” he said. “To that end, the full picture of superintendent compensation at all public schools should be made clearer.”
Texas lawmakers have filed legislation that would cap public school superintendents’ annual salaries, but most bills would not restrict bonuses. Those bills also don’t apply to private schools that stand to receive an influx of taxpayer dollars if lawmakers pass legislation this session approving education savings accounts, a type of voucher program. Private schools wouldn’t be subject to the same level of state oversight as public schools.
Lawmakers who advocate for vouchers won’t be able to gauge whether the investments were worthwhile if they don’t mandate that private schools follow the same financial and academic reporting requirements as public schools, said Bruce Baker, a professor at the University of Miami Department of Teaching and Learning.
Cavazos’ compensation proves that even those reporting standards are “woefully inadequate,” Baker said.
Texas school districts must post all compensation and benefits provided to their superintendent online or in public annual reports, according to rules set by the Texas Education Agency. They must also report superintendents’ salaries and any supplemental pay for extra duties to the state. But Valere excluded more than a dozen bonuses and additional payments it awarded Cavazos, some of which its board granted to him in perpetuity.
ProPublica and The Texas Tribune uncovered the total amount the district paid Cavazos by combing through federal tax records that the charter network must file annually with the Internal Revenue Service to maintain its nonprofit status. The news organizations then gathered additional details through public records requests to the district and the state.
Cavazos, who has overseen the charter district since 2014 and previously served as superintendent in two other public school systems, declined an interview and did not answer written questions for this story.
Board members provided written responses to questions through attorney Ryan Lione, who serves as outside counsel for the district. In defending Cavazos’ compensation, they likened his role to that of a corporate CEO, which they said comes with “many more day-to-day duties,” including fundraising, overseeing expansion and guiding the charter through a 2020 split from its parent organization.
“We believe that the benefits that Dr. Cavazos brings to Valere through his vast experience and knowledge justify the compensation that the Board has and continues to award him,” the Valere board’s statement read.
Board members said that they did not believe the district had run afoul of any state reporting requirements because no one from the state had told them that they had.
But Jake Kobersky, a spokesperson for the state’s education agency, said it does not monitor whether districts post their compensation information online and that it only follows up if it receives tips about violations. He declined to comment on whether the district’s omission of bonuses paid to Cavazos in its reporting to the state or on the district’s website was a violation, but after questions from the news organizations, Kobersky said the agency is now reviewing the district’s reporting to “determine what next steps, if any, are necessary.”
Bonus After Bonus
At least two other Texas charter school districts have also paid their superintendents hundreds of thousands of dollars on top of what they publicly reported in recent years, our analysis found.
Dallas-based Gateway Charter Academy, which serves about 600 students, paid its superintendent Robbie Moore $426,620 in 2023, nearly double his base salary of $215,100, the latest available federal tax filings show. Pay for Mollie Purcell Mozley of Faith Family Academy, another Dallas-area charter school superintendent, hit a high of $560,000 in 2021, despite a contracted salary of $306,000. She continued to receive more than $400,000 during each of the two subsequent years, according to tax filings.
The districts didn’t publicly post the additional payments on their websites, and only Faith Family Academy has reported any extra pay to the state. Moore, Mozley and Faith Family Academy did not respond to requests for comment. In a statement, Gateway Charter Academy did not address questions related to the superintendent’s compensation. Without providing any details, the statement said the district has made mistakes but is implementing “corrective measures.” Since it was contacted by the newsrooms, the district has updated its website with a new document that lists an undated $75,000 bonus for Moore. The Texas Education Agency did not answer questions about either school district.
Valere, however, stands out among the charter school districts identified by the news organizations.
Board members have voted to increase Cavazos’ pay or other financial benefits in 14 of their 24 meetings since 2021.
In one instance, the board granted Cavazos a bonus of $20,000 after taxes for every month that he continued to work for the district. The increase, described as a “retention incentive,” bolstered his take-home pay by an additional $240,000 annually.
“It’s almost like they’re just convening just to keep giving away their school’s money to this individual,” said David DeMatthews, a professor at the University of Texas Department of Educational Leadership and Policy. “I don’t think teachers that work in that school would feel so great that rather than make those investments into their children, they’re making it into this gentleman’s bank account.”
Board members defended their decision to dole out repeated bonuses to Cavazos, including payments totaling roughly half a million dollars to fully reimburse a withdrawal he made from his retirement fund in 2018 for a “personal emergency.”
They declined to discuss the nature of the personal emergency but said the payments were “the right thing to do” to ensure that Cavazos could retire one day. Board members claimed that a “significant” portion of Cavazos’ compensation came from private donations but would not say how much or provide documents to support their assertion.
The board also said that it rewarded Cavazos for his work leading the district through a “difficult” 2020 separation from its former parent organization, Southwest Key Programs, the Texas-based nonprofit that provides housing for unaccompanied minors who arrive at the southern border.
The split came after The New York Times revealed that Southwest Key’s leaders, including then-CEO Juan Sanchez, had used money from the charter district and its for-profit companies to bolster their pay well beyond the $187,000 federal cap for migrant shelter grants. Sanchez, who also served on Valere’s school board at the time, received $1.5 million in 2017 as the charter struggled with debt and students contended with deteriorating buildings, the Times found. In response to the reporting, a Southwest Key spokesperson disputed that the nonprofit had unfairly taken money from the schools. Sanchez, who resigned in 2019, denied wrongdoing, saying in an interview with ProPublica and the Tribune that his salary did not come from the charter’s coffers.
State records show that the state education agency closed an investigation in 2022 into “conflict of interest, nepotism, and misuse of funds” at Valere. The agency would not provide details on what prompted the probe or share information about its findings.
To piece together Cavazos’ compensation, the newsrooms filed public records requests for payment records and meeting minutes, which the district had not posted online for years. On at least two occasions, Cavazos received payments that initially appeared to have no record of board approval.
Minutes from a January 2024 meeting showed that the board did not vote on a $73,000 payment he later received. When the newsrooms asked about the discrepancy, the board said it provided the reporters with the wrong copy of the minutes and pointed to a different version the district had later posted online that included approval of both the payment, for a life insurance plan, and a car lease.
Another bonus came after a November board meeting attended by a reporter from the news organizations who heard no discussion of the payment. Questioned about when the board approved the bonus, members said they had done so during a closed-door portion of the meeting. After the reporter pointed out that such an action was against state law, board members said they voted after ending the closed session but before allowing the public, including the reporter, back into the meeting room.
Student Performance Lags
Three academics who study school performance and compensation data said they have never seen a school board fully reimburse any employee’s retirement account or approve so many hefty bonuses in such a short period.
Experts, including Klussmann, a former superintendent of the Spring Branch Independent School District in Houston, said that the money should be put toward students’ education. The vast majority of Valere’s students qualify for free and reduced meals and more than a third are English-language learners, which education experts say are often clear indicators that students are at a learning disadvantage.
Valere’s student performance on state exams also lags behind statewide averages, data shows.
Last year, Valere teachers left at a higher rate than in most schools across the state. The turnover has been difficult for Marisol Gauna’s son, who has autism and ADHD. Gauna says he no longer has a special education teacher who works with him one on one to help overcome learning hurdles. As a result, she worries he could fail the eighth grade.
A parent of three children in the district, Gauna was flabbergasted when she learned about Cavazos’ pay from ProPublica and the Tribune. Those funds, she said, could be used to retain teachers, improve sports facilities and provide healthier cafeteria food.
“It should go to the school or even to the teachers so that way there can be good, responsible teachers that want to stay there,” Gauna said.---
an 1 25
Soon Gov. Kristi Noem could be installed as the next Secretary of Homeland Security. In one of her last official acts as governor, Noem managed to instill some uncertainty in South Dakota’s public education system.
During her budget speech, Noem claimed she wanted to continue to “prioritize education.” Notice that she didn’t say “prioritize public education.” In what was likely her final budget address to the Legislature, Noem proposed an ongoing $4 million expenditure to help families pay for private school tuition and other forms of alternative instruction.
Her largesse toward families seeking to pay for a private school education came during a budget address in which she:
Offered a paltry 1.25% funding increase for the “big three” of health care, public education and state employee salaries.Unveiled $71.9 million in budget reductions and discretionary changes.Included in the budget cuts a $2 million reduction for the Board of Regents and a $3.6 million cut for South Dakota Public Broadcasting.
Noem proposed that the state would pay about $3,000 per student annually for private school tuition or alternative instruction. Private schools, homeschoolers and other forms of alternative instruction operate under a different set of rules. It’s a veritable wild west of schools that can be unaccredited or accredited by someone other than the state. In other words, good luck figuring out how your tax dollars are being spent.
It’s probably possible to figure out how much money the state of South Dakota has invested in public education since statehood. Instead of doing the math, let’s just assume it totals in the billions of dollars. It seems at cross purposes for the state to make that kind of long-term investment in public education only to turn around and start funding its competitors.
Instead of tackling the bigger issues in public education, Noem has revved up the Legislature for a fight over an idea that’s trendy in conservative circles. It’s also an idea that the state can’t afford. Any state budget that proposes tens of millions in cuts isn’t likely to have a spare $4 million. If there is $4 million extra in the state budget, it should be funneled into teacher salaries.
Through neglect and short-sightedness lawmakers and the governor have let teachers’s salaries sink back near the bottom of the barrel nationally. Noem’s proposed 1.25% increase in education funding certainly isn’t going to do much to get South Dakota’s national teacher salary ranking out of the basement.
With its low teacher salary ranking, South Dakota’s universities find themselves training the next generation of teachers for the surrounding states that make a greater attempt to pay teachers what they are worth. When qualified teachers become harder to attract because of South Dakota’s low salaries, school districts will be forced to cut their offerings, hamstringing the very education that Noem says she has gone to such great lengths to “prioritize.”
The last time South Dakota made any progress in this area was in 2016 when Gov. Dennis Daugaard led an effort to raise the state sales tax by half a percent with some of the funds dedicated to raising teachers’ salaries. Since then, lawmakers have cut the state sales tax and mandated a $45,000 minimum salary for public school teachers without offering any extra funding to help schools reach that goal.
Given the state of the budget Noem proposed, lawmakers would do well to put their efforts into protecting public education and finding a funding source that could ensure that the state’s teacher salaries are no longer a national embarrassment.
South Dakota Searchlight is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. South Dakota Searchlight maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Seth Tupper for questions: info@southdakotasearchlight.com.
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an 1 25
Failing AZ charter school reopens as a private religious school — funded by taxpayers
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an 12 24
The story of one Mississippi county shows how private schools are exacerbating segregation
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an 12 24
New Kristi Noem proposal would fund Christian ‘segregation academies’
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an 11 24
Despite Trump’s win, school vouchers were again rejected by majorities of voters
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math prof hit
off BS
milton friedman day at ball park
Jerry Stephenson renta
State Director at Black Alliance for Educational Options
http://68.77.48.18/RandD/Charter%20Schools/Packet/03%20Charter%20Advocacy%20Organizations.pd
srcwatch
Bluegrass Institute for Public Policy Solutions (BIPPS) is a right-wing pressure group that promotes itself as "an independent research and educational institution offering free-market solutions to Kentucky's most pressing problems."[1] The institute was created and initially funded by Chris Derry, a businessman from Bowling Green, Kentucky. BIPPS is a member of the State Policy Network (SPN).
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an 3 24
in August of 2023, Politico reported that right-wing billionaire Leonard Leo is "best known as Donald Trump's White House 'court whisperer," having "played a behind-the-scenes role in the nominations of all three of the former president's Supreme Court justices and promoted them through his multi-billion-dollar network of nonprofits."
Caroline Ciccone, president of the watchdog Accountable.US, told Politico "Leo spent years stacking the court with ideological kindred spirits. Now he's funding a dark web of special interest groups to push an extreme agenda."
According to a Monday, March 18 report published by Rolling Stone, the billionaire — "long averse to media attention" — in a recent podcast interview first reported by Accountable.US "spoke about his $1.6 billion dark money fund, called the Marble Freedom Trust, explaining: 'We’re trying to really institute a lot of legal and social change through philanthropy.'"
The conservative activist, according to Rolling Stone, "also offered his thoughts on how billionaires can help conservatives limit regulations, take over corporate C-suites, reshape America’s education system, and influence our culture," and as a "devout Catholic, additionally discussed his interest in reforming religious institutions."
Speaking "with Joe Lonsdale, the co-founder of surveillance company Palantir and the University of Austin, a conservative alternative college he started with journalist Bari Weiss," Rolling Stone notes, Leo said, "It’s really important that we flood the zone with cases that challenge misuse of the Constitution by the administrative state and by Congress," urging "the ultra-wealthy to support these litigation efforts."
Referring to the conservative-majority high court, he emphasized, "We have a great Overton window in the next couple of decades to really try to create a free society. And I think we should take full advantage of it."
Additionally, as a proponent of the effort to establish a publicly funded religious school in Oklahoma, Leo also "talked about the need to reform the clergy," during the interview, saying, "This is one that I just started thinking about, there’s the whole issue of clergy, and this is a tough one to crack. This may not be for everybody, but my own perspective is: God made us to know him, to love him, and to serve him. And I think our religious leaders need to center more on that, and less on knowing, loving, and serving ourselves, and whatever personal desires or affections we may have."
Furthermore on the subject of education, the billionaire added, "We need to create talent pipelines for K-12 education and for higher ed, something like you’re doing with the University of Austin, so that we remind people that the purpose of higher ed, for example, is to basically build a citizenry that’s committed to the Constitution as it was originally written."
Rolling Stone reports "Leo explained this means recruiting teachers and working to influence education board races, 'so that we can begin to have some sanity and local education.'"
READ MORE:Leonard Leo allies lead effort to establish publicly funded religious school
*Rolling Stone's full report is availableat this link (subscription required)
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moms-for-liberty-silent-on-having-registered-sex-offender-in-leadership
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judd ymail 1 24
Activists from a South Carolina chapter of Moms for Liberty — a group best known for opposing LGBTQ rights, pushing for the removal of library books, and fighting racially inclusive curriculum — are starting their own public charter school. The new school, to be known as the Ashley River Classical Academy, will be fully taxpayer-funded, but is structured in a way that effectively avoids any state oversight or accountability. The school will use the 1776 Curriculum, created by Hillsdale College, a small right-wing institution with close ties to former president Donald Trump. Adam Laats, a historian at New York's Binghamton University, described the 1776 Curriculum as "the red [MAGA] hat in textbook form."
Three of the seven board members for Ashley River Classical Academy are leaders in the Charleston Moms for Liberty chapter, including chair Tara Wood, treasurer Janine Nagrodsky, and education committee head Nicole McCarthy. In 2022, Wood wrote that a "significant amount of the Charleston County School District's budget is spent on third-party consultants who are trying to sexualize our children through inappropriate books and lessons." Wood's background, according to Ashley River Classical Academy's charter application, is not in education but in "real estate and facility development." The school is planning to open for the 2024-25 academic year and the children of board members will be given priority admission.
In general, charter schools in South Carolina are approved and overseen by the state's Public Charter District or the local school board where the school is based. These entities sponsor the school's application, allowing them to open and monitor their performance. If a charter school is not meeting the needs of students, the sponsor is obligated to revoke the charter.
In 2017, the Public Charter District was poised to close several South Carolina charter schools that were "abysmal failures." The schools were "started by people who clearly didn't have the academic heft to run a school or the business acumen to run a business" or "private companies more interested in turning a profit than educating children.
But those charter schools were not closed. A provision was written into the South Carolina charter law to allow colleges and universities to also serve as charter sponsors. It was included to allow South Carolina State University "to open its own charter school." But, in 2017, a small Christian institution, Erskine College, declared itself a charter school sponsor. The only thing required for Erskine College or another institution to become a charter school sponsor is to "register," there are no standards or oversight from the state. Erskine College promptly became the sponsor for the schools the state was planning to close.
Erskine College is controlled by the Associate Reformed Presbyterian (ARP) Church. Both Erskine College and the ARP Church have taken a fundamentalist turn in recent years. Today, "anyone applying to work at Erskine must sign a form affirming their religious views align with the ARP Church." They must also affirm "abortion is a sin, that 'in all instances, one should seek to preserve the life of the unborn child,' that homosexuality is a sin and monogamous marriage is 'God’s intended design for humanity.'" The extreme policies, according to the Index Journal, have "alienate[d] faculty and students and has resulted in a drop in alumni giving." The school's mission "is to glorify God as a Christian academic community where students integrate knowledge and faith." Total enrollment has dropped from over 1,000 in 2008 to about 850 today.
As a result, Erskine College has faced severe financial distress, running a deficit and quickly eating into its modest endowment to pay the bills. The money woes have threatened the accreditation of Erskine College by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges (SACSCOC). In December, the SACSCOC announced that Erskine College was "denied reaffirmation" of its accreditation due to a failure to "manage its financial resources in a responsible manner." The deficiency could result in the revocation of Erskine University's accreditation by SACSCOC in less than a year.
Erskine College has a compelling financial incentive to sponsor South Carolina charter schools since, as a sponsor, it receives "2 percent of the school’s state appropriations." Erskine currently sponsors 28 charter schools, generating millions of dollars in revenue.
Erskine College is sponsoring Ashley River Classical Academy, one of seven charter schools in the university's "pipeline." So even though Ashley River Classical Academy is being funded by state taxpayers, Erskine College will be the sole arbiter of whether the school founded by Moms for Liberty activists is meeting its obligation to students.
Ashley River Classical Academy has hired Alexandria Spry to serve as its first Head of School. Spry previously ran a charter school using the 1776 Curriculum in Florida, Jacksonville Classical Academy East. For the 2022-23 school year, when Spry served as Head of School, Jacksonville Classical Academy East received a grade of "F" from the Florida Department of Education. The school, under Spry's leadership, saw a low percentage of students receiving passing grades in state assessments for English (29%), math (23%), and science (12%).
Spry is scheduled to address a meeting of the Charleston Moms for Liberty chapter this Thursday. Also appearing at the same meeting is a member of the local school board who "allegedly threatened violence against a transgender teacher" and a representative from the South Carolina chapter of Gays Against Groomers (GAG), an anti-trans group. Among other things, GAG lobbies for the removal of books with LGBTQ characters from school libraries. “The school is not a political project,” Spry told the Post and Courier. “We are just trying to provide the best education we can.”
A request for comment, sent to the email address listed on Ashley River Classical Academy's website, bounced back as undeliverable.
Meet the board
The website for the Charleston County chapter of Moms for Liberty states that the group is “dedicated to the survival of America by unifying, educating and empowering parents to defend their parental rights at all levels of government.” Wood, who founded the chapter in August 2021, decided to start the group after attending a meeting where an “education expert spoke about critical race theory [CRT].” While Wood reportedly “does not think that critical race theory is being taught in schools,” she does think that its “tenants” are “trickl[ing] down into K-12 curriculums.” In an interview with the Post and Courier, Wood said, “Anytime you make the narrative ‘White man bad, dark man good’ that’s CRT and that’s horrible.” (CRT is a complex legal theory that is not taught in K-12 schools.)
Wood has been “talking to the Trump campaign about meeting with the former president” and “has already met with Trump’s state director.” Last April, Wood introduced Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) at an event in South Carolina.
Wood is reportedly friends with right-wing influencer Corey Allen. According to the Post and Courier, Wood has been seen on multiple occasions with Allen, who helped organize a rally that Proud Boys attended and was “on the steps of the U.S. Capitol livestreaming the Jan[uary] 6 insurrection.” Allen has since appeared with Wood at fundraising events and meetings for Moms for Liberty. On Facebook, Wood thanked Allen for attending a fundraising event in a comment, saying, “Thank you again for being there, Corey.”
Nagrodsky has also promoted posts by Allen on social media. Nagrodsky posts anti-trans memes and conspiracy theories about the safety of COVID-19 vaccines. On January 1, Nagrodsky reposted a Facebook post stating, “Well, I’m off to knock down the pyramids, because Egyptians had slaves 5,000 years ago. Wish me luck!”
The Board of Directors also includes Joel Schellhammer, who received his Bachelor’s Degree from Hillsdale College and was hired in February 2022 as CEO of “[a] new charter-school management organization associated with Hillsdale College.” Another board member is Elizabeth Crocker, who attended Erskine College, “served on the Erskine College Teacher Education Committee” and also worked at Erskine College as an adjunct professor.
Inside Hillsdale's "patriotic" education
The 1776 Curriculum, which Hillsdale claims “seeks to tell the entire grand narrative of the American story,” promotes a biased and often inaccurate version of American history.
For example, the 1776 Curriculum claims America's Founding Fathers “expressed regret and fear of divine retribution” about slavery. In reality, Thomas Jefferson wrote about his belief of “biological differences between blacks and whites” and reportedly had a relationship with his slave Sally Hemings. Instead of freeing his slaves in his will, James Madison chose to leave them to his wife, who “sold them off to pay debts.” George Washington left instructions to not free his slaves after his death until after his wife had also passed, and “aggressively pursued runaway” slaves. None of this is mentioned in the 1776 Curriculum.
A lesson in the 1776 Curriculum also encourages downplaying the history of slavery in America and emphasizing slavery in other areas of the world instead, stating that “of the nearly 11 million Africans who survived being brought to the Western Hemisphere, around 3 percent, or about 350,000, were brought to the North American continent” and that the “rest of all Africans [were] taken to other colonies in the Caribbean and South America.”
The 1776 Curriculum includes misleading information about the history of women’s rights in America, arguing that by saying “all men are created equal” in the Declaration of Independence, “the Founders meant that men and women share equally in human dignity and in possession of natural rights or freedoms.” The reality is that women at the time could not vote, were granted limited property rights, and could not earn their own income if they were married. The 1776 Curriculum is also circumspect about the cause of the Civil War, arguing many Southerners were motivated by “states’ rights” instead of “preserv[ing] the institution of slavery.”
According to a November report by the Collegian, Hillsdale College’s student newspaper, “the Hillsdale K-12 Education program [currently] has 23 member schools, 14 candidate member schools, and 69 curriculum schools across 33 states.” But some Hillsdale-affiliated schools have struggled with performance issues. According to a report by WFTS Tampa Bay, in the 2021-2022 school year, “three of Hillsdale’s member charter schools” in Florida “earned an overall ‘C’ by Florida’s Department of Education.” Other Hillsdale-affiliated schools have “complain[ed] of interference in individual school management and high fees charged by Barney Charter School Initiative, [Hillsdale’s] support arm.”
In some states, Hillsdale has had difficulty finding support or sponsors for new charter schools. In 2022, Tennessee Governor Bill Lee (R) announced that he planned to open “50 Hillsdale-affiliated charter schools,” but was faced with opposition after a video showing Hillsdale College President Larry Arnn at an event with Lee was released. In the video, Arnn says that teachers “are trained in the dumbest parts of the dumbest colleges.” Arnn later tried to walk back the comments, stating that he did not “mean ‘unintelligent’” but instead meant “ill-conceived” or “misdirected.”
Arnn, whose yearly compensation is reportedly over $1 million, objects to teaching about race and sexuality in schools. In an email obtained by News Channel 5 Nashville, Arnn said that “highly-charged subjects like racism and sexuality” should not be taught in the classroom, but instead teachers should focus on “classes of substance.”
In 2020, Arnn was named the leader of Trump’s 1776 Commission, which was created to advance a “patriotic education.” Hillsdale’s 1776 Curriculum was released “[s]ix months after President Joe Biden dissolved the commission,” although Hillsdale denies any “formal connection” between the two.
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:{===
https://www.alternet.org/alternet-exclusives/a-handy-guide-for-translating-republican-speak-into-plain-english/
alternet no lnx
A handy guide for translating Republican-speak into plain English
}:
Thom Hartmann
January 15, 2024
Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley had a spitting match Wednesday night on CNN as they fought for, well, something. Vice president? Unlikely. Beating Trump? Probably not. Book deal? Who knows?
Anyhow, during the “debate,” they both threw out numerous Reagan-era GOP talking points that most people probably poorly understand, so here’s a handy guide to translate Republican-speak into plain English.
Haley: “I think we have to acknowledge that Republicans and Democrats have both done this. I mean, the fact that they’ve done all of this wasteful spending, they did a $2.2 trillion COVID stimulus bill that expanded welfare that’s now left us with 80 million Americans on Medicaid, 42 million Americans on food stamps. That’s a third of our country.”}:
Reality: The economy crashed in 2020 (due to Covid) in a way that hadn’t been seen since Republican President Herbert Hoover oversaw Black Tuesday, 1929, which kicked off the start of the Republican Great Depression. Covid initially cost our economy an estimated $14 trillion, throwing 3 million Americans out of work. Donald Trump was the first president since Hoover to see significant job losses during his presidency. Unemployment hit 15% (Hoover’s was 23.6%).
While a loose money policy by the Fed helped, the main thing that prevented America from sliding into a second Republican Great Depression was Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s success in shepherding through Congress legislation that softened the impact of Trump’s 15% unemployment; without it, if those unemployed people had lost all their demand-creating spending power (which is what drives economies), the nation would almost certainly have slid into a long-lasting depression.
That was apparently what many in the GOP wanted: in May 2020, for example, when Pelosi shepherded through the House a nearly-$3 trillion coronavirus relief bill, only 44 Republicans voted for it, while 130 voted against it. Although it saved America, Republicans like Haley and DeSantis are still complaining about it.
Currently there are around 84 million low-income Americans on Medicaid, our country’s largest and most successful single-payer healthcare program. It’s far more efficient than any for-profit health insurance programs (no executive salaries, dividends paid to stockholders, or commissions to salespeople) and, with tweaks, could be the foundation of a Medicare-for-All national system like Canada, Costa Rica, and most of Europe have.
Republicans see this as a bad thing, though, because they want all our healthcare to be paid for by private, for-profit health insurance companies that will then kick back part of their profits to GOP political campaigns and other now-legal (Citizens United) bribes.
Food stamps (SNAP), on the other hand, reflect a failure of the rules that govern the American economy. Every family should have enough money to buy food, but, with 20 mostly Red states (including all 13 former Confederate states) keeping their minimum wage at or below the federal minimum wage of $7.25/hour, in virtually all of those states full-time minimum-wage workers can’t afford to provide their families with shelter, transportation, and food.
Nonetheless, Republicans would like to eliminate that food support. After all, they believe, when poor people are down they will only get up if you kick them hard enough.
Haley: “We’ll go and instead of 87,000 IRS agents going after middle America…”}:
Reality: This wild exaggeration of the number of IRS agents funded by the Inflation Reduction Act is a simple lie, promoted by think-tanks funded by America’s rightwing billionaires. Because nearly every time Republicans control the House, Senate, and White House they cut funding to the IRS, it’s been decades since that agency could effectively audit the nation’s largest tax cheats: those very same billionaires.
While the IRS has 79,000 employees, the largest block (13,000) are customer service representatives, and another 10,000 are seasonal employees who file mail or record data. There are lawyers, office staffers, administrators, etc. Only about 10,000 are agents, and that number would expand with the new money available in the Inflation Reduction Act, but not by more than a few thousand, virtually all of whom would direct their efforts to catching billionaire tax cheats.
This is why the “compromise” legislation being worked out right now between the House and Senate, at Republican insistence, contains a $10 billion cut to the IRS budget: they want to again kneecap the agency so their billionaire patrons can continue to steal our tax dollars.
It’s also worth noting that every $1 spent by the IRS investigating tax cheating by billionaires typically returns between $6 and $12 to the federal treasury. The fastest and easiest way to lower the national debt without raising taxes is to audit billionaires, but Republicans will lay down on railroad tracks to try to prevent that.
DeSantis (arguing for a flat tax): “We have a spending problem in this country. It’s not a tax problem in this country. And if you had something that was simple and transparent, not only would that [be] better for economic growth, it’s also better to end the weaponization of government.}:
“The IRS has been weaponized against conservatives going back to the Obama administration. I was there for that. No one’s been held accountable for doing that. … [T]he weaponization of federal power ends the day I become the president of the United States.”}:
Reality: Last year, the US government spent 22% of GDP, covering everything from the military (the largest single expenditure) to Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, all social safety net programs, education, and administration. But by comparison with other OECD countries, we’re misers: France spends 58.34%, Japan 44.09%, the United Kingdom 44.3%, Sweden 47.32%, Spain 47.11%, and Italy 56.74%
These countries spend more because they cover all or nearly all of the healthcare and educational costs of their citizens, as well as providing quality housing support, unemployment, paid sick and maternity leave, and other benefits.
The rightwing billionaires who own the GOP don’t want our government to do this because they fear their income taxes may be raised — like in those other countries — to fund quality-of-life programs for average and poor people.
A “flat tax” — where billionaires pay the same rate as average working people — has long been a dream of Republicans, with rightwingers like Ted Cruz and Rand Paul pushing it for years. They cite Hungary’s 15% flat tax, although Hungary’s billionaires routinely avoid paying anything close to that by living off money borrowed against assets instead of paying themselves wages (a trick emulated by most American billionaires, which is why they only pay 3%). They’ll also live off capital gains, which are taxed at a lower rate and almost entirely benefit the morbidly rich at a scale capable of supporting a wealthy lifestyle.
The net effect of instituting a flat tax in America would be that low-income people, who currently don’t pay income taxes or pay a very low rate, would have to start paying far more, while billionaires could still run their shell game with regard to their own living expenses. Squeezing the lowest income Americans hard to pay America’s bills is a very attractive prospect to Republican politicians and their billionaire owners.
DeSantis: “We’re looking forward to be able to open up energy production… We’re going to be able to open up production. We’re going to choose Midland over Moscow. We’re going to choose the Marcellus Shale over the mullahs. And we’re going to choose the Bakken over Beijing.}:
“Energy independence isn’t even -- it’s not -- it’s good for consumers. It’s good to reduce inflation. And it’s one of the best things we can do for our national security. So we’ll do that on day one, and we are going to reverse Biden’s green new deal and the electric vehicle mandates. We’ll save the American automobile.”}:
Reality: DeSantis and Haley, afraid to offend the fossil fuel billionaires who’ve funded a massive national support network of think-tanks and get-out-the-vote efforts for the GOP, argue that we should largely abandon any effort to cut oil, coal, or methane production and instead increase our dependence on the rightwing fossil fuel billionaires’ products.
Somehow, they manage to ignore the fact that producing electricity by wind or solar is now cheaper than any fossil fuel, and water power has been for centuries. They claim to love the “free market” but will go to the mat to defend hundreds of billions of dollars a year in federal and state subsidies (including military subsidies) to the fossil fuel industry.
Additionally, electric cars are becoming much cheaper to produce than internal combustion engines (they only have a handful of moving parts, never require oil changes or fluids, and don’t even have a transmission), save thousands a year for the average driver on the cost of gasoline, and are fun to drive (they take off like rockets because they have such great torque).
There are now multiple electric cars available at the very bottom end of the new car market, so affordability is no longer an issue, either. All we need is a national network of charging stations, which is what Biden’s “Green New Deal” (actually, it’s the Inflation Reduction Act) is funding over the next few years.
This GOP fealty to fossil fuels and the billionaires the industry produces could all be described as, “Don’t bite the hand that feeds you.”
DeSantis: “I supported Trump’s policy vis-a-vis Russia, Ukraine, and it was successful. You know, the Biden policy has not been. But, Nikki Haley is basically a carbon copy of what Biden is. It’s an open-ended commitment. They want another $108 billion. They will not tell you when the -- they have achieved their goal. And this is going to go on maybe hundreds of billions more into the future. I think a lot of people have died. We need to find a way to end this, because our priorities for national security, of course, the border, which we talked about, and people like Nikki Haley care more about Ukraine’s border than she does about our own southern border, which is wrong.”}:
Reality: Trump is owned by and terrified of Putin, a vicious fascist dictator who routinely murders his political opponents and imprisons journalists. Putin has ordered Trump to stop the US from further funding Ukraine, so he can add that nation — the largest country in Europe, about the size of Texas, with some of the most productive farmland and largest oil and natural gas reserves on the continent — to his empire.
DeSantis, trying to do whatever Trump wants so he doesn’t offend Trump’s fascist base, is willing to sacrifice a fellow democracy (Ukraine) just to curry favor. It’s frankly pathetic. And Ukrainians, trying to defend their own country, are dying every single day under Russia’s brutal attacks. As Republicans continue to withhold aid to Ukraine, blood is on their hands.
On this one issue, Haley is right and deserves credit for telling the truth.
Jake Tapper: “Governor [DeSantis], just a point of clarification, do you want to implement Florida’s education policies nationwide?”}:
DeSantis: “It depends on the policy. School choice universal, yes. I don’t want a nationalized curriculum. I think that that’s a bottom up thing. I want to get rid of the federal Department of Education, get that weight off the backs of the state and local governments. …”}:
Haley: “I have fought for school choice in my entire career because I think parents know their children best, and I think we should always do that. That's why we passed charter school legislation in our state. That’s why we empowered homeschoolers in our state. …”}:
Reality: The entire “school choice” movement emerged in America following the 1954 Brown v Board of Education Supreme Court decision ordering the desegregation of America’s schools. DeSantis and Haley — both governors of former Confederate states that exploded in response to that decision — know this well.
Prior to that time, Republican presidents from Teddy Roosevelt to Dwight Eisenhower were promoting public schools and helping build them as fast as possible.
The second major change in Republican attitudes around public education came in 1980, when David Koch ran for vice president on the Libertarian ticket and part of the billionaire’s platform explicitly demanded public schools in America be shut down:
“We advocate the complete separation of education and State. Government schools lead to the indoctrination of children and interfere with the free choice of individuals. Government ownership, operation, regulation, and subsidy of schools and colleges should be ended. … We condemn compulsory education laws, which spawn prison-like schools with many of the problems associated with prisons, and we call for the immediate repeal of such laws.”}:
Reagan, enchanted by Koch’s suggestion, put Bill Bennett in charge of his Education Department — the guy who said we could reduce crime in America by “aborting every Black baby” — and called for massive cuts to federal aid for education. The result was that many American students today are largely ignorant about civics and college debt has gone from negligible in 1980 to a nearly $2 trillion drag on American families and our economy today. But it’s very profitable for the banks that donate to the GOP.
jake Tapper (about raising the Social Security retirement age): “Just a clarification, Governor Haley, in 15 seconds, should voters in their 20s plan on having to work until they’re 70?”}:
Haley: “They should plan on their retirement age being increased, yes. We’re going to change it to reflect more of what life expectancy should be.”}:
Reality: Reagan, using the same rationalization of “rising life expectancy” lifted the Social Security retirement age from 65 to 67, made Social Security benefits taxable, and refused to index them to the inflation gauge that reflects the needs of the elderly. Republicans have hated Social Security — calling the program “socialism” or “communism” — ever since it was passed in 1935 as part of FDR’s New Deal.
Now they want to raise the qualification age to 70. As Haley pointed out about DeSantis’ years in Congress: “Three years in a row, he voted to raise [the Social Security retirement age] to 70 years old, three years in a row. Go to desantislies.com and you'll see it. So, now suddenly he's going to tell you because he's running for president and he's not going to do it, you can't trust him.” Well said.
DeSantis: “So, number one, we need term limits for members of Congress.”
Reality: This has been another Republican wet dream ever since the Reagan Revolution for a very simple reason: it increases the power of lobbyists.
Historically, when a new lawmaker comes into office, he or she will hook up with an old-timer who can show them the ropes, how to get around the building, where the metaphorical bodies are buried, and teach them how to make legislation.
With term limits, this institutional knowledge is largely stripped out of a legislative body, forcing new legislators to look elsewhere for help.
Because no Republican has ever, anywhere, suggested that lobbyists’ ability to work be term-limited, in those states with term limits the lobbyists end up filling the role of permanent infrastructure to mentor and guide new lawmakers.
Of course, lobbyists — and the billionaires and corporations that pay them — love this. It dramatically increases lobbyists’ power and influence, giving them an early and easy entrée into the personal and political lives of the individual legislators who lean on them for guidance.
Haley: “And I think we have to always be strong on the fact that, look, we want fair elections and we saw some discrepancies in those elections in 2020 that should be concerning. That’s why I passed voter I.D. in South Carolina. That’s why I think when absentee ballots go out, you should be able to verify signatures.”
Reality: Republicans want to make it harder to vote. As Paul Weyrich, co-founder of the Heritage Foundation, told a group of Reagan campaign workers in a Dallas church in 1980:
“How many of our Christians have what I call the goo-goo syndrome: good government? They want everybody to vote. I don’t want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of people. They never have been from the beginning of our country, and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”
For over a century, most states used biometrics to verify voter identity. Signatures done in front of a witness are nearly impossible to fake (unlike IDs, which can be easily faked). Polling place workers would compare the original registration signature with the signature of the person signing in to vote, and if they didn’t match, the worker would disqualify the voter.
When the Motor Voter Act was passed in 1993, not a single state required proof of citizenship to vote, and there was no national problem of voter fraud. The threat of a few years in jail was more than enough to discourage even the most ardent partisan from trying to double-vote or fraudulently vote.
But when Republicans realized that many Democratic voters — low-income people living in cities with mass transit — didn’t have drivers’ licenses, they began a campaign to require “voter ID” not just to register but to vote. It was a solution for a problem of “voter fraud” that didn’t exist: the first Red state to put mandatory ID laws into place as a way of suppressing the urban vote was Republican-controlled Indiana in 2005.
Now they’ve taken it a step further. Because mail-in and absentee ballots — heavily favored by Democratic voters — are authenticated by a signature on the outside of the ballot envelope, the GOP is sending people into ballot-counting venues in Blue cities to challenge signatures.
Once your signature is challenged, your ballot is removed from being counted until you can show up in person at a state or county elections office to produce ID and confirm your identity. Because most people never do this — most don’t even know their ballot has been challenged (it varies from state to state) — this has become one of the GOP’s favorite way of discarding Democratic votes. (See: The Hidden History of the War on Voting.)
— Haley argued that the solution to healthcare unaffordability was to publish prices, so people could comparison shop hospitals and doctors as the ambulance is carrying them from the scene of their car crash. She also argued for expanding the Medicare Advantage scam, because “seniors love it.”
Haley added: “We’re going to pass Tort Reform around this country” because why should you be able to sue a doctor or hospital who harms you? They need to make a buck, too, plus they’re big donors to the GOP.
— Both Haley and DeSantis feigned lack of concern about climate change by claiming that Obama has a big house and John Kerry has a private jet. This is a common diversion from the topic promoted by climate change denial groups funded by fossil fuel billionaires.
— Both also trash-talked trans kids and adults, arguing, as Haley said, “Boys need to go into boys’ bathrooms, girls need to go into girls’ bathrooms.” The medically sound reality of gender dysphoria, known for literally centuries under a variety of names across virtually every culture throughout history, has become a simple punching bag for Republicans. And it’s driving suicides across the country.
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January 2, 2024 rww
- Ed Mazza @ HuffPost: Lauren Boebert Cooks Up Bonkers New Excuse For Bailing On Her District.
Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) knows who to blame for her decision to ditch her own constituents and run in a different district in the upcoming election: Barbra Streisand and Ryan Reynolds.
- Heidi Przybyla @ Politico: Public Christian schools? Leonard Leo’s allies advance a new cause.
Groups aligned with the conservative legal movement and its financial architect, Leonard Leo, are working to promote a publicly funded Christian school in Oklahoma, hoping to create a test case to change the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the First Amendment’s separation of church and state.
- Ken Block @ USA Today: Trump paid me to find voter fraud. Then he lied after I found 2020 election wasn’t stolen.
If voter fraud had impacted the 2020 election, it would already have been proven. Maintaining the lies undermines faith in the foundation of our democracy.
- Steve Benen @ The Maddow Blog: Republican support for the ‘big lie’ moves in the wrong direction.
Three years after Jan. 6, two-thirds of Republicans still reject the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election — which carries lingering consequences.
- Paul Rosenberg @ Salon: Meet the New Apostolic Reformation, cutting edge of the Christian right.
Christian nationalism has new momentum — and a new movement that openly longs for “dominion” over secular America
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an 11 23
allies of influential Texas billionaire Tim Dunn are pushing ahead in Austin with efforts to create a private-school voucher system that could weaken public schools across the state. Meanwhile, Dunn’s associates in his hometown of Midland are working to defeat a local school bond proposal that his district says it desperately needs.
Dunn, an evangelical Christian, is best known for a mostly successful two-decade effort to push the Texas GOP ever further to the right. His political action committees have spent millions to elect pro-voucher candidates and derail Republicans who oppose them. Defend Texas Liberty, the influential PAC he funds with other West Texas oil barons, has come under fire after The Texas Tribune revealed that the PAC’s president had hosted infamous white supremacist Nick Fuentes for an October meeting and that the organization has connections to other white nationalists.
Less known are Dunn’s efforts to shape politics in his hometown of Midland, which will come to a head next week. On Tuesday, residents in the Midland Independent School District will vote on a $1.4 billion bond, the largest in its history, after rejecting a smaller measure four years ago. A dark-money organization whose leaders have ties to Dunn’s Midland oil and gas company, as well as to a prominent conservative public policy organization where Dunn serves as vice chairman, have become among the loudest voices against the bond.
On Sept. 21, less than two months before the Midland bond election, three Midland residents with deep connections to Dunn and his associated public policy organization registered a “social welfare” nonprofit called Move Midland.
The nonprofit is headed by Rachel Walker, a public affairs manager for Dunn’s oil and gas company, CrownQuest Operating LLC, according to public records. A second member, Ernest Angelo, is a former Midland mayor and board member of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think tank that Dunn has helped lead for more than two decades. The third member of the nonprofit’s board is Elizabeth Moore, a former West Texas development officer for the Texas Public Policy Foundation.
Within weeks, the nascent nonprofit had a website, campaign signs and a social media presence as its directors appeared on local radio shows and in community debates to oppose the bond. In the local newspaper, another former mayor urged residents to visit Move Midland’s website for insights about the election. That former mayor, Mike Canon, had run for the Texas Senate in 2018 to unseat Kel Seliger, a prominent Republican who opposed vouchers. Another PAC funded by Dunn, Empower Texans, provided the bulk of his war chest, nearly $350,000, in a losing effort.
Move Midland and its directors have not called attention to their relationship to Dunn and his entities in public appearances. Biographies of the three directors on the nonprofit’s website make no mention of Dunn, CrownQuest or the Texas Public Policy Foundation, where Dunn serves as vice chair of the board.
Walker and other members of the group did not respond to voice messages, emails, Facebook messages or requests made through the Move Midland website.
Dunn likewise did not respond to specific questions regarding the Midland bond and the role of his various entities. Defend Texas Liberty has condemned Fuentes’ “incendiary” views and replaced its president, but has not provided any details about its association with the white nationalist. Dunn has reportedly called the PAC’s meeting with Fuentes a “serious blunder.”
During a debate hosted by the Midland Reporter-Telegram, Walker said that the group is “more than just me. There is a group of informed and involved Midlanders involved in this organization. And we have every right to speak on this issue, because we are taxpaying citizens, just as the rest of the involved and informed community does.”
Walker has said that the group would be open to a scaled-down version of the bond in the future, but that should come when “our taxpayers feel like they have trust in the system, and right now, they just have an overwhelming distrust of how MISD is spending their tax dollars,” she told Marfa Public Radio.
Because Move Midland was formed as a nonprofit and not a political action committee, it is not required to disclose the sources of its funding. Organizations that engage in campaign activity but don’t disclose where their money comes from are typically considered “dark money” entities. A small number of states, including New York and Connecticut, require disclosure of donors who contribute to 501(c)(4) nonprofits that engage in lobbying or make political contributions.
The IRS allows such nonprofits to shield the identities of donors as long as political activity doesn’t constitute the group’s primary activity, though it rarely takes action against nonprofits that violate its rules.
According to its website, Move Midland is “dedicated to making Midland better” and plans to tackle various community issues. The bond election represents the group’s “current area of focus.”
Bond supporters, including a large chunk of the Midland energy sector, say it is crucial to relieving overcrowding and modernizing outdated facilities.
Supporters also have raised questions about the timing of Move Midland’s creation and expressed frustration that its donors are shielded from public view, unlike funders of traditional PACs.
“It seems disingenuous and also unfair and very odd that you would not disclose who’s behind it when as a PAC, they would have to,” said Josh Ham, a volunteer with the pro-bond PAC Energize Midland Schools.
Texas Ethics Commission records show the Energize Midland PAC has received more than $530,000 in contributions, most of it coming from Midland energy companies, which hail the election as an opportunity to cultivate a more robust labor force.
That far outstrips the $10,252 raised by Midlanders for Excellence in Education, a local PAC that opposes the bond. According to campaign finance reports, Midlanders for Excellence in Education has used much of that money to pay for signs and radio advertising.
Walker, the Move Midland leader, reported spending $33,432 to oppose the bond, including payments for direct mailings, text messages and yard signs. Texas law requires nonprofits that engage in independent campaign activity to disclose campaign-related expenditures to the state, but like the federal government, it does not require such groups to disclose the source of their funding. It is unclear if Dunn has given money directly to the group.
Ham said that he does not know who is funding Move Midland, but that its sudden appearance after two years of bond planning makes him question the motivation behind the effort. “To have someone just come along overnight and pop up with just a couple of talking points and with no real support is disappointing,” he said.
Dunn has not been quiet about his concerns over the bond. In an Oct. 15 commentary in the Midland Reporter-Telegram, Dunn accused bond supporters of not being forthcoming with voters about the bond’s tax impact. The district says the bond won’t raise tax rates because the new rates adopted in September were set lower than the previous year’s and included the bond’s impact. Dunn argued that the bond will soak up the $18 million in statewide property tax relief recently approved by the Legislature and that tax rates would be even lower if not for the bond.
While Dunn’s oil companies operate in multiple states, they control mineral properties that, combined, owed more than $1.3 million in estimated property taxes to the school district for 2023.
Dunn called claims that the bond won’t result in a tax rate increase “somewhere between materially misleading and factually false.”
In fact, Dunn noted, the actual ballot language Midlanders will find when they go to the polls will include the clause, “This is a property tax increase.”
Public policy organizations connected with Dunn played a central role in ensuring that the phrase is attached to every single school bond ballot measure in the state, regardless of the bond measure’s actual impact on local taxes.
The phrase, tucked into a 308-page bill in 2019, didn’t make headlines at the time, but those six words have since had an outsize impact on school bond passage rates. According to Dax Gonzalez, director of governmental relations at the Texas Association of School Boards, the phrase is at least partly responsible for the decline in school bond passage rates in subsequent years.
From 2000 to May 2019, about 75% of all school bond proposals passed, according to data from the state’s Bond Review Board. That passage rate has dipped to 64% since November 2019, which bond supporters have attributed to the new ballot language and pandemic-related worries. In elections this past May, that number rebounded to 78%.
“I really do believe that the sole purpose of that language is to decrease the amount of bonds that pass,” said Gonzalez.
Earlier this year, Dunn-backed entities marshaled opposition to attempts favored by public education supporters to give districts more flexibility in the required ballot language in cases where bonds don’t result in tax rate increases. None of the bills made it out of committee.
Dunn has weighed in on local Midland politics before. In 2019, Dunn cast doubts on the Midland school district’s $569 million bond proposal in an op-ed in the local newspaper in which he wondered whether school district officials were “sufficiently committed” to improving the quality of students’ education.
Although officials initially announced the bond had passed on election night, the bond proposal ultimately lost by 26 votes after Midland County election workers discovered a box of unopened ballots weeks after the election.
A few months later, Dunn threw his support behind a sales tax increase for the Midland County Hospital District, explaining in a newspaper column that “high property taxes violate a founding principle of America: private property ownership.”
Sales taxes, Dunn argued, “are the only broad-based, transparent and optional forms of taxation.”
The sales tax increase passed handily in July 2020.
A shift from property taxes to sales taxes at the state level has long been a goal of the various public policy organizations associated with Dunn. According to Texas Comptroller estimates analyzed by the Tribune, sales tax increases cost poor Texans more than wealthier ones, making it a regressive tax.
For some bond supporters, Dunn’s opposition to the current bond proposal is a reflection of his embrace of vouchers for private schools.
“Having a vested interest in a private school, while politically funding an agenda that includes private school vouchers, appears to present a pretty clear conflict of interest for Tim Dunn,” said Reagan Hignojos, a former Midland school board candidate and bond supporter. “These private schools would not be held accountable or be transparent by the same standards of public schools.”
Dunn is the founder of Midland Classical Academy, a private school that offers its approximately 600 K-12 students a “Classical Education from a Biblical Worldview,” according to its website. The school explains that through this lens, “human civilization is rightly understood to have begun in the garden with Adam and Eve.” The school believes in interpreting the Bible in its literal sense, which it takes to mean that marriage can only be between a man and woman and that there are only two genders.
Dunn’s school is currently unaccredited, however, according to data provided by the Texas Private School Accreditation Commission. Under legislation proposed by Texas lawmakers, including several state senators who have received campaign funding from Dunn and his associated PACs, private schools would need accreditation to be eligible for taxpayer dollars.
Dunn has not weighed in on whether his school would pursue voucher payments, and in 2014 he explained the lack of accreditation, writing that the requirements “deal mainly with processes and credentials rather than focusing on an excellent academic and student life opportunity.”
The school did not respond to questions about any potential accreditation or voucher plans.
According to its 2021 IRS filing, the most recent available, the school had $10.4 million in total assets and revenue of $6.3 million, a 66% percent increase compared to what it earned in 2020.
Dunn and his family own five million-dollar homes on land adjacent to Midland Classical Academy, where property taxes go to Midland ISD.
*Disclosure: The Texas Association of School Boards and the Texas Public Policy Foundation have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.
This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2023/11/02/tim-dunn-move-midland-school-bond/.
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an 8 23 $
no lnx
For the next time some idiot tries to tell you the GOP is 'The Party of Business'
Nikki Haley is ‘whitewashing’ her record on Putin while hypocritically attacking Democrats: conservative
Thom Hartmann
August 30, 2023
As predictably as the sun rises and sets, every Sunday sees a commentator or politician on one of the Sunday political talk shows say — without being challenged — words to the effect that the Republican Party understands and supports business better than Democrats. This weekend, as I recall, it was CNN‘s turn.
All my life, in fact, I’ve been told by the media that the GOP is the “party of business.”
It may have once been true when I was a very young child, but today it’s a lie — and has been so in a huge way since the neoliberal Reagan Revolution.
Between 1933 and 2020 there were 14 American presidents, 7 Democratic and 7 Republican.
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The economy during this time grew at an average rate of 4.6% under the Democratic presidents, but only an anemic 2.4% under Republican presidents. For example, the economy has grown three times faster under Biden than under Trump.
Ten of the past 11 recessions began under Republican presidents,although lifelong Republican and Trump Fed appointee Jerome Powell seems hell-bent on producing one for Joe Biden, just in time for the 2024 election.
Republican presidents have exploded the national debt, while the only balanced budgets out of the past 60 years have been presented by Democratic presidents Carter, Clinton, and Obama.
Bill Clinton left George W. Bush a $128 billion surplus (after 4 consecutive years of budget surpluses): Bush immediately squandered it with a massive tax cut for billionaires and two criminal wars.
Just last year, President Biden decreased federal spending by $550 billion and reduced the deficit by $1.4 trillion — the largest one-year deficit drop in American history — all while creating five times more jobs in 2 years than the last three Republican presidents combined.
If not for the Reagan, Bush, and Trump tax cuts for billionaires and the two wars George W. Bush lied us into, our national debt would today be zero instead of over $30 trillion.
The core of American business and thus the livelihood of American communities before Reagan was small- and medium-sized companies.
We enforced anti-trust lawsso aggressively that when Buster Brown and Kinney shoe companies wanted to merge in the 1960s the Supreme Court blocked the merger because the combined company would control about 5 percent of the US shoe market.Nike alone today controls around 20 percent of that market.
Small- and medium-sized companies built America and brought us the American middle class, the first and largest middle class in the world. But in 1983, when Reagan ordered the DOJ, FTC, and SEC to stop enforcing anti-trust laws dating back to the Sherman Act of 1890, giant corporations began a relentless campaign to destroy locally-owned companies.
Strip malls and small-town downtowns that were once mostly home to local retailers are now dominated by giant monopolistic national chains. Big Box stores, spreading across the country unconstrained since Reagan, have been wiping out small towns and rural communities.
One study found, as Reuters reported:
“[T]he closer a store was to the Walmart location, the greater the likelihood it would close. Persky and his colleagues found that for every mile closer to the Walmart, 6 percent more stores closed. Close in around the store's location, between 35 and 60 percent of stores closed.”
For most American businesses and the communities they serve, Republican governance has been a disaster since the Reagan 1980s.
In the 1950s, Republican President Dwight Eisenhower championed building tens of thousands of new public schools all across America, an effort supported by the business community because an educated workforce is a productive workforce.
From the early days of the Industrial Revolution, Americans were proud that we had one of the best-educated workforces in the world, and that itself was a huge boost to business.
In 2010, though, when fossil fuel billionaires bankrolled the Tea Party and were looking for an issue to beat up on Democrats in the 2010 and 2012 elections, they seized on the national standards for education program conceived and legislatively initiated by both Republicans and Democrats called “Common Core.”
Although it had been endorsed by the US Chamber of Commerce and GOP presidential front-runner Jeb Bush (among others) and was in place in 45 states, word went out that it was an effort to “indoctrinate” American students.
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The story ran day after day on Fox “News” and rightwing hate radio. Hysteria followed, and Red state after Red state outlawed these new high standards for high-school graduation. Republican grandstanding for political gain actually dumbed down America.
The 2020 version of this was Critical Race Theory, another equally bogus attack on public education. Between this, “Don’t Say Gay,” and banning thousands of books, the Republican war on public education has blossomed into full flower.
Now, Republican states are trying to shut down their public schools altogether via state-wide voucher programs, replacing Eisenhower’s AAA+ education system with state-funded religious and rightwing for-profit schools that refuse to teach actual science, civics, or American history.
Arizona was the first to go statewide with vouchers, and Republican legislators in Texas, Florida, Kansas, and a dozen other GOP-run states are considering the same. It’s quite simply an all-out effort to destroy public education and subsidize religious schools and private all-white academies for upper-middle-class people who can take advantage of a voucher that only covers part of the cost of tuition.
The only option left for the very poorest people will be the few remaining public schools, essentially turning them into ghettos.
Republican President Dwight Eisenhower ran for re-election in the 1956 election by bragging that he’d expanded Social Security across America, and his 1952 election was mostly powered by his enthusiastic endorsement of unionization.
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At a speech before the American Federation of Labor (AFL) in 1952, Eisenhower noted that the first national legalization of unions in America was signed by Republican President Calvin Coolidge, the 1926 Railway Labor Act.
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“Only a handful of unreconstructed reactionaries harbor the ugly thought of breaking unions,” he told the union group now known as the AFL-CIO, the nation’s largest. “Only a fool would try to deprive working men and women of the right to join the union of their choice.”
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Similarly, in September of 1970 President Richard Nixon hosted labor leaders from across America, praising the movement. As The New York Times noted on September 8, 1970:
“When the ‘great issue’ has been whether to support the President and to meet the nation’s responsibilities ‘for defending and protecting the forces of freedom in the world,’ he said, ‘American labor has never been found wanting. It has always been the first in war and in peace.’”
As a result of combined Democratic and Republican support of unions, by Reagan’s election in 1980 about two-thirds of all American workers had a union job or it’s equivalent,with great pay, benefits, and retirement plans, because a third of workers were union members and that set the pay and benefits floor for the non-union employers to compete for another third of workers.
But, following Nixon putting Lewis Powell on the Supreme Court in 1971, the GOP began to adopt the positions in thePowell Memo, which included gutting labor unions so the morbidly rich could become even richer.
Their rationale was that workers having a say in the workplace had “destabilized” America, a point first made in 1951 by Russell Kirkin his book The Conservative Mind that I detailed two years ago here.
President Reagan, however, declared war on organized labor with his attack on the PATCO union. Ever since, the GOP has been fighting efforts to expand unionization.
Combined with Reagan’s massive tax cuts for billionaires and giant corporations, this loss of union representation has led to a$50 trillion transfer of wealthfrom the homes and retirement accounts of working-class people straight into the money bins of the morbidly rich.
Instead of two-thirds of Americans having a middle-class lifestyle like in 1980, today that number is down to around 45 percent of us. As a result, both poverty and homelessness have exploded across the land. And poor and homeless people can’t afford to support a strong economy — and thus American business — the way a prosperous middle class can.
Dwight Eisenhower created the Small Business Administration to “aid, counsel, assist, and protect insofar as is possible the interests of small-business concerns.”
He signed a massive expansion of Social Security to take the pension/retirement onus off small- and medium-sized employers, increased the minimum wage so a prospering working class could purchase the products of American manufacturers, and built low-income housing across the nation to end the homeless “hobo” problem left over from the Republican Great Depression.
Eisenhower created from scratch the Department of Health, Education and Welfare to build a healthy and well-educated workforce, while Richard Nixon signed the Environmental Protection Agency into law to save the lives of American workers being killed by toxic pesticides and other chemicals (the agency’s creation was provoked by Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring).
Today’s GOP opposes all of these programs and agencies. They only support the largest American companies and the richest citizens.
When Trump was president, he rolled back regulation of toxic pesticides known to cause brain damage to children, and one of his first official acts in office was to end the prohibition of coal mines dumping their toxic waste and tailings into America’s rivers, polluting downstream water supplies with cancer-causing chemicals.
Arguably, the best policy possible for American businesses of all sizes is the Medicare For All program promoted for decades by progressive Democrats.
Back in 2004, Toyota announced they’d be opening a new factory in North America. Three southern US states offered them billions in tax advantages and free land, with the Republican governor of Alabama openly bragging about how cheaply his citizens would work for the company.
But in the end, in 2005, Toyota announced they’d be building the factory in Ontario, Canada because US healthcare costs are nearly twice those of Canada, which has had a successful Medicare For All system in place for more than a half-century (as I lay out in The Hidden History of American Healthcare: Why Sickness Bankrupts You and Makes Others Insanely Rich).
Since then, as Republicans (and a few bought-off Democrats) continue to fight any effort to establish a national healthcare or health insurance system, the company has built two more North American factories in Canada.
If it wasn’t for Republican obstruction, they would’ve been built here and the jobs would be here.
The simple reality is that Republicans have no coherent plans for the American economy beyond more tax cuts for their morbidly rich donors and more deregulation of the very largest and most polluting corporations.
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To compensate for this deficiency, they push hate against queer people, public school teachers, women, and dark-skinned immigrants. DeSantis has gone so far as to attack Disney, Florida’s largest employer and source of tax revenues, because they had the temerity to respect their gay, lesbian, and trans employees and customers.
Republicans have banned hundreds of books from public schools and libraries, saturated our towns and cities with weapons of war, banned women’s access to reproductive healthcare, and packed our courts with judges who’d be comfortable with the American Nazi movement, the Federalist Society, and the John Birch Society.
Not only are these policies and positions bad for America, they’re also destructive of most American businesses.
So, the next time some idiot tries to tell you that the GOP is “the party of business,” let them know the real facts.
The only businesses Republicans actually support are gun sellers, megachurches, corrupt defense contractors, and giant monopolies. And none of those are good for average Americans, locally-owned businesses, or the US economy.
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https://www.alternet.org/christian-nationalism-2661573247/
an imi 8 23
charges that public schools are subjecting children to leftwing indoctrination are proving to be mostly over-hyped or not at all based in fact. Yet, there’s evidence, according to a new report, that a fast-growing sector of the charter school industry is engaged in indoctrination, only, in this case, the schools are instructing children in white, conservative ideology.
The report, “A Sharp Turn Right: A New Breed of Charter Schools Delivers the Conservative Agenda” by the Network for Public Education (NPE), finds that charter schools that market to families a “classical” or “traditional” approach to schooling are essentially catering to parents and politicians that follow “right-wing ideology.”
Using keyword searches, news stories from local and national media, and examinations of charter school websites and other resources, the authors claim to have “identified a representative sample”—273 currently open charter schools—that resemble their definition of what constitutes a right-wing educational agenda.
The report authors offer this number with the caveat that “we are confident there are schools and even chains we missed.”
Two principal criteria the authors used to determine the political leanings of the schools were whether they offered what’s commonly called a “classical” curriculum or a “back-to-basics” curriculum and/or whether the schools’ websites made politically conservative or religious references or were “designed to attract white conservative families.”
Other evidence the authors looked for to determine a school’s political orientation was whether the charters’ owners or founders had publicly stated overtly conservative political beliefs or had substantial connections to right-wing individuals or advocacy groups.
Some charters blatantly signaled their education agendas by, for example, having a cross on their buildings or exhibiting religious symbols or hyper-patriotic messages in school common areas.
The report also accuses this sector of the charter school industry of enrolling mostly white and middle-class and wealthy families anddiscouraging attendance of low-income and non-white families....
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https://www.alternet.org/alternet-exclusives/t**hey-blew-up-my-life**/
no lnx docs
mARTINSVILLE, Ind. — It started April 12, right afterFox News’ Jesse Watters Primetime, one of the most-watched news programs in the country.
A phone call: “You stupid b*tch.”
Then an email: “Everyone you ever encounter … should spit in your face, fling their feces at you (with impeccable aim), punch you, knock you down, kick you, piss on you and hold you there for similar treatment by everyone waiting in line for their turn — you despicable sad excuse for a sub-human being.”
And that was just the first 11 minutes for Jenny Oakley, a mid-level public school administrator in Martinsville, Ind., who found herself depicted in a nationally televised secret camera video and thrust suddenly — and, she said, unfairly and inaccurately — into culture war cruelty.
It would get worse.
During sleepless nights, Oakley’s husband Justin took out his guns for the first time in 10 years. Police began patrols outside the Oakleys’ home after they reported harassment. The couple bought a Doberman named Zeus for added protection. Late on a Saturday night in their quiet neighborhood, a burst of sound — Pow-Pow-Pow — startled them and then a louder Boom.
Having previously enjoyed a quiet life, Jenny Oakley found herself in a debilitating new reality, breaking down when people merely asked how she was doing. She enjoyed reading, but now she couldn’t concentrate. She liked watching videos, but a video got her in this situation. Videos triggered dread.
Oakley describes herself as someone who wants to be liked, someone who has “always cared what people think, to a fault.” She said she avoids controversy and isn’t very political. Justin is the opposite. He works for an Indiana teachers union and ran for state Superintendent of Public Instruction in 2012 before dropping out of the race.
But on social media, strangers took off on Jenny’s character, including one who wrote, “I do not believe in any way that she is a good person.”
An email from the night of the program carried the subject line “God Bless You,” but what it said stung Oakley the most. She could handle the heinous screed of some kook. But this cut deep as an educator and mother of a middle schooler.
“You should never be near any children again, including your own…,” the email said.
That middle schooler helped her mother during the difficult days ahead.
Jenny Oakley and Zeus, her family's Doberman. Doug McSchooler / Raw Story
“I don't think she had ever seen me cry except at funerals,” Oakley said. “And I was walking around here like a zombie, basically. And she made out little Bible verses and stuck them all over the house, you know, trying to hold me up.”
And to what end are the Oakleys suffering through this ordeal?
“I just think it's just part of a bigger attack on public education,” Oakley said. “And, you know, that's the ultimate goal. I wasn't the target necessarily, but I'm definitely the collateral damage.”
Hidden camera, open wounds
In an exclusive interview with Raw Story, Oakley recounted her experience as one of seven public educators from different school districts in Indiana who Accuracy in Media recorded on a hidden camera. Fox News used the video for its April 12 segment on Jesse Watters Primetime.
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Accuracy in Media, a Washington, D.C.-based non-profit, and Fox News alleged that the educators were “stealthily” teaching “principles associated with Critical Race Theory,” a highly controversial front in the culture wars that, at its core, alleges systemic racism in America.
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Raw Story last week requested an interview with Accuracy in Media President Adam Guillette. Accuracy in Media responded with an unsigned email requesting Raw Story submit written questions in advance. Raw Story declined to do so, and Accuracy in Media did not respond to subsequent interview requests. Accuracy in Media also did not respond to several emailed questions.
Fox News did not respond to requests for an interview.
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The supposed deception of parents, Accuracy in Media argues, reinforces the need for public tax money to go to charter and private schools.
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“Our goal is school choice where the money follows the child,” Guillette said on Fox News. “That is the only solution.”
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Within the past few months, Accuracy in Media also published hidden-camera video of public educators in Ohio, North Carolina, Texas, and Nebraska. In those states — plus Indiana and several others — such recordings are legal because only one party to a conversation needs to consent.
ALSO READ: A neuroscientist warns: We're watching the largest and most dangerous 'cult' in American history
Educators were accused, as in Indiana, of sneaking CRT concepts into public school curriculum.
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“After this happened, I was like, ‘How in the world did they align what I was talking about to CRT?’” Oakley said. “Because in fact, I couldn't even talk intelligently about CRT at that time.”
Through open records requests to the districts involved, Raw Story obtained Accuracy in Media’s lightly edited video from the Elkhart, Ind., public school district, plus hundreds of pages of emails from all of the districts.
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Oakley said she spoke to Raw Story to explain her side, advocate for the teaching profession and to show the human cost of rabid culture war fighting.
She appears for 24 seconds in the Accuracy in Media video.
“We’ve talked about, to our textbook companies that are coming in to do presentations — and I actually prep them a little because I’m like, “We want this in our curriculum, so if you could just not say specifically this, then it won’t cause a red flag with the community,’” Oakley says. “And I hate that we have to do that. But that way, it’s still there. And the community would support it if just the content was there. They just … it’s the title.”
The Fox News story started with a graphic over Watters’ shoulder showing children’s blocks with the letters CRT.
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“Children are fed CRT propaganda,” it said on the lower-third of the screen.
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Watters started the segment by asserting, “Schools are brainwashing our kids and then lying about it.”
Jenny Oakley is the first educator shown. The Fox News segment cut something Oakley sees as critical from the Accuracy in Media video — the part where she says, “And the community would support it …”
In an interview, Oakley said the red flag she meant was Social-Emotional Learning (SEL), which is sometimes mistakenly conflated with CRT. Teaching SEL is part of Indiana’s state academic standards and is promoted on a flyer from three state agencies.
It equates to skills such as building resiliency, communicating effectively, and goal setting. Indiana schools are required by law to teach SEL concepts, the Plainfield, Ind., school district explained in a Q&A strongly supportive of its administrator who appeared in the Accuracy in Media video.
CRT, however, is another matter. In June, the Metropolitan School District of Martinsville sued Accuracy in Media, saying it defamed the district and presented it in a false light by saying it teaches CRT. In July, the district withdrew its complaint.
The complaint alleged, “MSD of Martinsville believes that AIM has manipulated a surreptitious recording of a School District employee in an effort to falsely claim that the School District is teaching CRT and is lying to School District parents about it."
Superintendent Eric Bowlen declined comment for this story, including why the district dismissed the lawsuit it brought.
Oakley has not seen the unedited version of the video. The school district’s lawsuit said Accuracy in Media initially agreed to provide it and then went silent.
A day after the Fox News segment, a truck with a large screen on the side played the Accuracy in Media video as it rolled around downtown Indianapolis, with the city about to host the National Rifle Association’s annual convention.
It’s unclear who hired the truck, but Accuracy in Media’s tactics were generating attention.
‘Sydney Greenberg’
On a Thursday morning in February, two women who Oakley thought were in their 20s showed up at Martinsville’s administration building unannounced, saying they were looking for a school district for their child in first grade.
Their story, according to an email Oakley wrote later that day to district colleagues: They came from Texas, but Texas was too conservative and they wanted a new community and school. They expressed concern about censored curriculum and book banning.
It was more than two months before the Fox News story.
Oakley wouldn’t normally be the one to talk with school shoppers. That would be her boss, Suzie Lipps, assistant to the superintendent for curriculum, instruction and human resources. But Lipps was working on an issue outside the building, so Oakley, the director of e-learning and literacy, spoke with them. These opportunities are not taken lightly. That’s especially the case with Indiana’s legislature using tax money for a robust voucher program supporting private, usually faith-based, schools.
When Oakley asked the women what part of town they moved to, they named a local church. The conversation lasted five or 10 minutes, Oakley said. She later contacted the principal of the elementary school the child would be attending and suggested inviting the women to a cultural festival at the school that night.
Oakley got a name from one of the women, “Sydney Greenberg,” and a phone number.
Nobody returned the call inviting them to the cultural event. When Raw Story called the number this month, there was a generic message to leave a voicemail.
Martinsville is a conservative town in a red state. It’s not the place one would think of for a couple seeking a community aligned with their progressive politics.
ALSO READ: Why violent extremists get security clearances — but people of color must sometimes wait and wait
Nothing came of the women’s visit until an email at 2:39 p.m. on April 12 from Max Kiviat, associate producer for Fox News’ Jesse Watters Primetime. He addressed it to Lipps and copied Oakley.
“Tonight we will be covering a story about an undercover investigation involving your school district,” the email said. “Video shows administrators admitting that the schools are using misleading language to confuse parents into stealthily teaching students principles associated with Critical Race Theory. We wanted to offer the school district a chance to comment on the story. We are going live at 7:30pm ET.”
The email didn’t say what specifically the district was being asked to comment on. Oakley said during ensuing conversations, she, Lipps and Bowlen all wondered if they were the one being targeted.
A little after 5 p.m., after internal discussions and consulting with lawyers, Lipps emailed back to say the district would wait to see the story. Two minutes later, Kiviat sent a link to the video Accuracy in Media had posted.
In their living room at home, Jenny and Justin Oakley watched the video on a laptop. Then Jenny started to hear from friends that her face was being used on Fox News promotions for that night’s Jesse Watters Primetime show.
The attacks on her would start in a few hours.
Oakley did have supporters in the community. Some came to her defense on social media. She sought therapy.
Before a school board meeting, local pastors led a prayer circle outside the building for people with all points of view on the situation. One of the pastors invoked the Gospel of John: “Love one another. Such as my love has been for you, so must your love be for each other. This is how all will know you for my disciples: your love for one another.”
A pastor led a prayer before a school board meeting at Martinsville High School the week after Fox News aired a story about Accuracy in Media video featuring a local school administrator. He invoked the gospel of John to love one another. Photo: Stacey Miers
About a week later, Justin learned his mother had brain cancer. This added to the pressure on their daughter who couldn’t have both of her parents in a prolonged dark place.
“So I had to snap out of it,” Jenny Oakley said. “I had to snap out of it for her, just being strong in the fact that I did not do anything wrong and that it'll be interpreted how it is no matter what.”
Unedited video
Accuracy in Media reported $908,000 in contributions and grants on its latest federal tax filing.
As a federally recognized nonprofit organization, it did not have to detail the source or sources of its money. Accuracy in Media says its mission is to “monitor the accuracy of news reporting activities by the media” and “promote accuracy, fairness and balance in news reporting.”
Guillette, the group’s president, makes $200,000, according to the document.
As part of a public records request, Raw Story obtained what Accuracy in Media described in an email to the Elkhart, Ind., school district as a lightly edited, 15-minute hidden-camera conversation with Brad Sheppard, assistant superintendent of instruction.
The edits, Guillette wrote, were to protect Accuracy in Media’s tactics during an “ongoing investigation.”
In the video, what sounds like a man and a woman gave Sheppard frequent affirmations of his answers — “right on,” “good,” “I love that.” The couple’s full pretense for showing up wasn’t part of the video, but what they said to Sheppard left little doubt about their supposed political views.
ALSO READ: A deafening silence from Sen. Tommy Tuberville’s Black football players
“In Texas, unfortunately, we banned anything that has to do with the 1619 Project,” the woman says, referring to the controversial New York Times project that put slavery at the center of America’s history.
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“In Texas, they passed one of those stupid laws banning what they call Critical Race Theory,” the man says.
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“We’re really hoping not to get a MAGA version of history, to put it bluntly,” the woman says.
Regarding what’s taught in the classroom, Sheppard emphasized the Indiana state academic standards.
“As long as (teachers) can tie it back to the standards, they’re covered,” he said. “That’s really the bottom line. Are you teaching the academic standards?”
Sheppard was shown in the Fox News video answering what educational material in the district needs to be “relabeled.”
“I think CRT, Social-Emotional Learning are the two biggies,” he says. “We just have to avoid the words. You know? The labels.”
An Accuracy in Media person says, “We can still do the content, just no labels.”
Sheppard says yes, to which the Accuracy in Media person says, “That’s cool.”
Sheppard was placed on paid administrative leave, returned to his same position and retired in June, according to a lawyer for the district.
ALSO READ: How the long 'arc of the moral universe' just landed in a New York City fire hall
Other records obtained by Raw Story show that Sheppard and another administrator in the Fox News story, Laura DelVecchio of the public school district in Plainfield, Ind., received the same email Oakley did suggesting a line of people punch her and urinate on her.
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All of them arrived within 15 minutes after Jesse Watters Primetime ended. Attorney Jon Little, who represents the Oakleys, believes that indicates a connection to an organization with all-purpose, pre-written screeds for perceived political enemies.
Trustees from the Plainfield school district received a long, racist email suggesting, amid the talk of CRT, a “Thank You White People Day.” It said, “White people created the very high standard of living all races in the USA enjoy” and “many immigrants don’t want to assimilate.” It claimed discrimination against “heterosexual White males.”
In the weeks that followed,Indiana attorney general Todd Rokita got involved on social media, encouraging journalists to write about the Accuracy in Media video.
When DelVecchio received an interview request from Indiana Public Media, she echoed what Oakley said, although they have never met or communicated.
“The story really isn’t about me,” DelVecchio wrote, “it is about the fate of public education.”
A life, changed
Jenny Oakley recalled with a touch of disbelief how, years ago, her husband used to rave about being an eighth grade teacher.
“He would come home every day and say, ‘I just can't believe I get paid to do this as a job,’” she said. “He would come home. He was so excited about the impact that he was making on kids and his conversations every day and the light bulbs going on and all those things.”
For many, teaching is a calling. Pay is often low, but the rewards are supposed to be great. That perception seems to be changing. Indiana has a teacher shortage.
Young teachers, Oakley said, “turn on their TV or hop on Facebook, and all they're seeing are attacks on their profession. And it's hard to keep up the intrinsic motivation of teaching when you have so many of these negative external factors.”
Many of the attacks come from advocates for private and charter schools.
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“I don't think that they're going to be happy until public education just completely crumbles,” Oakley said. “And then they're going to see what kind of pillars of the community we really are, and they'll have to build it back up.”
Among the administrators in the Accuracy in Media video, four are in the same job, one retired, and two districts (Monroe County and Fairfield) did not respond to Raw Story’s inquiry.
Oakley has continued to work. But she said she still can’t be certain about her future in the district.
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Oakley still doesn’t know the identity of the women who came to Martinsville. They weren’t asked to sign in. Now the district office uses the same system as its schools, scanning the driver’s license of everyone who comes in.
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“Thankfully, they didn't walk in here with a backpack that they left behind,” Oakley said, “but they blew up my life.”
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CRYPTO
https://www.mediamatters.org/local-news/local-news-outlets-subscribing-center-squares-wire-service-are-pushing-right-wing
Center Square is filling in a void left by vanishing local newsrooms with right-wing propaganda about school choice, guns, immigration, and elections
WRITTEN BY BEATRICE MOUNT & BEN VAN BLOEM
PUBLISHED 06/20/23
Three years after a dark money-funded conservative website known for posting misinformation rebranded as a local news wire, The Center Square has made its way into newspapers across the country.
In 2019, Watchdog.org, an organization that propagated misinformation and lies that benefitted Republican politicians, rebranded as The Center Square. Since rebranding, the company has operated as a dark money-fueled conservative news wire service writing and distributing right-wing slanted news stories. Their publisher, Franklin News Foundation, has apparently continued to receive funding from the ultra-conservative Donors Trust.
The Center Square provides struggling and underfunded local outlets their stories for free withattribution, unlike larger, more established wire services like the AP which charge licensing fees. This model preys on vulnerable news organizations with vanishing staff and shrinking budgets that need wire articles, like those offered by The Center Square, to fill space. Outlets that use The Center Square do not typically acknowledge the explicitly conservative lean of their work.
According to the company, in 2021, their articles had been republished nearly 180,000 times. Center Square articles appearing in daily papers and online news feeds promote right-wing narratives and cite many right-wing think tanks, lobbyists, and policy groups – many of which belong to the conservative State Policy Network, a group of right-wing think-tanks and policy groups that have promoted a highly-partisan agenda in state-level politics for years. The Center Square’s publisher is a member of the State Policy Network. Franklin News Foundation board chair John Tillman and member Charles Mitchell also lead groups affiliated with the State Policy Network.
Center Square articles are saturating local newspahh' 30,000 papers across Illinois’ River Bend region, [published multiple Center Square articles featuring an NRA lobbyist’s response to Illinois gun restrictions — without mentioning that he’s an NRA lobbyist. According to the Factiva database, The Telegraph published at least two articles in April about the Illinois assault weapons and high-capacity magazine ban that quoted Todd Vandermyde. The NRA lobbyist questioned how Illinois would enforce the law or decide who was properly licensed. The articles did not quote gun control activists or inform readers about enforcement mechanisms for similar bans.
- At least seven newspapers owned by The Times-Journal Inc, circulating over 100,000 papers across Georgia, simultaneously republish articles by The Center Square in each of those papers. According to the Factiva database, a recent article promoting school choice, “Georgia Democrat calls for lawmakers to pass school choice bill,” ran in The Gwinnett Daily Post, The Henry Daily Herald, Newton Citizen, Rockdale Citizen, Jackson Progress-Argus, Cherokee Tribune, and Clayton News Daily on June 2. The Center Square article promoted public school voucher legislation without any pushback from opposed lawmakers, public education groups, teachers, or public school workers. In 2022, The Times Journal Inc. bought six of the papers from Southern Community Newspapers Inc. Center Square articles began appearing on the sites after the purchase.
- According to the Factiva database, The Courier-Times, a North Carolina community newspaper, cited The Center Square at least 1,000 times in the last six months. The Courier-Times circulates about 7,800 papers across Roxboro and Person counties. Residents have received Center Square articles promoting conservative perspectives on the U.S.-Mexico border, including some alleging El Paso is “overrun with foreign nationals,” promoting a claim thatthe Biden administration’s border policies are the “greatest national security threat since 9/11,” and elevating the Texas GOP's accusation that immigrants are invading the U.S. Other Center Square articles run in the Courier-Times portrayed gender identity as a “controversial issue” and legitimized a bogus political investigation into COVID-19 vaccines.
- Sample News Group, which owns dozens of papers in Pennsylvania, published Center Square articles promotingschool choice. The News-Item published a Center Square article alleging that Pennsylvania school districts are “excessively funded” and raising taxes unnecessarily despite having a stockpile of savings. The article quoted from the Senior Vice President of the Commonwealth Foundation, a think-tank affiliated with the State Policy Network. The News-Item distributes 9,556 papers across Northumberland County.
- Louisiana’s L’Observateur, which circulates approximately 2,400 daily papers in the River Parishes area, published a Center Square article promoting a crime report by the free-market think tank Pelican Institute, according to Factiva. The Pelican Institute is a member of The State Policy Network and has ties to ALEC, which played a central role in the expansion of the U.S. prison system.
- The Waukesha Freeman, a Greater Milwaukee Today publication circulating 12,267 papers across Wisconsin, published a Center Square article on a lawsuit alleging the state is “making school choice more difficult.” The December article cited The Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty (WILL) and School Choice**Wisconsin Action. WILL is a conservative public interest law firm that argued against school closures during the pandemic. School Choice Wisconsin Action is a lobbying organization tied to the right-wing State Policy Network:{ which }
:{ }:anti-LGBTQ schools:{ under the }:guise:{ of parental choice. The Center Square article contained no pushback from opposing education groups. Studies show school choice initiatives divert funding from public schools }:and:{ }:increase inequality:{.}: - Washington County Daily News, another Greater Milwaukee Today publication circulating roughly 5,399 papers, republished a Center Square article platforming an election denialist’s bogus investigation into military ballot fraud. According to Factiva, a Center Square article legitimizing GOP state Rep. Janel Brandtjen’s claim ran in the January 10 edition of Washington County Daily News. Brandtjen’s embrace of election conspiracies alienated her from Republican colleagues; last November, they barred her from attending caucus meetings. The Center Square articles promoting right-wing election misinformation have appeared on GM Today’s website.
- Arizona's Herald Review, which circulates approximately 5,848 papers in the Sierra Vista area, reposted a Center Square article fear-mongering about undocumented immigrants evading apprehension. One article uncritically quoted a National Border Patrol Council tweet accusing the Biden administration of “complete erasure of our border.”
- Logan Daily News, which circulates approximately 4,500 papers across Logan, Ohio, republished a Center Square story one-sidedly criticizing Democratic economic policies last December. According to Factiva, Logan Daily News published a Center Square story on Ohio’s unemployment rate quoting from the Buckeye Institute– a State Policy Network affiliate.
- The online edition of Texas’ Longview News-Journal has republished multiple Center Square pieces, including a piece full of conservative attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs. The Longview News-Journal circulates to over 25,000 subscribers daily across 11 east Texas counties. The June article promoting attacks on DEI programs contained no pushback from DEI coordinators – only quotes from Republican legislators.
- The online edition of The Independent, which circulates around 38,000 newspapers across California’s Tri-Valley region, has published many Center Square articles containing unchallenged conservative talking points about theborder, Biden’s green energy policies, and COVID-19. The paper republished an article claiming China “unwittingly verified Wuhan Lab leak.” The report cited by The Center Square actually did not verify that COVID-19 came from a Wuhan lab.
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an 6 23
dem NC
https://www.alternet.org/tricia-cotham-charter-school-industry/
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maine town academy racist
https://www.alternet.org/school-choice-nightmare-families-rights/
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an 1 23
Although a sizable number of Republican candidates in the 2022 midterm elections who were counting on school vouchers to be a winning issue—including Tudor Dixon in Michigan, Kari Lake in Arizona, and Tim Michels in Wisconsin—went down to defeat, school vouchers are not about to go away. Voucher advocates are instead changing the name and pushing for education savings accounts (ESAs).
This article was produced by Our Schools.
ESAs are legal in around 10 states so far, but if this new idea for promoting school choice hasn’t already been proposed in your state, it may be appearing there soon. Here’s what education savings accounts are, how they work, and what policymakers and families in your state should consider before rushing headlong into adopting this idea.
What Are ESAs?
Education savings accounts are a kind of super-voucher. While traditional vouchers give parents a chunk of taxpayer money that they could use for tuition at the school of their choice, an ESA gives parents a chunk of taxpayer money that they can spend on private school tuition or a variety of other educational expenses.
Tennessee’s ESA law offers a typical list of eligible expenses that not only include private school tuition and fees but also textbooks, school uniforms, tutoring, transportation to and from school, computer software, tech devices, summer school tuition, and tuition and fees at a postsecondary school.
ESAs provide a wider range of choices—and a wider range of ways for vendors to get their hands on education tax dollars without having to open a whole school to get voucher money.
ESAs also provide political cover. Vouchers have frequently been rejected by voters, so voucher proponents, on Twitter and in legislative discussions, have opted not to use the label of “voucher” for ESAs. They may further try to sweeten the rebranding by using terms such as “education scholarship accounts” and “education freedom accounts.”
The money comes to parents by way of a company hired to handle these funds. Step Up for Students and ClassWallet are two examples of these “scholarship management” companies. These companies handle the actual disbursement of the monies, often through debit cards; they also take a cut of the funding.
Where Does ESA Money Come From?
Funding for an ESA program can come from several different paths.
One pathway is via tax credit programs that allow corporations and individuals to contribute directly to “scholarship” funding while getting a dollar-for-dollar tax credit. Former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos proposed this on a national scale with her failed Education Freedom Scholarships.
Proponents like to say that tax credit funding does not involve any government spending, which is technically correct because the money never touches government hands. But because it is a tax credit, it does cost the taxpayers. A million dollars in tax credit scholarships means $1 million of revenue the government does not get, leaving a hole that must be made up either by raising taxes or cutting other state and federal programs. Kentucky set up tax credit scholarships to fund its ESA program; the tax credit scholarship program was thrown out in December 2022 by the state’s supreme court for being “unconstitutional.”
Another pathway to ESA funding comes from new laws enacting “backpack funding,” where per-pupil funding that would have gone to the student’s home school district goes to the student’s ESA instead. This can be particularly damaging in states like Arizona, where the money is pulled from the student’s assigned district even if the student has always attended private school. In other words, the school’s operating revenue is reduced by the per-pupil funding, but its operating costs are reduced by zero dollars.
ESAs can also be funded by taking the money off the top of the state’s education budget, meaning the costs of the vouchers hit all school districts, whether they have students choosing vouchers or not.
In addition, a suggestion was made that pandemic relief funds be distributed via ESA-style programs (Oklahoma was one state that tried it).
GOP legislators have also tried to propose that federal funding intended for poor students or students with special needs, such as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), be turned into school voucher programs, a particularly ironic proposal, as students usually give up their rights under IDEA when they move out of the public education system. This repurposing of federal funding for education will no doubt become part of the rhetoric used for ESA funding.
How Are Tax Dollars in ESA Spent?
Tracking how tax dollars are spent in ESA programs is difficult if not impossible because these programs have hardly any accountability.
ESAs, like vouchers, have proven to be a way to use public tax dollars to fund private religious schools. In fact, in states where voucher programs exist, vouchers primarily fund religious schools (particularly Catholic ones). While the separation of church and state, when it comes to education, is already being increasingly whittled away, ESAs, like vouchers, allow states to circumvent that wall entirely.
Further, there are few checks in place to ensure that ESA money is spent on legitimate education expenses. In Arizona, parents spent $700,000 of their ESA money on beauty supplies, clothes, and other questionable expenses. In Oklahoma, pandemic relief funds were disbursed ESA-style, and when news broke that about half a million dollars in funds had been used to buy things like Christmas trees, gaming consoles, and outdoor grills, the state passed the buck.
Ryan Walters, who was just elected as Oklahoma’s education chief, bragged that the private sector would be a “more efficient way” to handle the funds, and he gave ClassWallet freedom to administer the state’s ESA program. But ClassWallet has admitted that it has “neither responsibility for, nor authority to exercise programmatic decision making with respect to the program or its associated federal funds and did not have responsibility for grant compliance.” In other words, nobody is checking to see how the money is really spent.
In most ESA programs, parents can select from an official list of vendors. One might assume that such a list would include vendors that have been screened to make sure that they are qualified providers of high-quality materials and instruction, but one would be wrong. In many states, a vendor is included in the list after simply meeting some very basic requirements. Tennessee’s ESA program leaves oversight of education vendors✎ EditSign largely up to the management of its private contractor. Arizona’s ESA program doesn’t even have✎ EditSign a list of approved schools, vendors, or providers, leaving the destination of taxpayer funding up to the “discretion” of the account holder.
The argument is that free market forces will keep vendors in line and that parents’ ability to make choices will work better than government regulations. One might also argue that the Food and Drug Administration should be shut down and the market should be allowed to regulate food manufacturing behavior. If a company gets sloppy or cheap and starts producing poisoned food, the market will correct it. All we have to do is let some consumers be poisoned in the process.
Not only are taxpayers’ interests unguarded in ESA systems, but parent and student interests are unguarded as well. Parents have to navigate an unregulated marketplace, an asymmetrical market where sellers have far more information than buyers, and where marketing materials take the place of useful information.
What Risks Do ESAs Pose to Students and Families?
Whether school choice advocates are pushing vouchers or ESAs, they frequently fail to mention the most fundamental issue for students and their families—private schools do not have to admit anyone they don’t wish to admit, either by placing various barriers in the way (not offering transportation or meals) or by simply putting restrictions in place.
That was one of the takeaways from Carson v. Makin, a Supreme Court decision that declared that Maine must allow voucher money to go to religious private schools, even if they are clearly discriminatory. Many ESA laws include a sort of non-interference clause that declares that accepting voucher money does not make the school a state actor, and the state may in no way dictate to the school how it will operate. In other words, they may teach what they want and discriminate as they like, even if they accept taxpayer dollars. Students with special needs, as well as LGBTQIA+ students, find they may have far fewer “choice” options than others.
ESA programs fail to protect students in other important ways. Should a family run out of ESA money, or find that they’ve been bilked by a bad vendor, or even be dumped by a vendor that goes out of business midyear, there are no real protections for families of students. Some school choice advocates have suggested that this risk would be minimized by providing third-party consumer reviews via a service like Yelp. But generally, it’s assumed that the invisible hand of the market, wearing its caveat emptor ring, is supposed to do the job of quality oversight.
In one striking example, an ESA bill proposed in Utah in 2022 included a requirement that parents sign a statement that they “assume full financial responsibility for the education” of their child. That means if they run out of voucher money or get left high and dry by a bad vendor or find the vendor incompetent, they are on their own. Presumably, in such a situation, a student would have no recourse but to return to a public school, though that school might get zero funding for that student.
Do ESAs Improve Education Results?
Most importantly, study after study shows that voucher programs in all their forms do not foster excellence in education. ESAs are a newer creation and so have been studied less, but given that the ESA system has even fewer guardrails than traditional vouchers, there’s no reason to think that the educational results would be any better.
In any case, under ESA, poor educational outcomes would be the parents’ problem, and the solutions we’ve seen for this problem are grim.
For instance, some voucher proponents (including DeVos) suggest a low-cost use for vouchers would be microschools, in which a handful of students gather in someone’s home around a computer with some online lessons while an adult “coach” keeps an eye on things. It’s not anyone’s first choice for a great education, but if that’s what you can afford—well, enjoy your choice.
That is the heart of voucher programs, whether you call them vouchers or education savings accounts or freedom scholarship accounts; they get the government out of the school business and turn education into a commodity that is the responsibility of parents alone. In voucher world, the state hands you your debit card and washes its hands of you. “Enjoy your freedom, and good luck.” And if an excellent education is not readily available because the ESA money is inadequate or your child has special needs, and your local public school is struggling with reduced funding, well, that’s your problem.
It’s all about the three D’s—disrupt, defund, and dismantle. Call the voucher system whatever you would like, but it is about reducing education from a public good and shared societal responsibility to a simple consumer good.
Author Bio: Peter Greene was a classroom secondary English teacher in Pennsylvania for more than 39 years and is a senior contributor at Forbes. Follow him on Twitter @palan57.
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6 22 pro publica
...That suggests that Yass’ adult children, two of whom work at Susquehanna, stand to someday inherit multibillion-dollar fortunes — tax-free.
Over decades of TV appearances and speeches promoting his libertarian gospel, Milton Friedman often liked to say he was “in favor of cutting taxes under any circumstances and for any excuse, for any reason, whenever it’s possible.” Friedman died in 2006. Today, Yass, who reveres the economist, is trying to bring Friedman’s ideas to fruition.
Yass has not only worked assiduously to lower his own taxes but has poured millions into political efforts to eliminate them for his class. In recent years he has given $32 million to the anti-tax stalwart Club for Growth. This money paid for TV ads attacking candidates who were seen as wobbly on Friedman’s tax-cuts-anytime-anywhere philosophy.
In Pennsylvania, where Yass is the richest person in the state and a kingmaker in local politics, his favored candidates have shaped tax policy. He is a longtime financial patron of aDemocratic state senator,Anthony Williams, one of the creators of a pair of tax credits that allow companies to slash their state tax bills if they give money to private and charter schools. Susquehanna is, in turn, a major user of the tax credits. (Williams did not respond to requests for comment.)
The programs limited the state tax credits a single company could receive, but Yass and the others found a way to sidestep the limits. Yass, Dantchik and Greenberg simply applied for the tax credits through individual companies each had formed, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported in 2015. In all, the credits have saved Yass and the others at least $53 million in state taxes, records show.
Yass’ views on taxes, along with another stance inspired by Friedman, school privatization, seem to have informed his shifting opinion of Donald Trump.
Yass had opposed Trump during the 2016 Republican presidential primary, instead donating large sums to Rand Paul of Kentucky, the de facto leader of the party’s libertarian wing, and to Libertarian Party nominee Gary Johnson.
A week after Trump won the presidency that November, Yass took the stage at a theater in Philadelphia. Even though Trump had not been his candidate, Yass seemed to relish the long-odds election win, joking that those who “didn’t like Tuesday’s results” could move to Canada.
He used the rest of his remarks at the event, part of a local TED Talk-style series, to promote his passion forcharter and private schoolsand attack Philadelphia teachers.:{ “All we ever hear about is how underpaid they are and how abused they are,” Yass }
:{. “}::{Well, the shocking fact is that the average school teacher in Philadelphia with benefits makes $117,000 a year.”
Over the next four years, Trump delivered both a historic tax cut for the rich and an education secretary who was a champion of charter schools.
Yass has since backed a range of pro-Trump candidates. In Pennsylvania, he has poured money into this year’s Republican effort to take the open gubernatorial seat, which many expect, if successful, will lead to an abortion ban in the state. The Club for Growth also backed a losing candidate for the state’s open U.S. Senate seat, Kathy Barnette, whose campaign centered on her hard-line opposition to abortion, even in cases of rape. Yass is the second biggest donor to the Club (which did not return ProPublica’s requests for comment).
He is also the largest donor to the Rand Paul-affiliated Protect Freedom PAC,giving $2.5 million of his more than $12 million in recent donations just days after the 2020 election. The group’s website says of Democrats: “Of course, they stole the election.”
Yass is looking to harness discontent with public schools during the pandemic to push privatization of the system. He has given $15 million as the sole funder of a political action committee, the School Freedom Fund, that says “school closures, mask mandates, critical race theory, and more” have created “a unique opportunity to promote School Choice as the structural solution to dramatically improve education in America.”
If Yass came to politics motivated by his libertarian ideology, he now has an acute material reason — beyond taxes — to have a voice in Washington.
Late in the Trump administration, Susquehanna’s prize investment came under threat. President Trump announced on July 31, 2020, that he was considering banning TikTok in the United States. (Backers of the ban cited national security concerns over Americans’ private data being controlled by the Chinese firm behind the app, ByteDance.) Susquehanna's multibillion-dollar stake in ByteDance accounts for a major part of Yass’ fortune.
There’s no record of Yass having given to Trump before. But on Aug. 4, 2020, just a few days after the president’s TikTok announcement, Yass gave $5 million to the Club for Growth.Two days later, the group deviated from its normal practice of funding congressional races and announced an ad campaign in the presidential race: $5 million against Joe Biden. The group didn’t mention Yass, but the ads attacked Biden on Yass’ pet issue, charter schools. Later that month, Yass gave the group another $5 million, and more ads ran against Biden.
At the same time, Trump and other administration officials were personally involved in trying to broker a deal to avoid finalizing the TikTok ban. At one point in September, Trump publicly announced his support for a deal in which U.S. companies would buy stakes in ByteDance and a new board would be formed. Among the proposed members of the board: Dantchik, Yass’ partner at Susquehanna.
It’s not clear if Yass or Dantchik talked to the White House about the deal, which ultimately fell through. Courts later blocked the proposal to ban the app.
Yass hasn’t spoken much publicly about how he thinks about his engagement in politics. A rare glimpse came after the Jan. 6 riot, when a Philadelphia political activist named Laura Goldman emailed Yass to question his donations to the Club for Growth. One of the candidates the group backed, Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., had objected to certifying the presidential election results just days earlier.
“To be clear — I don’t think the election was stolen,” Yass responded in a Jan. 15, 2021, email, first reported by the Guardian. “I gave the club money a year ago. Do you think anyone knew Hawley was going to do that? Sometimes politicians deceive their donors.”
Yass appears to have overcome any doubts about the Club for Growth, which has continued to back candidates who say the election was stolen.
Since he sent that email, he has given the group another $5.5 million.
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koch renta-tamales
https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/libre-initiative-promotes-ideology-over-evidence-on-d-c-vouchers/
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The LIBRE Initiative, the Koch brothers’ organization that promotes right-wing economic ideology to Latinos, put out a press releaseon Friday celebrating that Congress had tucked into the recent budget bill a three-year reauthorization for the private school voucher program that it had originally imposed on the District of Columbia during the George W. Bush administration.
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While LIBRE President Daniel Garza claimed that “educational choice programs offer tremendous potential benefits to Latinos and others around the country,” the evidence suggests that the D.C. voucher program hurts rather than helps student achievement.
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LIBRE’s press release claimedthat “there is growing evidence that this program is effective at breaking the link between poverty and poor education.” Really? The press release links “growing evidence” to an article from 2009. Meanwhile, just last month, the U.S. Department of Education published an evaluation that found that students using a voucher to attend private schools score worse in math a year later than their counterparts who applied for a voucher but were not offered one. Reading scores for voucher students were also lower, but not by a statistically significant amount.
As PFAW’s blog noted at the time:
These results throw more cold water on voucher supporters’ enthusiasm for the program, but history suggests that privatization advocates are not deterred by dismal data. That’s whyone scholar called the nomination of voucher cheerleader Betsy DeVos to be Secretary of Education “a triumph of ideology over evidence that should worry anyone who wants to improve results for children.”
In March, members of the DC Council sent a letter to Rep Jason Chaffetz, chair of the Committee on Oversight & Government Reform, opposing reauthorization of the program, which the councilmembers wrote “should be phased out because participation in the program and similar initatives has not only failed to improve students’ academic performance, but worsened it, as found in a series of recent studies.”
People For the American Way and the African American Ministers In Action were among 62 organizations that signed a National Coalition for Public Education letter opposing reauthorization of the program, which the signers said “has proven ineffective and unaccountable to taxpayers.”
The recent Department of Education analysis wasn’t the first bad news for the D.C. voucher program. A 2012 Washington Post investigation found that quality control and accountability were lacking.
Last year People For the American Way worked with Brave New Films to release “Koch Brothers Exposed,” which explains how LIBRE fits the Koch Brothers’ larger strategy to promote right-wing economic policies.
LIBRE’s Daniel Garza was listed earlier this year at #19 on right-wing site Newsmax’s list of 50 most influential Latino Republicans; Garza ally Samuel Rodriguez was next on the list at #20. Two other LIBRE spokespersons, Marilinda Garcia and Rachel Campos-Duffy, also made the top 50. In 2013, at a prayer breakfast organized by Religious Right operative Ralph Reed, Campos-Duffy criticized school breakfast programs for low-income students, saying they hurt family bonding by giving parents an excuse not to make breakfast for their own kids.
Although LIBRE and the Koch Brothers have had their disputes with Trump, a high-level former LIBRE and Americans for Prosperity staffer Andeliz Castillo joined Vice President Mike Pence’s staff this year, part of a wave of Koch-connected people moving into senior administration positions.
More information on the LIBRE Initiative is available in our 2015 Right Wing Watch In Focus report.
Tags: Andeliz Castillo Daniel Garza Donald Trump Marilinda Garcia Mike Pence Rachel Campos Duffy Koch Brothers Public Education Vouchers LIBRE Initiative
YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE:HTTPS://WWW.RIGHTWINGWATCH.ORG/ORGANIZATIO
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https://www.alternet.org/2022/04/devos-desantis/
charter sch
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aha charter school several goals: prove gubmint bad/inept/wasteful and corps cap'l do better 2) get kids out of hands of secular marxist indoctrination 3) grab/suck at big public tax payer teat 4) indoc kids with xian creationsim free mkt BS fossil fuels story 1 5 ? undermines the commons/civil society takeover of school bd also incubator pipeline, also way to recruit women // qanon pedophile?
10 21
// TP town hall ~ ACA:
...Moms for Liberty’s creation story is similar to others in the anti-public education universe: “moms on a mission to stoke the fires of liberty.” In a year and a half Moms for Liberty’s Form 990 tax returns are likely to show thesetwo patriotic moms hauling down in excess of $150,000 each.
As for who is responsible for collecting the names of these culture warriors, PDE has something called a director of outreach and that is Erika Sanzi. She is a veteran of privatization operationsincluding, as Ms. Schneider shows, the billionaire funded Education Post. Ms. Schneider details what we know of Ms. Sanzi’s lucrative attachment to the privatization industry: $82,000 from Ed Post in 2015, $120,000 in 2016, $131,000 in 2017, and $121,000 in 2018.
Perhaps it was Ms. Sanzi who recruited another member, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. Here is what the Sourcewatch project of the Center for Media and Democracy has to say: “Foundation for Individual Rights in Education has deep ties to the Koch brothers. The organization has received millions in funding from the Charles G. Koch Foundation, the Claude R. Lambe Foundation, and the Stand Together Trust.” The group is also a pet project of the radical right funders Bradley Foundation and a passel of other anti-democracy billionaires.
Or it could have been PDE president Nicole Neily who brought in the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. PDE’s website says “Nicole Neily is the president & founder of Parents Defending Education. She is also the president of Speech First, a national campus free speech organization, and has worked at the Independent Women’s Forum and the Cato Institute.” According to Sourcewatch
Speech First’s president and only listed employee, Nicole Neily has worked for many Koch-affiliated groups. Neily was the president of the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity, the Cato Institute’s manager of external relations, the coalition relations manager for FreedomWorks’ Center for Global Economic Growth, and a “Koch summer fellow for both the Center for Financial Privacy and Human Rights and the Competitive Enterprise Institute.”
Additionally, Neily is associated with other Koch-affiliated groups. Neily served as a board member for Young Voices and Young Americans for Liberty....
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https://www.alternet.org/2021/10/are-charter-schools-public-schools/
Proponents of charter schools insist that they are public schools “open to all students." But the truth is more nuanced. As an education policy researcher – and as author of a new book about charter schools I wrote with fellow researcher Wagma Mommandi – I have discovered that charter schools are not as accessible to the public as they are often made out to be.
This finding is particularly relevant in light of the fact that charter school enrollment reportedly grew at a rapid rate during the pandemic. Specifically, according to the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, enrollment increased 7% from 2019-20 to 2020-21. The organization says that is the biggest enrollment jump in a half-decade.
In our book, we identify and describe 13 different approaches that charters use to bring certain types of students in and push other kinds of students out.
Here are four examples from our book.
1. Targeted marketing and advertising
By using specific types of language in their promotional materials and by targeting those materials to specific audiences, charter schools often send a message that they are looking for a certain type of student. This is a way for charter schools to reach or appeal to a certain audience but not others, which in turn shapes who ends up applying to a given school.
For instance, Mueller Charter Leadership Academy in San Diego told prospective families that “All eligible students are welcome to apply. However, it should be noted that because this is a highly advanced, demanding program, it may not be appropriate for everyone."
Targeted advertising can also carry a message. LISA Academy in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 2016 sent out targeted recruitment mailers to area neighborhoods – skipping over the three zip codes for the heavily Black and Latino parts of town.
“They're sending a message they don't want the kids on the east side of town," Max Brantley, editor of the Arkansas Times, remarked after his newspaper exposed the practice. The school later apologized and explained that its plan was to subsequently reach out to those populations through digital advertising.
2. Conditional applications
Charter schools sometimes require multiple essays or a minimum GPA as a condition for initial or continuing enrollment.
Roseland Accelerated Middle School in Santa Rosa, California, for instance, required applicants to submit five short essays plus an autobiography using “well constructed and varied structure."
Minimum GPA requirements can be imposed at the application stage or once admitted. At Lushor Charter School in New Orleans, parents and students are asked to sign a contract that requires students to maintain a 2.0 GPA in core subject areas for continued enrollment.
3. Parents required to 'volunteer'
Some charter schools require parents to volunteer a certain amount of time at the school, or pay money in lieu of volunteering. Pembroke Pines Charter High School in Florida, for example, required each family to complete 30 such “volunteer hours" per year, but allowed 20 of those hours to be “purchased" – US$100 total to buy out the first 10 hours and $200 more for the next 10 hours. These requirements place an additional burden, in terms of time and money, on families that are already struggling economically.
4. Aggressive use of discipline.
At so-called “no excuses" charters that “sweat the small stuff", students have – at least historically – been subjected to harsh discipline for minor infractions, such as chewing gum or failing to constantly keep their eyes on the teacher during class.
Some of these schools repeatedly suspend students and call parents to leave work to pick up a suspended child. The most high-profile example is Success Academy charter school in Fort Greene, in the Brooklyn borough of New York City, where school leaders created a “Got to Go" list of 16 students who were then subjected to harassing discipline. In one case, a school official threatened to call 911 on a 6-year-old because the child was having a “bad day." Nine of the 16 students did in fact withdraw from the school.
Functioning like private schools
Cumulatively, these and the other approaches we detail in our book – titled “School's Choice" – make charter schools more like private schools than the public schools they claim to be.
These practices influence which students are admitted to charter schools and then stay in those schools. Charter school choice therefore affects schools' demographics, including the degree to which they are segregated.
They affect funding equity as well, since state school-finance formulas often don't adequately account for the actual costs of educating different students. In Pennsylvania, for example, charter schools are funded through a system that creates problematic incentives related to access for students with special needs. As explained in a report by the state's bipartisan legislative Special Education Funding Commission, the current funding system provides charter schools “the same funding for each student with a disability, regardless of the severity of that student's disability."
“This creates a strong incentive to overidentify students with less costly disabilities and to under-identify (or under-enroll) students with more severe (or more costly) disabilities," the report states. A speech impediment, for example, is an example of a mild disability, versus a student with, say, a traumatic brain injury, which is a more severe disability. As the report explains, “A student with a mild disability can be a financial boon to a charter school, given that the funding the charter receives will exceed the charter's cost to educate a child."
Notably, Pennsylvania's funding system does not create these incentives for district-run public schools.
These practices also can play a decisive role for comparisons of academic outcomes between charters and traditional public schools run by a school district. Overall, research consistently shows little if any difference in the average test-score outcomes for the two types of schools. But the comparisons may not be fair and accurate. If charter schools can improve their test scores by screening out students they don't think will do well, it can give them an unfair advantage in comparisons with public schools that accept all students.
Policy incentives revisited
So what can be done to make charter schools more accessible? One way is to change policy incentives such as the Pennsylvania funding system mentioned earlier. States can also change the way they reward schools for how well their students do on tests. Arizona, for instance, has policies that give extra funding to charters and other schools with higher achieving students.
In the final two chapters of our book, “School's Choice," Mommandi and I point to a future with charter schools that don't screen or push out students who are lower achieving or more expensive to educate. First, we hold up examples of charter schools that have resisted the incentives to limit access by, for example, working to support their communities' most marginalized students. We then offer a design for a healthier charter school system that doesn't put these exemplary schools at a disadvantage when it comes to accountability and funding systems.
Even in a post-pandemic world, charter school enrollment may continue to grow. But until the public has more access, charters will not be truly public.
Kevin Welner, Professor, Education Policy & Law; Director, National Education Policy Center, University of Colorado Boulder
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https://www.alternet.org/2021/05/no-excuses-charter-schools/
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1220 dingdong betsy, but calls for resistance
covid huge boost?
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LA CA Broad
https://www.alternet.org/2021/03/charter-school-myth/
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/charter-schools/
as the COVID-19 pandemic began closing school buildings and forcing schools to quickly ramp up online learning programs in April, an op-ed by Alex Medler, the executive director of the Colorado Association of Charter School Authorizers, made an appeal to Betsy DeVos's Department of Education to change the guidelines of her department's grants for new charter school startups to allow the money to go to existing charter schools. Medler justified the request to address "immediate needs during the pandemic." But when Chalkbeat broke the story that DeVos would agree with Medler and approve Florida's request to repurpose about $10 million in grant money for new charter schools to be redirected to existing charters, Medler made the curious admission to Chalkbeat reporter Matt Barnum that another reason for the need to change grant requirements was because "there aren't enough new [charter] schools being created across the country to spend all the… money on the one purpose of funding the start-up of new charters."
Is the charter school industry, even before the current crisis, really on the skids?
The annual rate of charter school growth nationwide from 2014 to 2016 was half of what it was between 2008 and 2014, according to a 2019 report from pro-charter nonprofit Bellwether Education Partners. And in some states where charters have proliferated, these schools are seeing student enrollments drop.
Many communities that have been reliable markets for the charter industry are now having fewer new charter school openings. Some of these cities are getting no new charters at all.
But this negative view of the charter market is contradicted by evidence of new charter schools proliferating in some places.
One of those places is northeast Wake County, North Carolina, a suburban sprawl outside Raleigh that includes Rolesville, Wake Forest, Wakefield, Zebulon, and other rapidly growing bedroom communities. The generally affluent region—the sixth-wealthiest zip code in the state—is now home to 11 out of the 24 Wake County charter schools. And more are scheduled to open.
In 2019, local school officials and school PTAs implored the North Carolina State Board of Education not to approve the two newest charters coming to Wake Forest, a community in northeast Wake County, arguing that charter "saturation" was adding to racial segregation in local schools and threatening to financially destabilize the district. The state board approved the schools anyway.
In 2020, Wake County parents have written letters to local news outlets saying new charter schools aren't needed, and they've protested at public hearings considering whether to open the new charters.
One of the charters the state had approved to open in Wake Forest, Wake Preparatory Academy, was rejected by the town's Board of Commissioners, the Wake Forest Gazette reported, because the board found the school's site plan and subdivision proposal had not met the town's requirements. The school is appealing the ruling to the state.
Why are new charter schools opening in northeast Wake County?
"Charter schools can open where they choose," Christine Kushner answered. Kushner, a Princeton graduate in public policy who has lived in Wake County for more than 20 years, has been on the school board of the Wake County Public School System since 2011.
In our phone conversation, Kushner asserted the schools are not needed, "academically or for capacity reasons." She disputed claims charter operators have made that the northeast part of the county "needs seats," and she called that claim, "not an accurate statement."
One reason why charter schools are expanding in northeastern Wake County seems to be because they can.
In 2011, when the North Carolina state legislature voted to lift the state's maximum limit of 100 charters allowed in the state, there was little to no consideration of where charters should expand to. Ten years later, with the number of charters nearly doubled, it seems that the charter industry itself has been allowed to determine that.
The state's light regulatory hand consists of a Charter Schools Advisory Board that receives and reviews charter applications and renewals and makes recommendations to the State Board of Education, which makes the final decision.
It is not uncommon for members of the advisory board to have close associations with charter schools,including Joe Maimone who co-founded a charter, NC Policy Watch's Progressive Pulse reported; Jeannette Butterworth who served on the board of a charter school, Blue Ridge Now reported; Cheryl Turner who was a principal of a charter school, Movement reported; and Lindalyn Kakadelis who was an employee of a state-based right-wing advocacy group that promotes charter schools, Nonprofit Quarterly reported.
Another member, Steven Walker, was appointed by Lieutenant Governor Dan Forest, who the Asheville Citizen-Times and the Courier-Tribune reported has repeatedly tried to squelch information from the state's education department showing charter schools serve disproportionately larger percentages of white and affluent students.
The Charter Schools Advisory Board sets "a pretty low bar" for new charter applicants to gain approval, Kushner told me, and the State Board of Education "often follows the advisory board's recommendations," according to NC Policy Watch.
A Policy Mystery
From a policy standpoint, the geographic placements of charter schools are murky.
The shifting policy justifications for charters—whether they're a civil rights cause, an agent for improving the performance of public schools, or a necessary choice for choice's sake—don't clearly explain why charter schools show up where they do.
If charters are necessary for equity, then why are they showing up in affluent northeast Wake County? If charters are needed in places where the state's public schools are the lowest-performing, then Wake County is well down the list of districts in need. And if choice for choice's sake is the goal, then the state's many rural school districts—where schools are often few and far between, and parents don't have the wherewithal for private school or homeschooling—seem much more in need of new state-supported education options.
Another reason the choice for choice's sake argument seems especially misapplied to Wake County is that the district already offers more choices than are typical of most school districts.
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/trump-pushes-school-privatization-but-keeps-public-schools-biggest-foe-hidden-from-sight
education Sec. Betsy DeVos has spent her life—and lots of her family’s money—pushing to destroy public education. And now the coronavirus pandemic is giving the Trump administration a tool to do just that, but DeVos is being all but erased from the public effort.
There’s a reason for that: DeVos has beenunpopular from her Senate confirmation hearing on. As people struggle with school reopening plans that are confusing, inadequate, unsafe, or all of the above, it might be counterproductive to remind them that the Trump administration’s proposed answers are in fact part of the same war against public education DeVos has been waging for a long time.
“School choice,” or, in translation, funneling public money away from public schools and into private schools and privately run charter schools that don’t have to follow the same rules as public schools, was a centerpiece of the Republican National Convention (RNC). Donald Trump talked about it—lying about Democratic nominee Joe Biden’s position on charter schools—as did Melania and Don Jr., among other speakers.
But while “school choice” was everywhere at the RNC, DeVos was entirely absent, not even included in a video about women in the Trump administration. That’s a decision. Not “we didn’t have time to include her as a convention speaker” but an intentional omission of one of the highest-ranking women in the administration.
deVos may be a particularly unappealing messenger with her yachts and mansions and fumbling about “potential grizzlies.” But it’s also worth thinking about how much Team Trump is trying to use the pandemic as a stealth attack, separating DeVos’ relatively unpopular longtime efforts against public schools from the push to replace public schools with privatized options in this specific pandemic moment. The coronavirus is a chance to rebrand school privatization away from Betsy DeVos, presenting it as an answer to a specific problem now.
That two-pronged attack—the longstanding one built on DeVos’ money and the current one masquerading as a solution to a new problem—is powerful. This is an existential crisis for public education. But don’t mistake the idea that privatized education is the answer to the coronavirus crisis for anything but the same old assault on the public good of an education system that serves all kids.
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occupy ~ stratfor
...
The playbook in action for Nestle
Speaking at the April 1982 Public Affairs Council conference to his colleagues in the PR industry, Pagan revealed the skeleton of the playbook that would last all the way through the Stratfor days.
Pagan International arose out of the ashes of a controversial Nestle public relations campaign named, in Orwellian fashion, the “Nestle Coordination Center for Nutrition.” It was co-run by Pagan and Jack Mongoven.
Mongoven was once a reporter for The Chicago Tribune and served as an executive editor of Pioneer Newspapers before becoming a spokesman for the Department of Health, Education and Welfare and then the Republican National Committee.
Nestle’s Coordination Center for Nutrition began in 1980 as a major public relations effort designed to fend off complaints and an eventual international boycott. Criticism of Nestle was spearheaded by the British group War on Want, which tracked the company’s marketing of powdered baby milk in the developing world in a 1974 investigation called “The Baby Killer.”
Nestle had decided the developing world would be a good place to sell its baby formula, despite the fact that the formula interrupted women’s lactation process and prevented their breasts from producing enough milk.
“Women who were induced to use [the] formula in place of breast milk often had no choice but to dilute the formula with contaminated water, leading to diarrhea, dehydration and death among … infants,” explain John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton in their book, “Toxic Sludge Is Good for You! Lies, Damn Lies and the Public Relations Industry.”
This behavior by Nestle created a global uproar and eventually planted the seeds of a boycott by more than 700 churches and activist groups.
Mongoven and Pagan — under the auspices of the Coordination Center for Nutrition, which shared office space with The Tobacco Institute,according to Legacy Tobacco Archive Library documents — decided the best response to the burgeoning social movement was to divide and conquer it.
One of their first strategies was to peel off some of strongest supporters of the anti-Nestle campaign — educators.
“Some of the boycott’s strongest support came from teachers, represented by the National Teachers Association, so NCCN courted support from American Federation of Teachers, a smaller, more conservative rival union,” wrote Stauber and Rampton.
Nestle also won over an ally from the inside of another institutional opponent: churches.
“To counter the churches involved in the boycott, they needed to find a strong church that would take their side,” Stauber and Rampton further explained. “The United Methodists were supporting the boycott, but through negotiations and piecemeal concessions, Nestle gradually succeeded in winning them over.”
To make amends, Nestle worked with the Infant Formula Audit Commission to ensure its global marketing practices were in line with World Health Organization rules. It was chaired by Edmund Muskie, a former U.S. senator and U.S. secretary of state under President Jimmy Carter.
The problem: Nestle created the commission, funded it and called all the shots. Few equipped with this knowledge were surprised when the commission concluded “the company has not been improperly ‘dumping’ baby formula on Third World hospitals,” as explained in The Los Angeles Times.
Muskie’s audit commission — or, better put, Nestle’s — is now seen as a “model” for corporations seeking to defuse sticky communication crises, as documented in a 1986 article in the Journal for Business Strategy.
For his successful efforts running what he would later describe as “a responsive, accurate corporate issue and trends warning system [with] analysis capability,” Pagan received the Public Relations Society of America’s prestigious Silver Anvil Award. Other industries have followed similar strategies, such as the shale gas industry’s“Energy in Depth” and corporate education reform’s “Stand for Children.”...
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720 cmd
Virtual Charter School Company Says Covid-19 Is the ‘Tailwind’ It’s Been Waiting For
In These Times — 6/18/2020
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see betsy no waste crisis // katrina?
https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/besty-devos-denounced-for-new-craven-public-school-privatization-scheme
with the Trump administration planning to demand that Congress devote a large chunk of the state and local education funding in the next Covid-19 relief package to a new grant program for private and religious schools, the 1.7 million-member American Federation of Teachers on Thursday accused Education Secretary Betsy DeVos of attempting to exploit the pandemic to advance her privatization agenda.
“It is telling that, after spending more than three years doing nothing to help the public schools that 90 percent of children attend, Betsy DeVos races to divert resources into private hands 48 hours after the Supreme Court’s decision in Espinoza,” Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said in a statement, referring to the high court’s ruling Tuesday that religious schools cannot be excluded from taxpayer aid programs.
“With our country dealing with a pandemic, an economic recession, and structural racism, she’s spied an opening to exploit this crisis to resuscitate her failed agenda,” said Weingarten. “And it’s especially sickening that, in the middle of a national reckoning over race, when poor schools are in desperate need of funds to reopen safely, DeVos hijacks the anniversary of the Civil Rights Act to shift support away from where it’s needed most.”
“DeVos’ craven attempts to divide and privatize would be laughable if the stakes weren’t so high,” Weingarten added.
mcClatchy reported Thursday that the Trump administration intends to ask Congress “for a ‘one-time, emergency appropriation’ for a new grant proposal” that would “be provided to states to distribute to nonprofit institutions that disburse scholarships to qualified students who want to attend non-public schools.”
“The White House is seeking to have 10% of the amount that Congress approves for state and local educational agencies set aside for the grants,” according to McClatchy. “Trump will also seek approval of $5 billion in federal tax credits for businesses and individuals who donate to the scholarship programs.”
Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), the top Democrat on the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, warned in a statement Thursday that “Secretary DeVos and President Trump are using this pandemic as an excuse to push an ideological privatization agenda that would divert much-needed funds away from our public schools that serve approximately 90% of students across the country.”
“Right now, our public education system is facing unprecedented challenges—public schools are scrambling to implement safety protocols with limited funds, millions of education jobs are on the line due to looming budget shortfalls, and families across the country are struggling with a chaotic, uncertain reality,” Murray said.
“On the anniversary of Civil Rights Act of 1964, it’s also important to note the pandemic has exacerbated severe racial inequities that have long existed in our education system,” the Washington Democrat continued. “If Republicans have any sincere interest in addressing these inequities, they should show it by working with Democrats to invest in public education and address systemic racism rather than siphoning resources away when they’re needed more than ever.”
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never waste a crisis: disaster capitalism poster child
https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/betsy-devos-openly-admits-shes-using-the-pandemic-to-further-her-private-school-choice-agenda/
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an 420
no lnx
How Betsy DeVos and the charter school movement are exploiting the pandemic to advance their agendas
PBS NewsHour
Written by Jeff Bryant / Independent Media Institute April 22, 2020
COVID-19 has shuttered public schools across the nation, state governments are threatening to slash education budgets due to the economic collapse caused by the outbreak, and emergency aid provided by the federal government is far short of what is needed, according to a broad coalition of education groups, but the charter school industry may benefit from its unique status to seek public funding from multiple sources and expand these schools into many more communities traumatized by the pandemic and financial fallout.
As school districts reported huge problems with converting classroom learning into online instruction delivered to students’ homes, often due to lack of funding for internet-capable devices and Wi-Fi hotspots, charter school proponents spread the news of how their industry could take advantage of emergency aid.
Charter operators rolled out new marketing campaigns to lure families to enroll in their schools. And in national and local news outlets, advocates for charters, vouchers, and other forms of “school choice” helped forge a new media narrative about how the shuttering of the nation’s schools was an opportunity for parents and their children to leave public schools.
Teachers in Los Angeles and Oakland urged their districts to stop charter school expansions and co-locations, which they believe worsen the trauma that children in their communities are experiencing due to the virus. But the Trump administration and U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos have shown no signs of easing up their campaigns to further privatize public schools.
“This is an opportunity,” said DeVos in an interview with right-wing radio talk show host Glenn Beck, “to collectively look very seriously at the fact that K-12 education for too long has been very static and very stuck in one method of delivering and making instruction available.”
A Gift from DeVos
On March 27, one of DeVos’s first reactions to the pandemic was to urge Congress to provide “microgrants” to help “the most disadvantaged students,” an idea that struck knowledgeable education policy observers—including retired teacher Peter Greene and National Education Association president Lily Eskelsen Garcia—as being in sync with her longtime advocacy for school vouchers. Somehow the mass shuttering of the nation’s schools convinced her “that necessity has never been more evident.”
A week and a half later, DeVos unveiled an investment of more than $200 million in grants from the federal government to help 13 charter school management companies expand.
It’s not at all clear the new grants come with new measures to oversee how charters spend the money. If they don’t, that would be a big mistake given a December 2019 report from the Network for Public Education (NPE) that found that since the charter grant program’s inception, approximately $1.17 billion has gone to schools that either never opened or that opened and have since shut down. The failure rate of charter startups funded by the education department’s Charter School Program is 37 percent.
An earlier NPE report, which I coauthored, also found that many charter management organizations that have received federal grants are “beset with problems including conflicts of interest and profiteering.” Some of the organizations receiving this new round of federal funding have these same flaws.
For instance, the largest grant, $72 million over five years, is going to the IDEA charter chain, which in January 2020 was publicly humiliated by reports in the Houston Chronicle for its plan to use $2 million in taxpayer money to buy a luxury private jet. The Chronicle also revealed the company had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars annually on tickets and luxury box seats at San Antonio Spurs NBA games—over $400,000 in the most recent year.
Another recent report, in the Texas Monitor, revealed IDEA executives spent over $800,000 on luxury travel between 2017 and 2019, including private jets and limos. In one of these larks, IDEA CEO Tom Torkelson took a private jet to Tampa to meet with DeVos “to discuss ‘education philanthropy,’” the Texas Monitor reports. Torkelson recently resigned.
Another charter chain benefitting from DeVos’s generosity is Mater Academy, which received the second-largest grant of $57.1 million. Mater Academy is affiliated with for-profit education company Academica.
As NPE executive director Carol Burris explained in the Washington Post, three schools operated by Academica in Florida, including two in the Mater chain, were the subjects of a government investigation that found “related party transactions” between Academica and “a real estate company that leased both buildings and security services to the schools.” The companies were also connected to founders of both the Mater Academies and Academica.
An extensive investigation of Academica’s business practices conducted by privatization watchdog group In the Public Interest in 2016 found in addition to providing management services, Academica also leased facilities to many of its schools and tended to charge significantly higher rents than what non-Academica charters were made to pay.
Each of these charter school operations deserves close scrutiny of their business practices, but DeVos has chosen to reward them with over $129 million in federal funding at a time when public school districts are in crisis and likely face severe budget cuts.
How Charters Double-Dip
When Congress and the Trump administration announced plans in late March to send $13.5 billion in emergency aid to public schools, the charter school industry insisted it deserves its cut of the rescue funds too.
Writing in the pro-charter media outlet The 74, Nina Rees, executive director of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools (NAPCS), said DeVos and governors should encourage districts to release these funds to schools “without regard to differences in school model,” meaning not to exclude charters.
In her letter telling governors where to apply for the emergency funds, DeVos specified the money was intended to support “schools (including charter schools and non-public schools),” meaning funds could be spent on charter schools and private schools.
Days before, Rees insisted charter schools be regarded as public schools and eligible for emergency aid, her organization also advised charter schools to apply for federal rescue funds for small businesses devastated by the pandemic.
According to Education Week, charter lobbying groups including NAPCS have “urged charter schools… to consider applying for the $349 billion Paycheck Protection Program, a short-term loan program designed to help businesses cover payroll expenses.”
Rees, who previously worked as a deputy assistant for domestic policy to former Vice President Dick Cheney, justified the request by claiming to the Education Week reporter, “The last recession hit charter schools pretty significantly” and that the fallout from COVID-19 might adversely affect “private giving to support their operations.”
But in the same article, NPE’s Carol Burris pointed out that “charter schools have had no drop in the funding stream” as a result of the pandemic, because state funding for both charter schools and school districts has already been set for the current academic year.
“Once again, the charter sector, through the lobbying efforts of Nina Rees… worked behind the scenes to gain fiscal advantage for the privately operated schools they claim are public schools,” Burris wrote in comments on the personal blog of education historian Diane Ravitch.
“Charters claim to be ‘public schools’ when that’s where the money is,” Ravitch added. “But when the money is available for small businesses, they claim to be small businesses.”
Charter school promoters defend their duplicity by pointing out that the law says nonprofit organizations are eligible for the funds, and charter schools are nonprofits. But public schools are not eligible for these funds, so why should charters, if they truly are public schools, get to change stripes to suit the occasion?
‘Disaster Capitalism’
While most would agree that the current disruption to children’s learning is a disaster, fans of charter schools and other forms of school choice see an opportunity.
“It isn’t too early for parents to plan ahead for next year and beyond when school doors re-open,” wrote Joe Pantorno for New York City news outlet AMNY. “Charter schools have become a viable and attractive option for a child’s education,” insisted Pantorno, a sports editor.
In some districts where schools have struggled with the transition to online, charter schools have stepped up marketing campaigns, opened their enrollments mid-year to take in more students, and provided free computers to lure families away from public schools. Online charters in Utah and elsewhere have run advertisements urging parents to leave their public schools and enroll in privately operated online academies, which have continued to operate “largely unimpeded,” reported Rachel Cohen for The 74.
In Oklahoma, the state’s largest online charter, currently the subject of a lawsuit because its for-profit operator refuses to comply with a state investigation, “has had teachers recruiting new students on social media,” according to Tulsa World. The school is accused of recruiting “ghost students,” explained John Thompson for the Progressive, “who were technically enrolled but received minimal instruction from teachers.” Thompson also reports that the owners are alleged to have hidden their school’s low graduation rates and used the school’s management company to divert state funds for their own personal use.
In Florida, the state board of education is considering a request from Florida Virtual School (FLVS), the state’s online K-12 school, for $4.3 million in technology upgrades to boost its current capacity of 170,000 students to 470,000. FLVS, a nonprofit, also inked a contract at the end of March for $525,000 to provide online schooling in Alaska.
To guard against online charters trying to profit in a crisis, Oregon announced their school closure orders applied to online charters too because losing students to online schools would negatively affect public school budgets. Pennsylvania passed a bill freezing payments to online charter schools, even if more students enroll in these schools, to prevent the financial drain that would happen when parents flee public schools.
“As the pandemic forces schools to innovate, Americans will get a glimpse into what the future of learning looks like,” predicted Jonathan Butcher, a senior policy analyst at two right-wing think tanks.
Butcher’s claim appeared in a policy brief for the Mercatus Center, a privatization advocate at George Mason University, which is funded by the family foundation of Charles Koch and his late brother David. COVID-19 “could change education content delivery forever,” Butcher wrote, forcing schools to enter into “public-private partnerships with virtual learning providers.”
In a critical review of Butcher’s brief, Kevin Welner, a project director at the National Education Policy Center, warned that heedless efforts to strike deals with online education companies were “a clear example of ‘disaster capitalism’—the exploitation of instability and crisis to advance marketization.”
Welner pointed to a substantial body of evidence that online schools are ill-suited to address the broad purposes of schooling, which often include providing meals and health care services. These operations also tend to generate very poor academic results and under-serve struggling learners, especially students with disabilities.
Rather than rushing headlong into privatizing the public education system, Welner concluded that when the nation emerges from this dark period, “the real lesson for many Americans is a renewed appreciation for vital roles played by their children’s schools and teachers.”
Jeff Bryant is a writing fellow and chief correspondent for Our Schools, a project of the Independent Media Institute. He is a communications consultant, freelance writer, advocacy journalist, and director of the Education Opportunity Network, a strategy and messaging center for progressive education policy. His award-winning commentary and reporting routinely appear in prominent online news outlets, and he speaks frequently at national events about public education policy. Follow him on Twitter @jeffbcdm.
This article was produced by Our Schools, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
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320 an
https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/why-the-coronavirus-pandemic-could-weaken-the-school-privatization-agenda/
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/watch-betsy-devos-cornered-by-congressman-for-lacking-basic-information-about-the-us-education-system-you-dont-know-the-answer/
no lnx
Betsy DeVos cornered by congressman for lacking basic information about the US education system: ‘You don’t know the answer?’
Written by David Badash / The New Civil Rights Movement February 27, 2020
Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos testified before a House Appropriations subcommittee Thursday and was repeatedly unable to answer basic questions, got snippy with Democratic lawmakers, and falsely claimed research cited by top Democrats was wrong and had been “debunked.”
(The numbers behind that research came from DeVos herself, according to this piece in the Washington Post.)
In an exchange with Rep. Mark Pocan (D-WI), DeVos got heated, refuted his claims, and yet was unable to give a correct answer.
“Everything you’re citing is debunked, ridiculous, so I don’t accept the premise of your question,” DeVos, putting the word “question” in air quotes, told Pocan.
Congressman Pocan was referring to reports that show more than 40 percent of charter schools funded in full or in part by the federal government “collected the grants and then either did not open, or have opened and shut down,” as the report’s author wrote in The Washington Post.
Pocan responded by correctly saying the reports have “actually not” been debunked.
Minutes later Pocan revisited the 40 percent failure rate of charter schools, to DeVos’ anger.
“That is not true, that has been a totally debunked report,” she declared, waving her finger. “It’s nothing but propaganda by an individual who has an in for charter schools.”
“So what percent of charter schools are failing?” Pocan asked.
DeVos’ mouth opened and her jaw dropped but she did not speak for several seconds.
“Do you have an idea?” Pocan pressed.
“I don’t have a state – national,” DeVos, flustered, replied.
“You’re the Secretary of Education and you don’t have this? You ‘know’ this report’s wrong, but you don’t –” Pocan said before being cut off.
“Charter schools are chartered by states, they are not chartered by the federal government,” DeVos said, smiling, as if she won a debate. She had not. She had, however, ignored that the report shows 40.5% of charter schools received some if not all of their funding from the federal government.
“You know that number’s not right but you don’t have a correct number,” Pocan responded.
“What I know is parents and families are choosing to send their children to charter schools,” said DeVos.
“So you don’t know the answer?” Pocan again asked.
“Parents and children are going to charter schools by choice,” DeVos repeated, showing she has little interest in anything but continuing to fund charter schools, regardless of the cost to taxpayers or the cost to students who don’t receive a good education, and the cost to public school students who lose funding every day a student attends a charter school instead of a public school.
That, too, is somewhat false. After three years of an anti-public schools Secretary of Education, parents are learning that charter schools “make up an outsized share of the number of public schools persistently graduating less than half of their students.”
Americans are “turning against” charter schools reveals another Washington Post report.
Watch this exchange between Devos and Pocan:
Aaron Rupar
@atrupar
.@repmarkpocan: 40% of charter schools that you're giving grant to are closing down
BETSY DeVOS: That's a totally debunked report. It's just propaganda
POCAN: So what percent of charters are failing? Do you have an idea?
DeVOS: ¯_(?)_/¯
P: You're the secretary of education!
Embedded video
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2/20 d ravich new book Yale Broad-ies
1/2 kids in public school elig free lunch, 20% really poor?
DR says billionaires admit charters do not work, but persist? eg bloomberg
Goliath 50M$ 440M$ betsy has control
NH, MI, WI ~ refuse to meet w/ besty and v pence?!
reed hastings ~ school bd, just corps?!
ALEC walton koch devos;
joann weiss sp?
uniform nat stds common core boon to vendors
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Gerry...
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After Katrina, neoliberals replaced New Orleans' schools with charters, which are now failingCORY DOCTOROW
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an 919
https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/why-2020-dems-should-target-the-nonprofit-charter-school-industry/
no lnx
Why 2020 Dems should target the nonprofit charter school industry
Written by Sarah Lahm / Independent Media Institute September 5, 2019
Charter schools, once the darling of politicians on the right and left, have become a hot potato in the Democratic Party 2020 presidential primary with nearly every candidate voicing some level of disapproval of the industry. A common refrain among the candidates is to express opposition to “for-profit charter schools.” Charter school proponents counter these pronouncements by pointing to industry data indicating only 12 percent of charter schools are run by overtly profit-minded entities, and that most charter schools are overseen by outfits that have a nonprofit, tax-exempt status.
But the singling out of for-profit charter schools is somewhat beside the point as residents of a St. Paul, Minnesota, neighborhood learned this summer when a treasured local landmark was threatened by an expanding charter school. The charter was decidedly nonprofit, but as families and preservation advocates would learn from their tenacious, but ultimately unsuccessful, battle to save a beloved, historic church, charter schools, regardless of their tax status, have become powerful players in a lucrative real estate market in urban areas where land values are high and empty lots or school-ready buildings are hard to find.
Tearing Down a Church to Make Way for a Charter
In the tiny Warrendale neighborhood of St. Paul, St. Andrew’s Catholic Church has stood as a community centerpiece for nearly 100 years. In 1927, St. Andrew’s was designed in the Romanesque revival style by Charles Hauser, the son of German immigrants who became the first city architect of St. Paul at the age of 25.
Today, it’s gone. In 2013, the St. Andrew’s site, which included the church building, a rectory and a small, two-story school, was sold to Kathleen Padian, a charter school real estate developer based in New Orleans. At the time, Padian purchased the site for over $2 million through a nonprofit organization, Educational Properties, Inc., which then leased the buildings to the Twin Cities German Immersion School (TCGIS), a charter school with a focus on German language and culture. (In Minnesota, charter schools cannot own their own property—at least not directly.)
TCGIS also took on over $6 million in renovation debt upon purchasing the St. Andrew’s site and proceeded to tear down the rectory and build an addition linking the old school building to the church. By the end of 2013, the school was on the hook for over $8 million in real estate and construction costs. Part of that debt included payments to an out-of-state real estate development group, TenSquare, for helping facilitate the purchase and remodel of the St. Andrew’s site.
Although Mass had not been held at the church since 2011, when the shrinking parish was combined with another one nearby, it had been in continuous use as a school and church site for various groups, including a French Immersion school run by the St. Paul Public Schools that moved when it outgrew the space. It had not been sitting idle, in other words, and many neighbors reported feeling pleased in 2013 when they learned that another school—the German Immersion charter—was moving into the neighborhood.
In 2018, however, shock waves reverberated through the tightly woven community when residents discovered, through a local newsletter, that the TCGIS was planning to tear down St. Andrew’s church, with its sturdy brown brick, striking bell tower and colorful mosaic tile details, and replace it with a more utilitarian structure.
The school said it simply had no choice but to tear down the church—deemed in very good condition by a local historic preservation board—in order to accommodate an unexpected uptick in student enrollment. What followed was a contentious 18-month battle between the school and many of its neighbors, who signed petitions, held protests and launched numerous court and civic battles arguing that the church should be preserved and repurposed rather than simply destroyed.
Ultimately, the community’s last-ditch efforts at a court order to block TCGIS’s demolition plans failed, and on August 12, crews began dismantling St. Andrew’s church. All along, TCGIS has been receiving extensive guidance from the decidedly for-profit group, TenSquare.
A National Enterprise Profits off Local Schools
TenSquare is a Washington, D.C., based outfit that bills itself as a “charter school support” organization. In 2018, reporter Rachel Cohen wrote about TenSquare for the Washington City Paper, describing it as “one of the city’s most connected, lucrative, and controversial charter consulting companies.” TenSquare makes millions, Cohen noted, by promising to “turn around” struggling charter schools in Washington, D.C., through its consulting and management services.
Cohen’s article described the difficulty she and others have had in finding out just what TenSquare does and how and where it makes money, citing a lack of transparency and accountability. Many of the teachers and charter school leaders profiled in Cohen’s piece argued that TenSquare consultants, under the leadership of founder Josh Kern, have pushed skimpy remake plans based only on boosting test scores or other business-centric ideas.
That hasn’t stopped TenSquare from expanding beyond Washington, D.C., as it has now set up shop in nine states across the country, including Minnesota. Through fee-based services that are paid for by the public education dollars that fund charter schools, TenSquare promises to provide a whole range of structural support and expansion help for charters, as advertised on the group’s website.
Need a “high-performing” staff? Tap TenSquare’s network. Want to “achieve dramatic results” in the classroom? TenSquare can draw up a plan for that. Scrambling for a spot to grow your charter school? Fortunately, TenSquare offers “comprehensive real estate development services,” from location scouting to “assessing and arranging financing.”
The whole TenSquare approach struck Cohen as evidence of a “circular” business model, where the group can essentially “hire itself.” By exalting its expertise in all areas of charter school operations—including finagling real estate deals—TenSquare is positioning itself to corner all aspects of this perhaps politically nettlesome, yet still growing, industry. Meanwhile, it stands to rake in a sizable, publicly funded profit from each contract it signs.
Papers filed with the Minnesota Department of Education, which must sign off on any charter school expansion plans, describe the financing behind the Twin Cities German Immersion charter school. The $6.4 million bill TCGIS has agreed to pay, over time, includes a $100,000 “development consultant fee” for TenSquare. That is on top of a contract worth thousands of dollars per month TCGIS has paid to TenSquare since 2013.
TenSquare has helped facilitate numerous other charter school expansion projects in Minnesota and a handful of other states, sometimes serving as the owner and landlord of various charter school properties.
Charter Schools Are Good Business
Investment appeal for charter schools is strong. In 2015, Wall Street Journal reporter Peter Grant wrote about the increasing opportunity charter schools present for real estate investors, “as the demand grows for classroom seats and some state and local governments become more willing to help finance charter-school projects.”
While some may raise eyebrows at publicly funded charter schools “cutting costly deals with developers who are more concerned with investment return than educating children,” Grant noted, many investors believe they can “do well by doing good.”
Further, Grant stated, developers need not be put off by the nonprofit status of most charter schools because “these groups often rent and buy their buildings from private real-estate developers, and that is creating a new niche asset for some investors.” In Minnesota, TenSquare has been tapping this niche market for several years, and, in 2018, it brought on local charter school administrator Sean Elder to serve as the group’s full-time director of real estate development.
Before Elder came on board in 2018, TenSquare employees Karl Jentoft and Kathleen Padian worked on behalf of the Twin Cities German Immersion charter school to help it find and finance a new site so that it could continue to expand. Jentoft and Padian are both experienced in the proliferation of charter schools, in Washington, D.C., as well as Minnesota and a handful of other markets, including New Orleans, where no traditional public schools remain.
Jentoft’s background in particular will look familiar to many who track the intersection of profit, privatization and school choice in the United States. After a stint at global consulting firm McKinsey & Company, which has been a leader in the push for using test score data to rank public schools, Jentoft went into banking and finance, where he oversaw subprime credit card accounts for Capital One.
From there, Jentoft veered into real estate and eventually landed at Charter School Development Corporation—a nonprofit that rakes in millions of publicly funded, tax-exempt dollars per year, as its tax returns indicate, all under the guise of “fostering the common good and general welfare of the American public by engaging in activities designed to promote opportunity, choice and parent initiative in K-12 American education.”
Jentoft then moved to TenSquare, where he and Padian continue to partner on charter school real estate development deals. A 2018 letter of intent from TenSquare to Claire Heckerman, founder of a charter school in Harvey, Louisiana, provides insight into how Padian and Jentoft work in tandem.
Padian, the letter notes, acts first to help schools find and purchase real estate, as she did with TCGIS. Jentoft then comes in to act as project lead, once the site is secured. TenSquare asks for $3,000 per month in fees, in addition to a development fee worth 2.5 percent of the total cost for any subsequent construction projects. It seems it would pay for TenSquare to facilitate the expansion plans of charter schools in as many markets as possible.
A recent story by local freelance reporter Joey Peters argues that TCGIS school board members, acting under the direction of TenSquare, sought to rapidly foist their demolition plans upon St. Andrew’s church in hopes of avoiding historic preservation status for the building. Board members such as Nic Ludwig, Peters writes, hoped to stave off a rising tide of neighborhood opposition to the school’s expansion efforts.
Citing emails obtained through a public data request, Peters documents the concern of Ted Anderson, executive director of TCGIS, who apparently laments just how Jentoft managed to lead the school down such a controversy-ridden path.
Who Owns Charter School Buildings?
On July 28, the Twin Cities German Immersion charter school held a farewell open house for St. Andrew’s church. After surviving numerous legal challenges, the school’s demolition permit had finally been secured, and it invited neighbors and supporters to say a final good-bye to the church before the wrecking balls arrived.
While the curious mingled inside, politely eating the German cookies and pastries being offered or taking in the St. Andrew’s sanctuary one last time, heated exchanges between upset neighbors and staunch supporters of TCGIS were erupting outside.
St. Andrew’s defender Roy Neal stood under a gloomy late July sky, hoisting a homemade orange sign that read, “Shame On Amy.” It was a pointed reference to St. Paul City Council Member Amy Brendmoen, who lives in the shadow of St. Andrew’s and once spoke of the church as a centerpiece of the neighborhood. Ultimately, she sided with TCGIS and its demolition plans, drawing the ire of the grassroots Save Historic St. Andrew’s group that attempted to save the church.
Standing across from Neal, hands perched on her hips, was Kirsten Partenheimer, parent of four TCGIS students. After declaring that she wished TCGIS could move, “just to get away from you,” in reference to the circle of dogged protesters that had gathered, Partenheimer struck a reverberating blow.
“We own the building,” she told Neal pointedly. “You have to remember that!”
Immediately, a small circle of protesters shouted back at Partenheimer, telling her, “You don’t own the building; the public does! You have an obligation to the community.”
“Seriously,” Partenheimer shot back, “when it gets down to it, we own the building.”
A thorny dispute about land rights and whether or not they are absolute then took place, sending the less committed off, perhaps in search of a cookie or a moment of respite inside the church. But the exchange was telling. Charter schools are funded through public education dollars, just like traditional public schools. Can they then function as if they were private real estate holders, with the freedom to knock down or otherwise alter buildings as they see fit?
Tax Dollars for Education Yield Profits for Investors
The dispute over ownership rights to St. Andrew’s also took place on the editorial pages of the Minneapolis Star Tribune. In a May 24 opinion piece, the paper’s editorial board argued that the church should be torn down to make way for TCGIS’s growing student body.
Sidestepping any question of whether or not a publicly funded, highly segregated German immersion school (its population is nearly 90 percent white, according to state records) should exist—especially in a city like St. Paul, where the public school district must continually make cuts to adjust for students lost to school choice schemes—Star Tribune editors wrote, “The property owners shouldn’t be forced to spend millions now and in the future on repairing and maintaining the old structure. Those funds would be better spent on a new facility and on educating students.”
In a counterpoint published in the Star Tribune, supporters of the church argued, “TCGIS is, in fact, a public charter school,” because the public not only financed its initial “$8.2 million acquisition and renovation of the former St. Andrew’s Church and school in 2013,” but will also be on the hook for the millions in demolition and construction costs needed to tear the church down and put up something new.
All of TCGIS’s real estate dealings have been “funded through low-interest conduit bonds issued by the city of St. Paul, bonds that are repaid with lease aid from the state of Minnesota that currently sits at $1,314 per student,” St. Andrew’s supporters noted. This financial support will continue because of an action taken by the St. Paul City Council recently to authorize another round of “conduit lease revenue bonds” to TCGIS worth $9 million, even though the school still owes over $8 million from its 2013 purchase and renovation of the St. Andrew’s site.
Those low-interest bonds have been underwritten by a Minneapolis-based investment bank, Piper Jaffray, that has worked to make itself indispensable in the charter school real estate sector. “Piper Jaffray is one of the nation’s top specialists in structuring tax-exempt bond issues to meet the needs of charter schools,” the bank’s website announces, under a cheerful heading that reads, “How can we help your school?”
Tad Piper’s family started Piper Jaffray over 100 years ago, and the company has reported annual revenue of more than $800 million in recent years. As a philanthropist, Piper has also become a high-profile advocate of school choice schemes in the Twin Cities by helping to foment political and popular support for the expansion of charter schools and other education reform initiatives.
Meanwhile, the bank his family started, where Piper still sits on the board of directors, facilitates the spread of charter schools through a range of debt financing options.
The zero down payment plan advertised by Piper Jaffray could certainly entice a charter school, under the guidance of a real estate development group like TenSquare, to take the plunge and finance a new school or renovate an existing one. In return, Piper Jaffray can sell that debt package to investors on the bond market.
Those investors, in turn, stand to make a fat return on their investment.
One way they can do this is through New Market Tax Credits. In a 2013 presentation, TenSquare’s Jentoft lists this option as one of three ways charter school real estate can be financed, along with asset-based and business cash flow loans. The New Market Tax Credits, however, are government-backed, and offer investors—including private equity firms—the chance to “receive a 39% federal tax credit over seven years,” according to a 2010 expose by journalist Juan Gonzalez.
That is in addition to any interest the investor makes along the way, making this a very attractive place to park some cash, all while enjoying the social justice-themed cover of “doing well by doing good.”
There are many other ways outside investors glean cash from the proliferation of charter schools through real estate investment strategies. A recent series in a New Jersey outlet by reporters Jean Rimbach and Abbott Koloff extensively revealed “how tax dollars meant for public education can yield profits for investors” in the Garden State through a range of schemes that include low-interest loans, profitable lease agreements, related party transactions, and property markups that exceed market values.
‘Gone Forever’
It’s clear private real estate developers, investment bankers and consulting groups like TenSquare have successfully figured out how to cash in on publicly funded charters with little accountability to taxpayers. These various money-making schemes largely exist under the radar, far from the growing scrutiny of presidential candidates who have newfound disdain for for-profit charter schools.
In cities such as St. Paul, where these financing options increasingly control where charter school construction goes, neighbors suddenly have little to no say in where and when such schools can set up shop. As TCGIS itself pointed out, charter schools are not neighborhood schools; by law, they can and do draw students from a boundary-free radius. And now, TCGIS can pour its millions in low-interest bond debt into a newly constructed school building, as St. Andrew’s church has been leveled.
On a recent morning, as demolition crews waited for the go-ahead, a handful of neighbors gathered outside the school, shaking their heads in dismay. “I don’t think this school will even be here in five years,” one observer mentioned, noting the charter school’s previous series of moves. “But the church will be gone forever.”
On August 20, just days after St. Andrew’s Church was reduced to rubble, the State Historic Preservation Board posthumously recognized it as a historic property worthy of earning a spot on the National Register of Historic Places.
Sarah Lahm is a Minneapolis-based writer whose work has appeared in the Progressive, In These Times, and other national and local publications. Follow her on Twitter at @sarahrlahm.
To learn more about school privatization, check out Who Controls Our Schools? The Privatization of American Public Education, a free ebook published by the Independent Media Institute.
Click here to read a selection of Who Controls Our Schools? published on AlterNet, or here to access the complete text.
This article was produced by Our Schools, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
Why 2020 Dems should target the nonprofit charter school industry
Sarah Lahm / Independent Media Institute
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/the-charter-school-industry-cant-acknowledge-its-documented-failures/
News broke recently about what may be the single biggest charter school scam ever in which an online charter school organization is alleged to have bilked the state of California for $80 million by enrolling tens of thousands of students into their programs, often without the students’ knowledge, and charging the state for nonexistent education services and bogus expenses related to operating the schools.
Nationwide, the litany of charter school outrages continues to grow—the Network for Public Education tallied 43 negative reports on charter schools from local and national news outlets in June alone. After a recent report I coauthored with NPE executive director Carol Burris found a federal government grant program had likely wasted as much as $1 billion on charter schools that never opened or were viable for only short periods of time, Burris and her colleagues followed up with yet more research that found$1 billion is likely an underestimate.
Charter advocates continue to dismiss these scandals as products of a few “bad apples,” but negative news about charter schools is landing blows to the industry’s image in California and nationwide.
Charter-friendly candidates in the Golden State have been trounced in recent elections, and in the Democratic Party presidential primary, campaign rhetoric surrounding the schools has been uniformly negative.
The charter industry is feeling a growing anxiety about public opinion turning against their schools. But recent developments both in California and at the national level show that rather than taking up an honest conversation about real reform, the industry is responding to criticism with behind-the-scenes maneuvering and a public relations campaign based on deception.
Charter Industry’s Secret Plans
In California, where charters are more plentiful than in any other state, the widespread scandals are starting to prompt talk among top state leaders of much-needed reforms.
A new law recently passed requires charter schools to abide by the same open-meetings and conflict-of-interest rules as public schools. Also, a task force requested by Governor Gavin Newsom and assembled by State Superintendent Tony Thurmond issued a series of reasonable proposals that could rein in charter growth and increase much-needed oversight of these schools. One proposal to limit the number of charter authorizers in the state would likely have prevented the $80 million scam. Another recommendation would let authorizers consider financial and community impacts before approving new charters, considerations they’re currently prevented from taking into account.
Interestingly, the recommendations have come from a task force that includes a number of charter school leaders and representatives of pro-charter organizations. This could indicate a stronger willingness within the charter school community to address the corruption and mismanagement within their industry.
But another headline from California reveals a different story about the charter industry’s willingness to reform. According to emails leaked to a local blogger, shortly after teachers in Los Angeles concluded their successful strike that included, among other wins, a resolution from the local school board to end charter school expansions, charter industry operatives secretly conceived a plan to “take back” control of the board, elect a pro-charter mayor, and rewrite labor agreements in a way that would push out unionized teachers.
The primary author of the leaked “take back” plan even quotes Machiavelli about the need to feel “feared” rather than liked.
Other emails included in the leak revealed how the current superintendent, who was picked by the previous board for his pro-charter leanings, has been working in secret with local charter school leaders to align his actions with pro-charter messaging and policies.
Charter Industry Defense Program
As charter reform in California takes one step forward and two steps back, charter proponents operating at the national level show no signs of being willing to consider the need for more regulatory oversight.
For instance, months after the report Burris and I published about waste in the federal government’s charter school grant program, officials from the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, a charter school lobbyist and advocacy group, attacked our report in a national media outlet supportive of charter schools.
The critique by Christy Wolfe and Nathan Barrett is a slog through a mostly unsubstantiated defense of a program their organization does not even administer and does not seem to have any greater understanding of than Burris and I’ve demonstrated. But what Wolfe and Barrett have written can serve as a useful example of how charter industry operatives continue to respond disingenuously to criticism of their schools no matter how reasonable and well-founded the criticism is.
As is so often the case, the first reaction charter school defenders have to critics is to attack the messenger, in this case, calling NPE “union-funded.”
The union-funded accusation is way off base, as Burris explains in her rebuttal published on a blog at the Washington Post. The accusation is sourced to a relatively small grant given to a former fiscal sponsor of NPE five years ago to help jump-start the organization’s first conference—a near-infinitesimal blip on the radar of the big money spent by education advocacy groups like NAPCS.
Wolfe and Barrett also accuse Burris and me of publishing “a hodgepodge of data sources, many not cited.” But a quick scroll to the footnotes in our report reveals over 100 citations to objective, unrelated sources, including Department of Education documents, Office of Inspector General audits, local newspaper reports, and articles in prominent national news outlets.
In the meantime, Wolfe and Barrett make plenty of assertions that are completely without sources, including this: “If a school closes, federally funded assets are liquidated or allocated to other schools,” and this: “when a funded school closes, at least some of the grant funding can usually be recovered.”
Another common deception Wolfe and Barrett employ is to claim expertise they’re unwilling to share. They describe their organization as having a “research team” of “several full-time staff members working year-round” who are “cross-checking across [sic] data sources” for “one of the most complex federal education-grant programs.”
Yet their critique of our report provides none of this supposed expertise—no new reports or data sets, just some generally unsubstantiated assertions about how the program works.
Closed Charters Aren’t Really ‘Closed’
As Burris says, engaging in a point-by-point rebuttal to Wolfe and Barrett “would bore readers to tears.” Yet it’s instructive to note that much of the charter school lobbyists’ template for refuting criticism relies on convincing you that what you think you know from common wisdom and language is not really what you think it means.
For instance, charter school proponents would have you believe a “closed” school is not really closed if it was an “innovation” that just didn’t work out, or that if the failed school was “merged,” “downscaled” or “reorganized,” then it didn’t really close—even when you can verify that the school is no longer in an existing location or easily accessible to its original students.
As an example, Wolfe and Barrett point to University Yes Academy, which our report described as closed but they describe as “scale[d] back.” The Detroit charter had operated for years as a K-8 school, which it still operates, but had received a federal grant to open a separate high school campus. The high school program was fraught with financial and ethical problems and was closed a week before classes started for its last fall semester, sending scores of students and families scrambling to find courses they needed for graduation and college acceptance. You can call this a “scale back” if you want, but that would be like McDonald’s closing restaurants and calling it a menu reduction.
Similarly, Wolfe and Barrett want to convince you that federal funds going to “prospective schools” that have yet to open, often several years after receiving the grant money, are not in any way “risks” to taxpayer funds. Time and again, Burris and I found charter school grant recipients on very shaky grounds that even Department of Education reviewers said made them “not financially viable.”
One such school, a prospective charter in Hawaii, obtained a grant and then delayed its opening for years while it searched for a location. Recently, the school announced it will open in a temporary location above a Buffalo Wild Wings at a shopping center for the 2019-2020 school year. Yet Wolfe and Barrett want you to believe that gambling on this school, and hundreds of others like it, with your tax dollars is the rightful “premise” of a government program.
The Biggest Deception
But the most deceptive argument Wolfe and Barrett employ would have you believe charter schools haphazardly opening and closing is “a good thing for students—and for anyone who cares about quality and accountability in schools,” while public schools are the real source of “waste” in the system.
No one disputes that public schools, especially those in communities that experience a lack of investment from tax dollars and the private sector, often struggle to meet various standards for quality due to a multiplicity of factors. Nevertheless, public schools remain society’s most preferred and best attempt to guarantee an education to every child, while private enterprises like charters have the option of closing down whenever they want because the public system remains as a safety net for students and families.
This is not to accuse every charter school of running a scam and to generalize that all charters are resistant to reasonable oversight. But the growth of these schools has been accompanied by the creation of a vast charter-industrial complex made up of organizations like NAPCS and the California advocacy groups who collude to undermine teachers and elections. Whether they operate in backrooms and boardrooms where policy is decided or in the public spaces of state capitals and prominent media outlets, they seem more determined than ever to resist reform of charter schools through a unified campaign of deception and denial.
If that sounds like a conspiracy theory to you, keep in mind the alleged mastermind of that $80 million charter scandal in California. As Burris notes, he “began his operation” as the CEO of a charter school chain that received $2,825,000 from the federal government’s charter school grant program.
Jeff Bryant is a writing fellow and chief correspondent for Our Schools, a project of the Independent Media Institute. He is a communications consultant, freelance writer, advocacy journalist, and director of the Education Opportunity Network, a strategy and messaging center for progressive education policy. His award-winning commentary and reporting routinely appear in prominent online news outlets, and he speaks frequently at national events about public education policy. Follow him on Twitter @jeffbcdm.
To learn more about school privatization, check out Who Controls Our Schools? The Privatization of American Public Education, a free ebook published by the Independent Media Institute.
Click here to read a selection of Who Controls Our Schools? published on AlterNet, or here to access the complete text.
This article was produced by Our Schools, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
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pro publ 619
...Teach For America cautioned its public school teachers against participating in recent teacher strikes in Oakland, California, and Los Angeles. Ava Marinelli, one of just 35 Teach For America teachers in the Los Angeles traditional public schools, joined the picket line anyway.
“With the level of divisiveness between charter and public schools, Teach For America has aligned with the charter school agenda,” she said in a recent interview. “This shows with their donors and who their partners are.” Teach For America said that it took no stance on whether its teachers should strike, but that the terms of their AmeriCorps funding prohibited involvement with organized labor.
Teach For America CEO Elisa Villanueva Beard said that donors don’t sway its approach. “We don’t have any one funder that is more than 5% of our overall budget,” Beard said. “We are very focused on what are our objectives, what is our mission, what are our values and what are the needs of the community.” She said that current grants to Teach For America from the Walton Foundation and other organizations don’t favor charter schools over traditional public schools.
She said that the organization does not have a national placement strategy and that where corps members teach is determined by the needs of regional partners. “Every last strategy question is answered locally,” Beard said. “Our interest is just to make sure that we are working to ensure that we meet our partners’ needs, are serving the students who need us most and are able to advance the needle for opportunity for them.”
Both push and pull factors have fostered Teach For America’s shift in direction. Since 2016, school districts in San Francisco; Jacksonville, Florida; and Houston have decided to end their contracts with Teach For America, citing, among other reasons, its teachers’ relatively low retention rate. At the same time, Teach For America and the charter school movement share a similar goal: promoting innovation by streamlining bureaucracy. Teach For America’s alumni have started some of the nation’s largest charter networks, including KIPP, Rocketship Education, IDEA and YES Prep.
Whichever type of school they serve in, Teach For America’s teachers devote their intelligence and energy to helping low-income and minority students and closing the nation’s unrelenting achievement gap. But its metamorphosis reflects a broader trend: As nonunion charter schools have gained acceptance in the past 20 years, political support for traditional public schools and teacher unions has eroded.
While both the Obama and Trump administrations have backed charter schools, the appointment of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, who once called the traditional public education system a “dead end,” fractured the political consensus. The issue divides candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination. Bernie Sanders has called for a moratorium on federal funding of charters until a national review of their growth is conducted. Sanders, Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren have criticized for-profit charter schools, with Sanders advocating an outright ban.
Other candidates, such as Cory Booker and Beto O’Rourke, are sympathetic to charters. As Newark’s mayor, Booker raised millions in private funds for education reforms, including the expansion of charter schools. O’Rourke, whose wife started a charter school, has called them a “good idea” for encouraging competition and innovation.
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/05/how-the-federal-government-poured-millions-into-these-failing-charter-schools/
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OMG
Three times more money was spent in California's State Superintendent's race than in the race for Governor. EdSource reports that as of November 3rd well over **$26 million**was spent by outside groups.
We wrote in a previous post that the reason for the overwhelming outpouring of BIG money in the race was this year's Vergara decision, which declared teacher tenure in the state of California unconstitutional. The California Teachers Association has a very helpful guide to common myths about due process rights in California, including the myth that "tenure is a job for life."...
https://web.archive.org/web/20150606220150/https://networkforpubliceducation.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Tuck-Money-Flowchart-4.pdf
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2/17 age of trump
When President Trump appointed Betsy DeVos to be U.S. Secretary of Education and made charter schools, vouchers, and other forms of “school choice” practically the sole emphasis for his K-12 education policy—other than slashing funding and programs for public schools—he brought national attention to a decades-long battle over privatizing public education that was already raging in communities across the nation.
The community that’s been on the frontline of the fight for the longest has been Milwaukee, where the city’s public schools have been undermined by a nearly 30-year-old voucher program—the nation’s oldest—and an invasion of charter schools going back to 1993, when the state passed its first charter school law just a year after the very first charter school law in the nation passed in Minnesota.
Despite the decades-long effort to privatize Milwaukee’s local school, recent events in that community have revealed how public school advocates can successfully fight back against the forces of privatization.
In Milwaukee’s recent school board election, a slate of five candidates swept into office under a banner of turning back years of efforts to privatize the district’s schools. The win for public schools was noteworthy not only because it took place in a long-standing bastion of school choice, but also because the winning candidates were backed by an emerging coalition that adopted a bold, new politics that demands candidates take up a full-throated opposition to school privatization rather than cater to the middle.
Unsurprisingly, the coalition includes the local teachers’ union, who’ve long been skeptical of charters, vouchers, and other privatization ideas, but joining the teachers in their win are progressive activists, including the Wisconsin chapter of the Working Families Party, and local civil rights advocacy groups, including Black Leaders Organizing for Communities and Voces de la Frontera.When President Trump appointed Betsy DeVos to be U.S. Secretary of Education and made charter schools, vouchers, and other forms of “school choice” practically the sole emphasis for his K-12 education policy—other than slashing funding and programs for public schools—he brought national attention to a decades-long battle over privatizing public education that was already raging in communities across the nation.
The community that’s been on the frontline of the fight for the longest has been Milwaukee, where the city’s public schools have been undermined by a nearly 30-year-old voucher program—the nation’s oldest—and an invasion of charter schools going back to 1993, when the state passed its first charter school law just a year after the very first charter school law in the nation passed in Minnesota.
Despite the decades-long effort to privatize Milwaukee’s local school, recent events in that community have revealed how public school advocates can successfully fight back against the forces of privatization.
In Milwaukee’s recent school board election, a slate of five candidates swept into office under a banner of turning back years of efforts to privatize the district’s schools. The win for public schools was noteworthy not only because it took place in a long-standing bastion of school choice, but also because the winning candidates were backed by an emerging coalition that adopted a bold, new politics that demands candidates take up a full-throated opposition to school privatization rather than cater to the middle.
Unsurprisingly, the coalition includes the local teachers’ union, who’ve long been skeptical of charters, vouchers, and other privatization ideas, but joining the teachers in their win are progressive activists, including the Wisconsin chapter of the Working Families Party, and local civil rights advocacy groups, including Black Leaders Organizing for Communities and Voces de la Frontera.
https://www.exposedbycmd.org/2019/03/18/cmd-continues-throw-spotlight-legislators-heralded-secret-group/
American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) seems to have stopped recognizing its rising stars with its “Legislator of the Week” award, switching instead to a monthly award.
ALEC meetings provide venues for global corporations and state politicians to vote behind closed doors to try to rewrite state laws that govern your rights. These so-called “model bills” reach into almost every area of American life and often directly benefit huge corporations.
Started a few years ago, the “Legislator of the Week” award recognized the group’s leaders on right-wing legislation written with corporate representatives, and affecting health care, environment, education and many other issues.
“Legislator of the Week” Recognition Did Not Go Well
CMD has frequently found ALEC’s award recipients notable for their extreme positions, questionable ethics, or poor judgment.
Consider the ALEC state legislator of the week the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) wrote about who likened homosexual behavior to psychopathic behavior. Or read about the ALEC female legislator who opposes gender pay equality in her state, despite that state having the largest gender earnings gap of all states.
Another honoree, and ALEC’s 2018 national chair, was shown to take the “pay” in a “pay-to-play” scheme to buy almost $20,000 of personal clothing.
In late 2017, CMD wrote about ALEC’s Legislator of the Year award going to a legislator who tried to carry a gun onto an airplane.
ALEC Tries “Legislator of the Month”
After a five-month hiatus in recognizing its leaders, ALEC’s first honoree of the month is Utah’s ALEC state chair: Representative Kim Coleman.
ALEC gave the award on March 8, 2019, just ten days after KUTV’s investigative report on February 26, 2019 exposed state legislators with ties to charter schools, who also regulate charter schools.
Kim Coleman is the founder of Monticello Academies, a charter in West Valley City, Utah. CMD found that her husband, Joel, is also a trustee of the school and serves as its board secretary. The latest IRS filings publicly available of the charter school do not show Joel Coleman drawing a salary from Monticello.
ALEC again has given its award to a legislator of some renown in their own state. Coleman has unsuccessfully brought lawsuits against the state board that regulates charters for removing her as executive director of the school.
“During Coleman’s tenure as the school’s director, parents complained she did not provide required special education services at the school … and had created an environment in which special education services were not provided as required by law.” Coleman lost in the lower court and the verdict was upheld by a Utah state appeals court. The charter school, meaning the Utah taxpayer, covered some of Coleman’s legal expenses.
Still Tied to Charter
Kim Coleman, though no longer on the board of the charter school along with her husband, is now executive director of Monticello Academy Properties, the non-profit entity that provides management services.
She was appointed to that board as executive director, presumably by, among others, her husband who is the principal officer, between July 1, 2016 and June 30, 2017, according to the group’s latest available tax filing. She is not on earlier tax filingsof this non-profit.
That same tax return shows her claiming she works 20 hours a week but does not receive a salary. CMD is not suggesting any wrongdoing but the Utah State Charter School Board, in removing her as executive director of the school, may not know that Coleman became the executive director of the property management company connected to the school.
CMD will make sure the Utah State Charter School Board is made aware that Representative Coleman is still involved in the school, even if she no longer determines the curriculum. Without ALEC naming Coleman as its “Legislator of the Month,” CMD would have never known of the controversy surrounding not only an ALEC legislator, but ALEC’s state chair for Utah.
CMD looks forward to next month’s award.
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/03/heres-how-charter-schools-are-scamming-the-us-government/
A new report issued by the Network for Public Education provides a detailed accounting of how charter schools have scammed the U.S. Department of Education’s Charter Schools Program (CSP) for up to $1 billion in wasted grant money that went to charters that never opened or opened for only brief periods of time before being shut down for mismanagement, poor performance, lack of enrollment, or fraud.The report also found many of the charters receiving grant awards that managed to stay open fall far short of the grant program’s avowed mission to create “high-quality” schools for disadvantaged students.
President Trump’s 2020 budget blueprint proposes increasing funding for the charter grant program by 13.6 percent, from $440 to $500 million, and education secretary Betsy DeVos praised this increase as a step forward for “education freedom.” But the report finds that increasing federal funds for this program would mostly continue to perpetuate academic fraud.
Of the schools awarded grants directly from the department between 2009 and 2016, nearly one in four either never opened or shut their doors. The federal program’s own analysis from 2006 to 2014 of its direct and state pass-through funded programs found that nearly one out of three awardees were not currently in operation by the end of 2015.
Since then, the federal program has continued to award charters with grant money, increasing the total amount awarded to over $4 billion. Should the department’s own 2015 study finding hold, that one in three of the schools awarded grants had closed, never opened, or were not yet opened, the likely amount of money scammed by bogus charter operators tops $1 billion. In California alone, the state with the most charter schools, the failure rate for federal grant-awarded charters was 39 percent.Of the 306 schools that received CSP money but are not open, 75 are “ghost” schools—that is, they received money but never began.
As a coauthor of the report, along with Carol Burris, the executive director of NPE, I found an astonishing array of charter operators who ripped off American taxpayers with impunity, and generally suffered no adverse consequences for their acts. In fact, many are still actively involved in the scam. The scams varied from the brazenly open—such as the Michigan charter that isn’t a charter at all, it’s a Baptist church—to the artfully deceptive—like the Hawaii charter that received a grant in 2016 and still hasn’t opened, doesn’t have a location, and its charter hasn’t even been approved.
But perhaps my favorite scam artist to take advantage of the federal charter grant program was aDelaware company.
Anatomy of a Scam
In 2013, Innovative Schools Development Corporation applied for and received a three-year start-up grant eventually totaling $525,000 to open Delaware Met Charter School in Wilmington, DE. The school’s grant application promised to create an “Expeditionary Learning (EL) charter” to “maximize learning” for “elementary-aged Hispanic Latino English Language Learners in a high poverty community.” The school claimed to “be able to cater to each students’ [sic] career goals by personalizing their education,” a local reporter gushed. “The model is called ‘Big Picture Learning,’ and for lack of a better analogy, it’s kind of like Build-A-Bear for a high school education.”
The school didn’t open until August of 2015, but the company was already at work getting more grants from CSP.
In 2015, Innovative Schools applied for and received a three-year grant totaling $600,000 to support the Early College High School charter schools at Delaware State University in Dover, Delaware. The school would focus on “the development of college-ready students through an inquiry and project-based learning environment that engages students with a dynamic, rigorous STEM curriculum … to serve a diverse student population, focusing recruitment on first-generation college-bound students from low-income families.”
Then in 2016, Innovative Schools applied for and received a three-year federal grant totaling $609,000 to open the Delaware STEM Academy charter school. The school promised in its application to enroll 250 students for 9th and 10th grade in September 2016 and to add 150 students each year for 9th grade thereafter from the high-needs student populations in the Wilmington and New Castle County area of Delaware.
In the meantime, while the company was applying for and receiving grant money from the federal government, no one seemed to notice that its schools were quickly failing.
Delaware Met was closed just five months into its first school year, in January 2016. The state committee that recommended closing found the school struggled to maintain a safe campus, used lesson plans that didn’t fit the state’s academic standards, and was out of compliance on all 59 of its Individualized Education Plans for its students with disabilities.
In June 2016, Delaware’s Charter School Accountability Committee and the State Secretary of Education both recommended revoking Delaware STEM Academy’s charter two months ahead of its planned opening, due to low enrollment of just 30 students and uncertain funding due to an overreliance on external grants. Local news reports on the demise of the school noticed that New Castle County already had a heavy concentration of charter schools—20 of 27 charter schools statewide. Yet in its review of the application, the U.S. Department of Education’s reviewers complimented the application for its “detailed management plan including objectives, measures, targets” and including a full year for implementation.
The Early College High School has managed to stay open, but although the _{application}_said it would have a student enrollment that is 24.7 percent “economically disadvantaged,” the school is located in a district with a student population that is 70 percent economically disadvantaged. In other words, what was supposed to be a lifeline out of poverty for students more closely resembles a white flight academy.
In the meantime, Innovative Schools Development Corporation did fine, as it was budgeted to receive, just from the STEM Academy deal, $247,500 of the federal grant funds for management fees, with $147,500 coming in the first year alone.
At this writing, the Innovative Schools Development Corporation website has been taken down and it is unclear whether the company still exists.
An Inside Operation
Much of the fraud and malfeasance is due to the fact that in many ways the charter scam is an inside operation.
The Department of Education uses a slipshod process to conduct reviews of charter school grant applications that allows applicants to get away with making false and misleading claims about their academic programs. The review process does not allow the verification of applicants’ claims, and reviewers are instructed to accept what applicants have written as fact. And reviewers are not publicly identified by the department and are likely to be biased because of the department’s requirement that they have “a solid understanding of the ‘charter school movement.’”
Many of the worst abuses take place in the grant program that sends money to states. When state education agencies pass the federal funding on to charter schools, there is generally little to no accountability for how the money is used. The subgrantee schools often never open or close quickly, and the schools often blatantly discriminate, engage in outright fraud, and engage in related-party transactions that result in private individuals and companies pocketing huge sums of money at taxpayer expense. But once the monies are given to the state, the Department of Education maintains a “hands-off” policy.
One of these subgrantee charter schools recently made national headlines when the New York Times recently reported about East Austin College Prep in Texas, where raccoons and rats invade offices and classrooms. When it rains, the roof of the main building leaks. Yet for all this, the secondary school pays almost $900,000 in annual rent to its landlord who is also its founder, Southwest Key Programs, the nation’s largest provider of shelters for migrant children. The federal charter grant program gave the school a grant to start the school through its Texas state grant.
Shut It Down
There is only one way to deal with this blatant grift program for the charter school industry.
First, Congress must reject President Trump’s budget proposal for increasing funding for the charter school grant program. Then Congress must end funding for new charter grants coming from this program and demand thorough audits of previous grant awards and steps to ensure grant awards still under term are being responsibly carried out and that misspent money is returned.
And Congress also needs to consider the unintended consequences to districts caused by the unchecked expansion of charters. Resources are depleted for the students left behind, and public schools become more segregated and serve needier populations.
This article was produced by Our Schools, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
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Charter school cap efforts gain momentum
Matthew Gardner Kelly, Pennsylvania State University
A number of states are considering laws to put charter school growth on pause, saying they drain resources from public schools. A school finance expert explains the logic behind the efforts.
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omg
https://www.alternet.org/2019/03/betsy-devos-right-wing-school-indoctrination-program-betrays-a-fundamental-misunderstanding-of-the-differences-between-public-and-private-schools/
What do you do when thinking people reject your political ideology?
You get rid of thinking people.
That’s Betsy DeVos’ plan to rejuvenate and renew the Republican Party.
The billionaire heiress who bought her position as Donald Trump’s Education Secretary plans to spend $5 billion of your tax dollars on private, religious, and parochial schools.
This would be federal tax credits to fund scholarships to private and religious institutions—school vouchers in all but name.
It’s a federal child indoctrination program to ensure that the next generation has an increasing number of voters who think science is a lie, white supremacy is heritage and the Bible is history—you know, people just gullible enough to believe a reality show TV star who regularly cheats on his many wives with porn stars is God’s chosen representative on Earth. A measure to make child kidnapping, imprisonment, and wrongful death seem like a measured response to backward immigration policy. A measure to make collusion and fraternization with the world’s worst dictators and strongmen seem like global pragmatism.
To make matters even more galling, consider the timing of DeVos’ proposal.
In the beginning of February, Donald Trump Jr. criticized “loser teachers” who he said were indoctrinating school children into—gasp—socialism.
At the end of that same month, DeVos proposed funding Christian madrasas from sea-to-shinning-sea.
Apparently indoctrination is just fine for conservatives so long as it’s the right kind of indoctrination.
But even beyond the blatant hypocrisy, this betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the differences between public and private schools.
Florida’s GOP Governor Ron DeSantis tweeted that if a school receives public funding—whether it be a charter or voucher institution—it is a public school.
To which DeVos tweeted her glowing approval.
This makes a few things strikingly clear: either (1) these folks have no idea what happens at authentic public schools or (2) they’re pretending not to know so as to further their political and financial ambitions.
Authentic public schools do not indoctrinate children into socialism or any other ideology.
They’ll teach what socialism is and how it has functioned historically without commenting on its merits or deficiencies. It’s up to individual students to decide whether it’s a good thing or not.
Public schools are supposed to be ideologically neutral.
At most, they teach children how to think. They teach media literacy, skepticism, and critical thinking skills.
If that leads kids away from Republican orthodoxy, it’s not the fault of the teacher or the child. It’s a problem with your orthodoxy.
You can’t proclaim the benefits of a marketplace of ideas and then decry that too many ideas are on display.
Nor can you conflate the way a school is funded with what that school actually does and how it teaches.
There is a world of difference between authentic public schools and their market based alternatives—especially the parochial and religious variety.
It’s the difference between telling students the answer and getting them to think about the answer. It’s the difference between total certainty and doubt, between trite truths and useful skills that can help you arrive at deeper truths.
When you ask children to think, you never know what conclusions they’ll draw. When you tell children what to think, you know exactly what conclusions you want them to hold.
Authentic public schools do not indoctrinate. Conservatives graduate from these hallowed halls the same as liberals, moderates, and the politically checked out. The difference is that in a world where facts are prized and logic is exercised, conservatism becomes less appealing.
I’m not saying liberalism or progressivism is guaranteed, but they are certainly more fact-based world views than their opposites.
The same cannot be said of the kinds of institutions DeVos wants to bankroll.
They educate kids behind closed doors with little to no transparency for the public about how their money is being spent. But word seeps out of the cracks in the system.
We’ve seen the textbooks they use to teach. Their graduates have returned to the public square to tell us about the instruction they received.
The American Christian Education (ACE) group provides fundamentalist school curriculum to thousands of religious schools throughout the country. Included in this curriculum is the A Beka Book and Bob Jones University Press textbooks. A Beka publishers, in particular, reported that about 9,000 schools nationwide purchase their textbooks.
In their pages you’ll find glowing descriptions of the Ku Klux Klan, how the massacre of Native Americans saved many souls, African slaves had really good lives, homosexuals are no better than rapists and child molesters, and progressive attempts at equal rights such as Brown vs. Board of Education were illegal and misguided. You know—all the greatest Trump campaign hits!
We should not be funding the spread of such ignorance.
Frankly, DeVos’ ambitions have little chance of coming to fruition.
Two years ago, when Republicans controlled both houses of Congress, she wanted to spend $20 billion on the same nonsense. Her party refused to back her.
Now with Democrats in control of the House, it seems even more unlikely that her plan will pass.
But sadly smaller scale versions of it have been allowed by state legislatures throughout the country—often with full support from Democrats.
My own state of Pennsylvania spends $125 million in taxpayer dollars on the Educational Improvement Tax Credit (EITC) and Opportunity Scholarship Tax Credit (OSTC) programs to send children to private/religious schools. And every year legislators ask for more.
Why any Democrat would support conservative indoctrination programs is beyond me.
And this is true even though indoctrination is sometimes unavoidable.
To a limited degree, it may even be desirable. You might even say it’s a normal part of growing up.
Even the most fair-minded parents often want their children to hold at least some of the same values as they do. They want to be able to relate to their kids and view them as a continuation of the kinds of lives they lived.
But what’s okay for parents is not okay for governments.
If Mom and Dad want their kids to have a Biblical education, they should pay for it. The burden should not be shouldered by society since it’s not in society’s interest.
Governments have no right taking public money and using it to prop up private interests. And that’s exactly what this is.
It is political and religious interest. It is a way to circumvent skepticism and free thought.
It’s a way to ensure that in a time where information flows freely and dogmas crumble, people like Donald Trump continue to be elected.
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https://www.alternet.org/education/choice-has-become-excuse-charter-and-voucher-schools-discriminate
12/18
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https://www.alternet.org/education/midterm-elections-show-americas-major-shift-attitude-charter-school-privatization
For years, the policy window for privatizing public schools has been wide open, and what was once considered an extreme or at least rare idea—such as outsourcing public schools to private contractors with few strings attached, or giving parents public tax money to subsidize their children’s private school tuitions—has become widespread as charter schools are now legal in all but a handful of states, and voucher programs have proliferated in many forms across the country.
Politicians of all stripes have been extremely reluctant, especially at the national level, to lean into a real discussion of the negative consequences of redirecting public education funds to private operators, with little to no regulation for how the money is being spent. Candidates have instead stuck to a “safe boilerplate” of education being “good” and essential to “the workforce” without much regard to who provides it.
But policy windows can be fleeting (remember “the deficit crisis”?), and multiple factors can rejigger the public’s views. Indeed, in campaigns that candidates are waging in the upcoming midterm elections, one can see the policy window on school privatization gradually shifting back to support for public schools and increasing skepticism about doling out cash to private education entrepreneurs.
‘Vulture Schools’
It is the wave of new progressive candidates who appear to be the ones who are shifting the policy window on school privatization.
Take the campaign of progressive superstar Randy Bryce, running for the congressional seat Paul Ryan held in Wisconsin. The Badger State recently expanded statewide a voucher program that was confined to Milwaukee and Racine, and charter schools have expanded significantly under the leadership of Republican Governor Scott Walker.
On his website, Bryce provides the usual bromides about “every child deserves a quality education” and “charter, private and traditional public schools can all thrive,” but he then adds the curious statement that “no student should see money taken from their classroom in order to serve another.” What does that mean?
Click through the “learn more” prompt and you’ll watch a video in which he makes a much stronger statement about the problems of privatizing public schools. “We can’t afford two school systems, a public one and a private one,” he elaborates, and he blasts “vulture schools that don’t have the same accountability and don’t have the same rules.”
The example of the school he brings up that closed after head count day, and the owners “moved to Florida,” is a real school run by a husband-and-wife team who abruptly closed their Milwaukee private school, after taking more than $2.3 million of state voucher money, and moved to Florida to start another one.
These sorts of scandals have become nearly daily occurrences in the privately operated school industry.
Schools for Scandals
The latest scandal breaks from Arizona, where the state auditor found that parents who used the state’s voucher-like education savings program spent more than $700,000 on cosmetics, music, movies, clothing, sports apparel, and other personal items. Some even tried to withdraw cash with the state-issued debit cards. The state has not recovered any of the money. But the state legislature recently passed a bill to expand the voucher program, which is now being challenged by a recall effort on the ballot on Tuesday.
Earlier this month, in Florida, the founder of a company that operated charter schools in seven counties was found guilty of using those schools to steer millions of dollars into his personal accounts. In one school district alone, “nearly 1,000 students were affected by the chaos and disruption that ensued.”
In California,a recent audit of a charter school found the married couple who ran the school made almost $850,000 in less than two years and secretly hired people and created positions without approval from the school’s board.
A video from Florida that went viral shows an African American boy being denied admission to a private school that his parents used public school voucher money to enroll him in. An enormous white cross adorns the school’s front lawn. This and other similar occurrences of discrimination by voucher-funded private schools in the Sunshine State has prompted the NAACP to call for an investigation into all private schools accepting vouchers. Around the same time, an op-ed appeared in a Florida newspaper recounting the scandalof a voucher-funded private school that stiffed teachers and skipped rent payments. Teachers filed formal complaints about a “lack of basic school supplies,” academic “irregularities,” student safety concerns, and inadequate staffing. But when the school was evicted, it simply moved to a new location and started the whole flimflam all over again.
In Georgia, a police investigation of a charter school found the governing board terminated the school’s leader, made no public announcement of the firing, and never told parents why. At another Georgia charter school, parents were told to “watch your bank accounts” after 6,000 school records were mysteriously transferred to a personal email account.
In Nevada, an analysis of the state’s charter school industry found they increase racial and economic segregation by enrolling far fewer low-income kids and far more white and Asian students than public schools do. A state audit of a charter school in New Mexico found tens of thousands of dollarshave been stolen by the school’s employees.
Some Regulatory Control, Please
One doesn’t need to “cherry pick” to find news stories about waste, fraud, abuse, and downright theft in the school privatization sector. The above examples all happened within the last month.
Of course, financial scandals happen in public schools too. That’s why they’re heavily regulated. But the notion that “parent choice” can keep charter schools and private voucher schools clean and honest is disproven nearly every day.
In Washington, D.C., there now seems to be an inkling to address the mountain of fraud created by charter schools and voucher programs. Prompted by a massive scandal involving an online charter school in Ohio, Democratic senators want the top watchdog agency for the federal government to investigate the business practices of online charter schools.
Their investigations can’t stop there. A recent analysis of states with the most charter schools and the most charter closures finds the federal governmentdumps millions into these schools but provides little oversight and guidance for what to do when these schools close, leaving millions of dollars in taxpayer money at risk to scamming.
More Progressive Democrats Against Privatization
The endless revelations of corruptions in the charter school and school voucher racket are now what’s driving policy, more so than dry, empirical studies about whether privatizing public schools “works” academically.
You can see that especially in the campaigns of progressive standouts like Andrew Gillum, who is running against Ron DeSantis to be the next governor of Florida, a state that is rife with charter school and voucher scandals.
While members of the family of U.S. Secretary DeVos are bankrolling the DeSantis campaign to push their agenda for charters and vouchers, Gillum is determined to stanch the flow of public dollars to the state’s many voucher programs and make charters more accountable for how they spend public money.
A review compiled by the Intercept of progressive candidates running for Congress singles out Leslie Cockburn running in Virginia’s 5th Congressional District. Cockburn opposes school vouchers and shows her skepticism for charter schools by noticing their problems with teacher turnover and their lack of oversight. At a recent meet-and-greet, she said, “We want more funding for public schools, not less. We need to not take away funds from public schools and give them to charter schools or private schools.”
Another candidate, Kara Eastman, running in Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District, says on her website, “We must resist the administration’s political nominees who advertise the benefits of expanding charter schools.”
Among People’s Action’s endorsements in congressional races is Anthony Brindisi, running in New York’s 22nd Congressional District. Brindisi has pledged “to fight any and all attempts to privatize our public education system for corporate gain.”
A candidate endorsed by the Progressive Change Campaign Committee (PCCC), Dana Balter, running in New York’s 24th Congressional District, is a special education teacher turned Syracuse professor who got the endorsementof the powerful state teachers’ union largely because she “understands that giving money away to charter schools is not the right approach.”
Candidates for state houses have similar positions. In the race for West Virginia Senate 1st District seat that pits Democrat William Ihlenfeld against Republican Senate Majority Leader Ryan Ferns, Ihlenfeld says, “I am not a supporter of charter schools … I don’t think charter schools are a good idea for West Virginia. I don’t think we can afford to allow the private sector to come in and profit from precious education resources.”
Of course, some progressive candidates still stick to the old script of “investing in schools” with little regard to who runs them, and a few still cling to the school privatization cause. But the trend that made privatizing public schools an acceptable if not preferential policy has at least stalled, if not completely been thrown into reverse.
This article was produced by the Independent Media Institute.
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10/18
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/betsy-devos-and-family-bankroll-florida-governor-candidate-desantis-a-school-voucher-enthusiast
Betsy DeVos and Family Bankroll Florida Governor Candidate DeSantis, a School Voucher Enthusiast
ByAdele M. Stan | October 24, 2018 5:54 pm
The third in our three-part series on the right-wing players around Ron DeSantis, the Republican candidate for governor of Florida.
When Ron DeSantis, Florida’s Republican candidate for governor, found himself in hot water—once again—over his beliefs about black people and America’s racial history, a handful of wealthy donors swooped in to try to rescue his campaign.Polls showed him in a dead heat against Democrat Andrew Gillum, who is African American.
Among the angels to alight in his coffers was the heiress Betsy DeVos, who currently leads the U.S. Department of Education, and whose family enriched a pro-DeSantis political action committee this month with hundreds of thousands of dollars. The DeVos family has long invested in the project of building a right-wing political infrastructure that is designed to elevate the policy prescriptions of white evangelical leaders, as has DeVos’ family of origin, the Princes. (Erik Prince, founder of Blackwater, is DeVos’ brother. Her parents, Elsa and Edgar, helped found the Family Research Council, which is classified as an anti-LGBT hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.)
It’s not surprising that DeVos would want to rescue DeSantis. Take a look at the education agenda he has put forward and you’ll find a wish list of goodies for Religious Right leaders and other “small-government conservatives.” And even more than that, the specter of a progressive Democrat like Gillum leading education policy in a state as populous as Florida (20 million) could create a significant pocket of resistance to any federal policy imposed by DeVos.
While DeSantis may not be especially involved with the evangelical community, he knows on which side his bread is buttered. DeVos, champion of the privatization of education, and the Trump administration’s secretary of education, descends from Religious Right royalty. When Trump chose DeVos for that spot, it was because he knew on which side his base is buttered—the evangelical side.
Right-wing evangelicals and Catholics favor school voucher plans and supports for homeschoolers that siphon money away from public schools, as well as from the public-sector unions that represent teachers and other school personnel, all positions DeVos advances. The vouchers amount to tax dollars applied to tuition at private schools and those run by churches and other religious organizations. (For more on DeVos’ record as a school privatizer, see PFAW’s 2017 report, A New High Water Mark in Right Wing’s Long War on Public Education.)
In fact, on a visit to New York City last spring, the U.S. secretary of education seemed to go out of her way to insult public-school students and teachers by choosing two religious schools for a visit, but none of the city’s public schools. From a May 18 New York Times report:
Education Secretary Betsy DeVos toured two New York City schools on Tuesday and Wednesday, but the city’s public schools, with their 1.1 million students, were not among them.
Instead, Ms. DeVos visited two Orthodox Jewish schools, and offered her strongest comments to date in support of public funding for religious schools in a meeting with Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan and other Catholic dignitaries.
In addition to his pro-voucher position, DeSantis stood behind Amendment 8—a measure ultimately struck from the 2018 ballot by the Florida Supreme Court for being “misleading”—which would have yanked control of charter schools from local school boards and handed it to the state—through changes to the state constitution. Conservatives have found certain localities to be unwelcoming to charter schools.
The measure would also have imposed eight-year term limits on local school boards. Absent the ballot measure, DeSantis has folded those positions into his own education policy agenda.
The court’s actions stirred right-wing ire about the ideological balance of the state’s highest court. Governor Rick Scott, who is currently challenging incumbent U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson for his seat, had planned to replace three of the court’s justices just hours after he leaves office, but the court overruled his power-grab. Because of term limits on the state’s Supreme Court justices, three retirements will kick in automatically in January, leaving the next governor to determine the shape of the court.
SINCE WINNING the Florida GOP gubernatorial nomination, DeSantis’ attitudes towards African Americans have attracted scrutiny, beginning with comments he made at the outset of the general election campaign, when he urged Floridians to “not monkey this up” by electing Democratic opponent Andrew Gillum, who is black. Something of a steady trickle commenced, with DeSantis having to ditch a fundraiser, state Rep. Ralph Arza, who had used the “N” word in threatening voicemails to a colleague 12 years ago, and who has a reputation for using racial slurs. Next, the Washington Post published a report on DeSantis’ participation in the far-right conferences convened by David Horowitz, where he appeared on the same stage as the professionally offensive, white-nationalism-sympathizer Milo Yiannapoulos, and other far-right figures. Then, on October 8, the American Ledger blog published by the American Bridge super PAC unearthed a book he authored that made excuses for slavery in the U.S. The DeSantis campaign was losing momentum, virtually tied with Gillum in the polls.
Three days later, the candidate’s PAC, Friends of Ron DeSantis, received a total of $200,000 from four members of Betsy DeVos’ family, as well as infusions from others in the donor network created by the billionaire brothers, Charles and David Koch.
Each of those donors no doubt has his or her own checklist of expectations and demands, but DeSantis’ school privatization agenda seems robust, hitting all of the key constituencies: the homeschoolers, the religious schools, the union-haters.
Some of the candidate’s education agenda, as posted on the Ron DeSantis for Governor website:
Support School Choice Options.To ensure that all Florida students can go to a good school and empower parents to make educational decisions for their children, Ron DeSantis will support school choice options such as public magnet schools, district & non-district managed public charter schools, Florida Virtual School, home education, and the various other choice options. DeSantis will also look at the possibility of creating Education Savings Accounts for more Florida students including those from low-income and working-class families.
[…]
Ensure Equal Access for Parents Who Home School Their Children.To support the families of the nearly 90,000 students in Florida that are home schooled, Ron DeSantis will ensure that these children have equal access to resources available to other students, such as dual enrollment and extracurricular activities. The decision on how a child should be educated is best left to their family, as no far-away bureaucrat could ever understand a child the way a parent does. For many Florida families, homeschooling provides the best opportunity to educate their children.
DeSantis also embraces a so-called “merit pay” scheme that seems designed to pit teacher against teacher, and teachers against non-teaching staff, by pledging to cut “wasteful” spending on the education “bureaucracy,” and funneling that “savings” into merit increases for selected teachers.
Like DeSantis, DeVos is a fan of charter schools, which also draw their funding from tax dollars, but exist outside the traditional public school system. In April 2017, DeVos visited the Excel Academy, a public charter school in Washington, D.C., describing it as a “shining example of a school meeting the needs of its students, parents and community.” By January 2018, the school had closed because of its poor performance.
Of course, there are reasons beyond DeSantis’ education agenda that make him an attractive repository for DeVos dollars. The family owns the Orlando Magic basketball team, a business, like any, that could always use a friend in the governor’s mansion.
Read more in our series on DeSantis and the right:
Ron DeSantis’ Appearances at Horowitz Events: Even Worse the Closer You Look
Ron DeSantis Embraces Right-Wing Plan to Rewrite U.S. Constitution
Tags: Andrew GillumBetsy DeVosEdgar PrinceElsa PrinceErik PrinceRon DeSantisElection 2018AmwayDepartment of EducationFamily Research CouncilSouthern Poverty Law Center
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//emerg mgr flint
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related school takeover:
https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/state-takeovers-schools-are-about-political-power-school-improvement-right-wing
When states take over local school districts – like they’ve done or are trying to do in Kentucky, Georgia and Mississippi – school improvement is typically the stated objective.
Although the research on the effects of state takeovers on academic outcomes is mixed, takeovers often have devastating political and economic implications for black communities. As states increasingly attempt to take over school districts in major Southern cities, it’s worth exploring whether school improvement is the real purpose, or whether political motives are at play.
I raise this issue as the author of the first systematic study of state takeovers of local school districts. I am also a researcher who focuses racial and ethnic politics, urban politics, education politics and public policy.w
here state takeovers began
State takeovers of local school districts are nothing new. They emerged in the late 1980s and 1990s when governors and state legislatures began to pass state laws to intervene in underperforming school districts. Since New Jersey took over the Jersey City schools in 1989, there have been over 100 state takeovers of school districts.
Although they have been spread throughout the U.S., the early wave of state takeovers in major cities were concentrated in northern states. In the 1990s and early 2000s, the cities of Boston, Chicago, Detroit, New York City, Newark and Philadelphia all experienced some form of a state takeover of their schools. During this period, major cities in Southern states were not targets of state takeovers. Now, things have changed.
For instance, Kentucky state officials recently announced the state takeover of the Jefferson County School District, which serves the city of Louisville and its surrounding suburbs.
In Georgia, Gov. Nathan Deal has proposed creative ways of taking over Atlanta schools after voters rejected a takeover law proposed by the governor and the state legislature in 2016. These cities would join New Orleans, whose school district was taken over practically in its entirety by the state in 2005 in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
Why does there appear to be a sudden interest in state takeovers of local school districts in the South? Have Southern governors figured out the blueprint for improving education in urban communities, predominantly occupied by people of color? Hardly. I would argue that these governors have discovered a blueprint for the economic and political disempowerment of their urban centers.Political power plays
Much like the state takeovers in northern cities in the 1990s and early 2000s, these state interventions are being led by Republican governors and majority-Republican state legislatures.
The school districts that are targeted for takeovers are in majority-Democratic cities with mostly black student populations and black political leadership. Once the states assume leadership of the school districts, the locally elected school board – which has historically served as the foundation for local political empowerment – is stripped of its power. Decision-making and control of the school budget is removed from the local community.
For a number of states, including state governments in the South, the New Orleans school takeover is seen as a model. Following Hurricane Katrina, the state took over the majority of the New Orleans schools and transformed the traditional public schools into charters.
While state leaders tout the transformation of the New Orleans schools, polls show that most black residents – who represent the majority of New Orleans population – do not think that the schools are better after Katrina.Takeover proved problematic in New Orleans
The state takeover has also had a devastating effect on black economic and political power in New Orleans. For example, the black teaching force in New Orleans has decreased from roughly 71 percent black to less than 50 percent black.
Over 7,000 school employees lost their jobs in the year following Katrina and governance authority has shifted from the locally elected school board to the state-created board and to the individual governing bodies of each charter school. Recent research by J. Celeste Lay and Anna Bauman of Tulane University shows that 60 percent of the charter board members in New Orleans are white, while the majority of the city and student population is black.
Funding is key
If Southern governors want to improve the schools, they should look at one of their own states as a model. In 1990, after the Kentucky Supreme Court ruledthat the state’s schools were severely underfunded, Kentucky’s governor led a bipartisan effort to enact the Kentucky Education Reform Act, which increased funding for low-resourced school districts in the state. The Kentucky Supreme Court funding decision provided a model that other states, including Alabama, Massachusetts and New Hampshire followed.
Research shows that Kentucky’s Education Reform Act, and other efforts to increase school funding across states in the 1990s, led to improved school outcomes in Kentucky as well as other states. However, over time, Kentucky state leaders have refused to maintain equitable state funding of schools, which threatens the gains the state has made.
In addition to serving as a model for state funding, the Jefferson County School District in Kentucky has been committed to integration. While the courts have struck down integration plans, local leaders, including the local school board in Jefferson County, have remained steadfast in making integration work, despite significant political opposition. However, Jefferson County’s integration plan, is also being challenged by the state legislature and the state takeover of schools is likely to bring an end to Jefferson County’s integration plan, since the state takeover will remove the local school board.
State leaders in Kentucky, Georgia, Louisiana and Mississippi profess to want to improve education in urban majority-black schools. However, by separating communities from their schools, the state takeovers of school districts will lead to the economic and political disempowerment of black communities in the South. This is not a solution for troubled schools.
Domingo Morel, Assistant Professor of Political Science, Rutgers University Newark
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https://www.alternet.org/deluxe-charter-schools-serve-opportunities-taxpayer-funded-white-flight
no lnx
Charter schools are often billed as benefiting disadvantaged urban kids—but in lots of places around the country, charters are segregating school systems by offering rich white families a way to get their kids away from students of color and poor students. In reality, 115 charter schools nationwide have student populations at least 20 percentage points whiter than public schools in their districts; more than 700 charter schools nationally are whiter than their district’s public schools.
Why charter schools do this is no mystery: racism pays. As for how they they do it, Emmanuel Felton reports on common tactics like not offering school bus service so that parents have to have the flexibility and the reliable vehicle to get their kids to and from school. Or they require uniforms from Land’s End that low-income families can’t afford. Or they create “priority attendance zones” that ensure that kids from mostly white neighborhoods will get an admissions advantage.
Felton reports in depth on Lake Oconee Academy in Georgia, which is 73 percent white while public schools in the district are just 12 percent white. It was founded essentially at the behest of a company selling luxury lakeside properties, and when the school opened, 80 percent of its spots were reserved for people living in that company’s properties. Lake Oconee Academy has a “piano lab” with 25 pianos. It has 17 Advanced Placement courses. And just 10 percent of its students are black in a district where 68 percent of public school students are black.
As one mother, who ruled out trying to send her kids to Lake Oconee Academy because there wasno school busto get them there, said, “It’s like a black and white thing, who has money and who doesn’t have money.” It’s not just Lake Oconee Academy, and it’s the kind of education policy the Trump administration, with Betsy DeVos heading the Education Department, is pushing.
Laura Clawson is the Labor editor at Daily Kos Labor, and a contributing editor at Daily Kos.
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KTY
https://www.alternet.org/kentucky-gov-matt-bevin-may-destroy-states-public-education-system-charter-schools-scheme
https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/even-republicans-are-horrified-kentucky-governors-attack-protesting-teachers
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https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/texas-charter-school-asked-students-list-positive-aspects-slavery
...Roberto's child, Manu, attends the San Antonio, Texas charter school Great Hearts Monte Vista, CNN reported.
The school has now come out and distanced itself from the assignment.
"To be clear, there is no debate about slavery. It is immoral and a crime against humanity," Superintendent Aaron Kindel said in a statement.
He continued: "Our review of the situation found this incident to be limited to one teacher at just one campus. It was a clear mistake and we sincerely apologize for the insensitive nature of this offense. We want to thank the parents who voiced their concern and brought this to our attention."
The teacher who gave the assignment has been put on leave, the school said, and the textbook it relates to is under review.
The assignment is part of a larger problem in the United States. Since the Civil War, there had been a concerted effort to whitewash history and obscure the horrendous human rights abuses that were ubiquitous at the start of the nation and inherent in the institution of slavery. Presenting "slavery" as something with both positive and negative aspects is part of this effort to downplay the grievous misdeeds of the United States....
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big pict alec koch:
https://www.alternet.org/education/corporate-plan-groom-us-kids-servitude-wiping-out-public-schools
The Plan: Lower People’s Expectations
When Lafer began to study the tsunami of corporate-backed legislation that swept the country in early 2011 in the wake of Citizens United—the 2010 Supreme Court decision that gave corporations the green light to spend unlimited sums to influence the political system—he wasn’t yet clear what was happening. In state after state, a pattern was emerging of highly coordinated campaigns to smash unions, shrink taxes for the wealthy, and cut public services. Headlines blamed globalization and technology for the squeeze on the majority of the population, but Lafer began to see something far more deliberate working behind the scenes: a hidden force that was well-funded, laser-focused, and astonishingly effective.
Lafer pored over the activities of business lobbying groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) – funded by giant corporations including Walmart, Amazon.com, and Bank of America—that produces “model legislation” in areas its conservative members use to promote privatization. He studied the Koch network, a constellation of groups affiliated with billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch. (Koch Industries is the country’s second-largest private company with business including crude oil supply and refining and chemical production). Again and again, he found that corporate-backed lobbyists were able to subvert the clear preferences of the public and their elected representatives in both parties. Of all the areas these lobbyists were able to influence, the policy campaign that netted the most laws passed, featured the most big players, and boasted the most effective organizations was public education. For these U.S. corporations, undermining the public school system was the Holy Grail.
After five years of research and the publication of The One Percent Solution, Lafer concluded that by lobbying to make changes like increasing class sizes, pushing for online instruction, lowering accreditation requirements for teachers, replacing public schools with privately-run charters, getting rid of publicly elected school boards and a host of other tactics, Big Business was aiming to dismantle public education.
...
Temin traces the emergence of the U.S. dual economy to the 1970s and 80s, when civil rights advances were making a lot of Americans uneasy. People who had long been opposed to the New Deal began to find new ways to advance their agenda. The Nixon administration gave momentum to anti-government, free-market fundamentalist ideologies, which gained even more support under Reagan. Gradually, as free-market programs became policy, the rich began to get richer and economic inequality began to rise. Economist Paul Krugman has called this phenomenon the “Great Divergence.”
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60 min (i do not see fail from clip)
betsy devos says do not invest in systems; amplifying feedback death spiral
https://www.democracynow.org/2018/3/13/charterize_privatize_christianize_the_devos_backed
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https://kpfa.org/episode/former-pr-political-prisoner-oscar-lopez-rivera-speaks/
says 1971 cabal, pledge loyalty to corp?
Oscar López Rivera, one of the longest serving political prisoners in the world, imprisoned for his anti-colonial activism for Puerto Rico, is a free man. Rivera served 35 years of a 70-year sentence when President Obama commuted his term. On our show today we’ll play an interview I had with him at Pasadena City College where he spoke as part of his nationwide tour. Then, author and academic Noliwe Rooks will join us to discuss her new book, Cutting School: Privatization, Segregation, and the End of Public Education.
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"segrenomics" rural etc virtual charter, most vulnerable
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https://www.alternet.org/kicking-charter-money-out-unifying-party
The mood was festive at the annual Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Dinner in Los Angeles. About 600 Democrats gathered in a hotel ballroom on an October evening to begin wrapping up the year. Community activists and party worker-bees mingled with political luminaries to celebrate top volunteers. Anybody with a (D) after their name and $135 for a ticket was welcome at this event in blue, blue California.
Then Eli Broad crashed the party. He didn’t actually show up, but as usual in Los Angeles, his presence was felt. When his likeness appeared on a video screen displaying sponsors, the place erupted in boos. Then, as if they’d been caught on a hot mic, many attendees gasped at their collective slip of decorum.
By the time L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti spoke, the room was composed. In fact, Garcetti couldn’t have asked for a friendlier reception. But the hometown crowd turned hostile again when former L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa was announced. He, too, was booed.
The common thread between Broad and Villaraigosa is charter schools.After he was elected mayor of L.A. in 2005, Villaraigosa, who’d run on a pro-labor platform, cut ties with the teachers union and adopted Broad’s agenda of school privatization. Los Angeles has long been a target of the privatizers. As the biggest school district in the country that elects its school board, it’s harder to control for the so-called education reformers, who seek to dismantle the public school system in order to create a marketplace of school choices, shifting billions of dollars in public moneys into private hands.
Villairagosa’s political calculation paid off—at least with the billionaire education reform crowd which has been pouring money into Villaraigosa’s gubernatorial bid.
The Roosevelt Dinner should have been a victory lap for Villairagosa and his allies. Just six months before, they’d successfully taken over the L.A. school board, an effort in which the former mayor had been personally involved. They had spent more money to win the seat held by board president Steve Zimmer than has ever been spent on a school board race in U.S. history.
Backlash builds
But the huge sums of money made people skeptical of the pure-sounding claims of “putting students first.” Signs of a backlash first appeared at the State Democratic Convention last spring. In convention speeches, references to the vast resources of the charter school lobby made it sound like an occupying force. Speakers pointed out that the staggering amount of money to buy charter school proponents control of L.A.’s school board was sounding less and less democratic. It went beyond school boards, too. Last year, the California Charter Schools Association (CCSA) was the biggest spender in state legislative races.
The awakening has been a long time coming. Five years have passed since the L.A. County Dems demanded that the deceptively named charter promoters, Democrats for Education Reform, cease and desist from calling themselves Democrats. Since then, Betsy DeVos has finished yanking the Democratic disguise off the charter agenda. On NPR affiliate KCRW in early December, stalwart conservative David Frum lumped charter schools in with “medical savings accounts and everything else in the Republican agenda” that Democrats oppose.
And now, spontaneous outbursts showed Democrats opposing the biggest names in corporate education reform. But the clash between charter schools and Democratic ideals still isn’t obvious to everyone.
Glowing conflict
Perhaps there is no stronger metaphor for Democrats’ conflict about charters than the swag at the state party convention. During caucus meetings and on the floor of the convention, candidates and delegates alike balked at the CCSA’s brazenness in buying electoral influence. But afterhours, many of them waved glowsticks featuring the CCSA logo at the parties throughout the weekend. Maybe they thought no one would notice who bought them.
But the power of charter money is noticeable. At a State
in October about possible charter law reforms, Jackie Goldberg, a retired grand dame of progressive politics and public education in California, seemed to hammer the whole state Democratic caucus for its failure to provide oversight.
“You got two-thirds [majority] for the first time—I never had two-thirds when I was up there—in both houses! You actually can do something about this. And I’m saying to you, it is time to say, Ya basta! Enough is enough…”
If California Democrats are calibrating their relationship with big charter money, the 2018 elections could magnify the issue. Villaraigosa will be the likely recipient of the charter cash.
However, Gavin Newsom, the current lieutenant governor and unquestioned front runner, is doing his best to avoid the topic. Newsom was caught on videotelling a friendly crowd that he had no intention of taking a position on the existential battle in public education.
“I'm not interested in a stale and raging debate around which side...you're on. ‘Are you with the charter people or are you anti-charter? Are you with the teachers or are you anti-teacher?’ I've been hearing that damned debate for ten damned years…whether Eli Broad was right or whether the CTA was wrong [sic]. I'm not interested in that debate.”
Previous news reports might help explain Newsom’s reticence to speak up against charters. Some of the original money to launch Newsom’s gubernatorial bid came from the same dark charter figures who schemed with Eli Broad to unsuccessfully defeat Proposition 30, Governor Jerry Brown’s initiative to fund public schools through a tax on millionaires. The schemers included one of Newsom’s early donors, John Scully, who sits with his wife on the board of Eva Moskowitz’s Success Academy, the politically powerful charter chain that was the recent subject of an exposé in the New Yorker. The union helped unmask Scully in its 2016 bombshell Hedge Clippers report revealing supporters of the anti-Prop 30 campaign, but it is now apparently unconcerned with Scully’s support for Newsom.
Big money, big opposition
Its anybody-but-Villaraigosa campaign resulted in the union endorsing Newsom, opening the organization to criticism that it isn’t going to help fight big charter power. Half the union delegates pushed for the candidate with a track record of working to pass common sense charter oversight legislation, current State Treasurer John Chiang. But some union delegates said leaders made sure endorsing Chiang was procedurally impossible.
Polls show 30% of the electorate is still undecided among the crowded field for the June, 2018 primary. So why isn’t CTA playing a more active role in shaping the debate about charter money during the course of the election?
The job of making charter money a campaign issue might fall to the teacher activists who led the insurgency for John Chiang at the union’s endorsement meeting. It could also fall to the Berniecrats, who now make up half the California Democratic Party and who strongly oppose the influence of big money. However, their repeated chants of “Single payer now!” at the convention and other public events leave one wondering if they have the capacity or the interest to take on the charter issue. Activist Lauren Steiner who ran the L.A. for Bernie campaign, pushes the issue among the Bernie constituency, though many of them are backing Delaine Eastin.
Given all the signs in the past year that Democrats are down on corporate charter money and Berniecrats’ natural opposition to big money in politics, this could be a unifying issue between the two factions of the party. The implications of that would reach far beyond California.
Karen Wolfe writes about public education
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11/16
https://www.scpr.org/news/2016/11/11/66059/flood-of-spending-by-charter-advocates-leads-to-el/
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Charter school advocates flooded state legislative races with more than $19 million in campaign spending — and mostly got the results they were seeking.
In seven of eight races where charter advocates made at least $900,000 in "independent expenditures," the candidate they supported will advance to Sacramento. That's according to a KPCC review of election results and campaign finance records.
Richard Garcia of the California Charter Schools Association Advocates said those millions of dollars were money well spent.
"It seems that the voters recognized what we recognized in these candidates," Garcia said. "It's a big win for those who value their right to choice in education."
Garcia's group is linked to theParent Teacher Alliance, one of the two main charter spenders. The other big spender wasEdVoice's independent expenditure committee. The two groups spent a combined $18.4 million trying to get their favored candidates to seats in Sacramento.
In fact, EdVoice and the Parent Teacher Alliance were the number one and two outside spenders in state legislative races, beating out groups backed by political heavyweights like the oil industry and developers.
If you add an additional $930,000 from two smaller pro-charter committees — Parents and Teachers for Student Success and CCSA Advocates's independent expenditure group — the total reaches $19.4 million from charter groups. The money they spend is separate from actual candidates' campaigns.
RELATED: Election results in the races charter groups targeted
Not everyone was on board with the charter groups' aims.
Their one big defeat came in the 27th Assembly District, representing the San Jose area. There, the Parent Teacher Alliance dumped more than $4 million into an effort to elect Madison Nguyen — the most any group spent in a single race.
Yet San Jose city councilman Ash Kalra defeated Nguyen in that race. A union group was active there, pouring more than $1.2 million into the contest, which funded a big chunk of negative spending against Nguyen.
That dynamic was flipped in the 14th Assembly District, where charter-backed Tim Grayson cruised to victory. EdVoice spent $3.3 million in that race supporting Grayson and opposing the union-backed Mae Torlakson. Her husband is the state's top K-12 education official, Superintendent Tom Torlakson.
In a Southern California race, charter-backed Laura Friedman easily beat challenger Ardy Kassakhian to represent Glendale, Burbank and parts of Los Angeles.
In most of the races where charter groups spent big, two Democrats were fighting for a single seat. In essence, voters were deciding what kind of Democrat to send to Sacramento.
EdVoice and the PTA spent to make sure they were charter-friendly democrats, in a legislature that could feature a democratic supermajority.
Rob Pyers, who analyzes elections for the California Target Book, said that all the outside spending seemed to have an impact. While it's still early, Pyers said that "in the vast majority of circumstances, spending...closely correlated with the odds of success."
The complexity of elections and privacy of the polls make it difficult to say exactly how much political spending — or any single factor — impacts elections.
The pivot this year to statewide policy for represents a shift for education reformers, who previously had focused on local school boards. The implications for education policy in the state are still coming into focus.
With a crop of friendly legislators on their way to Sacramento, CCSA Advocates' Garcia said his group has two areas of focus. The first is changing the process of getting new charters approved, known commonly as charter school authorization. Currently, decisions are made at the local level by school boards, with inconsistent support for charters.
Garcia also emphasized access to school district facilities for charters. "Facilities issues have been problematic for us," he said.
At L.A. Unified, charter backers have grown frustrated with what they perceive as an increasingly hostile environment.
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http://www.latimes.com/local/la-me-edu-school-election-money-20170521-htmlstory.html
Charter school supporters and unions spent nearly $15 million to battle each other in last week's Los Angeles Board of Education races, which crossed the finish line as the most expensive school board election in U.S. history.
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https://www.alternet.org/kicking-charter-money-out-unifying-party
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https://www.alternet.org/charter-schools-making-school-segregation-worse-own
When Martin Luther King Jr. said, “We must never adjust ourselves to racial segregation,” he wasn’t suggesting that black kids need white kids and teachers in the classroom with them to learn. King was acutely aware that segregation sustains racial inequality in schools and other institutions. Education reform without an explicit attempt to dismantle the sources of inequality isn’t a moon shot toward justice; it is simply a maladjustment to injustice.
A recent Associated Press analysis of national school enrollment data found that “as of school year 2014-2015, more than 1,000 of the nation’s 6,747 charter schools had minority enrollment of at least 99 percent, and the number has been rising steadily.”
A startling number, but the charter school lobby essentially responded with a version of, “So what?”
“Academics, attorneys, and activists can hold any opinion they want about public charter schools and other families’ school choices,” said a spokesperson for the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools in an official response to the AP story. “In the end, parents’ and students’ opinions are the only ones that matter. And every year, more parents are choosing charter schools.”
New York magazine columnist Jonathan Chait co-signed that dismissal of segregation with a column that essentially argued it’s not really the job of charter schools to change the system of oppression that created schools that perform poorly, “because integrating schools is hard,” and he calls the criticism of increased segregation among charters as merely a “talking point.” For Chait, rising test scores trump segregation concerns.
In the all-charter district of New Orleans — that Chait described at the 2015 anniversary of Hurricane Katrina as “spectacular” in another defense of charters — virtually no (less than one percent) white students attend schools in that have earned a “D” or “F” performance rating. But 77 percent of white students are enrolled in “A-” and “B-” rated schools, according to a new report by non-profit advocacy group Urban League of Louisiana. It is unthinkable that this situation would be tolerated if the students’ races were reversed. It is clear that segregation, and who gets a quality choice, matters.
My colleagues Richard V. Reeves, Nathan Joo, and Grover J. “Russ” Whitehurst at the think tank the Brookings Institution compared the racial composition of country’s public schools to that of the under-18 population of those neighborhoods. They found that schools more or less look like the neighborhoods that host them.
“The average public school is 2.6 percent less white, 1.8 percent more black, 0.9 percent more Hispanic, and 0.3 percent more Asian than its surrounding neighborhood,” according to the study. No surprise there.
The segregated state of our schools helps maintain the inequitable funding that determines families’ educational options. When the government-backed Home Owner’s Loan Corporation developed color-coded maps to sort out who could receive mortgage lending, blacks who lived in the red sections of the map were not given loans. And of course, the most well-resourced schools just happen to be located in the most expensive neighborhoods.
The Brookings team looked closely at district lines, and they found that if you remove them, many schools become more racially imbalanced. It seems to me that wealthy neighborhoods are using district lines to leverage themselves against demographic shifts. According to EdBuild, a non-profit focused on school finance issues, the most egregious cases of segregation are shown by the roughly 36 districts that were formed since 2000 as a result of secession — when a school district splits from a larger one.
U.S. News & World Report explained the study’s results: “In almost all cases, the communities involved were less diverse and had higher property values than those they left behind.”
The Brookings report found that among the racially imbalanced schools, charters stood out as having a much higher representation of black students. Their imbalance rating is roughly four times that of traditional public schools. (You can see how your school compares through this interactive map). Charters didn’t cause segregation, but they sure aren’t helping matters....
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see charters (poor schools blk the most profitable target?!)
https://www.alternet.org/money-talked-leaks-show-input-wealthy-privatizers-clinton-education-policy
rare peek into the evolution of Hillary Clinton’s education platform is afforded through an overlooked Wikileaks-published document. Entitled “Policy Book— FINAL,” the PDF file was attached to a 2014 email sent to John Podesta, Clinton’s future campaign chair. The education portion of the document runs 66 pages, mostly concentrated on K-12 policy, and captures specific input from billionaire donors looking to overhaul and privatize public education.
Today, Donald Trump seeks a rapid expansion of charter schools and private school vouchers, while his Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, touts “school choice” and market competition for public school at every stop. But in private, Hillary Clinton’s donors, dubbed “experts," also sought rapid charter expansion and market-based options to replace public schools.
One of the most connected “thought leaders” discussed is Laurene Powell Jobs, the widow of Apple founder Steve Jobs, and the head of the Emerson Collective, a prominent education reform advocacy group. Powell Jobs who has been close with the Clintons since the late '90s, also sat with Betsy DeVos on the board of Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Excellence in Education. She set up billionaire “roundtables” with Clinton’s campaign advisors through 2015 while donating millions to Priorities USA, Clinton’s main PAC.
Fixing teachers
Notes taken by Clinton aide Ann O’Leary were made in interviews with Powell Jobs and Bruce Reed, CEO of The Broad Foundation (and former chief of staff to Joe Biden). According to the notes, the “experts” were calling for new federal controls, more for-profit companies and more technology in public schools — but first on the menu was a bold remake of the teaching “profession”:
“Elevating the Teaching Profession and Reforming Teacher Training. Every single person from across the spectrum wrote about and talked about the need to improve our schools of education, entry into the teaching profession and our professionalism once teachers make it in . . . there is consensus that you could offer a bold vision for reforming teacher training and professionalizing the teaching profession for those new to the profession.”
In previous
, Clinton campaign manager John Podesta indicated that recruiting and grooming younger, more compliant teachers was the plan to overcome resistance to corporate education reform over the long term. But in the policy book, Bruce Reed also sets his sights on teaching colleges, claiming “they don’t deliver the goods.”
Powell Jobs suggests letting principals “pick their teams," making teachers individually negotiate salary (every teacher—really?), expanding online education offerings like Khan Academy and making teaching universities “truly selective like TFA and Finland.” This comment is perplexing because while Finland has demanding teacher vetting and training, Teach for America places inexperienced teachers in classrooms after a seven-week summer crash course.
A perfect storm
Representing billionaire Eli Broad, Bruce Reed celebrated the paralysis in local governance in post-Katrina New Orleans as key to pulling off the rapid expansion of charter schools, exploiting disaster without oversight by any “central office”:
“New Orleans is an amazing story — when you make it possible to get political dysfunction and sick a bunch of talent on the problem — it’s the one place where grand bargain of charters has been kept the best.”
New Orleans' "amazing" story resulted in the firing of 7,500 mostly black school employees, wiping out a substantial part of the city’s black middle class. Meanwhile, the “miracle” claims of boosters like Reed have fallen apart. A recent editorial in New Orleans’ African American newspaper called out the false promises and lack of results from the charter experiment.
The new normal
But they did more than talk. On June 20, 2015, O'Leary sent Podesta an email revealing the campaign adopted two of Powell Jobs' suggestions, including "infusing best ideas from charter schools into our traditional public schools.” When Clinton announced this policy in a speech to teachers, however, it was the one line that drew boos.Tying campaign donations to a singular issue like expanding charter schools might in days past been seen as a prohibited quid-pro-quo. But in this cycle, Podesta, O’Leary and Tanden all busily raised campaign money from the same billionaire education reformers with whom they were also talking policy specifics.
“Donors want to hear where she stands” John Petry, a founder of both Democrats for Education Reform (DFER) and Success Academy, New York’s largest network of charter schools, told the New York Times. Petry was explicit, declaring that he and his billionaire associates would instead put money into congressional, state and local races, behind candidates who favored a “more businesslike approach” to education, and tying teacher tenure to standardized test scores.
Clinton’s advisors warned her that wealthy donors like Petry, Whitney Tilson, or Eli Broad could walk if she didn’t support charter schools. Broad would indeed threaten to withhold funding from Clinton when she criticized charter schools for excluding difficult students. John Podesta and Ann O’Leary would publicly correct Clinton, reaffirming her commitment to charters.
The revolving door was also in full swing, with top Clinton and Obama administration officials working for “non-profits” run by Powell Jobs and Tom Steyer. In the end, the influence of the various well-connected “experts” advising Clinton could be felt in an official education platform that endorsed a test-centric approach that was becoming unpopular with parents, students and educators.
Warnings ignored
Clinton was also advised to “Stand Up for the Common Core” despite the botched implementation that was then unfolding from coast to coast. By this time, states were already moving to junk the standards, while the Washington Post was asking whether Common Core could sink Jeb Bush’s presidential run. Yet her advisors were nudging her to echo the Bush talking point of “kindler, gentler” tests.
The feuds over testing resulted in Clinton largely avoiding the controversy. Her advisors describe New York as a messy example, where rushed implementation of President Obama’s Race to the Top’s test-based teacher evaluations “fueled opposition”:
“Governor Cuomo had a very heated political battle with the state’s teachers unions in 2013 over the new teacher evaluation system…[t]he use of test scores in teacher evaluation has caused a substantial backlash . . . This backlash caused the Governor (in the midst of his re-election cycle) to agree to a “moratorium” on using the tests for two years. In an effort to win over Common Core opponents, he ran ads saying he supported a delay in the “use [of] Common Core test scores for at least five years…”
In their efforts to steer Clinton towards pro-testing policies, her advisors relied on education reform talking points. Neera Tanden, head of the Clinton-aligned Center for American Progress wrote that “New York has shown positive gains resulting from the implementation of the new higher standards.” But New York’s repeated changes of proficiency thresholds nullified any statistical validity. Tanden was advising Clinton based on a test-centric philosophy that educators, psychometric experts and court rulings have rejected since 2011.
Teacher input?
Under the heading “[g]ood ideas from the AFT crowd” the 2014 document mentions Randi Weingarten’s call for more “full-service community schools.” Clinton would not promote this much on the campaign stump though, outside of a speech made right back to the AFT. To this day, the education section of Clinton’s 2016 website says only vaguely that states should “use federal education funding to implement social and emotional support interventions.”
Behind the scenes, however, O’Leary was pushing for holistic student supports, by March of 2016 suggesting that Clinton’s K-12 platform:
“…focus on the whole child — and acknowledge that toxic stress created by poverty does impact learning and that teachers cannot do this work alone. We need to support parents through two-generation approaches to learning. We need to provide schools the resources to hire guidance counselors and mental health providers, and make sure that children from low-income communities once again have music and art education and opportunities to participate in gymnastics and ballet. These activities cannot be reserved for only those who can pay for them.”
The Clinton campaign did not bring this message forward, falling silent, even when pressed for more specifics on education plans, as detailed in this CBS article. Meanwhile, emails showed that Clinton and campaign staff knew their donors were behind a lawsuit seeking to end teacher tenure, so her plan was to stay quiet about it.
School’s out
Not mentioning education would become important in the general election. This policy book shows a snapshot in time when wealthy donors were pushing Clinton’s and Jeb’s positions together, seeking more of the federal privatization begun under George W. Bush and continued by Obama.
Seeing this, Trump would tell ticked-off voters what they wanted to hear, vowing loudly to “terminate Common Core out of Washington.” He knew (or should have known) that it was already a state-based decision to use the standards by late 2015. After the election, Trump would completely drop the idea.
This was predicted by John Podesta, who
just after the 2012 election about nullifying education policy differences between President Obama and Mitt Romney. Sitting next to Jeb Bush, Podesta proclaimed “ed reform” a bipartisan affair, telling donors “the Obama administration has made its key priorities clear. The Republicans are pretty much in the same place…this area is ripe for cooperation between the center-right and center-left”.
As the reformer money rolled in, Clinton avoided public stances, with articles by 2015 noting she was getting support from both sides yet still unclear on her vision, critical of testing and charters while still supporting them. From Politico:
Clinton will have to walk carefully between both sides of the education reform debate so as not to alienate either side, said a source close to the Walton Family Foundation: "She’ll be able to receive money from both sides of the education reform debate if she plays her cards carefully…”
Reading this, John Podesta wrote in a private email: “Complicated. She won’t back off criticism, but won’t object to taking contributions.”
Both sides now
These pre-campaign deliberations show the Clinton team was well aware of the controversies raging in education, courting wealthy reformers who claimed to support poor students’ “civil rights” while pushing top-down privatization, testing, cookie-cut standards and invasive data mining.
Ann O’Leary would later tell Podesta that Powell Jobs and other education reformers were “pleased with our work” but were “wary of a few issues” like test-based accountability, then being negotiated in the U.S. Senate:
“The reauthorization of the law – spearheaded by Senators Murray and Alexander in the Senate – provides flexibility to states to set their own accountability systems and their own goals for improvement. The civil rights groups and the ed reformers are very concerned that this lack of accountability will leave poor and minority students with no real systems for improving the poor education that they are receiving.
To date, HRC has stayed out of this debate: generally praising the Senate for moving forward with the reauthorization by keeping standards and testing in place and saying little about the accountability system. I do not believe that she should weigh in on this debate, but rather should continue to monitor it closely.”
In reality, wealthy and well-connected education reformers were likely more instrumental in calling for the “accountability” that kept federal testing mandates in place than were civil rights groups. A key player in this was Russlynn Ali, former Assistant Secretary of Civil Rights to US Education Secretary Arne Duncan. Ali would become an intimate advisor to Powell Jobs, and the head of the Emerson Collective, the charter school advocacy group that Powell Jobs founded.
What did we learn?
The same cadre of billionaires that tried to steer Clinton towards unpopular pro-testing policies and controversial school privatization schemes are hard at work today. Powell Jobs, for example, has sought greater influence, funding a lavish and high-profile effort to “rethink high school” and acquiring a majority stake in The Atlantic. In July, Powell Jobs was reportedly contacted by Ivanka Trump on behalf of the administration, seeking "advice on shaping funding approaches" for STEM education in public schools.
While Eli Broad may have stepped down from his foundation, his post-disaster playbook of taking advantage of local government paralysis remains alive and well. Efforts to replicate New Orleans’ “amazing story” appear to be thriving in Puerto Rico, where schools were devastated by Hurricane Maria.
The 2014 policy book reveals some essential lessons about how education policy is crafted: in secret, with the input and influence of billionaire donors seeking more school privatization and testing—regardless of what party is in power. Even as the backlash against testing and the Common Core grew, Clinton’s advisors pushed her to embrace them. Clinton vacillated, then fell silent on K-12 policy, and as a result, education issues were largely left out of the election debate. Today, under Trump, privatization marches on worse than ever.
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https://kpfa.org/program/against-the-grain/
From charter schools to enterprises like Teach for America — profiteering off of public education has surged, supported by both Democrats and Republicans. But Noliwe Rooks argues that the plundering of taxpayer-funded education has a long history, going back to the era after Reconstruction. Rooks discusses that history — and whether we’re now seeing the slow unraveling of public education in the U.S.
https://kpfa.org/player/?audio=273859
9/17
https://www.amazon.com/Cutting-School-Privatization-Segregation-Education/dp/1620972484
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https://www.alternet.org/education/notorious-family-contributing-opioid-crisis-and-funding-charter-schools
notoriously secretive Sackler family, also known as the OxyContin Clan, has been the subject of much scrutiny of late, including lengthy exposés in the New Yorker and Esquireshining a harsh light on the connection between the drug that made the Sacklers wealthy and their philanthropic giving. But there is another troubling beneficiary of Sackler largesse that has escaped public scrutiny: charter schools. OxyContin heir and Purdue Pharma director Jonathan Sackler is a major funder of charters and an extensive network of pro-charter advocacy groups.
Figuring out who is funding the latest charter school-promoting front group often feels like a game of whack-a-mole. That's why reading Patrick Radden Keefe’s recent New Yorker piece, “The Family That Built an Empire of Pain,” made so much fall into place. Keefe writes, “Purdue and other pharmaceutical companies have long funded ostensibly neutral nonprofit groups that advocate for pain patients.”
The same influence techniques Purdue used to promote painkillers are now being used by Jonathan Sackler to expand charter schools.
Promotional power
The late Arthur Sackler, the eldest of three brothers who bought the company in 1952, was posthumously inducted into the Medical Advertising Hall of Fame, and cited for his achievement in “bringing the full power of advertising and promotion to pharmaceutical marketing.” Yet Allen Frances, former chair of psychiatry at Duke University School of Medicine, quoted in the *New Yorker*piece, highlighted the darker side of that power: “Most of the questionable practices that propelled the pharmaceutical industry into the scourge it is today can be attributed to Arthur Sackler.” As a copywriter at a medical advertising agency, Arthur Sackler devised strategies to promote drugs like Librium and Valium. Now, some of those same strategies are now being used with the aim of promoting charter schools.
Jonathan Sackler, Arthur’s nephew, is a well-known name in the education reform movement. He founded the charter school advocacy group ConnCan, progenitor of the nationwide group 50CAN, of which he is a director. He is on the Board of Directors of the Achievement First charter school network. Until recently, Sackler served on the board of the New Schools Venture Fund, which invests in charter schools and advocates for their expansion. He was also on the board of the pro-charter advocacy group Students for Education Reform.
Through his personal charity, the Bouncer Foundation, Sackler donates to the abovementioned organizations, and an ecosystem of other charter school promoting entities, such as Families for Excellent Schools ($1,083,333 in 2014, $300,000 in 2015 according to the Foundation’s Form 990s) Northeast Charter School Network ($150,000 per year in 2013, 2014 and 2015) and $275,000 to Education Reform Now (2015) and $200,000 (2015) to the Partnership for Educational Justice, the group founded by Campbell Brown which uses “impact litigation” to go after teacher tenure laws. Earlier this year, the Partnership for Educational Justice joined 50CAN, which Sackler also funds ($300,000 in 2014 and 2015), giving him a leadership role in the controversial—and so far failing cause—of weakening worker protections for teachers via the courts.
Just as Arthur Sackler founded the weekly Medical Tribune, to promote Purdue products to the medical professional who would prescribe them, Jon Sackler helps to fund the74million.org, the “nonpartisan” education news website founded by Campbell Brown. The site, which received startup funding from Betsy DeVos, decries the fact that “the education debate is dominated by misinformation and political spin,” yet is uniformly upbeat about charter schools while remarkably devoid of anything positive to say about district schools or teachers unions.
Vertical integration
The Sackler “special sauce” is vertical integration. As far back as the early 1960’s, staffers for Tennessee Senator Estes Kefauver prepared a memo for a subcommittee he chaired that was looking into the rapidly growing pharmaceutical industry.
“The Sackler empire is a completely integrated operation in that it can devise a new drug in its drug development enterprise, have the drug clinically tested and secure favorable reports on the drug from various hospitals with which they have connections, conceive the advertising approach and prepare the actual advertising copy with which to promote the drug, have the clinical articles as well as advertising copy published in their own medical journals, [and] prepare and plant articles in newspapers and magazines.”
This was used to great effect in promoting OxyContin. Art Van Zee MD looked at the Marketing and Promotion of OxyContin and found that in 2001 alone, the company spent over $200 million to market and promote the drug through a variety of methods. In the settlement in the US District Court of Western Virginia, the company admitted to misbranding the drug with the intent to defraud and mislead the public.
The company was lavish with branded swag for health care practitioners. According to a GAO report, these included, “OxyContin fishing hats, stuffed plush toys, coffee mugs with heat-activated messages, music compact discs, luggage tags, and pens containing a pullout conversion chart showing physicians how to calculate the dosage to convert a patient to OxyContin from other opioid pain relievers.”
The description of “lavish swag” will sound familiar to anyone who has witnessed one of the no-expenses-spared charter school rallies that are a specialty of Sackler-funded organizations like Families for Excellent schools. Then there is the dizzying array of astroturf front groups all created for the purpose of demanding more charter schools. Just in Connecticut, we’ve had the Coalition for Every Child, A Better Connecticut, Fight for Fairness CT, Excel Bridgeport, and the Real Reform Now Network. All of these groups ostensibly claim to be fighting for better public schools for all children. In reality, they have been lobbying to promote charter schools, often running afoul of ethics laws in the process.The GAO report went on to quote the DEA as saying the Purdue’s use of branded promotional items in the marketing of OxyContin was “was unprecedented among schedule II opioids, and was an indicator of Purdue's aggressive and inappropriate marketing of OxyContin.”
Take Families for Excellent Schools, a “grassroots” group that claims to be about parent engagement, yet was founded by major Wall Street players. In Connecticut, the group failed to register its Coalition for Every Child as a lobbying entity and report a multimillion-dollar ad buy expenditure and the costs of a rally in New Haven.
In Massachusetts, Families for Excellent Schools-Advocacy (FESA) recently had to cough up more than $425,000 to the Massachusetts general fund as part of a legal settlement with the Office of Campaign and Political Finance, the largest civil forfeiture in the agency’s 44-year history. Massachusetts officials concluded that FESA violated the campaign finance law by receiving contributions from individuals and then contributing those funds to the Great Schools Massachusetts Ballot Question Committee, which sought to lift the cap on the number of charter schools in the state, in a manner intended to disguise the true source of the money. As part of the settlement, the group was ordered to reveal the names of its secret donors. Jonathan Sackler was one of them.
Patrick Riccards, a former CEO of ConnCan, the pro-charter group that Sackler founded in 2005, told me, “Jon went to Berkeley and in many ways fits into that idealistic mold. But at the same time it was he who made it clear to me that one of the reasons ConnCan existed was to leverage the investment in the charter community, in Achievement First, which is still the dominant charter school network in the state. [CT] The venture capital community ... has put tons of money into seeing Achievement First grow, first in Connecticut, then in New York, then in Rhode Island.”
It’s all part of the model, concluded Riccards. “While you have a public vision of great public schools for all, ConnCan’s focus was: how does the charter industry continue to grow? Every year, ConnCan’s fight was how do we increase the number of seats, and how do we increase the per pupil expenditure?”
Staggering toll
OxyContin was approved for use in treating moderate to severe pain in 1995. Purdue was determined to make the drug a hit, and funded doctors like Russell Portenoy, who said in a 1993 interview with the New York Times: "There is a growing literature showing that these drugs can be used for a long time, with few side effects and that addiction and abuse are not a problem.”
Except that the literature was based on short-term usage, not on long-acting opioids taken over extended periods of time. By 2003, Portenoy admitted to the Times that he had misgivings about how he and other pain specialists had used the research. Although he had not intended to mischaracterize it or to mislead fellow doctors, he had tried to counter claims that overplayed the risk of addiction. But if not for such mischaracterizations, the Sacklers wouldn’t be as wealthy, and America might not be suffering from a public health crisis that is costing the country an estimated $78.5 billion a year.
Even as the scope and scale of the opioid epidemic unfolds, the fortune OxyContin built continues to grow. In the case of OxyContin heir Jonathan Sackler, part of that fortune is being devoted to expanding charter schools and weakening protections for teachers in traditional public schools. Patrick Keefe’s New Yorker feature ends with a stunning statistic: “An addicted baby is now born every half hour.” He asks whether such devastation should give pause to organizations that benefit from the Sacklers' extensive philanthropy. In the case of the charter schools and education reform advocacy groups that Jonathan Sackler funds, the answer to that question should be obvious.
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mass walton
dark $
http://www.alternet.org/dark-money-charter-group-democracy
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http://www.alternet.org/education/evidence-mounts-school-choice-isnt-delivering-promised-results-not-k-12-privateers-are
Another week, another round of evidence that providing parents with more “school choice,” especially the kind that lets them opt out of public schools, is not a very effective vehicle for ensuring students improve academically or that taxpayer dollars are spent more wisely.
The latest evidence comes from a study of the voucher program in Washington, DCthat allows parents to transfer their children from public to private schools at taxpayer expense. The study found that students “who attended a private school through the program performed worse on standardized tests than their public school counterparts who did not use the vouchers,” reports the New York Times.
This study adds to others – from Ohio, Indiana, and Louisiana – finding that school vouchers have negative impacts on students.
Despite these results, many proponents of school choice contend the purpose of school choice was never about generating better results. It’s about choice for choice’s sake.
Results Don’t Matter?
That seems to be what US Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos argues in her reaction to the news about the apparent failure of the DC voucher program. As the Washington Post reports, the report prompted her to say, “When school choice policies are fully implemented, there should not be differences in achievement among the various types of schools.”
That reaction struck education historian Diane Ravitch as an implication that “results don’t matter.” She writes on her personal blog, “If you parse this sentence, what she is saying is that when everyone chooses, none of the schools will be better than any others. They will all get the same results, even if they are dismal. The purpose of choice is choice.”
Ravitch points to an op-ed in a local DC paper that argues the “whole point” of choice is for parents to pick schools they believe to be “best” for their children, regardless of the nature of the school or the results of its program.
The writer compares education to breakfast cereal, arguing that some parents may prefer Cheerios while some prefer other brands. What’s the big deal?
This line of reasoning aligns with DeVos’s recent comments comparing schools to all sorts of consumer goods. As the Associated Press reports, in a recent address she made at an education technology conference, DeVos compared school choice to switching phone carriers. “If you can’t get cell phone service in your living room,” she says, “you should have the option to find a network that does work.”
In another of her pronouncements about school choice, she compared education options to ride sharing apps like Uber and Lyft.
For anyone who’s been paying attention, DeVos’s remarks aren’t surprising.
Seven years ago, when a study of the school voucher program in Milwaukee came to a disappointing conclusion similar to the more recent studies mentioned above, it prompted Charles Murray –co-author of the eugenics-inspired treatise The Bell Curve – to respond, basically, “So what!”
Writing in the New York Times, he argued that results from the study of the Milwaukee program didn’t much matter. “Our children’s education is extremely important to us,” he wrote, “and the greater good doesn’t much enter into it.” (Point of irony: Murray argues against using test scores as meaningful measures of school performance, yet the title of his infamous book is a direct reference to how test scores are distributed on a graph.)
More recently, editors of The Economist ruminated over the DC voucher study and concluded the negative results meant, “A parent with a voucher may increasingly think twice about using it. That is a good choice to have.”
The Ultimate Choice
All of this sounds just so sensible until you take into consideration that individuals don’t pay for public education; the taxpayers do. And the choices parents make about their children’s education don’t just affect their children; they have an impact on the whole community.
Businesses are free to create whatever demand they want in the marketplace, whether it’s for better-tasting food or for more convenient service, and how individuals choose to respond to those demands is of no concern to the greater public unless it endangers lives or infringes on freedoms. But the demand for education is a given, it’s universal, and it’s ultimately of interest to our whole society.
And no one has a right to Cheerios, interruption-free cellphone service, or a ride home from the bar. But everyone does have a right to an education.
Further, when you extend the argument of choice for choice’s sake out to its logical conclusion, you’re led to the conclusion parents should have the option to skip educating their children altogether. Don’t laugh. A newly elected Representative in the Arizona legislature recently told a local news reporter, “The number one thing I would like to repeal is the law on compulsory education.
“Education used to be a privilege,” he laments. “Now we basically force it down everybody’s throats.”
His comments prompted education journalist Valerie Strauss to write on her blog at the Washington Post, “Compulsory education has a long history in this country, actually predating it … Education has long been seen not only as a personal ticket to a better life in this country but also as essential for the health of the democratic enterprise.”
Strauss quotes a columnist for the Arizona paper who, after reading the views of her state lawmaker, responded “Oh the horror, of trying to create an educated citizenry. Of forcing kids to actually learn something … Much better, I suppose, to let them stay home, ignorant and hungry and so not our problem. Until someday, when they are.”
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http://www.alternet.org/education/sorry-charter-boosters-record-numbers-teachers-chicago-charter-schools-are-organizing
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http://www.alternet.org/education/california-taxpayers-spent-100s-millions-charter-schools-communities-didnt-need-and-then
A blockbuster report detailing how California’s charter school industry has wasted hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars by opening and building schools in communities that don't need them and often end up doing worse than nearby public schools, is a nationwide warning about how education privateers hijack public funds and harm K-12 public schools.
“This report finds that this funding [building, buying, leasing] is almost completely disconnected from educational policy objectives, and the results are, in turn, scattershot and haphazard,” the report's executive summary begins. “Hundreds of millions of dollars are being spent each year without any meaningful strategy. Far too much of this public funding is spent on schools built in neighborhoods that have no need for additional classroom space, and which offer no improvement over the quality of education already available in nearby public schools. In the worst cases, public facilities funding has gone to schools that were found to have discriminatory enrollment policies and others that have engaged in unethical or corrupt practices.”
The report, "Spending Blind: The Failure of Policy Planning in California Charter School Funding," was written by the University of Oregon’s Gordon Lafer for In The Public Interest, a research and policy center based in Oakland, California.
Its findings are significant on national and statewide levels, especially since California has more charter schools than any other state and the Trump administration has proposed spending $20 billion for a range of “school choice” initiatives, from charter public schools to tuition vouchers for religious schools or to subsidize home schooling. Charter schools are privately run K-12 schools and have become an industry dominated by corporate franchises seeking rapid growth.
The school reform template embraced by the Trump administration’s K-12 privatization agenda would use many of the same fiscal devices and tax-based incentives the new report has documented as wasting California taxpayer funds and harming nearby traditional schools.
Viewed from the level of state politics, where most of the nation’s K-12 education policies are sanctioned and administered, the report highlights a fundamental injustice. California’s charter industry accessed more than $2.5 billion in government-backed bonds, tax credits and grants to lease, build or buy schools in communities where school districts could not meet the legal criteria to build new schools because current or future enrollments would not justify that expansion.
“The most fundamental question to ask about any type of school construction is: how many schools are needed for the number of students we have?” the report asks. “Nearly 450 charter schools have opened [across California] in places that already had enough classroom space for all students—and this overproduction of schools was made possible by generous public support, including $111 million in rent, lease, or mortgage payments picked up by taxpayers, $135 million in general obligation bonds, and $425 million in private investments subsidized with tax credits or tax exemptions. Moreover, since this data was available for only a portion of the state’s charter schools, the real amounts of funding devoted to schools in communities that had no need for more classrooms is almost twice as great.”
The report goes further and notes that despite the charter industry’s assertions that exempting it from regulations would lead to education excellence and innovation, that absence of oversight has led to creating large numbers of shoddy schools in these unwarranted locations.
“The most commonsense question for policy makers to ask when considering funding a new charter school is: will this school provide a quality of education that is superior to that currently available in nearby public schools? Surprisingly, this question is never asked, nor has the data been assembled to easily answer it,” the report says. “This report answers that question for the first time, and for three-quarters of California charter schools, the answer is negative—that is, the quality of education they offer is worse than that of a nearby traditional public school.”
The report cites the statewide charter lobby’s research as the source for that conclusion.
“Indeed, the CCSA [California Charter School Association] has identified 161 schools that last year ranked among the worst of the worst—scoring in the bottom 10 percent of similar schools,” it says. “But this has not prevented these schools from collecting $44 million in lease payments, $57 million in general obligation bonds, $40 million in tax-credit investments, and $85 million in conduit bond financing.”
Stepping back from the worst-performing California charters, the report still paints a picture of large-scale failures by an industry whose core rationale was that the schools were wanted and needed in many communities that hungered for a reinvention of K-12 public education.
“The data suggest that at least 30 percent of charter schools fail both tests—they were opened in places that had no need for additional seats, and they failed to provide an education that was superior to that offered in nearby public schools,” it said. “Due to multiple limitations on available data, the actual share of such schools is almost certainly higher. But even by this limited measure, assuming such failures are evenly distributed across all schools, Californians provided these schools combined facilities funding of over $750 million, at a net cost to taxpayers of nearly $400 million.”
The report correctly points out that charters siphoned these multi-millions away from traditional public schools during a period of great fiscal scarcity in California. That, in turn, harmed many existing school districts that were forced to cut or curtail successful programs.
“Such indiscriminate funding comes at a time when schools across the state face urgent needs that are going unmet due to budgetary shortfalls,” the report notes. “Parents, teachers, superintendents, and school board members alike point to model programs in danger of closure; oversubscribed schools that can’t afford to expand; overcrowded classrooms that make personal attention impossible; and insufficient funding for school counselors, social workers, special education, and English language learners.”
The report concludes by restating what many critics of K-12 privatization have been saying for years—that the original vision for a charter school—a locally created and overseen experimental public school—has been usurped by educational entrepreneurs who see great profit-making potential in accessing billions in taxpayer funds. It points out, for example, that charters in the Los Angeles area have used these state fiscal devices to buy and transfer more than $200 million in real estate property to private ownership—all under the guise of improving public schools.
“When California legislators first created charter schools, their intent was clear,” the report notes, referring to the 1990s. “They sought to empower small groups of educators to launch a wide variety of innovative startups that, by experimenting with new approaches to education, would develop superior models fit to meet the needs of the diverse students that make up the state’s school population.
“However, because legislators’ vision for charter schools has not been incorporated into funding formulas, the hundreds of millions of dollars spent annually on charter facilities have not created the hoped-for incubator of innovation and continual improvement,” it continues. “While some charter schools have proved exemplary, much of the industry has become dominated by the same types of organizations legislators had sought to reform: large chains of schools where materials, methods, and evaluation are centrally dictated and teachers lack the power to set the curriculum; Charter Management Organizations (CMOs) that replicate a single model over and over again with little variation; and schools whose quality of education is no better than that of nearby public schools, and who do not serve to spur improvements in the wider system.”
The report notes that California has raised $500 million from bond sales to fund an upcoming round of public school construction and very strongly suggests that the state develop new criteria to more wisely spend that money than has been the pattern up to now.
“It is not too late to shift course,” the report’s author writes. “With $500 million in newly appropriated general bond funding waiting to go out the door, now is the time for legislators to establish spending rules to guarantee that available funds serve to meet the most critical needs of California students. It is my hope that this report may help shed some light on this pressing issue.”
It’s not just a pressing issue for California’s public schools. As the Trump administration and Congress craft a fiscal year 2018 federal budget, one would hope that the lessons seen in the states on how privatization schemes waste public funds and harm institutions like public schools would be heeded. But just as the charter lobby has prospered in the biggest bluest state, California, there’s even less inclination for government oversight in the reddest federal government in recent memory.
Steven Rosenfeld covers national political issues for AlterNet, including America's democracy and voting rights. He is the author of several books on elections and the co-author of Who Controls Our Schools: How Billionaire-Sponsored Privatization Is Destroying Democracy and the Charter School Industry (AlterNet eBook, 2016).
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https://www.propublica.org/article/these-for-profit-schools-are-like-a-prison
...The Seals incident is the best-documented example of staff-on-student violence at facilities run by Camelot, a company dogged by allegations of similar abuses. Thirteen Camelot students have alleged in interviews or documents that they were shoved, beaten, or thrown — assaults almost always referred to as “slamming” — by Camelot staff members, usually for the sin of talking back, in separate incidents that span 10 years and three states. (Six of the students were interviewed in 2009 in New Orleans.) Two additional students, and five Camelot staff members, say they have personally witnessed beatings or physical aggression by staff.
The abuse allegedly occurred in Camelot programs in Reading; Lancaster; Philadelphia; New Orleans; and Pensacola, Florida. Jandy Rivera, for instance, a former teacher at Camelot-run Phoenix Academy in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, says that on multiple occasions staff members, including administrators, “baited kids so they could hit kids.” For the most part, staffers who allegedly assaulted students have faced no criminal charges or internal discipline; some have even been promoted.
The Florida Department of Children and Families, which investigates reports of child abuse, is looking into an incident last week at Camelot Academy in Pensacola in which a behavioral specialist, while breaking up a fight between students, allegedly knocked a 13-year-old to the ground, causing a bloody abrasion and bruising near the teenager’s eye. The youth posted a graphic photo of his swollen face on Facebook. “I do not like this way of disciplining kids,’’ said his mother, Pauline Ball. “You can give him a permanent injury.” Camelot said the specialist “had to intervene to protect other students,” and that the injuries were an accident: “The staff member and student tripped over each other’s feet and both fell.”
This 13-year-old student at Camelot Academy in Pensacola, Florida, says his face was bruised when a staff member knocked him to the ground. Camelot says it was an accident. (Courtesy of Pauline Ball)
Despite such allegations, Camelot has continued to expand. It contracts with traditional school districts to run about 40 schools across the country — schools that serve kids who have gotten into trouble, have emotional or behavioral issues, or have fallen far behind academically. In 2015, Camelot reported more than $77 million in revenue, more than a third from contracts with the school districts of Philadelphia, Houston, and Chicago. The company also maintains a large presence in some heavily Hispanic old factory towns of Pennsylvania.
About half a million students in the United States attend alternative schools, which are publicly funded but often managed by private, for-profit companies such as Camelot. Camelot’s story illustrates the risk that for-profit schools, which are favored by the Trump administration and new Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, may put earnings ahead of student welfare. It also exposes the dismal educational options available to some students that traditional high schools don’t want to serve, because they are disruptive, severely disabled, years behind in school, or have criminal backgrounds.
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A Chain Of Religion-Based Charter Schools
As I report in an in-depth investigation of the conservative movement’s influence on charter school expansions in Colorado, in addition to reinforcing gender and race inequity, Hillsdale operates the Barney Charter School Initiative, which is essentially a consultant service for a chain of 16 charter schools called Classical Academies. These charters purport to offer “the same course of study that helped propel Western Civilization to the top of the world,” according to what at least one of these schools says on its website.
The Barney project’s strong political agenda was revealed in its former mission statement, since taken down, which said the Initiative seeks to “recover our public schools from the tide of a hundred years of progressivism that has corrupted our nation’s original faithfulness to the previous 24 centuries of teaching the young the liberal arts in the West.” The statement also said, “The charter school vehicle possesses the conceptual elements that permit the launching of a significant campaign of classical school planting to redeem American public education.”
Charter schools created with the help of the Barney Initiative are also proving to be an ideal vehicle for evading laws enforcing separation of church and state. Since my investigation into the opening of a Barney-related charter in Colorado called Golden View Classical Academy, an independent news outlet in that state confirms the school indeed provides students a religion-based curriculum on the taxpayers’ dime.
As Marianne Goodland of the Colorado Independent reports, charter schools like Golden View “have found a legal workaround, and many Democratic and Republican lawmakers are looking the other way.”
Goodland recalls when Golden View applied to the district school board for approval, the school’s director “assured the board Golden View would not use a religious curriculum” and “agreed to comply with the intent of Colorado’s sexual education law by providing ‘appropriate instruction on human anatomy, reproduction and sexuality.'”
Yet, she notes the school’s family handbook, “adopted before the charter application was approved includes references to teaching about sexual intercourse only “in the context of a monogamous relationship between two people of opposite sexes,” a focus on abstinence, admonitions on “the moral and physical consequences of promiscuous sex,” and the “limited effectiveness” of condoms in preventing sexually transmitted diseases.
Goodlad blames a loose, unregulated waiver process for allowing charter schools like Golden View to skirt state laws, and she points to Colorado public officials who provide charters ample leeway to ensure they have the “autonomy” which they claim justifies their existence.
Keep in mind, Barney-related charters like Golden View, that essentially function like private religious schools while receiving taxpayer money, are scattered across the country; their network is growing, and a Trump administration that has pledged to provide more money for “school choice” will only help fuel more rapid expansions of these schools.
“Neither the public nor lawmakers understand the extent of the problem,” Goodlad concludes.
How DeVos And Hillsdale Intersect
Unsurprisingly, Hillsdale president Arnn says Trump’s education secretary nominee Betsy DeVos, “is someone he ‘knows and admires,'” according to right-wing news outlet Breitbart.
And why not, since Hillsdale also has strong ties to DeVos and her immediate family.
As the Hillsdale campus newspaper reports, DeVos’s “roots in Michigan philanthropy run deep and also intersect with Hillsdale College. Betsy DeVos’ brother is Erik Prince, a 1992 graduate of Hillsdale College and the founder of the controversial private security firm Blackwater Worldwide, now named Academi. In 2009, the DeVos family also founded ArtPrize, an international art competition that featured the work of five art professors and students this year. Most notably, Richard DeVos, Betsy DeVos’ father-in-law, co-founded Amway with Jay Van Andel. Van Andel’s son, Steve, was a 1978 graduate of Hillsdale and currently serves as the chairman of Amway.In 2013, after he donated to graduate school scholarships and operations, Hillsdale named its graduate school of statesmanship in his honor.”
Jay Van Andel was also, at the time of his death, a trustee of Hillsdale College, according to Wikipedia.
Most Extremist Administration Ever?
“Those who know DeVos say her goals are not sinister,” Politico reporters caution, “though they acknowledge the policies she’s likely to advance would benefit Christian schools. In fact, Trump’s $20 billion school choice program that would allow low-income students to select private or charter schools was devised with the help of the advocacy group DeVos headed until recently.”
Despite the strong evidence Trump’s education agenda may be driven by right-wing evangelicals, advocates for charter schools in the Democratic Party keep looking for reasons to believe Betsy DeVos is not going to be the extremist she is often portrayed as in media reports.
On hearing the news of the DeVos nomination, the politically centrist hedge fund-backed Democrats for Education Reform released a statement congratulating DeVos on her appointment and applauding her “commitment to growing the number of high-quality public charter schools,” while at the same time regretting that her nomination is the outcome of a political campaign driven by “bigoted and offensive rhetoric.” (Never mind the charter schools DeVos helped grow in Michigan seem less than “high quality.")
Another centrist Democrat deeply embedded in the investment community, Andrew Rotherham of Bellwether Partners, hopes a Trump administration will offer up a plan for charter school expansion that includes “sweeteners for the Congressional Black Caucus” – a condescending and white privilege phrase if there ever was one.
Emma Brown, the education reporter for the Washington Post, notes many advocates for charter schools “worry” Trump’s embrace of charter schools may be identified with his “rhetoric about immigrants, inner cities, and women,” but still hope some kind of “strong accountability” will be in the new administration’s charter school governance, even though those accountability measures have proven to be easily gamed by the savviest charter operators.
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The ALEC agenda for this year’s State and Policy Summit contains the usual potpourri of anti-worker, anti-government proposals along with quite a few important pay-to-play measures for big telecom, health care companies, and nuclear utilities. But much of the agenda will be taken up with speculation on opportunities presented by a new Trump presidency to advance ALEC’s corporatist agenda and its politicians.
TRANSPARENCY FOR UNIONS AND SCHOOL TEACHERS, BUT NOT FOR BILLIONAIRES OR CORPORATIONS BANKROLLING ALEC
ALEC’s offshoot for local governments, ACCE, is taking a page from the ALEC play book and advancing a measure to harass public sector workers.
ACCE’s “Public Employee Bargaining Transparency Ordinance” targets public sector workers by opening up public sector collective bargaining negotiations to public scrutiny and participation. The bill is nothing but an effort to advance the harassment of a targeted group of public-sector workers. There are no ALEC bills opening closed partisan caucuses or opening up economic development loan negotiations, other areas of state government where millions are spent with no public participation.
Similarly, ALEC’s bill “Substantive Transparency in Education Act” is up for renewal vote by special interest lobbyists and legislators in the Education and Workforce Development Task Force. The bill requires public schools to open up their instructional materials for review by any parent or guardian. Note that the bill does not apply to private schools and many private charters refuse to abide by state open meetings and open records laws.
ALEC, however, is for secrecy when it benefits itself and its donors.
It is notable that another ALEC bill under consideration at this week’s meeting “Resolution in Support of Nonprofit Donor Privacy” recommends that the public be kept in the dark when it comes to finding out which millionaires or corporate interests are bankrolling ALEC, because the poor souls might be subject to public criticism or public pressure to drop their ALEC membership.
The resolution highlights 501 (c) (3) organizations like ALEC, but the operative language also protects 501 (c) (4) dark money groups like the Kochs’ Americans for Prosperity. ALEC along with the State Policy Network, the Wall Street Journal, and leaders of dark money groups have been fighting donor disclosure for dark money non-profits active in campaigns and elections. Wrapping dark money in the American flag and the Federalist Papers, they argue in endless articles, books, and speeches, that “anonymous speech” goes back to the founding fathers. But back then no Supreme Court had embraced the deeply flawed and corrosive concept that money is speech. They are sparing no effort to promote the idea that secrecy of donors is essential to protect First Amendment rights, despite the hundreds of millions now being secretly spent in elections without the disclosures the public supports to guard against corruption.
It comes as no surprise that Wall Street Journal editorial writer KimStrassel, who has become the key proponent of this propagandistic effort to shield the billionaire class from scrutiny with her fact deficient new book “The Intimidation Game,” will be addressing the ALEC meeting. Her book attempts to smear concerned citizens and small community organizations across the country that have successfully convinced over 100 ALEC firms to stop funding ALEC’s extreme agenda.
HOSTILITY TO RAISE THE WAGE EFFORTS
ALEC’s offshoot organization for local officials ACCE is advancing a series of muddled measures geared toward keeping wages low and handicapping activist federal agencies.
The “Local Resolution in Support of a State Minimum Wage Law” sounds like ACCE is in support of raising wages, but the cookie-cutter ordinance instructs local governments notto raise the minimum wage and to embrace preemption of local control by state legislatures. This is a rather odd position for a group whose model “Founding Philosophy and Principals Act” teaches American school children government “as close to the people as possible” is best.
But ALEC and its key funders like the billionaire Koch Brothers have long opposed any measure to raise the wage, including living wages and prevailing wages, and the Kochs have even characterized the federal minimum wage as an “obstacle to prosperity.” ALEC opposes even having a minimum wage for workers.
While ACCE favors state preemption of localities on some issues, on others it seeks unconstitutional local preemption of federal policy making. ACCE’s draft “Ordinance for Local Coordination on Federal Regulations” suggests that any local government — from a city or county to a school or water district — or even an NGO can invoke a theory of “coordination” to “force” the federal government to meet with them on an equal basis to work out their differences. “Coordination” is defined as “the process by which an agency of the federal government brings its regulations, whether proposed or established, into consistency with the public policy of [the local jurisdiction.”
So for instance if Superior, Wisconsin, thinks that the federal mercury standards for walleye and perch are too strict, ACCE thinks they should be able to impose their own notions on the federal government. In truth, ALEC has no consistent position on federalism or local control and simply attempts to hamstring any policy it or its funders don’t like.
ALEC’S EXTREME EDUCATION AGENDA ADVANCES WITH TRUMP PICK OF BETSY DEVOS
ALEC education bills were not publicly available at the time of this writing, but the nomination of billionaire Betsy DeVos as Education Secretary is a big win for the ALEC crowd and will be a hot topic at the ALEC meeting.
DeVos and her husband of the AmWay fortune have long bankrolled the dark money group, American Federation for Children (AFC), which spends big each election cycle on politicians advancing her agenda to transform Americas public education system into a for-profit “cash for kids” enterprise. As CMD reported recently, AFC aggressively promotes school vouchers for private schools, religious schools, and even sham virtual schools through ALEC where DeVos lobbyist Scott Jensen, the disgraced former Speaker of the Assembly, has played a leadership role.
CMD has also documented how charter schools promoted by DeVos in her home state of Michigan have been embroiled in fraud and scandal, and how the state has even received federal tax dollars for charters that never opened. The New York Timeshas covered in depth how they are failing the state’s children. Even charter advocates acknowledge that her efforts in Detroit represent “the biggest school reform disaster in the country.”
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cmd 2015 report
WISCONSIN
In 2009, Wisconsin was awarded up to $69.7 million in a CSP grant that ran through 2015. As with other states, Wisconsin was praised for the “flexibility” given to charter schools by state law. Wisconsin was in the first wave of states to approve charter schools, in 1993, through a bill modeled on the “Charter Schools Act” pushed by the American Legislative Exchange Council, which took credit for it being introduced and becoming law.(Governor Tommy Thompson (R-WI) was an early ALEC legislative member, and as governor he became known for numerous “reforms” that later were spawned by ALEC, which Thompson essentially conceded in a public speech years later.) Initially, Wisconsin capped the number of charters but today it has over 240 charters with nearly 50,000 students enrolled. Earlier this year, Wisconsin expanded who can authorize charters. More than 90 charters have failed and closed in Wisconsin, including more than two dozen just in Milwaukee alone. The reasons cited for closures include allegations of financial improprieties and fraud, financial mismanagement, poor academic performance, low enrollment, failure to hire enough qualified teachers, and more. Among those failed charters are nearly a dozen, at least, that were federal CSP sub-grantees, as noted in the list below....
http://www.prwatch.org/files/new_charter_school_black_hole_report_oct_21_2015.pdf
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http://www.alternet.org/education/education-victories-democrats-can-rally-around
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Over the last two decades, a major struggle over control of public schools in America has put our children’s education at risk. Several dozen billionaires, through a powerful infrastructure they established, are attempting to privatize as many K-12 schools as they can—6,700, at last count. There has been plenty of resistance, and the battle continues.
AlterNet.org has covered the school privatization story in great detail. Over time, AlterNet’s parent organization, the Independent Media Institute (IMI), became alarmed at what we were seeing through this coverage, and have responded with a report titled, Who Controls Our Schools? The Privatization of American Public Education. Click here to access the report on your computer, phone, tablet, or e-reader.
School privatization has too often resulted in self-dealing, corruption, thousands of failed schools, and attempts, often successful, to dislodge and usurp local school boards—often community beacons of local democracy. Many boards have been replaced with a corporate model of school control, with virtually no transparency.
Some good things have happened as well, of course. Not all charter schools are bad. There are parent-organized and community-run charter schools doing great things in many locales—but they are increasingly few and far between. At this point, more than 40% of all charter schools are part of national and regional chains, often with no roots in the community.
We are sending you this report because we want to share what we now know about this important, but too little discussed, topic. You might say, “But I’m not interested in public schools”—which is understandable. But we believe that privatizing public schools so that the super-wealthy can profit and impose their ideologies is anti-democratic to its core. This is an issue that affects us all.
Our report draws on extensive research, investigative reporting, and industry publications to show what is happening in our communities and explain why school privatization has taken hold in some cities.
Please, if you could give the report a read, we would appreciate it. And we would love to know what you think; send comments to comments@alternet.org. If you have friends or colleagues who might be interested, please forward them a copy, too.
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Today, the U.S Department of Education announced today that it had approved $245 million in grants to eight states under the federal Charter School Program. The states, California, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Tennessee, Texas and Washington, will receive $177 million in grant money. In addition, 15 charter management organizations, including IDEA Public Schools in Texas and KIPP’s public charter school network in California, will receive $68 million in taxpayer dollars.
This means the federal government has spent nearly $4 billion on charters in the past nearly 25 years, according to Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) analysis.
These awards continue to fund a program that has been plagued by significant fraud and waste; at least $200 million and counting as the Center for Popular Democracy has detailed in two reports.
As CMD documented in its report “Charter School Black Hole,” federal tax dollars have even gone to “ghost schools,” charters that never opened, in addition to charters that opened and failed—with almost no accounting for the money spent or assets, let alone accountability to the school children affected by charter fraud, waste, and incompetence. Indeed, as CMD documented late last year, in state after state charters overall performed no better than traditional public schools—and virtual charters like the K12 operation performed markedly worse—and charters were subject to little transparency or real accountability.
Meanwhile, at the American Legislative Exchange Council, corporate lobbyists, special interest groups, and legislators turned their attention to vouchers—another way to divert cash from public schools to the private or quasi-private sector but with even less accountability. This comes in the wake of the numerous failures caused by ALEC’s deeply flawed charter school bills, which were passed into law in numerous states.
Twenty states applied for the new round of grants, and here are the new charter school state grantees along with a snapshot of their complex history and/or documented problems:
California: More than $4.7 million in federal taxpayer money was handed out to create charter schools that subsequently closed within a few years. CMD’s investigation found that California’s record on charters is marked by continued failures, including squandering of taxpayer money, along with deference to unaccountable authorizers and resistance to federal efforts to mandate better state oversight.
Florida: Florida landed a grant worth up to $104 million in 2011, and has one of the worst records in the nation when it comes to fraud and lack of charter school oversight. More than 120 charter schools have closed in the little more than a decade that Florida began authorizing charters for reasons that include poor academic performance, unsafe conditions, lack of running water, financial mismanagement, and fraud.
Georgia: Here’s one of many examples of problems with charter schools in the state. Atlanta’s Latin Academy Charter School, Latin Grammar Charter School, and Latin College Prep Charter School discovered that the founder of the schools, Christopher Clemons, had allegedly misappropriated approximately $600,000 from school accounts through ATM withdrawals. The FBI arrested Clemons. “The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports Clemons allegedly used that money on travel, meals and clubs. A records check by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution revealed cash withdrawn from an ATM at the same address as a strip club…Clemons also allegedly borrowed hundreds of thousands of dollars in the schools’ names but without their authorization. The financial hit put the viability of Latin Academy at risk despite fundraising efforts by parents and an anonymous pledge of $1 million. The boards cut salaries and expenses in an attempt to remain in operation.”
Massachusetts: The Gloucester Community Arts Charter School was closed in early 2013 due to low enrollment, high rates of attrition, and financial instability. An investigation by the state’s Charter School Office found myriad problems with the school, including the lack of a coherent curriculum, violations of the State’s bidding laws in the contract for its facility, among other concerns. The schools trustees surrendered their charter and the school closed down in the middle of a school year, putting about 100 students on the street in search of new schools.
Tennessee: In 2013, Tennessee’s governor told the Tennessee Virtual Academy, an online charter school operated by for-profit K-12, Inc., that it had one last chance to improve its students’ academic performance after a history of low test scores. The school responded by, in Diane Ravitch’s words, by becoming the “worst school in the state” and posting the very lowest test scores of all of its 1,300 elementary and middle schools. But state’s effort to close the school failed after a fierce public relations campaign from K-12, and it remains open today.
Washington: In 2012, after three failed efforts, billionaire school privatization philanthropist Bill Gates spent an estimated $30 million to win a referendum to allow charter schools in his home state. The state’s Supreme Court ruled charter schools unconstitutional in September 2015, but the nine charter schools that were operating at the time remain open as their backers attempt to oust the Justice who wrote the court’s decision. Microsoft billionaires Connie Ballmer and Paul Allen, and Netflix’s Reed Hastings have given money to the political arm of “Stand for Children” to spend on behalf of Justice Barbara Madsen’s opponent in the November 2016 election.
Texas: The state was awarded up to $41 million under a CSP grant in 2010, and has landed another big grant even though it lacks strong statutory authority to hold failing charter schools receiving federal or state tax money accountable, as a 2013 WestEd audit obtained by CMD showed. An unknown number of schools seeded by federal CSP grants, in fact, housed in churches; some of these are sponsored by, or closely tied to, religious groups. For example, “UME Preparatory Academy” in GrandPrairie, Texas, received $600,000 under CSP during the previous grant cycle. Created by the founder of the Christian schools group the “National Association of University-Model Schools,” the academy added a disclaimer to the bottom of every school webpage: “UME Preparatory Academy is not a member of the National Association of University-Model Schools (NAUMS) since charter schools are required to be non-sectarian in nature and NAUMS is a private Christian organization.
Louisiana: Among other scandals, the New Orleans Times-Picayune reported in January 2016 that the former principals of ReNEW SciTech Academy in New Orleans are accused of special education fraud, failing to follow federal special education law and breaking state testing rules. Louisiana Recovery School District officials said the principals secured almost $320,000 in taxpayer money for the school in the 2014-15 academic year by artificially inflating special education services. They also broke numerous test security rules by directing at least three teachers to review testing booklets to improve future results.
http://www.exposedbycmd.org/2016/10/03/education-department-continues-pour-millions-charter-school-blackhole/
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weld:
Investcorp acquires Nobel Learning Communities, a network of 176 schools in the US
Bahrain | Mar 30, 2015
Investcorp, a global provider and manager of alternative investment products, today announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Nobel Learning, a leading provider of private preschool through high school education in the United States, from Leeds Equity Partners.
Founded in 1984, Nobel Learning operates a network of 176 schools across 18 states with a commitment to outstanding education. The company also has an accredited online private school that offers college preparatory programs to students from over 55 countries worldwide. With approximately 5,000 teachers and staff and 25,000 students, Nobel Learning is one of the largest private operators in the U.S. Investcorp is joined in the acquisition by its co-investors and partners, Mumtalakat, the investment arm of the Kingdom of Bahrain.
“We are pleased to have concluded another transaction that is aligned with Investcorp’s strategy of investing in companies that we believe have the potential to grow with the support of our hands-on approach to investment,” said Mohammed Al-Shroogi, Investcorp, President of Gulf Business. “Nobel Learning has a strong presence in a fragmented and growing defensive market. We believe this provides us with the ideal platform from which to apply our operational and financial expertise to enhance its educational product as well as its reach across the US and around the world.”
“Nobel Learning has achieved tremendous progress over the last several years in further developing the quality of our educational product and building a very strong portfolio of on-ground and online schools. We believe that we are well-positioned to capitalize on the opportunities within the private education market in the U.S.,” said George Bernstein, President and Chief Executive Officer of Nobel Learning. “We are extremely pleased to partner with Investcorp, which can support our expansion with operational resources, real estate expertise, and access to their global network. We look forward to benefitting from their experience in accelerating the growth of their portfolio companies as we continue to invest in our curriculum, our on-ground and online school platforms and t
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http://www.alternet.org/education/what-happens-gulen-charter-turkish-schools
he calls were coming from around the country. A call from Springfield, Mass. was followed by a call from New Orleans, followed by a call from Columbus and also a call from Chicago. The callers were contacting my office at the American Federation of Teachers asking about charter schools in their area operated by Turkish men. We didn’t have any good answers.
By now, the scale and ambition of Fethullah Gulen and his followers are in the news daily with the fallout of the apparent coup attempt in Turkey this summer. I'd be lying if I said I knew how to interpret the events in Turkey. However, I am not the least surprised by the direct assertions by Republic of Turkey officials that Gulen—a nearly 80-year-old mullah living in the Poconos since 1997—is behind a large network of charter schools here in the United States. This fact has taken far too long to pierce the headlines, but it has now become a standard paragraph in both international and domestic coverage of the confusing events in Turkey.
In 2009, we were stunned by what we were finding as we ran down charter applications and tax forms for these widely dispersed but seemingly related schools. Teachers at the schools were contacting the union to determine how to proceed with asserting their rights in the face of management practices. (This is part of the challenge charter schools overall pose in public education, as these schools may receive nearly all their revenue from public sources, but their practices more resemble private entities than public schools. The teachers at one of those charter schools, the Chicago Math and Science Academy, ultimately became the subject of a landmark National Labor Relations Board case that found the CMSA was in fact a private employer and not covered by Illinois public sector labor law.)
As we pieced together the origin stories of more than 100 charter schools across the country, we found what can only be described as a public conspiracy. Dozens of Turkish men were forming charter school boards and applying to open schools for approval by city officials or school district administrators or state education department bureaucrats. These charter schools were allied with education management organizations—the private foundations or companies hired to run the daily operations of the schools—that were also run exclusively by Turkish men. The charter applications stated that these schools in part would be staffed by teachers or administrators brought to the United States from Turkey under the H1-B visa program for "specialty occupations." (The cumulative numbers of staff with H1-B visas nationally are difficult to know precisely; in 2014, theCincinnati Enquirer identified 67 H1-B visa holders out of a total teacher workforce of 541—comprising 12 percent of staff at 17 Concept Schools in Ohio.)
The Turkish individuals who came as H1-B visa teachers then became founding charter board members at subsequent generation charter schools. The historic research showed that starting in 1999, the first Turkish charter schools were approved, and that by 2009, entire charter chains had been created to operate dozens of schools: the Horizon Science Academy chain in Ohio, the Magnolia Science Academy chain in California, the Harmony Science Academy chain in Texas, the Sonoma Science Academy chain in Arizona.
As a labor organizer, I was surprised by the organizational capacity and sheer bravado of the whole charter school enterprise. But then we found the links to Fethullah Gulen in the academic work of Joshua Hendrick, a scholar then at the University of Oregon. And I was simply amazed. Was it really possible that a network of charter schools in the United States was in fact affiliated with the Turkish international missionary organization headed by the exiled Fethullah Gulen from Pennsylvania?
Was it really possible that no one in the American education administration knew about this network or grasped the implications? A strict interpretation at face value of all of the Gulenist movement's declared intentions means one has to accept its missionary purpose as primary. In the United States, the Gulen movement has successfully employed many hundreds of its adherents inside the charter schools and used public funds to further employ many thousands of other adherents through contracted products or services to the charter schools.
In retrospect, the pattern exhibited by the group of school founders seems so transparent and yet wholly undeclared. Academics like Joshua Hendrick havedescribed their actions as "strategic ambiguity" in masking their true intentions. Hendrick said after the coup:
"[The Gulen movement’s] organizational culture emerged in a context that demanded strategic ambiguity. While some people are open and proud about their affiliation, others deny it completely. This starts with Fethullah Gulen himself. He is a very ambiguous character, right to his birthdate one cannot get a straight answer from him about anything.
"The movement operates in over 100 countries and over 100 legal spheres, and this model ensures that if something goes wrong in one place, it doesn’t affect everywhere else. It’s a calculated measure. For example, when lots of questions were raised about charter schools linked to Gulen in Texas, you started to see the same answers appearing from institutions in Ohio, Maryland, Alabama with the same script: 'Some people might be influenced by Gulen because they come from Turkey, in the same way as people from the U.S. are influenced by Martin Luther King Jr.'"
This is how it works in the American charter school “sphere”: The Turkish men who applied and vouched for the academic pursuits of the founding board would also be inviting local school district officials or local politicians to Interfaith Dinners as is common with the Gulenist movement activities worldwide. The schools publicized their STEM focus (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) but these courses were often taught by recently arrived Turkish teachers who spoke such heavily accented English many students couldn't comprehend the instructors. The schools invariably offered Turkish language instruction and the most promising students were "volunteered" to participate in language competitions that culminated in national or even international "Turkish Olympiads."
American families were allowing their children to travel around the United States or even to Turkey with Turkish teachers for little or no cost. Local politicians all the way up to representatives and senators were accepting "donated" trips to Turkey hosted by Gulenist officials in the United States and traveling within Gulenist networks of hotels, guest houses, restaurants and institutions. And to start the cycle all over again, those politicians or parents were advocating alongside the Turkish men to open new schools within the charter application process.
Even within the insular charter school industry where public funds regularly become private profit like modern alchemy, the presence of charter operators dominated by recently arrived Turkish men has no precedents. Perhaps the establishment of parochial schools by the Catholic Church in the early 20th century is similar, but those schools were subjected to highly charged constitutional changes in state constitutions (known as Blaine Amendments) that precluded public funds from going to those schools. The legal fights for public funding for religious-based schools recurs regularly around the so-called “voucher” programs around the country.
The franchise-like growth of "unrelated" schools run by Turks “influenced by the teachings of the Iman Gulen” took place in full public view and can easily be compiled from public records or the promotional websites of the Gulen movement. This went on for years in communities all across the country with seemingly few people asking any questions, including state and federal educational regulatory bodies. I can only assume the thinking among the education bureaucrats was if the Turks were taking the financial risk to open the schools, then their motivations must be true and legitimate. Now, in retrospect, we have a deeper insight into their intentions from the accusations coming from their home country.
Over the last few years, many local newspapers or national reporters covered this charter school network and Gulen's role in it as local interest stories. The New York Times in 2011 did a front-page profile of the Harmony Science Academy chain and its sole-source contracting practices with seemingly related Turkish companies. Leslie Stahl on "60 Minutes" did an infamous piece in 2012 in which Stahl stood around sheepishly at the empty seat where Gulen would have sat if she were granted an interview for her segment. And still the Gulen schools continued to apply and receive new charters in nearly all cases.
The Turkish charter school applicants and their supporters were prepared to go after the critical voices who spoke against their applications by raising the apparent ties to the Gulen movement: they attacked the messengers. Anyone who raised the public records and activities and cited the Gulen movement's own declarations linking its worldwide network of private schools to the charter school networks was dismissed as anti-Muslim, xenophobic or unhinged.
After closely watching the pressure mount on the Gulenist schools and their defenders since 2009, I am concerned that these claims of anti-Muslim motivations are intentionally confusing the central issue of public oversight of charter schools. The administration of public education within the bounds of our laws and tradition of separation of church and state is severely tested by the charter school model of the Gulenists—as is equally true if the charter schools or other public institutions were hijacked to surreptitiously serve any criminal conspiracy or sect's missionary goals. The demands for full disclosure and public transparency in the Gulenist schools' operations are the same for charter school mismanagement (as
even by the comedian John Oliver).
The fact is that all those accusations of "discriminatory motives" made toward the critics are bluster. We know this because the bark of any of the Gulenists with the anti-Muslim dodge has never been followed by any bite in civil actions claiming defamation or libel in American courts.
However, slowly but surely over the last few years, as the pro-public education activists were increasingly vocal of challenging charter schools generally, the critical voices started to gain traction in some communities. The Gulen charter schools in the Atlanta area were shut down completely by community demands including from former students and families who felt duped by the dishonest practices at the school.
More and more of the darker workings of the Gulen charter schools have started to be aired from former teachers or insiders. There are repeated but so far not proven in court of law accusations of mandated tithing by the Turkish immigrant adherents; this would certainly be in line with Gulen movement practices elsewhere. In the U.S., however, the added twist is these charter school employee salaries are entirely from public sources, so it's not a stretch to say the American education system is indirectly subsidizing the Gulenist missionary purposes.
The other troubling—and substantiated—practice is the active, regular workplace discrimination that takes place against the American educators and staffers from the Turkish staff and administrators. The reviews of the publicly available teacher rosters and the labor condition applications for the Turkish workers showed that American teachers were commonly paid substantially less than the Turkish visa-holding educators. In the Chicago Math and Science Academy unionization drive, a vocal union supporter who was in her third trimester of pregnancy was summarily fired; she later won her labor board case alleging violations under federal labor law. Many teachers in Ohio called for investigations into questionable practices at the Concept Schools, including disparate treatment of American certified teachers compared to the H1-B visa teachers from Turkey.
In my most sympathetic moods, I can see how some of the local education bureaucrats have been too inattentive to these growing accusations against the Gulen charter school chains. In most cases, however, the entire charter school industry has convinced the public that these schools are exempt from any regulation at all and now are "self-policed" by a captured set of pro-market ideologues who serve solely to advance even more charter school openings. But I hold no sympathies for the federal Department of Education, which could have intervened at any point to notify the states and localities of the actions of federal or congressional authorities around some of the Gulen charter chains and foundations.
The FBI and other agencies (including the Dept of Ed) in 2014 jointly raided the offices of Concept Schools, a Gulenist management foundation, and a handful of schools under the Horizon Science brand to investigate illegal contracting for the E-Rate program that wires schools for internet services. Those investigations are now more than two years old and are "still on-going" according to FBI spokesmen in July before the so-called coup attempt.
In October 2015, USA Today reported on the possible unethical foreign trips taken by dozens of Congress members to Turkey at the invitation of multiple Gulenist institutions including the Turquoise Council of Texas, a sister organization to the Cosmos Foundation. A followup story by USA Today cited dozens of suspicious political contributions by Turkish individuals employed at Gulenist institutions or charter schools. In one instance a large donor to Sen. Kelly Ayotte is quoted saying, "He is a good guy. He is doing a good job so far. I know him." Both Senate and House Ethics Committees are reportedly investigating the facts behind USA Today's reporting.The U.S. Dept of Education awarded the Gulenist Cosmos Foundation a multimillion-dollar grant to "replicate" its Harmony Science Academies program and grow the charter chain in Texas in 2011. In 2014, the Dept of Education Office of Civil Rights and the Harmony Science Academies and Cosmos Foundation "settled" an investigation into Harmony's possible violations of anti-discrimination laws in the selective admission of English Language Learner and disabled students. According to the settlement record, the Dept. of Education had been at multiple Harmony schools reviewing admission policies for many years and was offered a settlement by Harmony administrators before any formal investigation was concluded.
So what exactly is going on in Washington since the July 17 violence in Turkey? Vice President Biden was dispatched to Istanbul to hear the Turkish government’s grievances. The Republic of Turkey is demanding the exiled Gulen be extradited. Multiple departments and agencies of the federal government have monitored or investigated Gulenist institutions and charter schools for years, so there is undeniably a paper trail somewhere. However, the network of charter schools is now estimated to be more than 150 schools with enrollment of nearly 70,000 students.
The neighboring public school systems are normally expected to accept displaced students with any charter school closure, although some students would choose to enroll in other local charter operators. But could any local district manage the sudden arrival of dozens or hundreds of students from a shuttered Gulen school? In the Concept Schools case, 540 teachers across 17 schools enrolled nearly 6,500 students across a dozen or more districts in 2014. We all take for granted—and certainly the charter industry knows it—that no student would be turned away from their neighborhood public school. That is their right to attend and be admitted. But is the education bureaucracy contemplating this possible outcome of the shutdown of these Gulen schools?
The lack of transparency of the Gulen charter network and the failure of federal and state oversight are warning signs of the dangers involved in turning over taxpayer dollars for public education to private charter operators. In the case of the Gulen network, the amount of money involved is enormous—hundreds of millions of dollars. Shouldn’t there be government investigations? A moratorium on adding more schools to these networks? Where is the voice of the charter industry for due diligence in schools where we send our children? Our children deserve better.
Gene Bruskin is a 40-year veteran of the labor movement. He has been a local union president, as well as an organizer and campaign coordinator for numerous local and national unions. He retired in September 2012 after establishing and leading the Strategic Campaigns Department for the AFT. He is currently producing a musical comedy he wrote called Pray for the Dead—A Musical Tale of Morgues, Moguls and Mutiny.
http://www.alternet.org/education/what-happens-gulen-charter-turkish-schools
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http://educationblog.dallasnews.com/2016/05/texas-charter-school-network-accused-of-bias-and-self-dealing.html/
Soner Tarim, CEO of Harmony Public Schools, during a tour of a new campus in Houston in 2011. Harmony runs seven charter school districts in Texas with a total of 46 campuses. (Michael Stravato/The New York Times)
Harmony Public Schools, Texas’ largest charter school network, is known for its math and science prowess. Now it’s under fire forallegations of discrimination, self-dealing, misspending — and alleged ties to a controversial preacher from Turkey.
A law firm hired by the Republic of Turkey is asking the Texas Education Agency to investigate Harmony, which was founded in 2000 by Turkish graduate students.Harmonyeducates 31,000 students at 46 campuses across the state, including 12 in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.
The firm, Amsterdam & Partners, filed a 32-page complaint Tuesday with the state that details “some very concerning issues and some apparent illegal or improper conduct related to these school operators,” said John Martin, senior counsel for the firm. Among the allegations: Harmony hires under-qualified Turkish teachers and steers business to companies run by Turkish nationals, including some former Harmony employees.
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8/16 update inequality charters
http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/katrina-pain-index-2016-numbers-race-and-class-gap-widening
3.Ninety-three percent of New Orleans’ 48,000 public school students are in charter schools, the highest percentage in the U.S. Before Katrina, there wereover 65,000 students enrolled in New Orleans public schools, less than 1 percent in charter schools. There are now 44 governing bodies for public schools in New Orleans. There are seven types of charter schools in Louisiana. The public schools are 87 percent African American. Widespread charter school problems for students with disabilities are getting a little bit better according to a federal court monitor report. The public has very mixed feelings about the system reflected in the most recent poll, which shows 43 percent of whites think the schools are getting better, compared to 31 percent of African Americans; while 23 percent of African Americans thought schools were getting worse, in contrast to 15 percent of whites.
2,000. Black median income in New Orleans rose from $23,000 in 2005 to $25,000 eight years later, while white median income rose by $11,000 from $49,000 to $60,000 during the same time.
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