Lying to Sell School Choice

By Thomas Ultican 10/20/2024

Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) and The 74 are lying about education gaps to promote “school choice.” The 74’s October 10 headline says, “In Cities With School Choice, Low-Income Kids Catching up to Wealthier Peers.” The article is based on a report from the PPI’s Reinventing America’s Schools. The non-peer reviewed report assaults scholarship and is based on other billionaire paid nonsense.

Progressive Policy Institute

Tressa Pankovits, the Co-director of PPI’s Reinventing America’s Public Schools, authored the propagandistic report. She came to PPI after 10 years as CEO of Vallas Group inc. Her PPI bio says the Vallas Group was, “led by esteemed education and public finance expert Paul Vallas.”  It should be noted Vallas is not universally esteemed in New Orleans, Philadelphia or Chicago where he did his best to privatize their schools and demean teachers.

PPI pushes conservative ideology while dressing it up like progressive philosophy. The biography of its founder, Will Marshal, states, “Founded in 1989, PPI started as the intellectual birthplace of the New Democrat and ‘Third Way’ movements, earning a reputation as President Bill Clinton’s ‘idea mill.”’

Lily Geismer’s book, Left Behind, claims that the Democrats failed attempt to solve inequality demonstrates how Bill Clinton “ultimately did more to sell free-market thinking than even Friedman and his acolytes” (Left Behind Page 13). She went on to note that Journalist Charles Peters called Clinton and his core supporters, neoliberals. Geismer noted:

“Peters meant it not as a pejorative but as a positive. … Neoliberals, he observed, ‘still believe in liberty and justice and a fair chance for all, in mercy for the afflicted and help for the down and out,’ but ‘no longer automatically favor unions and big government’” (Left Behind Page 18). [Emphasis added]

Historian Arthur Schlesinger labeled the DLC “a quasi-Reaganite formation” and accused them of “worshiping at the shrine of the free market” (Left Behind Page 46). DLC stands for Democratic Leadership Council which is also referred to as “New Democrats.”

David Osborne was an early fellow at PPI. He developed his view of entrepreneurial government into a 1992 book written with Ted Gaebler, called “Reinventing Government: How the Entrepreneurial Spirit is Transforming the Public Sector.” In their book the authors “made the case for what they called ‘entrepreneurial schools,’ which would compete among each other for customers” (A Wolf at the School House Door Page 84).  Under Osborne’s influence, “the DLC became one of the first political organizations to explore charter schools as a means of improving public education” (Left Behind Page 118). Osbourn became a senior advisor for Vice President Al Gore and founded PPI’s Reinventing America’s Public Schools. He is still its Director Emeritus.

Reinventing America’s Public Schools is aggressively for school privatization through charter schools. They are funded by the Walton Family Foundation (TIN: 13-3441466), the Broad Foundation (TIN: 95-4686318), and the Arnold Foundation (TIN: 26-3241764). These are the billionaires paying the freight and they want their deliverables.

Propaganda Masquerading as Research

There are two main claims being asserted in the report. One is that achievement gaps are shrinking in areas with significant school choice. The second claim is that charter schools do not negatively impact public schools. The 74 quotes Brandon Brown, CEO of the Mind Trust in Indianapolis, saying, “[A] lot of the evidence shows that the growth of high-quality charter schools does not come at the expense of the school district.” Both of these claims are farcical.

The PPI report claims:

“Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) has undertaken many local studies and, in 2023, released its third major national report in a series spread out over the past 30 years. In that massive study, CREDO researchers assessed the performance of students at 6,200 charter schools in 29 states between 2014 and 2019, confirming that charter-school students, on average, outperformed their peers in demographically-matched traditional public schools” (Report Page 6).

If we believed the CREDO results, the differences of 0.011 standard deviations in math and 0.028 standard deviations in reading are so small as to be meaningless. In addition, the CREDO methodology is highly suspect. Professor Andrew Maul of UC Santa-Barbara stated, “The study’s ‘virtual twin’ technique is insufficiently documented, and it remains unclear and puzzling why the researchers use this approach rather than the more accepted approach of propensity score matching.”

Economics writer, Andrea Gabor, noted the “study excludes public schools that do NOT send students to charters, thus introducing a bias against the best urban public schools, especially small public schools that may send few, if any, students to charters.” Schools sending less than 5 students to charters are excluded from the study. In addition, the CREDO study makes no adjustment for charter schools creaming students which means charters teach fewer special education and language learner students than do public schools.

Macke Raymond is the current director of CREDO. In 2015, her Hoover Institute Fellow’s profile said, “In partnership with the Walton Family Foundation and Pearson Learning Systems, Raymond is leading a national study of the effectiveness of public charter schools.” The 2023 report was their third in this series of studies. Her partners have too much skin in the game to be viewed as unbiased.

The PPI report looks at 10 cities “with more than one-third of students enrolled in bricks-and-mortar charter or charter-like schools.” PPI claims, “In every one of these cities, students have significantly closed the gap in outcomes between low-income students and all students statewide between 2010-11 and 2022-23” (Report Page 10). (Emphasis added)

In the beginning of the standardized testing craze, outcome gaps between racial groups were a big concern. Then Sean Reardon and his team at Stanford discovered that these gaps in testing results were more likely poverty driven. There is almost no information about where PPI got the data to support their claims. Most of the 10 cities studied are in states that have changed test types and venders since 2011. This makes the state tests somewhat difficult to use for comparing gap changes if the data required could be attained. However four of the cities PPI studied are in the NAEP (National Assessment of Education Progress) Trial Urban District Assessment (TUDA) group; Cleveland, District of Columbia, Detroit and Philadelphia.

Using the NAEP data explorer to look at 8^th grade math, the results for students receiving free or reduced lunch was found. Free and reduced lunch is generally believed to be a good indicator of poverty and 8^th grade math is a subject that all students take. There was almost no change over the 12 years cited.

Only the national results saw a 3% improvement and the four studied cities saw testing declines of more that 1%. The PPI report states, “In all of these 10 cities, the data show that in the last decade (school years 2010-2011 through 2022-2023), low-income urban students closed the gap with statewide test score averages by 25-40% (Report Page 10). This is a surprising and difficult claim to accept. In fact, it looks like an outright lie.

Conclusion

It has been clear that The 74 was a billionaire propaganda rag ever since its original funding was provided by the Dick and Betsy DeVos Family Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation, the Doris and Donald Fisher Fund and Bloomberg Philanthropies.

PPI appears to be an organization stuck in its 1990s neoliberal ideology with their misguided belief that markets are always the superior path to improvement.

Both organizations seem to be missing out on ethics. Here they have joined in a lie to sell school choice.

Tags: Andrew Maul, David Osborne, Lily Geismer, Margret (Macke) Raymond, Paul Vallas, Sean Reardon, Tressa Pankovits, Will Marshall