Tag Archives: Betsy DeVos

Promoting Vouchers to Destroy Public Education

15 May

By Thomas Ultican 5/15/2025

It is clear that the motive for financing voucher adoption has never been about improved education or democratic principles. Pro-voucher billionaires are using their stolen opulence to end taxpayer funded education for all. Vouchers are their most effective tool in this venture.

The latest mania is a wild scheme to give parents bank accounts from which to pay for their children’s education. These so called education savings accounts (ESA) are not really vouchers. They just directly transfer public money to private citizens while shunning accountability measures.

What could possibly go wrong?

ESAs used to be systems like the Coverdell ESA or the 529 tax advantaged plans where a parent put money in an account for their child’s higher education. Today, ESAs are states giving money directly to individuals and telling them to use it to educate their children almost any way they see fit. Wealthy people, who send their children to private schools, now get a nice chunk of change from the state.

Writing in the billionaire funded education propaganda channel, The 74, Jeb Bush is ecstatic about the new ESA voucher program just arm twisted into existence by the Texas governor. Bush declares:

“After decades of debating private school choice, Texas has delivered a monumental victory for its students and families. With the passage of a $1 billion education savings account (ESA) program, Texas joins a growing list of states giving parents real power to customize their children’s education. But this is more than just a win for Texas families — it is a moment of national significance that can reshape how ESA programs work across the country.”

All of the hyperlinks, in Bush’s declaration, are to former articles from The 74 pushing school privatization.

Abbott Lying to Texans about Vouchers

Why is it that when given a chance to vote on vouchers, people always vote against these “monumental” victories? Before billionaires destroyed their political careers, even Republican politicians from rural Texas opposed vouchers. They could see that the only winners would be wealthy people in cities like Dallas. Where rural people live, there were no privates schools to take vouchers. The ESA scheme transfers wealth from rural areas to urban areas by underfunding public education to pay for vouchers.

The Economic Policy Institute reported in 2023, “An analysis of voucher programs in seven states found an unmistakable trend of decreased funding for public schools as a result of voucher expansion.”

Texas Can Expect a Fraud Fest

The right-wing Texas Policy Research champions ESAs and informs:

“Education Savings Accounts (ESAs) represent a more flexible alternative to vouchers. Instead of directing public funds solely toward private school tuition, ESAs allow parents to use the money for a variety of educational expenses. ESAs function like a debit account that parents can use to pay for tuition as well as other approved education-related costs, such as tutoring, online courses, special education services, and homeschooling resources.”

There are two big problems with this approach. Instead of the school, private or public, managing their child’s education now parents who normally have no training or expertise in education must do it. Secondly, handing out money to thousands of parents for their children’s education is a giant management problem. Fraud and abuse are guaranteed.

In February, two Phoenix men 21 and 20 years-old were convicted of voucher fraud. They pleaded guilty to money laundering, agreed to pay $196,526.33 in restitution and were given supervised probation. 

Two Colorado residents, Bowers and Hewitt, were recently indicted for submitting fraudulent applications for 43 “ghost” children.

Just over a year ago, three employees of the Arizona Department of Education and two others were indicted for fraud, conspiracy, computer tampering, illegally conducting an enterprise, money laundering and forgery related to the ESA Program.

The defendants approved ESA applications for minor students, both real and fictitious, and admitted them into the program by using false, forged or fraudulent documentation such as fake birth certificates, and falsified special education evaluations. The defendants approved and funded these fictitious student’ ESA accounts and expenses for reimbursement which went to their own benefit.

Save Our Schools Arizona summarized an ABC15 receipts study documenting extravagant ESA spending by parents:

  • $3,400 for one purchase at a golf store
  • $10,000 for one purchase at a sewing machine company 
  • $19,000 for more than 100 passes to Arizona Snowbowl Ski Resort
  • $100,000 for extravagant appliances that freeze dry food which cost $3,000 each
  • $350,000 for “Ninja Warrior” training centers, trampoline parks & climbing gyms
  • $400,000 for trendy, indoor hydroponic tower gardens that cost $1,000 each
  • $1.2 million for martial arts instruction

Save Our Schools Arizona also reported on ESA Director John Ward’s explanation:

“Even a $4000 piano for a single family? Director John Ward explained, ‘These are absolutely allowable. Now, if it was a luxury piano, some type of grand piano, baby grand, we may not approve that as a luxury item.’ So, ‘luxury’ pianos aren’t approved, but what about ‘luxury’ driving lessons in BMWs and Teslas? According to Ward, ‘while you may think this may not be a good use of that family’s ESA funding, at the end of the day, they get a fixed amount of money, and if that’s how they’re going to choose to use it, that’s their prerogative.”’

Most people hope that responsible public servants would not create this kind of unaccountable taxpayer funded system but that is the nature of the ESA voucher scheme. Arizona’s ESA program, which now serves over 70,000 students across the state, is staffed by 32 employees. 

Failed Policy

Josh Cowen writing about vouchers in his book, The Privateers states, “The purpose was and is to do away with schools existing as a core function of democracy and stand up instead a privately held, sectarian, and theocratic version of publicly funded education.” The results with vouchers the past 20-years have been abysmal. From an education policy standpoint, no one would recommend continuing with them.

In February 2017, Kevin Carey’s article in the New York Times was a rude awakening for voucher hawking billionaires. He reported on three voucher studies.

The first was a 2015 voucher study in Indiana that showed significant drops in math results.

This was followed by results from a Louisiana study showing voucher students having huge comparative losses in both English and Math. Carey wrote, “Martin West, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, calls the negative effects in Louisiana ‘as large as any I’ve seen in the literature’ — not just compared with other voucher studies, but in the history of American education research.”

Finally the conservative think tank, Thomas B. Fordham Institute that is a proponent of school choice, did a Walton Family Foundation financed study of a large voucher program in Ohio. They reported, “Students who use vouchers to attend private schools have fared worse academically compared to their closely matched peers attending public schools.”

Reviewing these and other results prompted Professor Cowen to remark, “… the evidence against vouchers is actually overwhelming.”

Conclusion

The only reason vouchers schemes are gaining ground is because billionaires like the Walton Family, Betsy DeVos and Charles Koch are spending lavishly to make it happen. They target Republican politicians, who oppose vouchers, by funding primary challengers. They have created and funded the state policy network (SPN).  Influence Watch reports, “The SPN has close ties to the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) with the two organizations sharing many members, and the SPN supporting policies formulated by ALEC and its members.” SPN is a network of 167 conservative and libertarian think tanks throughout the United States and Canada which coordinate efforts to support billionaire policy goals, raise funds, and amplify the influence of its members.

One billionaire policy goal is to end free universal public education.

SPN is an anti-democratic movement created to subvert the will of people. There has never been a voucher program to win an election. Vouchers only occur where Republican politicians can ram them through state legislatures and then fight tooth and nail to keep them off ballots.

The billionaire created voucher movement is harming American students and undermining democracy.

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Privatized Schools Will End Democracy

30 Oct

By Thomas Ultican 10/30/2024

America’s founders believed in a need to educate the populace, especially second and third presidents, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. They believed that the only way a self-governing society could be sustained is with an educated population. Adams penned to his wife, Abigail, “And liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people who have a right from the frame of their nature to knowledge, as their great Creator who does nothing in vain, has given them understandings and a desire to know.” In a 1786 letter to scholar and fellow signatory to the Declaration of Independence, George Wythe, Jefferson wrote:

“I think by far the most important bill in our whole code is that for the diffusion of knowledge among the people. No other sure foundation can be devised for the preservation of peace and happiness.” (School and Society 1995, Page 25)

In the antebellum era, two types of schools flourished, common schools and academies. Common schools were supported by local and state governments. They were free for students. Academies may have received some governmental support but they charged students tuition. The common schools dominated towns and cities while the rural areas without enough population to support a common school turned to academies which were often boarding schools.

After the Civil War, common schools became more dominant. As the school system developed throughout America, the public structure took root.

In the 1930’s, the fact of an educated population that could read, write and do some math probably saved America from authoritarianism. During World War II, the high rates of literacy among American troops had a lot to do with their success on the battlefield.

The 1960s and 70s witnessed civil rights coming to public education and the development of a pluralistic system. Unfortunately, in the late 1970s, Washington DC politicians began to interfere with public education by proposing education standards, a harmful error.

In 1983, the Reagan administration published a deceitful attack on public schools, “Nation at Risk.” Since then public schools have been under relentless attack financed by billionaires.

A key weapon in this attack has been forcing school vouchers on communities and states. Vouchers have never survived a popular vote, but in areas dominated by the Republican Party they have been enacted by legislatures. Researcher Joshua Cowen’s new book, “The Privateers; How Billionaires Created a Culture War and Sold School Vouchers,” documents the way rightwing billionaires advanced a public education killing agenda.

The Privateers

Milwaukee, Wisconsin brought us America’s first voucher program in 1991. Cowen claims with evidence that the driving force behind the program was the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation.

In 1901, the brothers founded the Allen Bradley Company with a $1,000 investment by local Milwaukee doctor Stanton Allen. The older brother Lynde died in 1942 and the younger brother Harry succumbed in 1965. In 1985, Rockwell International bought the Allen Bradley Company for $1.65 billion and overnight the Bradley Foundation ballooned from $14 million to $300 million. The faceless people in control of this giant pile of cash pushed through America’s first voucher program.

Joshua Cowen is a Professor of Education Policy at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.  From 2015-2018, he served as co-editor of Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, the flagship peer-reviewed education policy journal in the United States. He was previously Associate Editor of Education Finance and Policy, and remains on the editorial boards of both journals. Since 2009, his research has been funded by an array of philanthropist and organizations including The University of Arkansas Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation and John Arnold.

Cowen being in the research trenches working directly with scholars that had an ideological predisposition to support vouchers makes his information powerful.

Billionaires Charles Koch, Betsy DeVos and other holders of extreme wealth have financed the fight to move funding away from public education and toward private schools. Cowen explains, “The purpose was and is to do away with schools existing as a core function of democracy and stand up instead a privately held, sectarian and theocratic version of publicly funded education.” (Privateers Page 30)

When the nation’s first voucher program was enacted, Wisconsin lawmakers included a requirement for an outside evaluation. University of Wisconsin professor of political science, John F. Witte, was given the assignment. Cowen reports, “Although the evaluation found the parents of voucher users indicated greater levels of satisfaction with their children’s educational experiences over time, Witte also found little consistent evidence that vouchers improved test scores or attendance rates and found that students gave up the vouchers at high rates to return to Milwaukee Public Schools.” (Privateers Page 36)

Paul Peterson, a Harvard professor who thirty years earlier earned a PhD in political science from the University of Chicago, was not having it. He blasted Witte’s report in the New York Times and in academic papers. Peterson was known mostly for his 1990 book, “Welfare Magnets.” However, in 1995, he received funding from both the Olin foundation and the Bradley foundation. Some of that funding was to evaluate Witte’s report. Peterson and his then graduate-student Jay P. Greene (now at the Heritage Foundation) attacked Witte’s study with a shocking level of vitriol and ferocity. (Privateers Page 38)

The next voucher program popped up in Cleveland, Ohio. It was the Peterson-Greene evaluation of the program that caused researchers concern about a hidden agenda and sloppy scholarship. Cowen writes:

‘“Even when he has limited data, he’s always squeezing out whatever data he can to arrive at a predetermined answer,’ said Professor Bruce Fuller, an early voucher critic at University of California, Berkeley. Fuller noted that with Olin and Bradley funding Peterson’s work, ‘That’s like the tobacco companies sponsoring studies on the effects of smoking.’ A later textbook for future evaluators would cite the Peterson Milwaukee work as a cautionary example of ideologically predisposed research and ‘a hidden agenda,’ particularly in Peterson and Greene’s willingness to use lower-than-conventional standards of statistical inference to make their case. Even Paul T. Hill, an otherwise prominent school choice supporter, singled out the Peterson Cleveland work as ‘not a persuasive study.’” (Privateers Page 42)

The central role of the Bradley Foundation was brought home with a quote from the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer:

“The Bradley Foundation virtually drove the early national ‘school choice’ movement, waging an all-out assault on teachers’ unions and traditional public schools. In an effort to ‘wean’ Americans from government, the foundation militated for parents to be able to use public funds to send their children to private and parochial schools.” (Privateers Page 46/7)

The wheels on the voucher bandwagon flew off. Patrick Wolf, another Peterson acolyte at Harvard who is now at the University of Arkansas, presented a paper with results Cowen described as “shocking.” The evaluation of Louisiana’s statewide voucher program showed unprecedented large negative impacts on students. Martin West, a former Peterson student and now Harvard Professor, wrote about the results calling them “as large as any I’ve seen” in the history of American Education.(Privateers Page 89)

Since that Louisiana study, two studies in Washington DC also showed large academic losses. The same thing occurred in both Ohio and Indiana. The largest academic declines ever recorded were from these voucher programs; larger than the losses due to Katrina or the Covid pandemic.

Conclusion

 If you have not read “Privateers,” I strongly recommend you do. In it, Joshua Cowen documents the massive spending by Charles Koch, Betsy DeVos, the Walton family and other wealthy conservatives to undermine public education by selling school choice. Public education is expensive and does not allow for religious indoctrination. Good private schools cost a lot more than the vouchers offered. This creates two benefits for conservative billionaires, overall education costs are reduced and the public is forced to fund religious schools. Those who are not wealthy will get an enfeebled education if the billionaires succeed in destroying public education.

Koch, DeVos and other billionaires run wealthy foundations that are tax exempt charities. In reality, they are not charities. They are political organizations spending to advance school privatization and other political agendas. The laws governing tax exempt foundations are being ignored because no one wants to face the wrath of the supper wealthy.

America can no longer afford billionaires. They undermine democracy. I have two recommendations. Tax billionaires back to being millionaires and cleanup tax free giving.

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Bigots and Title IX

14 Aug

By Thomas Ultican 8/13/2024

Biden administration’s update for Title IX of the national education law was scheduled for implementation on August 1st. However, a coalition of bigots and creepy right wing billionaires won court relief for about half of America’s schools. Moms for Liberty, claiming members with students in 2000 schools nationally, got a stay for those schools on July 26. With the addition of Alabama, Florida, Georgia and South Carolina on July 31, the total number of states challenging the law rose to 26.

The latest stays came when the US District court in the Northern District of Alabama ruled that the Biden/Harris rewrite should take effect. That was July 30th. An immediate appeal was filed that day by Independent Women’s Forum, Parents Defending Education, Speech First, and the states of Alabama, Georgia, Florida, and South Carolina.

The three supposedly grassroots organizations that joined the legal challenge are libertarian billionaire creations … specifically Charles Koch’s.

A 2021 Washington Post report about Charles Koch fueling the opposition to mask wearing in schools, noted work of the Independent Women’s Forum:

“In 2003, Independent Women’s Forum announced that it was formally affiliating with Americans for Prosperity, the Koch network’s main political arm, and that the two organizations would share office space. ‘The affiliation agreement provides for staff and resource sharing between Americans for Prosperity and the Independent Women’s Forum,’ an archived news release stated, explaining that Nancy Pfotenhauer, then-president of Independent Women’s Forum, would also serve as president of Americans for Prosperity.”

Speech First and Parents Defending Education are two more Koch-created entities. Speech First founder Nicole Neily, now leading Parents Defending Education, is a long-time Koch operative.

Source Watch reported:

“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.”

Neily worked from 2009-2012 at the Independent Women’s Forum where she served eight months as executive director.

On January 2021, Neily became founder and president of Parents Defending Education.

This attack on Biden’s Title IX update is not an organic grassroots effort. It is a billionaire financed attack on public schools and equity … a bigoted aggression on homosexuality.

Charles Koch Opposes Justness

The National Education Policy Center (NEPC), housed on the campus of University of Colorado, briefly reported on resistance to the Title IX changes, sharing:

“Preventing exclusion based on gender identity: This section is one of the more contentious elements of the changes even though it does not apply to school sports, which have been the focus of much of the controversy in recent years related to transgender students in schools.”

The new rules also made discrimination against gay students easier to demonstrate. Trump’s 2020 rewrite required a discrimination complaint be severe AND pervasive. Under Biden, NEPC observes, “[T]he incident(s) need only be severe OR pervasive, making it easier to file a successful complaint.”

It does not seem these legal appeals will lead to overturning the new rules but will delay their implementation. The language is consistent with prior case law interpretations of Title IX, including Whitaker v. Kenosha (2017) and Grimm v. Gloucester (2020).

From the 2017 case record:

“Ashton, a transgender high school senior, requested to use the boys’ restroom while at school. The Kenosha School District denied the request, indicating that Ashton’s mere presence would invade the privacy rights of his male classmates.”

The Seventh Circuit upheld this injunction, stating, “Harms identified by the District are all speculative, whereas the harms to Ashton are well‐documented.”

In 2020, the Fourth Circuit ruled, in a similar case, “The Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 can protect transgender students from school bathroom policies that prohibit them from affirming their gender.”

These are just outcomes which billionaire Charles Koch is fighting against!

Save the Children

Many of us are not well-informed about the plight of transgender children. However, as cited above, courts find ignoring transgender youths’ issues inhuman. A small subset of human beings is born with gender-dysphoria, a mismatch between gender identity and their own personal sense of gender. Scientific American reported almost all major American medical groups have “policy statements and guidelines on how to provide age-appropriate gender-affirming care” and “find such care to be evidence-based and medically necessary.”

Columbia University Psychiatry states:

“It is well documented that TGNB [transgender non-binary] adolescents and young adults experience anxiety and depression, as well as suicidal ideation, at a much higher rate than their cisgender peers. According to The Trevor Project’s 2020 National Survey on LGBTQ Youth Mental Health, 54 percent of young people who identified as transgender or nonbinary reported having seriously considered suicide in the last year, and 29 percent have made an attempt to end their lives.”

Transgender children are fine just the way they are but society can be flawed. People tend to see a small group of people that are different from themselves and make negative judgments. There is no healthy way for these children to change so the rest of us need to grow and express our humane side.

A 2022 study by the UCLA School of Law’s Williams Institute identified 0.6% of Americans, over 13, as transgender. Adults over 17 had a rate 0.5% while youths 13 to 17 came in at 1.4%. The numbers are quite small but not insignificant.

The new Title IX rules, fought by Charles Koch and right wing Republicans, are designed to protect these people.

Conclusion

The new rules reverse a requirement that schools only investigate alleged incidents on their campus and end a demand for in-person live courtroom-like hearings in sexual misconduct cases. Betsy DeVos called this a “radical rewrite” of the law, claiming it is an “endeavor born entirely of progressive politics, not sound policy.”

Kel O’Hara, a senior attorney at Equal Rights Advocates, has a much different view:

“The new regulations put an end to unfair and traumatic grievance procedures that favor harassers. No longer will student survivors be subjected to processes that prioritize the interests of their perpetrators over their own well being and safety.”

I don’t expect anything from Mom’s for Liberty, a feckless organization that only exists because of billionaire dollars. However, seeing 26 states in this country side with homophobia and discrimination is disheartening. Since their claims against Biden’s rules are baseless, the only conclusion is that many leaders in these Republican-dominated states are hoping to delay equity until head bigot, Donald Trump, is elected President of the United States.

Members of the LGBTQ+ community are among the most creative and productive citizens in America.

Aren’t bigots who encourage hate campaigns against them, benighted fools? 

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Citizen’s Guide and Defense Manual

5 Aug

By Thomas Ultican 8/5/2024

Jennifer Berkshire and Jack Schneider just published The Education Wars. In their 2020 book, A Wolf at the School House Door, the focus was the rightwing and neoliberal attacks on public education. In this new book, they address actions taken to end taxpayer funded universal public education and the resistance. It is a handbook and guide.

Historian and author of Democracy in Chains, Nancy MacLean noted:

“Who would want to ‘take down the education system as we know it’—and why? Read this fast-paced, lucid, and gripping account to understand who is behind the escalating attacks on public education and what, exactly, they seek.”

Parker J. Palmer, author of The Courage to Teach, highlighted the unique dilemma facing public education in America, commenting:

“We’ve argued about our schools from the earliest days of public education. But never before have our public schools been threatened with a well-financed strategy to bring the system down, replace education with indoctrination, shred our social fabric, undermine opportunity for millions of kids, and consign them to second-class citizenship. This is a vital handbook for all who want to enlist in the never-ending struggle for a ‘more perfect union.’”

What’s in it for Billionaires?

Eric Anderson, cited in the book, worked in a Bavarian-themed restaurant for the mother of Betsy DeVos and Eric Prince. He shares about waiting tables and overhearing billionaires’ conversations which gave him insights. In his 2023 article about DeVos pushing for vouchers in Pennsylvania, he stated:

“Equality does not serve the ruling classes well. It never has, which is why the plutocrats lobby so hard against it. It’s why they pursue agendas, such as school vouchers, that are guaranteed to exacerbate inequality.”

“An uneducated populace is bad for democracy, but it’s great for the rich and powerful, who can more easily pull the wool over the eyes of voters. The less able you are to reason, the more amenable you are to lies and smokescreens and dog whistles (e.g., ‘school choice,’ ‘parental rights,’ etc.). Education liberates. Ignorance subjugates.”

While many self-styled school reformers seek profits, for billionaires, the motive is securing control over democratic processes to solidify their privileged positions in society.

The push for vouchers by Charles Koch and Betsy DeVos has multiple purposes. Vouchers undermine public schools and voucher laws are written to limit government oversight. Furthermore, this creates an environment for indoctrinating students with conservative beliefs.

Getting rid of oversight is key for voucher-pushing billionaires. The authors also note:

“Want to sow a revolt against the largest expense in most state budgets? Make it impossible for the public to see where their tax dollars are going.” (Page 22)

Public Schools are Better than Ever

One important point made early in the handbook is that public schools have continually improved as have student outcomes. On NAEP, the nation’s report card, scores have increased over the last 50 years. Since the 1980s, graduation rates have soared from less than 70% to almost 90%.

Teachers and curriculum have significantly improved. Back in Glenn’s Ferry, Idaho where I attended school, almost all teachers were graduates of Albion Normal school. It was a two-year institution for teacher training after which they went directly into the classroom. The highest math my algebra instructor studied was algebra I. Today, a vast majority of teachers have at least a bachelor’s degree plus a year of supervised teaching practice. Math, science, social studies and English teachers are experts in their field.

Public schools continue to become more equitable. Into the 1950s, a separate curriculum was provided for girls, low-income students and students of color, emphasizing domestic or industrial training. The Education Wars states, “Schools were segregated by race, students with disabilities were mostly turned away and students not proficient in English were isolated in schools with limited academic opportunities.” (Page 14)

Work still needs to be done but the campaign for equal schooling has come a long way.

In the 1970s, both Republicans and Democrats decided that the primary purpose of school was to prepare students for jobs. Democrats especially advanced the idea that education was the way to address the nation’s deepening wealth gap. They saw education as expanding the middle class without resorting to politically-challenging ideas like wealth redistribution.

Since then, public education has been expected to solve poverty: “The view that education is a ‘passport out of poverty,’ as Lyndon Johnson insisted, holds deep sway.” (Page 43) The reality is the biggest indicator of poor education performance is poverty and schools have no control over the wealth of neighborhoods in which they reside. It is not surprising that these institutions disappoint when held responsible for things out of their control.

Schools Attacked in New Era of Fierce Partisanship

 At a Moms for Liberty event in 2023, Donald Trump claimed public schools were infested by “Marxist lunatics and perverts.” He also said he would “liberate our children” by cutting federal funding to any school pushing “inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content on our children.” (Page 45)

Over the top rhetoric like this has become common place, even though there is scant evidence to support it.

Since its founding in 1973, Heritage Foundation has been fanning the flames of school culture ideology. They see it as the key to undermining faith in public schools. Over the decades, specific issues have changed but their goal of ending public education has persisted.

In 1992, while stumping for president, Patrick Buchanan claimed he would be the president of parents. He said, “I will shut down the U.S. Department of Education, and parental rights will prevail in our public schools again.” (Page 80)

Today, his claim has become parental rights, almost exclusively for religious conservatives as these disingenuous and divisive calls continue. A Virginia law governing the treatment of transgender and non-binary students allows parents of other students objecting to a student’s preferred pronouns, based on the First Amendment’s guarantee of religious freedom.

The handbook shares:

“Justifying this policy, Governor Glenn Youngkin’s administration pointed to what it identified as parents’ fundamental rights. But a more accurate explanation is that the rights of certain parents are being privileged above others.”   (Page 89)

Milton Friedman’s vouchers have become taxpayer-funded discrimination. Civil rights attorney, Jeffrey Spitzer-Resnick, suggested, “Let’s stop calling it a ‘choice program’ and let’s call it a private discriminatory education program funded with your tax dollars.” (Page 109)

Education as a Public Good

In the final chapter, “Reclaiming Education as a Public Good,” Beth Lewis of Saving Our Schools Arizona says:

The defining issue here is: Do you care about other people’s kids or not? Do we want to live in a world that’s based on the understanding of a public good, or one where only the individual good matters? (Page 134)

The authors assert, “We can start by reducing the responsibility that education bears for achieving minimal social and economic security.” (Page 145)

Currently schools are asked to do the impossible and blamed for failing. Literally billions of dollars are being spent to destroy public education, the foundation of Democracy.

The Education Wars is a handbook to help parents and citizens recognize feckless attacks and defeat them.

America’s public education system is a treasure and if lost, will never come back.

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Kamala Harris and Public Education

31 Jul

By Thomas Ultican 7/31/2024

Democratic presidential candidate, Kamala Harris, has a good record with public education. Her opponent, who appointed Betsy DeVos Secretary of Education, disagrees and says she is a “radical liberal,” responsible for Mr. Biden’s most left-leaning policies. It is unlikely he has any actual knowledge of what she might have been responsible for. To this fascist leaning fellow, the entire Democratic Party and a slice of the GOP look like “radical liberals.” With the two major candidates for president, there is a clear difference in education policy: Harris is pro-public education, Trump wants to end it.

Ruby Bridges’ Shadow and Kamala Harris

Her Record

In a 2020 run for President, Harris stated at a Houston rally, “You can judge a society by the way it treats its children, and one of the greatest expressions of love that a society can give to its children is educating those children with resources they need.” At that time, she identified the “pay gap” between teachers and other college graduates, as undermining the required resources. She wrote in the Washington Post:

“As president, I will make the largest federal investment in teacher pay in U.S. history. We will fully close the teacher pay gap during my first term, and provide the average teacher a $13,500 raise.”

Her plan would have included $315 billion in federal funding over 10 years to subsidize pay for K-12 educators and reward state and local governments for raising teacher’s salaries. This was to be paid for by adjusting estate taxes.

She has yet to mention teachers’ pay in 2024 but, obviously, it is something to which she has given a lot of thought and believes needs attention.

In 2019, as California’s U.S. senator, considering a presidential run, she supported the teachers strike in Los Angeles. Harris wrote, “Los Angeles teachers work day in and day out to inspire and educate the next generation of leaders.” Besides wage increases, teachers were demanding smaller class sizes and more support staff. The union victory in the strike was a defeat for pro-charter school billionaire Eli Broad and the California charter school movement.

Cecily Myart-Cruz, current president of the United Teachers of Los Angeles, remembered Harris’s support “was such a boost.”

In July 2020, the President of the United States and his Secretary of Education demanded schools open with in-person classes five days a week. Parents were worried about the safety of their children and teachers were frightened.

President Trump tweeted,

“In Germany, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and many other countries, SCHOOLS ARE OPEN WITH NO PROBLEMS. The Dems think it would be bad for them politically if U.S. schools open before the November Election, but is important for the children & families. May cut off funding if not open!”

Michelle Goldberg of NY Times wrote, “… with their crude attempts at coercion, they’ve politicized school reopening just as Trump politicized mask-wearing and hydroxychloroquine.” It was the beginning of a rightwing offensive toward public schools, eventually leading to open bigotry, attacks on school board meetings and book banning.

Harris and Orange County Congresswoman, Katie Porter, responded to Trump with a letter agreeing that in-person schooling was crucial for children’s well-being and for parents’ ability to work. They also wrote that lives could be at risk if schools reopened without stringent safety measures such as social distancing, regular randomized virus testing and virus contact tracing.

These were never seriously addressed by Trump.

In some liberal-leaning states, including California, millions of students went 18 months without in-school classes. However outcomes have not matched expectations. In New York, which opened schools in fall 2020, their 2022 reading and math scores fell while in Los Angeles, math and reading scores improved. Commissioner, Peggy Carr, of the National Center for Education statistics reported, “There’s nothing in this data that tells us there is a measurable difference in the performance between states and districts based solely on how long schools were closed.”

Last week, when Harris addressed the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) convention in Houston, Michael Whatley, chairman of the Republican National Committee, accused her of “already ignoring parents and getting cozy with the same teachers union bosses who she allowed to dictate school reopening guidance and keep kids out of the classrooms.”

Republicans believe that by not enthusiastically embracing Trump’s open school edict and siding with teachers unions made her vulnerable to political attack. However, his “divide-and-conquer” incompetent management of the COVID crisis and demand to open schools without preparations makes him more exposed to current criticism.

At last Tuesday’s AFT convention, Harris shared education issues to be focused on between now and Election Day: student loan forgiveness, protecting schools from gun violence and resisting Republican attempts to restrict curriculums.

In 2023, she flew to Florida to take on Gov. Ron DeSantis’ attacks on what he dismissed as “woke indoctrination” in schools. Harris was particularly incensed by the state’s middle school standards, arguing that enslaved people “developed skills that could, in some instances, be applied for their personal benefit.” 

As attorney-general in the state of California, she went after for-profit colleges, accusing them of false advertising and intentionally misrepresenting to students the benefits provided. She won a $1 billion judgment  against the California-based Corinthians Colleges Inc. stating, “For years, Corinthian profited off the backs of poor people – now they have to pay.”

Harris was not blowing political smoke when kicking off her campaign saying in her long career as a prosecutor, she has taken on all kinds of predators:

“Predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain. So hear me when I say, I know Donald Trump’s type.”

EducationWeek says Harris is unlikely to stray far from Biden’s education agenda. She will continue working to overcome court challenges against forgiving student loan debt and expanding protections for LGBTQ+ students and school staff through a rewrite of rules for Title IX, the nation’s landmark sex discrimination law.

It also states, “On the Republican side, the party has proposed a platform that calls for eliminating the U.S. Department of Education, defunding schools that teach ‘critical race theory’ or ‘gender ideology,’ and universal private school choice.”

This is disingenuous. No k-12 schools teach “critical race theory” and never have nor do they teach “gender ideology.” These are false claims designed to scare and divide people in order to garner votes. “Universal private school choice” is a scheme to end universal taxpayer funded public education.

Conclusions

Kamala Harris is a strong supporter of public education and embraces our nation’s outstanding teaching force which she wants to enhance. She will be dealing with people who believe public education is too expensive and charter schools are helpful but her track record says she will protect this important foundation for American democracy and national achievement.

The soon-to-be Madam President has good instincts and I look forward to her pro-public education administration!

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School Moms Battle for Public Education

11 Feb

By Thomas Ultican 2/11/2024

Leading into the 2020-2021 school year, I started hearing about parents protesting mask mandates. It did not make sense. Soon, open schools now protests started in San Diego County. News came that Florida had mandated in-class school. These events turned out to be part of a new right-wing attack on public education. Journalist, Laura Pappano, explores this recent history in her book School Moms: Parent Activism, Partisan Politics, and the Battle for Public Education.

War Moms

Visiting the Marriott Tampa Bay in 2022 for first-ever Moms for Liberty (M4L) national gathering, Pappano described the conference rooms as “white, far-right Christian world”, adding:

“As I listened to keynote speeches and strategy session after strategy session, I saw speakers lay a foundation of a distorted groupthink. Then, like an ideological conveyor belt, the speakers carried the moms to ever crazier places, stirring fears that their children were being brain washed and indoctrinated into Marxist ideology and that they were being groomed by teachers to want to transition from one gender to another.” (Page 2)

Before COVID vaccines, Tina Descovich, who just lost her Brevard County school board seat, became angry about school mask mandates. M4L grew out of this anger. She joined Indian River County school board member, Tiffany Justice, and Sarasota County school board Director, Bridget Ziegler, to legally found M4L.

The first speaker at the Tampa rally was Florida Governor, Ron DeSantis, wanting people to recall that in July, 2020 Florida’s education department declared schools would return to in-person learning. He did not mention Florida Education Association’s Safe Schools Report that disclosed 46 COVID-related teacher deaths, 10 student deaths and 200,834 student-positive tests in school year 2020-2021. Knowing how much that last statistic spread COVID is impossible but it was a lot.

At the conference, DeSantis claimed:

“While they were infringing freedoms, we were lifting people up. We made sure that every single kid in this state had the right to go to school in person five days a week.”(Page 3)

A quick peek at data from the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) shows little to no advantage for Florida students academically.

Pappano shared the drumbeat of fear in Tampa with:

“Parents were told that public schools are rooted in ‘Marxist ideologies’ and seek to brainwash their children—and not ‘brainwash in some cute way,’ said one speaker, the far-right cultural critic James Lindsay. ‘I mean brainwash in the sense of ‘she-now,’ which is Mandarin, which is literally what the Maoist prisons referred to as their program of thought reform.”’ (Page 6)

DeSantis told his audience about drawing “a line in the sand” with the “Don’t Say Gay Law”, prohibiting discussion of sex and gender identities in grades K-3. He claimed it lets parents send kids to school “without having woke ideology” and “have some first-grader be told that yeah, your parents named you Johnny and were born a boy, but maybe you are a girl.” (Page 7)

This has never happened in an American elementary school … but reality was not the point.

Former Education Secretary, Betsy DeVos, used “education freedom,” the new term for “school choice” to promote vouchers. Moms were told it was critical because public schools were a mess. (Page 8)

James Lindsay asked, “If you knew you were sending your children for thirty to thirty-five hours a week to a Maoist thought reform prison, Maoist brain-washing prison, what would you [do] differently?”, saying take “all lines of dedicated action to fix this system to get this crap able to be seen and identified for the crime against humanity that it is and pulled out of schools.”  

He declared: “You are War Moms!” (Page 7)

Not everything following the convention has been positive for M4L. February 3rd, 2024, CNN ran “Moms for Liberty faces new challenges and growing pushback over its conservative education agenda.” The article reported on the January 23rd Brevard County school board meeting, where M4Lstarted, with many quotes similar to this:

‘“Why are we banning books?’ asked Mindy McKenzie, a mom and nurse who is a member of Stop Moms for Liberty, which was formed to counter what it calls a far-right extremist group ‘pushing for book banning and destroying public education.”’

Critical Race Theory

In School Moms, Pappano addresses the headline-grabbing education concerns since 2020. Few issues stirred more animosity and notice than Christopher Rufo’s Critical Race theory (CRT).

Rufo was born August 26, 1984 and grew up in Sacramento, California. His path to fame and power in rightwing politics opened while he was a research fellow at the Christian think-tank, Discovery Institute. This small institute is most famous for promoting “intelligent design” in high school science classes and opposing Darwinian Theory.

While working at Discovery, Rufo lived in Seattle, Washington. When protestors drove police out of a precinct near Cal Anderson Park, erected barricades and established the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, he immediately jumped on the story and wrote pieces for Manhattan Institute’s City Journal, with titles like “Anarchy in Seattle.” (Page 76)

In “Cult Programming in Seattle”, he described a “racial-justice shakedown”, causing white employees to “abandon their ‘white normative behavior’ and learn to let go of their ‘comfort,’ ‘physical safety,’ ‘social status’ and ‘relationships with some other white people.’” He also quoted James Lindsay, the Maoist prison camp guy, calling it “the language of cult programming—persuading members they are defective in some predefined manner.”

Pappano reports:

“On July 18, 2020, he pressed harder. In ‘White Fragility’ Comes to Washington,’ Rufo claimed that diversity trainings at several federal agencies were part of ‘the creation of a new, radical political consciousness.’ He also miss-defined this new consciousness as CRT, writing, ‘Critical race theory—the academic discourse centered on the concepts of ‘whiteness,’ ‘white fragility’ and ‘white privilege’—is spreading rapidly through the federal government.’ The erroneous definition of CRT caught on. Rufo tweeted about it. Then, on August 17, 2020, Rufo was a guest on Fox’s Tucker Carlson Tonight, where he described critical race theory as spreading ‘like wildfire’ across American institutions.”’ (Page 77)

A few weeks later, Rufo, back on Carlson’s show, claimed, “Conservatives need to wake up that this is an existential threat to the United States” and looking into the camera stated:

“The president and the White House, it is within their authority and power to immediately issue and executive order abolishing critical race theory. I call on the president to immediately issue this executive order.” (Page 78)

President Trump complied. Two days later on September 4, 2020, Russell Vought of the Office of Budget and Management wrote to all agencies, “The President has directed me to ensure that Federal agencies cease and desist from using taxpayer dollars to fund these divisive, un-American propaganda training sessions.” (Page 78)

CRT indoctrination was from the beginning a bogus claim. It is a legal theory, developed in the 1970s and 80s, looking at how race is affected by legal structures. This was almost exclusively the purview of graduate school legal debates. Forty years later, it has been drudged up to fuel a McCarthyesque style attack on educators and fight against inclusion. There is no evidence that it has ever been taught in the K-12 environment. Today, CRT is almost forgotten, as Rufo and the hard-right are focusing on destroying diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI).

Those opposing DEI are supporting segregation, privilege and exclusion. Antagonism to DEI indicates support for white supremacy and disapproval of judgments based on merit.

School Moms

Big education issues that appeared over the last three years are covered in this book.

The Seven Mountains mandate, placing the law of God above secular law, is addressed in Chapter 5. Pappano writes, “For Christian Extremists, LGBTQ+ individuals, and especially transgender students, are a deviation from ‘God’s design’ and a clear ‘problem’ in the ‘extremists’ quest for a Christian society.” (Page 116)

The movement to ban books is addressed in Chapter 3, “When librarians Come Under Attack.”

There are heart-wrenching stories from Texas, Tennessee, Minnesota and other states, of popular educators having careers ruined by zealots and racists.

The story of Free Staters, trying to destroy public education in New Hampshire, is included.

Not all is lost!

Pappano says, “In this new environment, everything had a side: masks, books, pride flags, pronouns, history lessons.” Before their children arrived, many mothers were high-functioning employees with skills. She asserts, “So one should not be surprised at the professional-level organizing going on in grassroots public education groups.” (Page 128)

School Moms: Parent Activism, Partisan Politics, and the Battle for Public Education

… is a worthwhile read.

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The Phony NAEP Crisis

1 Nov

By Thomas Ultican 11/1/2022

The recent data release by the National Assessment of Education Performance (NAEP) for mathematics has inspired balderdash. Jeb Bush called it “Alarming.” A Chalkbeat headline characterized it as a “massive drop.” Harvard’s Tom Kane wrote that it signaled “ enormous learning losses.”  The Heritage Foundation’s Lindsey Burke was able to place her article in many outlets with the subtle headline, “New NAEP Test Scores Are a Disaster. Blame Teachers Unions.”

In reality, the score drops were not massive and learning loss which probably isn’t actually a thing was not enormous. However, if the purveyors of doom can convince enough people it is a crisis, then they can advance their own pet agendas such as ending public education.

NAEP (pronounced nape) testing which is known as the nation’s report card was originally implemented in 1969. The tests use a combination of standardized testing and sampling. The Washington Post reports that this year 224,000 fourth-graders from 5,700 schools and 222,000 eighth-graders from 5,100 schools were sampled. Sampling certainly makes more sense than states paying testing companies to test every student but standardized testing is still not a capable tool for measuring learning.

It is not just me saying it. Unlike the scientifically well behaved data associated with genetics study, standardized testing data is extremely noisy. The famed Australian researcher Noel Wilson wrote a seminal work in 1998 called “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error.” His peer reviewed paper which has never been credibly refuted says error in standardized testing is so large that meaningful inferences are impossible. Unfortunately, the paper has been ignored.

Wilson’s paper was followed a year later by a paper from UCLA’s Education Professor James Popham which stated, “Although educators need to produce valid evidence regarding their effectiveness, standardized achievement tests are the wrong tools for the task.”

It does seem that with all of the tests taken, data gathered and arithmetic performed, the tests must be telling us something but what? We know that the one thing this kind of test correlates to is the student’s family wealth. Education researcher Linda Darling-Hammond puts that correlation at an r-value of 0.9. An r-value of 1 on the 0-1 scale says it is a dead certainty like men not becoming pregnant. No other variable studied has a strong influence meaning they mainly input noise into the data.

So what caused the downward turn in 2022 NAEP math data for 4th and 8th graders? Is it really related to learning and should it be a large concern?

Let’s Go to the Scoreboard

Everyone has the right to access the NAEP Data Explorer and create their own data reports and charts. The tested years, the jurisdictions, data types, the subject, etcetera may be manipulated to shape a report. It is possible to compare states, public schools and private schools, districts, etc. There are limitations such as charter school data being lumped with public school data.

In the following charts, I chose mathematics either 4th or 8th grade in tested years 2003, 2019, 2022. I selected the average scale scores which are based on a 500 point scale.

Data Explorer Graphed Fourth Grade State Comparisons

One of the first observations to make is that the 500 point scale scores are plotted on a 60-point graph scale which visually magnifies any differences by more than 8 times. The national average scores go from 235 in 2003 to 241 in 2019 and then 236 in 2022. If we use the lowest data point for a denominator that five point drop from 2019 represents a 2% drop, but if we use the 500 point scale as the denominator which we should that purported enormous drop is just 1%.

Of the five large states queried, only New York had a larger than 5 point drop. Its 10-point drop calculates to a 2% decline.

The Walton Family financed publication The 74 is known to support libertarian positions on education policy. Some people claim they are biased against public schools. The 74 recently claimed in a headline, “Strong Link in Big City Districts’ 4th-Grade Math Scores to School Closures.” Under the previous president, the political right railed against health care policies like masking, vaccination and closing schools. By September 2020 there were loud sometimes violent open-schools-now protests at school boards meetings in many states and jurisdictions. The 74 article looks like an attempt to say “see we were right” but the data does not support their specious claim.

For evidence, they turned to the Koch addled economist Emily Oster. She is the Brown University professor that argued in the summer of 2020 that children should be back in school. At the same time, she cast doubt on masking. With the new NAEP results, she again supports the libertarian cause stating, “The districts with more remote learning have larger test score losses.” This appears to be something she just said with no evidence.

If we look at the states graphed above, the only outlier is New York with its 10-point drop, but California, Texas, Florida and Massachusetts all had 5-point drops.

District Comparisons of Fourth Grade Mathematics Scale Scores

Oster’s claim was about big city districts. If we look at these big city data sets there does not appear to be real differences. All of the big city districts had an 8- to 9-point drops in their fourth grade test between 2019 and 2022. Whether they opened early or stayed closed longer.

Education reporters note that test score drops in eighth grade were worse than those in fourth grade. On the 500-point scale the average drop in fourth grade was five points while in eighth grade it was eight points or 1% and 1.6% respectively.

Eighth Grade Mathematics by District

It is true that the national math data for eighth graders showed an average 8-point drop in 2022. However, the declines were not uniform between districts. The country’s second largest school district in Los Angeles actually returned a positive result and the 4-point decline in the nation’s largest school district was relatively modest.

There is no way the eighth grade testing result for the nation’s two largest school districts could fairly be characterized as a crisis. It is also noteworthy that these two districts were closed longer than most others in the nation.

The Roots of the Down Turn

America’s students like everyone else suffered through a two year pandemic-inspired nightmare. Did anyone really expect that on average they would perform at par?

One of the difficult pandemic related student manifestations was increased violence. As schools were reopening, Homeland Security notified them, “The reduced access to services coupled with the exposure to additional risk factors suggests schools — and the communities in which they are located — will need to increase support services to help students adjust to in-person learning as they cope with the potential trauma associated with the pandemic response.” Schools around the country saw a dramatic increase in fighting and insolent behavior.

This past July, the Washington Post reported, “The data, collected as the 2021-2022 school year was winding down, also showed that more than 70 percent of schools saw increases in chronic student absenteeism since the onset of the pandemic and about half of the schools reported increased acts of disrespect toward teachers and staff.”

Many school districts started experiencing crippling staff shortages and the NAEP testing came at a particularly inconvenient time. During the January to March, 2022 testing window, the nation experienced the omicron variant infection explosion. CDC data shows that during the testing window infection rates grew to more than 200 people out of every 100,000 in population becoming infected daily.

Disaster Capitalism Needs a Crisis

Amway Billionaire and dominion supporter Betsy DeVos said the NAEP data showed that children should no longer be “hostages” in a “one-size-fits-none system that isn’t meeting their needs.” She has been spending for decades to get rid of the secular public schools she sees as an evil.

Like every education crisis since 1983’s “A Nation at Risk” this is another manufactured crisis. The crisis rhetoric used to justify incessant accountability layered onto a constant process of new standards and new tests is, as Berliner and Biddle documented, a manufactured lie.

In writing about the pandemic effects on schools, John Merrow reported, “Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona, who called the results ‘appalling and unacceptable,’ told a group of reporters that the results are ‘a moment of truth for education,’ adding ‘How we respond to this will determine not only our recovery, but our nation’s standing in the world.”’

And even more over the top than Cardona, Harvard’s Tom Kane wrote in the Atlantic,

“[S]tudents at low-poverty schools that stayed remote had lost the equivalent of 13 weeks of in-person instruction. At high-poverty schools that stayed remote, students lost the equivalent of 22 weeks. Racial gaps widened too: In the districts that stayed remote for most of last year, the outcome was as if Black and Hispanic students had lost four to five more weeks of instruction than white students had.”

When people start using the sham CREDO days of learning metric, I am pretty sure they are dissembling. This is the kind of stuff that caused Professor Paul Thomas to declare, “But mostly, I hate the lies, political, media, and commercial interests that are eager to shout “crisis!” because in the spirit of the good ol’ U.S. of A., there is money to made in all that bullshit.”

Cardona’s Department of Education is known to embrace at least three methods for helping struggling students raise their test scores: 1) extend school day and year, 2) mandatory summer school and 3) ‘high-dosage tutoring,’ where one trained tutor works with no more than four students, three times a week for an entire year. In other words our Education Secretary who is a former New Leaders Fellow embraces a method that may raise test scores but promises to undermine engagement and the joy of learning. It is a corporate solution, not an educator’s solution.

The NAEP test scores are not a crisis but bad education leadership, suspect scholarship and billionaire meddling are. It is time to get out of the road of educators and let them do their job. No high-dosage tutoring, no extended days and no forced summer schools.

The children are not broken. If they missed some lessons over the past two years, unfettered educators will quickly resolve the issues. Students who have not been convinced that education and learning are onerous and hateful will be fine. Cardona, Kane and DeVos are the crisis.

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Choosing to End Public Education

25 Feb

By Thomas Ultican 2/25/2022

In 2017, the new President of the United States was explicit in his intention to end public education. He appointed a dominionist as secretary of education and regularly invoked the libertarian inspired pejorative “government schools” when referring to public schools. He loudly supported a movement to end public education which started in earnest five decades before he took office.

Its foundation was the economic theories of Milton Friedman and opposition to integration in the old south. Neoliberals, libertarians and their billionaire financiers have unsparingly attacked public education. Their fundamental weapon for ending the public school system is “choice.”

The newly published book Public Education: Defending a Cornerstone of American Democracy is a compilation of 29-essays edited by David C. Berliner and Carl Hermanns. All of the essays are written by accomplished award winning educators and historians. Gloria Ladson-Billings, known for her work on Culturally Relevant Pedagogy wrote,

“Some years ago, when the school choice movement began to gain attention, I argued that we were looking at the beginnings of the plan to destroy public education. There are those who declared I was being ‘alarmist.’ But I made this pronouncement after looking at the ways other aspects of public services have faced severe erosion.” (Education 226)

She also speculated that a contributing factor for the loss of consensus to support public schooling is the long-term campaign by powerful interest groups to portray public education as failing.

In another essay, Education Historian and former US Assistant Secretary of Education Diane Ravitch reported that in 1984 the Republican Party for the first time called for prayer in school and “choice.” She stated,

“Despite the sordid history of school choice and its origins in the segregationist movement, the term became a rallying cry for critics of public education. Right-wing think tanks, libertarian billionaires, and groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council – an organization that brought together far-right extremists, big corporate money, and other who wanted to reduce government regulation and unleash free enterprise – unleashed an unmodulated campaign of vilification against public schools.” (Education 27)

Duke University Professor of History and Public Policy Nancy MacLean, this past September published a new research paper at the Institute of New Economic Thinking – “How Milton Friedman Exploited White Supremacy to Privatize Education.” She is the author of the must read book “Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America.” In her new paper MacLean states,

“This paper traces the origins of today’s campaigns for school vouchers and other modes of public funding for private education to efforts by Milton Friedman beginning in 1955. It reveals that the endgame of the “school choice” enterprise for libertarians was not then—and is not now–to enhance education for all children; it was a strategy, ultimately, to offload the full cost of schooling onto parents as part of a larger quest to privatize public services and resources.”

A New Trojan Horse

The Gateway Drug: Charter Schools

An article by the Education Law Center’s Wendy Lecker states,

“As noted in a 1996 Detroit Metro Times article, while the DeVos’ ultimate aim was to abolish public education and steer public funds to parochial schools, they knew not to be blatant about that goal. Thus, they chose a vehicle that blurred the lines between public and private schools- a “gateway drug” to privatizing public education: charter schools.”

After John Walton read the 1983 Reagan administration publication ‘“A Nation at Risk’ with its ominous warnings about the failings of public education,” he convinced his family to direct their philanthropy toward reforming public education. Throughout the 1990s he campaigned endlessly for new voucher legislation and saw his efforts repeatedly rebuffed. Shortly before his death in 2005, John joined Don Fisher and Buzz Woolley in establishing the Charter School Growth fund. Around the same time the Walton Family Foundation began financing charter school startups in communities across America.

Jeff Bryant interviewed Jeffry Henig of Teachers College about the Walton’s move to supporting charter schools. Bryant asserted,

“Henig believes many conservatives view charter schools as a way to ‘soften the ground’ for potentially more private options, though he isn’t entirely sure ‘the Waltons view charters as a Trojan Horse for eventually providing vouchers universally.’”

Former Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos has carried on a relentless attack on public education that continues today. One of the images she sells is viewing students as having a backpack full of taxpayer money which each school age child’s parents spends on education services. In her essay “Public Education at a Crossroads: Will Horace Mann’s Common School Survive the Era of Choice?” educator, administrator and public school advocate Carol Burris warns,

 “Given the anti-tax, anti-government proclivities of those who espouse this type of funding scheme, it is likely that fewer and fewer tax dollars would be place in the backpack over time. Parents once again would assume the sole responsibility for educating their children, buying what services they could afford, with the poor relying on charity.” (Education 239)

A Pillar of Democracy: Public Education

In the essay “Values and Education Policy” Edward Fiske and Helen Ladd tell us, “Good education policy making is rooted in coherent and enlightened educational values.” (Education 33) They begin by discussing the values expressed by Horace Mann who successfully implemented his vision of “common schools.” Today’s public school system is very much a result of that vision and his leadership. Some of the issues Mann addressed are the same issues driving “choice” today. Fisk and Ladd share,

“The idea of taxing all citizens, including those of the privileged classes who already enjoyed access to private education, in order to finance the education of poor and working-class children was viewed as both wasteful and as an infringement of property rights. Mann argued that free schooling served the collective interests of all citizens, rich and poor alike. ‘Jails and state prisons are the complement of schools,’ he wrote. ‘So many less as you have the latter, so many more you must have of the former.’”

“He famously declared, ‘Education, then, beyond all other devices of human origin, is the great equalizer of the conditions of men – the balance-wheel of the social machinery.’” (Education 34-36)

The authors conclude,

“Proponents of citizenship education are struggling to find a place in school curricula. Powerful private foundations and individuals, including the recent U.S. Secretary of Education, are raising millions of dollars to undermine the concept of universal education by privatizing public education and, by means of vouchers and charter schools, to break the link between publicly supported schools and democratically elected officials. Racial resegregation of schools is now pervasive, and courts are retreating from the notion that public funds should not be used to further sectarian religious instruction.” (Education 45)

For a long time, Richard and Betsy DeVos have been working to obliterate the separation of church and state, and privatize public education. In a 2001 interview conducted at the Gathering, Richard  lamented how awful it was that public schools had replaced churches as the center of communities. He did not identify whose church would be accepted as the new community center, but it seems certain to be some flavor of Christianity.

Public Education Shares Informed Discourse

Thirty-two of America’s most accomplished education thinkers and practitioners share their insights. All of them have more than two-decades of experience practicing, researching and debating education policy. None of them are billionaires trying to offload their tax burden or implement self-centered libertarian ideology.

In these pages, there is general respect for Horace Mann’s education advocacy and the public school system but also recognition of associated problems. The common schools were not just the “great equalizer” but also the great homogenizer. They indoctrinated students with a protestant Anglo-Saxon ethic. There is nuanced discussion here about the great foundation for democracy (public schools) needing to inspire not indoctrinate. And some of the authors reject the “great equalizer” belief as a myth.

Professor Ken Zeichner discusses the extreme segregation of public schooling in the United States, speculating they are “possibly more segregated today than it was in the 1960s.” (Education 178) He says in non-dominant communities, families and community members are excluded from real participation in school affairs. He recommends community centered engagement versus school centered engagement. Unfortunately he reports, “Both federal legislation and school practices have encouraged school-centric as opposed to community-centric family and community engagement, creating mutual distrust between families and schools.” (Education 179)

University of Georgia’s Peter Smagorinsky shares, “According to [Betsy] DeVos, those who direct the prevailing K-12 system are ‘trapped in an outdated education model,’ beholden to the ‘wrong and manipulative’ theories of Horace Mann and John Dewey.’” For people not on the extreme right this sounds like nonsense. However, Smagorinsky cautions that people’s positions “are largely emotional and the argumentative reasoning is used as a post hoc means of justifying an established position, … it’s unlikely the Culture Wars will end any time soon, because no one can win them with logic or facts.”

I will end my taste of what is in this wonderful compilation with a quote from one of the editors, David Berliner. He ran through a litany of the scandals arising from both the charter and voucher school movements fueled by unregulated taxpayer dollars. Then personally gratifying to me he wrote, “But Tom Ultican, a thoughtful and passionate defender of public schooling, has a reminder to Americans about the origins of the charter and voucher movement in our nation,”

“Birthed in the bowels of the 1950s segregationist south, school choice has never been about improving education. It is about white supremacy, profiting off taxpayers, cutting taxes, selling market-based solutions and financing religion. School choice ideology has a long dark history of dealing significant harm to public education.

“Milton Friedman first recommended school vouchers in a 1955 essay. In 2006, he was asked by a conservative group of legislators what he envisioned back then. PRWatch [published by the Center for Media and Democracy] reports that he said, ‘It had nothing whatsoever to do with helping ‘indigent’ children; no, he explained to thunderous applause, vouchers were all about ‘abolishing the public school system.’” (Education 280-281)

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Education Improvement Thwarted by “Reform”

1 Oct

By Thomas Ultican 10/1/2020

For more than two decades, bureaucratic style top down education “reform” has undermined improvement efforts by professional educators. For budding teachers, beginning in college with the study of education and their own personal experience as students, an innate need to better education develops. However, in the modern era, that teacher energy to improve education has been sapped by the desperate fight to save public education from “reformers,” to protect their profession from amateurs and to defend the children in their classrooms from profiteers. 

Genuine advancements in educational practices come from the classroom. Those edicts emanating from government offices or those lavishly financed and promoted by philanthropies are doomed to failure.

The writer Kristina Rizga conducted a four years’ study of Mission High in San Francisco. She discovered a great school whose students do not test especially well. One of her clarion observations that almost all teachers would hardily second was,

“The more time I spent in classrooms, the more I began to realize that most remedies that politicians and education reform experts were promoting as solutions for fixing schools were wrong.”

Sadly, every business and government sponsored education innovation for the past 40 years has resulted in harm to American schools. Standardized education, standardized testing, charter schools, school choice, vouchers, reading science, math and reading first, common core, value added measures to assess teachers and schools, mandatory third grade retention, computer based credit recovery, turnaround schools, turnaround districts, and more have been foisted on schools. None of these ideas percolated up from the classroom and all are doing harm.

True Education Improvement Comes from Teachers and Classrooms

Before becoming a teachers union in 1906, the National Education Association (NEA) was our nation’s most important influence organization shaping public education policy. The 1891 NEA gathering in Toronto, Canada is still affecting schooling today and the debate engaged in there is still relevant.

It was at this meeting that James H. Baker’s committee made its report on the need for standardizing education. It’s a natural tendency that as a movement matures people will appear who want to standardize it. The main argument for needed standardization was the difficulty high schools were having creating classes that prepared students for entry requirements at Universities because the requirements were so varied. The Baker Committee report led to the establishment of the Committee of Ten and the first curricular standards in the United States in 1894.

In the same meeting’s proceedings, Francis W. Parker of Chicago representing the Cook County Normal School declared:

“The common school furnishes the essential principles in the development and perpetuation of a democracy, and its growth and progress has been purely democratic; it has been and is, ‘of the people, for the people, and by the people.’ … State and national officials are given little more than advisory influences.”

“Our foreign critics mistake variety and honest individual striving for chaos. … But that which is imposed upon a people by any authority below heaven breaks into atoms when the intelligence and power of a people can reach and control it.”

“Centralized power may be a necessity for infancy, but manhood sheds it off for the strong wings of freedom.”

 From Parker’s perspective, the variety in public education led to an organic process in which innovation was judged by educators freely adopting it or rejecting it. The Baker committee’s response to the college preparation issues frustrated educator autonomy. The national standards they called for have a long history of undermining creative thinking and democratic progress.

In Young Zhao’s book Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Dragon there is the story of how the standards based testing system adopted for selecting government employees during the Han dynasty stunted that society’s growth.

It has been estimated that in 600 AD, China had at least a 400-year scientific lead on the rest of the world. So why didn’t the industrial revolution occur in China? Former Chief Economist and Senior Vice President of the World Bank, Justin Yifu Lin says, “I believe the real reason of the absence of scientific revolution was not due to the adverse political environment that prohibited the creativity of Chinese intellectuals, but due to the special incentives provided by the civil-service examination system.”  

Scoring well on these exams was the path to professional success. The Chinese civilization was in the ascendancy when exams focused on Confusion philosophy and government theory were instituted. How can we know if our civilization is headed for a similar kind of trouble?

In his book A study of History, historian Arnold Toynbee provided criteria for judging whether a civilization was in a stage of growth or decline. He wrote:

“We must ask whether, as we look back over the ground we have traversed, we can discern any master tendency at work, and we do in fact unmistakably decry a tendency towards standardization and uniformity: a tendency which is correlative and opposite of the tendency towards differentiation and diversity which we have found to be the mark of the growth stage of civilizations.”

Some of the greatest twentieth century education thinkers warned against allowing schooling to be dominated from the top. In Democracy and Education, John Dewey wrote,

“An aim must, then, be flexible; it must be capable of alteration to meet circumstances. An end established externally to the process of action is always rigid. Being inserted or imposed from without, it is not supposed to have a working relationship to the concrete conditions of the situation.” (Page 122)

“Imposing an alleged uniform general method upon everybody breeds mediocrity in all but the very exceptional.” (Page 203)

“His own purpose will direct his actions. Otherwise, his seeming attention, his docility, his memorizing and reproductions will partake of intellectual servility. Such a condition of intellectual subjugation is needed for fitting the masses into a society where the many are not expected to have aims or ideas of their own, but to take orders from the few set in authority. It is not adapted to a society which intends to be democratic.” (Page 356)

Paulo Freire opined in Daring to Dream: Toward a Pedagogy of the Unfinished,

“Neoliberal doctrine seeks to limit education to technological practice. Currently education is no longer understood as formative, but simply as training.” (Page 4)

The Swiss psychologists, Jean Piaget called Dewey’s discovery-based approach to education “constructivism.” Piaget believed that “children play an active role in making sense of things, ‘constructing’ reality rather than just acquiring knowledge.” The philosophy of “constructivism” is a move away from the educational philosophies of behaviorism and social conservatism advocated by men like B. F. Skinner and Edward K. Thorndike.

In addition to Piaget’s work, there is the slightly different view from the Russian developmental psychologist, Lev Vygotsky. He believed education’s role was to give children experiences that were within their “zones of proximal development,” thereby encouraging and advancing their individual learning. This approach to “constructivism” has lead to the idea of scaffolding. The teacher identifies the student’s needs and helps them through the “zone of proximal development” by questioning or other means until the student no longer needs the aide for constructing understanding.

In the mid-1920s two women who studied progressive education under John Dewey and William Kilpatrick at Columbia University’s Teacher’s College exerted a powerful influence over education policy in California. Helen Heffernan was the state Commissioner of Rural and Elementary Education from 1926-1965 and Corinne Seeds was the Director of the University Elementary school at UCLA from 1925-1957. Their reign saw the most filial, longest and largest implementation of progressive education that ever took place in the US.

However, their methods did not spread to neighboring states and after they left the scene progressive education receded in California. My mother was an elementary school teacher in Idaho for 40-years. I remember her saying in the early 1960s that when children transfer in from California they are usually at least a year behind. Dr. Larry Lawrence in a private interview said that even at the UCLA lab school when Jonathan Goodlad took over, he moved away from many of Corinne Seeds’ practices.

 It seems that teachers found some aspects of progressive education wanting. Unfortunately, about this time, organic development by education professionals was being replaced by centralized authoritarian control.

Top Down Control and Bad Policies

On October 17, 1979 President Jimmy Carter signed legislation elevating the Department of Education to a cabinet level position. Thus the table was set for the federal takeover of public education.

By the time Ronald Reagan’s administration published “A Nation at Risk” a growing call for standards based education had arisen. In the 1960s, psychometrician Benjamin Bloom’s levels of understanding theory had spread widely. Known as Bloom’s Taxonomy, it became the basis for ideas like “mastery education” which has many names and eventually leading to top down education standards.

Vanderbilt University Published a Bloom’s Taxonomy Graphic

IBM CEO Louis Gerstner was so adamant about the need for education standards that in 1994 he even wrote a book about it called Reinventing Education. As the keynote speaker for the National Governors Association (NGA) conference in 1995 which he hosted, Gerstner stated three urgent education goals for 1996: (1) high national academic standards with accountability, (2) the standards must happen NOW, and (3) don’t be sidetracked by academicians.

Corporate titans like Gerstner and Gates foisted their misguided standards on public education. Their costly standards have seriously degraded the development of creative thinking in both students and educators.

Neoliberals like the Charles Koch and the Walton family have joined with religious leaders in the Catholic Church and religious zealots like Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos to sell vouchers. Money is being siphoned away from public schools to pay for students to attend private religious schools. Evidence is very clear that student outcomes are harmed when they transfer to voucher schools and public schools are financially harmed. This is the same scheme segregationists used to fight for all white schools after the Brown vs. the Board of Education stuck down “separate but equal” schooling.

The other big school choice agenda is Charter Schools. In his new book School House Burning, Derek Black observes about the plutocrats promoting charter schools,

“In their minds, the scale of justice should tip away from mass democracy and the common good toward individualism and private property. That means less taxes, less government, less public education.”

The fraud and instability of the charter school industry has made this so called “reform” an abject and harmful failure. Because the industry is being finance by draining money from public schools, they are being degraded.

America’s high school graduation rates peaked at about 77% in 1970 and then drifted down for almost four decades to 69% in 2007. In 2012, 81% of the freshman cohort in America graduated on time. These record setting numbers are the result of cheating and computer based credit recovery. It is another top down “reform” that is selling fraudulent corporate products while undermining education integrity.

Mandatory third grade retention for children who score too low on a reading test does lifelong harm to those children and the measuring stick is standardized testing which is very flawed.

Also, these tests are also not capable of measuring teacher or school quality. The only correlated student characteristic with this kind of testing is family wealth. The growth models called Value added measures often used to evaluate teachers are just fancy arithmetic applied to noisy standardized testing data. It is an expensive fraud.

All of these agendas have been forced onto public education by politicians and businessman. Instead of the democratic method of organic development by educators freely adopting what they perceive as the best pedagogy, we have allowed public education to be run by authoritarian methods reminiscent of the former Soviet Union.

Public education run democratically by local communities is the bedrock of American democracy. Today a rising oligarchy is demolishing that 1776 experiment. To revitalize the American ideal, start by freeing public education from a billionaire financed tyranny and associated political malfeasance.

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School Choice is a Harmful Fraud

7 Sep

By Thomas Ultican 9/7/2020

Birthed in the bowels of the 1950’s segregationist south, school choice has never been about improving education. It is about white supremacy, profiting off taxpayers, cutting taxes, selling market based solutions and financing religion. School choice ideology has a long dark history of dealing significant harm to public education.

Market Based Ideology

Milton Friedman first recommended school vouchers in a 1955 essay. In 2006, he was asked by a conservative group of legislators what he envisioned back then. PRWatch reports that he said, “It had nothing whatsoever to do with helping ‘indigent’ children; no, he explained to thunderous applause, vouchers were all about ‘abolishing the public school system.”’ [Emphasis added]

Market based ideologues are convinced that business is the superior model for school management. Starting with the infamous Regan era polemic, “A Nation at Risk,” the claim that “private business management is superior” has been a consistent theory of education reform promoted by corporate leaders like IBM’s Louis Gerstner, Microsoft’s Bill Gates, Wal-Mart’s Walton family, Bloomberg LP’s founder, Michael Bloomberg and SunAmerica’s Eli Broad. It is a central tenet of both neoliberal and libertarian philosophy.

Charles Koch and his late brother David have spent lavishly promoting their libertarian beliefs. Inspired by Friedman’s doyen, Austrian Economist Friedrich Hayek, the brothers agreed that public education must be abolished.

To this and other ends like defeating climate change legislation, the Kochs created the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). This lobbying organization has contributing members from throughout corporate America. ALEC writes model legislation and financially supports state politicians who promote their libertarian principles.

Like the Walton family and Betsy DeVos, Charles Koch promotes private school vouchers.

What is the main motive behind the mega-rich spending to undermine public education? Professor Maurice Cunningham of the University of Massachusetts claims what they really want are “lower state and local taxes.”

John Arnold is the billionaire Enron trader who did not go to prison when that company collapsed. He has joined forces with the billionaire CEO of Netflix, Reed Hastings, to sell the nation on the portfolio model of school management.  To achieve their goal, they created The City Fund. After its founding in 2018, Bill Gates, Michael Dell and Steve Ballmer all made significant contributions.

In brief, the portfolio model directs closing schools that score in the bottom 5% on standardized testing and reopening them as charter schools or Innovation schools. In either case, they will no longer come under the purview of an elected school board.

Because standardized testing only reliably correlates with family wealth, this system guarantees that schools in poor communities will all eventually be privatized.

In 2014, SFGATE reported, “Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, who suggests that democratically elected school boards are the problem with public education, says they should be replaced by privately held corporations.”

When it came to privatizing schools, vouchers were a tough sell. Jeffry Henig of Teachers College noted to writer Jeff Bryant, “The Walton foundation itself was one of the early organizations to transition from vouchers to charters.” In an AlterNet article Bryant explained,

“Henig believes many conservatives view charter schools as a way to “soften the ground” for potentially more private options, though he isn’t entirely sure “the Waltons view charters as a Trojan Horse for eventually providing vouchers universally.’”

John Walton read “A Nation at Risk” and that set off his hyper focus on reforming public education. Throughout the 1990s he campaigned endlessly for new voucher legislation and saw his efforts repeatedly rebuffed. Shortly before his death in 2005, John joined Don Fisher and Buzz Woolley in establishing the Charter School Growth fund. Around the same time the Walton Family Foundation began financing charter school startups in communities across America.

No matter how stinking the thinking, a billionaires beliefs have influence. The billionaire led push to privatize public education is based on at least four completely bogus ideas:

1 – “A Nation at Risk” was a misguided fraud but it is still the motivating prime point for corporate driven education “reform.” Former New York Times Education writer, Richard Rothstein states,

“A Nation at Risk based its analysis of declining student achievement entirely on average SAT scores which had dropped by about half a standard deviation from 1963 to 1980. But much of the decline had been due to the changing composition of SAT test takers — in the early 1960s, the preponderance of SAT test takers were high school students planning to apply to the most selective colleges. By 1983, the demographic composition of SAT test takers had mostly stabilized, and average SAT scores were again rising, not declining.”

2 – The growing belief among wealthy elites that elected school boards are the problem is ridiculous. Saying democracy is a discredited way to run publicly financed organizations and elected boards should be replaced by privately run businesses is UN-American.

3 – Market based ideologues religiously believe in Adam Smith’s invisible hand. They are sure comparative school performance will provide families with improving schools that are striving to win the market. These proponents trust that this system will efficiently remove low-performing schools. A 2015 paper notes,

“This idealized theory assumes that all consumers are equally desirable customers for which providers will compete …  just because parents can voice a choice in the system does not mean they will get the choice they want. In New Orleans, the most desirable schools choose their students to a substantial extent.”

4 – Our present Secretary of Education is emblematic of people who believe it is terrible that public schools have replaced churches as the center of community life. Betsy and Dick DeVos have been using their Amway generated wealth to tear down the separation between church and state. They believe the public should provide vouchers to private religious schools and they promote home schooling.

Choice Drives Segregation by Race and Class

It is well known that integrated schools are beneficial for all races and classes and for the social development of society. Professor Peter Piazza’s “School Diversity Notebook” provides a short summary of the research validating this statement.

Data does not inform the decisions to segregate schooling. As Professor Piazza states, “Decisions to segregate are made in the gut or maybe (sadly) in the heart, but not in the head.”

A Matt Barnum article about school integration discusses what happened:

‘“School integration didn’t fail,’ Berkeley economist Rucker Johnson, who has conducted some of the most far-reaching research on school integration, recently argued. ‘The only failure is that we stopped pursuing it and allowed the reign of segregation to return.”’

Adding more perspective, Sonya Ramsey wrote “The Troubled History of American Education after the Brown Decision” for the American Historian. It is made available by the Library of Congress. In that paper she reported,

“From 1954 to the late 1980s, the rate of black children attending white schools rose tremendously in the South, from 0 percent in 1954, to 43.5 percent by 1988, only declining after the dismantling of court ordered desegregation plans to 23.2 in 2011. The South remains the least segregated area of the nation. The current resegregation of the public school are due more to the declining support for desegregation by local districts, the federal government, and the Supreme Court. In 2007 Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. stated the following in his majority opinion in two court cases that used race in determining transfer policies and school plans to foster desegregation: “The way to stop race discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” [17] This decision turned a blind eye to decades of racial discrimination in public schools and struck a deathblow to Brown. The federal government’s focus on assessment testing in the 1980s also placed less emphasis on enforcing desegregation.” [Note 17: https://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/29/washington/29scotus.html]

Today’s school choice advocates precisely echo the language and schemes created by southern segregationists in the 1950s.

Last year three researchers – Julian Vasquez Heilig from the University of Kentucky, T. Jameson Brewer from the University of North Georgia and Yohuru Williams from the University of St. Thomas – collaborated on a study of the segregating effects of charter schools. Their paper clearly documents that charter schools are accelerating resegregation. 

In the literature search section of the study, they reported that the conservative oriented “American Enterprise Institute (AEI) conducted a study of the entire universe of charter schools in the United States concluding that parents were self-segregating along racial and class lines but that such segregation was simply a result of a ‘well-functioning education market.”’ [Emphasis added]

The researchers concluded that “Many of the nation’s charters can even be classified as “apartheid schools”—a term coined by UCLA Professor Gary Orfield for schools with a White student enrollment of 1 percent or less.” And “double segregation by race and class is higher in charter schools” than in public schools.

A personal 2019 study of Washington DC charter schools revealed that 64 of the 116 charter schools would be classified “apartheid schools” using Professor Orfield’s definition.

For their study, Heilig at al accessed the Common Core of Data (CCD) – the Department of Education’s primary database on public elementary and secondary education in the United States. This data was brought together with census and zip code data to reveal related school site and community demographic data.

A common defense of charter schools is that they purposely serve highly segregated communities. However, the researchers discovered “even when comparing schools that are located near each other—that charter schools are more segregated than nearby public schools.”

The paper contained six tables revealing the magnitude of segregation comparing charter schools with public schools. The following is Table 4 from the study that details growing charter school segregation in major cities.

Overall, the intensity of charter school segregation in America’s major cities is shocking. However, the city with the most charter schools, Los Angeles, looks relatively OK. This is a bit of an illusion because many of the charter schools in that city serve racially isolated white students.

In February, Anji Williams published “How Charter Schools in Hollywood Uphold the Racist Tradition of Redlining Segregation.” In Hollywood, the public middle school, La Conte, is almost 100% free and reduced lunch while the co-located Citizens of the World Charter School is more than 60% middle class.

The School Choice Advantage

For the Catholic Church and Evangelical Christians like Betsy DeVos, publicly provided vouchers for private religious schools opens a path to taxpayer support for their religious organizations. It is lamentable for their cause that every recent large scale study of vouchers have shown that students perform worse when they transfer to voucher schools.

For the Walton family, John Arnold and Charles Koch, school choice grants a path to undermining public education and lowering taxes. However, “when considering the extant literature on school performance comparisons, the minority of charter schools, at best, provide minimal academic benefits whereas the majority underperform public schools.” Worse yet, charter schools are unstable with half of them going out of business within 15 years.  

For Bill Gates, Reed Hastings and Michael Dell, school choice prepares a path for creating an education technology industry that has the promise of huge future profits. Unfortunately for them, digital learning has proven to have serious limitations. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) said in a 2015 report that heavy users of computers in the classroom “do a lot worse in most learning outcomes.”

For the white supremacist, school choice presents a path for not having their children attending school with “those people.” The data shows it clearly works for their purposes.

For the mission of public education and the future of America, school choice is an atrocious policy.

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