Tag Archives: privatization

Shocking GOP Effort to End Public Schooling

21 Sep

By Thomas Ultican 9/21/2025

This year, state legislators have proposed in excess of 110 laws pertaining to public education. Of those laws, 85 were centered on privatizing K-12 schools. Republican lawmakers sponsored 83 of the pro-privatization laws. Which begs the question, has the Grand Old Party become the Grifting Oligarchs Party? When did they become radicals out to upend the foundation of American greatness?

The conservative party has a long history of being anti-labor and has always been a hard sell when it came to social spending. However, they historically have supported public education and especially their local schools. It seems the conservative and careful GOP is gone and been replaced by a wild bunch. It is stupefying to see them propose radical ideas like using public money to fund education savings accounts (ESA) with little oversight. Parents are allowed to use ESA funds for private schools (including religious schools), for homeschool expenses or educational experiences like horseback riding lessons.

A review of all the 2025 state education legal proposals was used to create the following table.

In this table, ESA indicates tax credit funded voucher programs. There have been 40 bills introduced to create ESA programs plus another 20 bills designed to expand existing ESA programs. Most of 2025’s proposed laws are in progress but the governors of Texas, Tennessee, Idaho and Wyoming have signed and ratified new ESA style laws. In addition, governors in Indiana, South Carolina and New Hampshire signed laws expanding ESA vouchers in their states.

None of the 16 proposals to protect public education or 3 laws to repeal an existing ESA program were signed by a governor or passed by a legislature.

Fighting in the Courts

June 13th, the Wyoming Education Association (WEA) and nine parents filed a lawsuit challenging the Steamboat Legacy Scholarship Act, Wyoming’s new voucher program. The suit charged:

“… the program violates the Wyoming Constitution in two key ways. One for directing public dollars to private enterprises, which the lawsuit says is clearly prohibited. The second for violating the constitution’s mandate that Wyoming provide ‘a complete and uniform system of education.”’

On July 15, District Court Judge Peter Froelicher granted a preliminary injunction against the state’s universal voucher program. He wrote, “The Court finds and concludes Plaintiffs are, therefore, likely to succeed on the merits of their claims that the Act fails when strict scrutiny is applied.” The injunction will remain in effect until the “Plaintiffs’ claims have been fully litigated and decided by this Court.”

Laramie County Court House

Last year, The Utah Education Association sued the state, arguing that the Utah Fits All Scholarship Program violated the constitution. April 21st, District Court Judge Laura Scott ruled that Utah’s $100-million dollar voucher program is unconstitutional. At the end of June, the Utah Supreme Court agreed to hear an appeal of Scott’s ruling. However, the decision seems well founded.

The Montana Legislature, in 2023, established a statewide Education Savings Account (ESA) voucher program. It allows families of students with disabilities to use public funds deposited into personal bank accounts for private educational expenses. In April this year, Montana Quality Education Coalition and Disability Rights Montana brought suit to overturn this program. In July, the Montana Federation of Public Employees and the organization Public Funds Public Schools joined the plaintiffs in the suit. The legal action awaits its day in court.

At the end of June, the Missouri State Teachers Association sued to end the enhanced MOScholars program which began in 2021 funded by a tax credit scheme. This year in order to expand the program; the states legislature added $51-million in tax payer dollars to the scheme. The teachers’ suit claims this is unconstitutional and calls for the $51-million to be eliminated.

Milton Friedman’s EdChoice Legal Advocates joined the state in defending the MOScholars program. Their July 30th message said, “On behalf of Missouri families, EdChoice Legal Advocates filed a motion to intervene as defendants in the lawsuit brought by the Missouri National Education Association (MNEA) challenging the state’s expanded Empowerment Scholarship Accounts Program, known as MOScholars.” It is unlikely EdChoice Legal Advocates are representing the wishes of most Missouri families.

In South Carolina, the state Supreme Court ruled in 2024 that its Education Trust Fund Scholarship Program was unconstitutional. The lawsuit was instituted by the state teachers union, parents and the NAACP. The program resumed this year after lawmakers revised it to funnel money from the lottery system instead of the general fund. 

The South Carolina effort has been twice ruled unconstitutional for violating prohibitions against using public funds for the direct benefit of private education. Legislators are proposing funneling the money through a fund that then goes to a trustee and then to parents, who then use it for private schools. 

 Sherry East, president of the South Carolina Education Association stated:

“We just don’t agree, and we think it’s unconstitutional.”

“We’ve already been to court twice. The Supreme Court has ruled twice that it is unconstitutional. So, we don’t understand how they’re trying to do a loophole or a workaround. You know, they’re trying to work around the Constitution, and it’s just a problem.” 

The South Carolina fight seems destined to return to the courts but they have vouchers for now.

Last year in Anchorage, Alaska, Superior Court Judge Adolf Zeman concluded that there was no workable way to construe the state statues in a way that does not violate constitutional spending rules. Therefore, the relevant laws “must be stuck down in their entirety.” This was the result of a January 23, 2023 law suit alleging that correspondence program allotments were “being used to reimburse parents for thousands of dollars in private educational institution services using public funds thereby indirectly funding private education in violation … of the Alaska Constitution.” Alaska has many homeschool students in the correspondence program.

Plaintiff’s attorney Scott Kendall believes the changes will not disrupt correspondence programs. He claims:

“What is prevented here is this purchasing from outside vendors that have essentially contorted the correspondence school program into a shadow school voucher program. So that shadow school voucher program that was in violation of the Constitution, as of today, with the stroke of a pen, is dead.”

The Big Problem

GOP legislators are facing a difficult problem with state constitutions prohibiting sending public dollars to private schools. The straight forward solution would be to ask the public to ratify a constitutional amendment. However, voucher programs have never won a popular vote so getting a constitutional change to make vouchers easier to institute is not likely.

Their solutions are Rube Goldberg type laws that create 100% tax credits for contributing to a scholarship fund. A corporation or individual can contribute to these funds and reduce their tax burden by an equal amount. Legislators must pretend that since the state never got the tax dollars it is constitutional. Lawyers who practice bending the law might agree but common sense tells us this is nonsense.

The big problem for the anti-public school Republicans is voucher schools are not popular. They have never once won a public referendum.

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The Delta Variant Meets Open Schools Now

13 Aug

By Thomas Ultican 8/13/2021

It is not possible for schools in most states to open safely. Well respected Dr Jorge A Caballero wrote in the Guardian, “school reopening plans that hinge on universal mask mandates and frequent testing are doomed to fail.” At this perilous time, there is also a political movement demanding that schools be fully opened. Because the delta variant is so much more transmissible, only mandated vaccination and masking will make it possible for schools to safely operate.

This weekend the President of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), Randi Weingarten, accepted reality and in a Meet the Press interview called for mandatory vaccination of teachers. The leadership at the National Education Association (NEA) also reversed their opposition on Thursday (8/12/2021) and joined with AFT’s call for vaccine mandates.

The Governor of California, Gavin Newsom, mandated (8/11/2021) that all public school employees in California be vaccinated. Schools have until October 15 to come into compliance. However, this is not enough. Students also must be vaccinated as soon as they are of eligible and until this pandemic is conquered, masking is required of everyone.

As Dr Caballero further explained,

“It is biologically impossible to test our children to safety. A new study showed that persons infected with the Delta variant had produced around 1,000 times more copies of the virus by the time they tested positive, as compared to persons infected with the original (novel coronavirus-2019) strain. The study traced 167 infections to a single index case. A separate study traced a total of 47 cases (including 21 secondary cases) to a single person. Simply put: the Delta variant makes each of its hosts into a walking super-spreader event before the person even realizes they’ve been infected.”

“On a population-adjusted basis, the weekly average of US children admitted to hospitals with Covid-19 is rising faster than any other age group.”

 Open Schools Now

It seems the campaign to ignore safety issues associated with the novel corona virus originated in May 2020. The former president and his secretary of education began calling for schools to be open for full time face to face instruction.

A recent analysis of a San Diego County school board election revealed that the leaders of two county open schools groups were very active Republican operatives. However, OpenSchoolsCA which bills itself as an umbrella organization for the California open school movements seems less connected to the Republican Party but very connected to the public school privatization agenda.

Founder of OpenSchoolsCA Megan Bacigalupi earned a JD from the University Of California Hastings School Of Law in 2007.  She soon after went to work for Michael Bloomberg’s New York City administration where she served in various positions including a year in the Department of Education. The Bloomberg administration ended in 2014 and so did her work for the city.

A New York Times article announced Megan’s 2010 marriage to John Bacigalupi who worked in the financial industry selling real estate investment trusts. In 2016, John accepted a position as Senior Vice President at Cantor Capital in the bay area and the two west coast transplants came home.

In the graphic above, the LittleSis map shows that The Oakland Public Education Fund is little more than a pass-through channel financing organizations dedicated to privatizing public schools. Megan serves on the Advisory Board for the fund.

Evidently, OpenSchoolsCA is receiving big funding from unknown sources. They were first organized in December 2020 when they hired well-known public relations expert Pat Reilly. Her PR resume’ goes back to the National Governors Association in 1989 and includes being San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown’s press secretary in 1995. This March, Megan Bacigalupi resigned from her position as a program manager at the Canadian technology non-profit C100 to be the full time Executive Director of OpenSchoolsCA.

The OpenSchoolsCA about page list of advisors includes David Castillo who at one time was the California Charter Schools Association’s Alameda County director and has spent more than 20-years working to advance charter schools.

The former Oakland Unified School District Trustee, Jumoke Hinton-Hodge, is also listed as an advisor. The billionaire founded and funded organization dedicated to privatizing Oakland Schools, GO Public Schools, spent more than $167,000 over 2012 and 2016 for her elections. She also received max contributions from Michael Bloomberg, Laurene Jobs Powell, Stacy Schusterman, Greg Penner and Arthur Rock among other extremely wealthy enemies of public education.

Megan Bacigalupi insisted to LA Times reporter, Howard Blume, that privatization was not what it is about, but OpenSchoolsCA recent Oakland rally made it look otherwise. Ken Epstein reported,

“Witnessing the Lake Merritt rally and the mayor’s participation in it were Davey D Cook, hip-hop activist and KPFA radio host; and local artist, activist and educator Kev Choice.

“Kev Choice, speaking on the radio show, said, “I was taken aback by the demographics of the rally” and particularly upset by two prominent placards he saw at the rally: ‘End Oakland Teacher Supremacy’ and ‘Teacher Union Delay Kills Kids.’

“Joining the mayor in calling for the district to reopen were former school board member Jumoke Hinton-Hodge and current school board member Cliff Thompson.”

In November, Cliff Thompson won Oakland’s District-7 seat with 30.4% of the vote (4,735 total votes). He was supported by CCSA PAC, GO PAC, Power2Families and Committee for California. There were four seats up in that election. He was the only billionaire supported candidate elected when the teachers union and a local community group split on whom to support.

OpenSchoolsCA is Not Right for this Crisis

A new Business insider piece says, “Average daily hospitalizations of children with COVID have reached an all-time high of 239.”

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported on August 9, “Ten metro Atlanta school districts reported 1,015 cases of the coronavirus in the first days of the new year.”

Lamar County Mississippi put two of its high schools back in virtual mode. On August 9, Superintendent Steven Hampton revealed, “Last week we had 114 positive students with 26 positive faculty members, our employees. We had to quarantine 608 students due to close contact, also 41 employees quarantined. We had 16 outbreaks across our district.”

The Washington Post’s Valerie Strauss described how 200 doctors in Kansas had to fight a superintendent to get a mask mandate imposed. She also explained how state law is stopping Kansas from re-employing virtual learning.

This is a nationwide crisis that is just starting. We need to take off our rose colored glasses and deal with reality. Making students and teachers safety a priority should not be controversial. Today’s circumstances make forcing large numbers of students into small rooms dangerous.

Until we can vaccinate all students and school staff, prudence says conduct on-line school. Even with the delta variant younger children appear not to be quite as susceptible, it might be safe to bring them into schools if everyone is masked and ventilation is up to par. Until we get all students over 12 and all staff vaccinated, we must use common sense which means stop face to face school.

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