State Support for Pre-Kindergarten Is Another Victim As Vouchers Drain State Tax Dollars

Yesterday, the Ohio Capital Journal‘s Susan Tebben reported some troubling numbers about Ohio children’s access to early childhood education:

“The National Institute for Early Education Research’s annual ‘state of preschool’ report showed nationwide disparities in access, quality, and funding for preschool, with Ohio sitting at 43rd in total reported spending on early education… Ohio has a total of 18,000 children enrolled in pre-K education, with 35% of the school districts offering a state-funded program… In terms of access, Ohio ranked 36th for 4-year-olds and 26th for 3-year-olds.”  Its overall investment is among the lowest of the states.

Sadly, while the new FY 24-25 state budget increased funding for preschool by $122 million over two years, the increase was not sufficient to build enrollment significantly: “Last year’s report saw Ohio in 36th for 4-year-old enrollment, but slightly lower at 27th for three-year-old enrollment.”  And, “The boost followed a reduction in the 2022-2023 school year, when state spending dropped $268 per student from the 2021-2022 year.”

Tebben adds that neither did Ohio meet the National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER) quality benchmarks in its requirements for “learning and development standards, curriculum supports, minimum class size and staff-to-child ratios… An associate degree is required in the state for pre-K teachers, but the NIEER benchmark is a bachelor’s degree.  For assistant preschool teachers, the Ohio requirement is a high school diploma, though NIEER sets a benchmark of a child development associate credential or equivalent credential.”   While NIERR recommends class size in pre-K to be limited to 20 students, Ohio permits a class size of 28 for 4-year-olds and 24 for 3-year-olds.

Research has shown quality pre-K programs to be transformational, especially for children living in poverty.  Clearly the availability of quality pre-K in Ohio is inadequate.  Professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, David Kirp reviews the research about the kind of programming needed to help prepare students socially and developmentally for Kindergarten: “A high-quality program, according to early childhood education experts, features small classes and low student-teacher ratios, with well-trained teachers, an evidence-based curriculum that emphasizes hands-on learning, not eat-your-spinach instruction in the ABC’s or coloring inside the lines, and lots of time for play. The focus is on kids’ physical, social and emotional growth as well as their cognitive development. In that setting, youngsters, preferably from different social backgrounds, are solving problems together, while their teachers talk with, not at, them.”

As we read this news about Ohio’s paltry investment in pre-Kindergarten programs for children who desperately need early childhood enrichment, it’s important to consider the context.

Late in March, the Plain Dealer’s Laura Hancock reported: “As of March 18, state spending on all five scholarship (private school tuition voucher) programs was $980.4 million, with several months yet to go in the state’s fiscal year.” “State spending on private school scholarships (vouchers) has exceeded estimates by over $15 million and is inching toward the $1 billion mark.”  That’s a diversion of a billion dollars for vouchers in just the first year of the budget biennium.

Who are the students receiving these vouchers? In a March 2 report, Hancock explains that they are not poor students exiting their public schools looking  for greater opportunities.The legislature expanded the EdChoice program in the state budget by raising family income eligibility for a full voucher to 450 percent of the federal poverty level and making all Ohio children eligible by offering children in families with even higher incomes a partial private school tuition voucher. Ohio’s diversion of tax dollars from public schools is now covering private school tuition for middle and upper income students who were already enrolled in private and parochial schools with tuition previously paid by their parents.

Underfunded pre-Kindergarten programs are only one of the victims of the drain of state funding into vouchers for the wealthy.

Chicago Begins the Hard Work of Dismantling Neoliberal School Reform

Right now we are watching in real time as Chicago tries to figure out how to undo the consequences of a catastrophic, two-decades long experiment in marketplace school reform.

Chicago’s Board of Education has voted to implement an important first step in Mayor Brandon Johnson’s proposed school district overhaul: the elimination of student based budgeting.

Mayor Johnson seeks to restore equal opportunity across a school district that has become marked by magnet schools, charter schools, elite and selective public schools, struggling neighborhood schools, and neighborhoods without a a public high school or even a traditional public elementary school.

Johnson has prioritized major changes in the Chicago Public Schools, whose problems became especially obvious in June of 2013, when Mayor Rahm Emanuel closed 50 neighborhood public schools because, as he claimed, they were under-enrolled. Eve Ewing, a University of Chicago sociologist explains that, “80 percent of the students who would be affected were African American… and 87 percent of the schools to be closed were majority black.” (Ghosts in the Schoolyard, p. 54)

Chicago was an early experimenter with school reform. Brandon Johnson, the city’s elected mayor, leads Chicago’s schools as part of the 1994 mayoral governance plan imposed on the public schools by Mayor Richard M. Daley and the Illinois legislature. The Chicago Public Schools adopted universal, districtwide school choice, and the launch in 2004 of Renaissance 2010 (led by Arne Duncan) that involved the authorization of a mass of new charter schools and the subsequent closure of so-called failing neighborhood public chools. Chicago adopted a strategy called “portfolio school reform,” described in a National Education Policy Center brief: “The operational theory behind portfolio districts is based on a stock market metaphor—the stock portfolio under the control of a portfolio manager. If a stock is low-performing, the manager sells it.  As a practical matter, this means either closing the school or turning it over to an charter school….”

Then in 2014, Mayor Emanuel added a districtwide funding plan called student based budgeting. In a 2019 report, Roosevelt University professor Stephanie Farmer explained: “Student Based Budgeting fundamentally remade the approach to funding public schools. Student Based Budgeting is akin to a business model of financing public schools because funds are based on student-consumer demand and travel with the student-consumer to the school of their choice.  (The plan contrasts with)… the old public good approach to financing public schools that ensured a baseline of education professionals in each school.”

Because it is known that aggregate school test scores correlate primarily with poverty and wealth, it was predicable that student based budgeting would put schools in Chicago’s poorest neighborhoods on a race to the bottom, leading to schools with tragically limited programming for the city’s most vulnerable students and more school closures.  Farmer concludes: “Our findings show that Chicago Public Schools’ putatively color-blind Student Based Budgeting reproduces racial inequality by concentrating low budget public schools almost exclusively in Chicago’s Black neighborhoods. The clustering of low budget schools in low-income Black neighborhoods adds another layer of hardship in neighborhoods experiencing distress from depopulation, low incomes, and unaffordable housing.”

In late March of this year, WBEZ’s Sarah Karp reported that the Board of Education voted to launch a new plan to determine how much each school has to spend on teachers and programming: “Chicago Public Schools is officially moving away from a school funding formula that pitted schools against each other as they competed for students… District officials… announced (on March 21, 2024) they are implementing a formula that targets resources for individual schools based on the needs of students, such as socioeconomic status and health. They will abandon student based budgeting—a formula unveiled a decade ago under former Mayor Rahm Emanuel that provided a foundational amount of money based on how many students were enrolled…. Under the needs-based formula, every school will get at least four foundation positions, including an assistant principal, plus core and ‘holistic teachers.’… Schools will then get additional funding based on the opportunity index, which looks at barriers to opportunity including race, socioeconomic status, education, health and community factors.”

While undoing a market-based scheme for school funding and operations is clearly a moral imperative, the challenges appear daunting.  Karp continues: “This change was expected as Mayor Brandon Johnson and others have sharply criticized student based budgeting. However, it was unclear how it would play out, especially as the district faces a $391 million deficit for the next school year.  The shortfall is the result of federal COVID relief funds running out… District officials offered no information at a Board of Education meeting… on how the district will fill the budget hole.”

In addition to the threat of a serious financial shortfall, another challenge is the outcry from parents who have over the past two decades become a constituency for charter schools, magnet schools and selective high schools.  Mayor Johnson has tried to reassure parents: “(L)et me assure people that—whether its a selective enrollment school or magnet school—we will continue to invest in those goals… (A)ll I’m simply saying is that where education is working in particular at our selective enrollment schools and our magnet schools, my position is like any other parents in Chicago: that type of programming should work in all of our schools. And that has not been the case. Neighborhood schools have been attacked, they have been demonized, and they’ve been disinvested in, and Black and brown parents overwhelmingly send their children to those schools. So it’s not just demonizing and disinvesting in Black and brown schools, it’s demonizing and disinvesting in Black and brown people—and not under my administration.”

Although school choice plans like Chicago’s were originally premised on the idea of providing more choices for those who have few, in her profound book, Ghosts in the Schoolyard, Eve Ewing explains that families in Chicago do not have equal access in today’s school system based on school choice: “While choosing the best option from a menu of possibilities is appealing in theory, researchers have documented that in practice the ‘choice’ model often leaves black families at a disadvantage. Black parents’ ability to truly choose may be hindered by limited access to transportation, information, and time, leaving them on the losing end of a supposedly fair marketplace.” (Ghosts in the Schoolyard, p. 23) Families dealing with poverty and its challenges are more likely to select a neighborhood school within walking distance of their home.

Mayor Johnson and his school board are facing a fraught political battle in the midst of severe budget challenges. Chicago school reform has exacerbated inequality. The families whose children remain in traditional neighborhood schools that have been undermined by school choice and student based budgeting have watched their their schools lose staff and programs their children need. At the same time, families who have benefited from charter schools, magnet schools and selective-enrollment high schools have now become strong supporters of the programs they have come to take for granted.

Mayor Johnson has been very clear, however, about what the past two decades of portfolio school reform, school choice and student based budgeting have meant for Chicago: “What has happened in the city of Chicago is selective enrollment schools go after students who perform academically on paper.  It’s a very narrow view of education. Let’s also ensure that other areas of need are also highlighted and lifted up.  That’s arts, our humanities, technology, trades…  It’s not like we’re asking for anything radical. We’re talking about social workers, counselors, class sizes that are manageable. We’re talking about full wraparound services for treatment for families who are experiencing the degree of trauma that exists in this city.”

Today’s Bitter Divide—in Our Society and in Our Public Schools

In America Has Legislated Itself into Competing Red, Blue Versions of Education, the Washington Post’s Hannah Natanson and her colleagues identify the growing divide between red states—whose legislatures are banning school curricula that recognize the history of racial inequity, intentionally include the stories and histories of Black, Brown, and American Indian students, and cover human sexuality—and blue states whose curricula aim to reflect on and correct our society’s history of racism, exclusion, and homophobia.

Certainly the Post’s reporters are correct to acknowledge the growing political divide in public school curricular policy across the states, but they misdiagnose the cause. They explain that online programming during COVID alarmed parents when they saw what their children were being taught, and caused frightened parents to begin organizing: “(T)he onslaught of restrictive legislation in red states began in 2021… inspired in many cases by parent concerns over curriculums…. as some mothers and fathers—granted an unprecedented glimpse into lessons during the era of school-by-laptop—found they did not like or trust what their children were learning. Soon, some parents were complaining that lessons were biased toward left-leaning views and too focused on what they saw as irrelevant discussions of race, gender, and sexuality—laments taken up by conservative pundits and politicians. National groups like Moms for Liberty formed to call out and combat left-leaning teaching in public schools.”

This explanation distorts what happened. Natanson and her colleagues present the emergence of groups like Moms for Liberty and Parents Defending Education as spontaneous grassroots uprisings of disgruntled parents who didn’t like what they watched when their children’s schools went remote during COVID. These organizations did not just spring up as parents met over coffee or argued in PTA meetings. The organizations are instead offshoots of national networks funded by well known far-right philanthropists and resourced by staff at right-wing think tanks.  Moms for Liberty and the rest are Astroturf—fake grassroots—organizations.

Education writer Jeff Bryant names some of the groups and traces their operating money: “According to an analysis by NBC News, there are ‘at least 165 local and national groups’ connected to protests and incidents of threats and violence directed at public schools. Many of these groups have connections to prominent national rightwing advocacy organizations and think tanks, including the American Legislative Exchange Council, the Manhattan Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, and FreedomWorks. In a study of the funding sources for Moms for Liberty, retired University of Massachusetts professor Maurice Cunningham linked the group’s financial records to conservative dark money organizations such as the Council for National Policy (CNP) and the Leadership Institute (LI).”

Cunningham traces the money behind what may appear to be a spontaneous emergence of parents’ groups—Parents Defending Education, Moms for Liberty, and No Left Turn in Education. Cunningham points to clues that these are not local grassroots groups of parents; their websites, for example, betray a big investment in communications. And while the founders of Parents Defending Education (PDE) claim to be a bunch of working moms, Cunningham explains: “PDE took in $3,178,272 in contributions and grants in 2021… Donor’s Trust, a dark money donor associated with the Koch network donated $20,250 to PDE in 2021. The Achelis & Bodman Foundation which funds voucher and charter school programs and targets public education, contributed $25,000. Searle Freedom Trust, another right-wing donor with ties to Donors Trust, contributed $250,000 in 2021. We don’t know all the names on the checks, but we do know that those checks had to be pretty large, that the attorneys and consultants sit at the hierarchy of right-wing operatives, and that the board members and staffers are connected to the highest levels of conservative donors including the Koch network.”

In January,  the NY Times‘ Nicholas Confessore profiled another sponsor of far right attacks on “diversity, equity, and inclusion” in public schools and in American higher education: “Centered at the Claremont Institute, a California-based think tank with close ties to the Trump movement and to Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, the group coalesced roughly three years ago around a sweeping ambition: to strike a killing blow against ‘the leftist social justice revolution’ by eliminating ‘social justice education’ from American schools.”  When Confessore asked the Claremont Institute for a statement of its policies, he received the following: Claremont is: “proud to be a leader in the fight against D.E. I., since the ideology from which it flows conflicts with America’s Founding principles, constitutional government and equality under the law.” He continues: “By 2022, as Claremont and allies like the Maine Policy Institute and a Tennessee group called Velocity Convergence rolled out early research… (t)heir public reports began to borrow from Mr. (Christopher) Rufo’s rhetoric, attacking ‘critical social justice’ or ‘critical social justice education.”  Confessore adds: “Claremont officials would partner with state think tanks, and with hundreds of former fellows scattered through conservative institutions and on Capitol Hill. They would catalog the D.E.I. programs and personnel honeycombed through public universities. Then they would lobby sympathetic public officials to gut them.”

Not only do Natanson and her colleagues neglect to consider the funding behind the anti-D.E.I. campaign, but they also fail to notice a much broader surging of the open expression of racism and homophobia that seems to have culminated in today’s MAGA era.

In a profound column in the March 2024, Stanford Social Innovation Review, the Schott Foundation for Public Education’s President and CEO, Dr. John Jackson and Nicole Rodriguez Leach, the  Executive Director of Grantmakers for Education, explore profound social and demographic trends  that predate COVID: “First, the American classroom has changed… Data from the National Center for Education Statistics tells us that as of 2021, public school students in the U.S. are now majority non-white…. Second, the education justice movement has changed…. As the public school community has diversified, parents, young people, and educators have increased their demands for equitable funding, an end to discriminatory and punitive school discipline policies and (for) the wraparound services and supports needed to make the promise of quality education real for every child…. (Third) the larger racial justice movement, too, has changed… reaching its most recent peak in the summer of 2020 after the police murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. Institutions large and small have shifted their rhetoric, and to a lesser extent their practices, in response to their members, customers, donors, and constituents. The fourth factor is a backlash to the first three, in a pattern that extends back to the Reconstruction Era…. Advances in racial justice are being met with harsh reaction from the radical right.” Perhaps what we have been watching is the culmination of a reaction against the Civil Rights Movement itself.

What we see happening today in the fight about the social studies curriculum in our public schools is mirrored in the nation’s political partisan divide. Last week, Washington Post columnist  Eugene Robinson declared: “The rest of us… should take a moment to ponder the bridge the American right has crossed—a bridge leading to the Jim Crow past. It would be wrong to blame all this on Donald Trump. But by bulldozing the guardrails that used to delimit our political rhetoric, he has given permission for quiet racism to be shouted.”

Robinson highlights the attacks he has heard and received in e-mail responses to his writing about the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore. After Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott made a public statement on the collapse of the bridge, Robinson received this comment: “This is Baltimore’s DEI mayor commenting on the collapsed Francis Scott Key Bridge.” Robinson explains: “‘DEI’ is diversity, equity and inclusion. For the unhinged far right, however, ‘DEI’ has come to mean ‘any Black or brown person who holds a position of authority that we think should have gone to a white man.’… I don’t need to defend Scott; he’s perfectly capable of defending himself: ‘We’ve been the boggeyman for them since the first day they brought us to this country,’ he said on MSNBC of his racist critics… ‘We know what they want to say. But they don’t have the courage to say the N word.'”

Robinson adds: “They might not say it out loud, yet. But the racists now hurl that word to me, in emails and other communications, with a gusto I haven’t seen since the days of Bull Connor and Strom Thurmond.”

The battles happening in local school board meetings and the attacks on the honest teaching of American history, didn’t all just well up because parents watched online lessons during COVID. In a political climate where people feel freer to express their biases, racism and homophobia have surfaced in a widespread reaction to what has been our society’s greater acceptance and inclusion of formerly excluded groups of people. And since the police killing of George Floyd, the fire of bigotry has also been intentionally fanned by think tanks lavishly funded by the far right. The battle about whether our diverse society should be more inclusive and equitable is not merely an education battle, but that broader fight sure is affecting the public schools.

Retired professor of education at the University of Illinois, Chicago, William Ayers describes how public schools, as a core social and civic institution, reflect our society: “Schools don’t exist outside of history or culture: they are, rather, at the heart of each. Schools serve societies; societies shape schools. Schools, then, are both mirror and window—they tell us who we are and who we want to become, and they show us what we value and what we ignore, what is precious and what is venal.”  (Public Education: Defending a Cornerstone of American Democracy, p. 315)

Oklahoma Supreme Court Justices Appear to Question Constitutionality of Religious Charter School

On Tuesday, the  Supreme Court of the state of Oklahoma heard oral arguments in a case filed by Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond versus the Oklahoma Virtual Charter School Board, which approved a religious charter school last June. The case challenges whether the establishment of St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual Charter School can be legal under the provisions of the Oklahoma Constitution.  If the school is permitted to open in August, it will be operated by the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Oklahoma City and the Diocese of Tulsa.

The Oklahoman’s Murray Evans reports that during oral arguments on Tuesday, “Drummond told justices he sued the virtual-school board ‘to defend the separation of church and state’… Drummond said Article 2, Section 5 of the Oklahoma Constitution was at the heart of his case: ‘No public money or property shall ever be appropriated, applied, donated, or used, directly or indirectly, for the use, benefit, or support of any sect, church, denomination, or system of religion, or for the use, benefit, or support of any priest, preacher, minister, or other religious teacher or dignitary or sectarian institution as such.'”

There are two issues being tested in two cases challenging the establishment of St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual Charter School: (1) protecting children from a charter school’s imposition of religious practice in violation of the constitutional protection of religious liberty, and (2) ensuring that government is not sponsoring charter schools that can select students according to the school’s religious affiliation or discriminate against students whose LGBTQ status (or other characteristic) may violate church strictures.

Drummond’s lawsuit, heard before the state’s supreme court this week, focuses on the protection of religious liberty by ensuring that public schools do not impose religion on their students—an issue with St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual Charter School, which has clearly defined itself as a religious school.  For Education Week in 2023, Mark Walsh quoted the school’s application for approval by the Oklahoma Virtual Charter School Board: “‘To the extent permissible under the Oklahoma Charter Schools Act,’ the application says, the school’s purposes, activities, programs, and affairs will operate ‘in harmony with faith and morals, including sexual morality, as taught and understood by the Magisterium of the Catholic Church based on Holy Scripture and Sacred Tradition.'”

A second lawsuit (which was not part of Tuesday’s oral arguments and awaits a hearing in a district court) has been filed by parents, faith leaders, and public school advocates—all part of the Oklahoma Parent Legislative Action Committee.  They are represented by attorneys from Americans United for Separation of Church and State, the Education Law Center, the American Civil Liberties Union,  and the Freedom from Religion Foundation. Plaintiffs’ primary argument is that St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual Charter School will violate the civil rights of students based on the religious operation of the school.  Plaintiffs’ attorneys explain: “The plaintiffs… object to their tax dollars funding a public charter school that will discriminate against students and families based on their religion and LGBTQ+ status, fail to adequately serve students with disabilities, and indoctrinate students into one religion—all in violation of Oklahoma law and our country’s promises of the separation of church and state and public schools that are open to all.”

The Case Heard on Tuesday Is a Constitutional Test Case and Will Likely Be Appealed

The Washington Post‘s Laura Meckler explains that the case heard this week is part of a years-long series brought by the far right to undermine the U.S. Constitutional protection of citizens from the imposition of religion by the state: “In recent years, religious activists have succeeded in tearing down what had been a clear delineation between public funding and religious education. In three (of the most recent) significant rulings, the U.S. Supreme Court found that religious institutions may not be excluded from taxpayer-funded programs that were available to others.  In a 2017 case, the high court ruled that a church-run preschool in Missouri was entitled to a state grant that funded playgrounds. In 2020, the court ruled that Montana… include religious schools in a program giving tax incentives for supporting private-school tuition scholarships. And last year, the court said that a Maine voucher program that sent rural students to private high schools had to be open to religious schools.”  In today’s Oklahoma case, the issue is whether publicly funded charter schools can be religious under the state’s constitution.

For two decades now, conservative advocates have used far-right legal firms including the Institute for Justice and the Alliance Defending Freedom (the attorneys defending St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual Charter School in the current case) to bring a series of test cases for the purpose of reframing the separation of religion from public education.  The strategy has been to reduce concern about the separation of church and state (a principle articulated in the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause) and refocus on protecting religious free exercise in the form of guaranteeing religious private schools the right to the same public tuition vouchers available to other private schools (a First Amendment Free Exercise Clause argument). The contention in these lawsuits is that religious institutions cannot be denied the same public funding that is available to secular institutions because denying them these benefits is a violation of the free exercise of religion. The John Roberts Supreme Court has in all three recent cases endorsed Free Exercise Clause arguments over Establishment Clause arguments.

The Oklahoma Case Will Determine the Future of Charter Schools

Are charter schools public (state actors) or are they private schools?  That question is at the heart of the case that was heard on Tuesday in Oklahoma City. Juan Perez Jr. led POLITICO Morning Education this week with this declaration: “The future of American charter schools will be shaped in an Oklahoma courtroom this week.” And in a paper published in December, 2022 in the University of California Irvine Law Review, constitutional scholar Derek Black explains why: “A marriage of religion and state power in the form of public charter schools would practically, ideologically, and constitutionally transform public education as we know it. As a practical matter, religious schools will flood states with requests to convert into charter schools and thereby shift the cost of religious instruction onto taxpayers. Given the number of interested religious organizations, the impact on state public education budgets could be catastrophic. As an ideological matter, the existence of religious charter schools would eliminate the distinct mission and values that have long defined public schools. And as a constitutional matter, the federal and state constitutional rights that students currently enjoy in public schools would vanish.”

There has been confusion about the status of charter schools because over the years, attorneys representing charter schools have, in some court cases, defined the schools as private schools, and in other cases they have defined the schools as public schools.

Some attorneys like Preston Green III at the University of Connecticut law school and Suzanne Eckes at the University of Wisconsin law school argue that because court precedents fall both ways, it is time for state legislatures to “make charter schools ‘public’ for constitutional matters.” They explain: “Charter schools are publicly funded and operate under a contract (charter) with the state or a state authorized entity. Although charter schools are commonly understood to be public schools, they are really public-private hybrids. Like public schools, they are state financed, free, and open to all students. However, they are usually run by private board of directors instead of elected school boards.”

Derrick Black, at the University of South Carolina law school, on the other hand, told Patrick Wall and Cara Fitzpatrick at Chalkbeat: “‘I would say there’s 101 reasons why they are state actors… and none why they are not.’ He noted that charter schools and traditional public schools both receive public money, cannot charge tuition or turn students away, and must adhere to state academic standards. Unlike traditional public schools, charter schools don’t answer to elected school boards, and they enjoy flexibility from some state regulations. But these qualities don’t make charter schools ‘private actors.’… ‘If Oklahoma were to approve the plan for a religious charter school, the state would essentially be endorsing the school’s religious beliefs… That is, the state adopting private religious beliefs as the state’s curriculum… That stamp all by itself is state action.'”

What Did We Learn from Tuesday’s Oral Arguments?

Writing for Oklahoma Voice, Nuria Martinez-Keel describes some of the interchange between Attorney General Drummond, who brought the lawsuit to block the opening of St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School, and the Oklahoma Supreme Court’s justices.  She recounts:

“Drummond said…. religious entities often receive taxpayer funds to help them offer a public benefit, such as a church-affiliated hospital, but he said public education is a core service the state provides.  St. Isidore is a joint venture between the church and the state—two entities who agreed to enter into a charter contract with each other to found the school….”

“Vice-Chief Justice Dustin P. Rowe asked whether taxpayers are not ‘indirectly supporting the Catholic Church’ by funding the school and questioned how this would not violate the state Constitution.”

“Justice Noma Gurich seemed skeptical of the idea that a state-funded charter school is free of constitutional obligations. ‘Where is the choice for Oklahoma taxpayers not to support the Catholic Church?'”

“The Court’s most experienced justice, Yvonne Kauger, asked bluntly, ‘Are we a test case?'”

It would appear that several of the justices showed themselves sympathetic to Drummond’s argument that opening St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual Charter School as a public and explicitly religious charter school would violate the Oklahoma Constitution’s protection of the separation of church and state.  Many hope the Court will reach a decision before the school is set to open on August 12.  An appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court is likely.

Education Philanthropists Respond When Challenged to Increase Investment in Projects for Racial Justice in Public Schools

The Schott Foundation for Public Education recently released Justice Is the Foundation, a new report that lifts up the need for increasing philanthropic support for racial justice in American public education. Here is how the report begins:

“Concentrations of wealth are both created by and reinforce the historic and present hierarchies of race, gender, and class. As many philanthropic leaders and advocates have stressed, what matters now is not just to recognize that extreme inequality, but to help resolve it through shifting power and resources from the few to the many… The Schott Foundation for Public Education worked with Candid, a center for nonprofit resources and tools… to critically examine K-12 education philanthropy’s grantmaking priorities. Our project, Justice is the Foundation, assesses the collective philanthropic impact of giving in the education sector through the lens of racial equity and racial justice. We believe that education philanthropy has an important and irreplaceable role to play in building a more just and equitable society: public schools touch 90% of students in the U.S….”

In the new report, the Schott Foundation defines what ought to be the two primary purposes of grants addressing racism and the culture wars in public schools: “Racial equity in education grants refers to grants designed to close the achievement gap that persists between racial groups… Racial justice in education grants refers to grants designed to address the larger systemic issues creating barriers to the ecosystem necessary to close opportunity gaps… (including) organizing… to change the systems and structures that generate and reinforce racial inequity.” (Emphasis is mine.)

The Justice is the Foundation report exposes a troubling decline since 2018 in the level of education philanthropy supporting racial equity and racial justice at school: “Both racial equity and racial justice remain drastically underfunded by the K-12 philanthropic sector… K-12 education philanthropy’s already scant investment in racial justice dropped sharply compared to 2018-2020. The $62 million recorded in 2019-2021—just 0.3% of grantmaking—pales in comparison  to the still-meager $105 million (0.7%) in 2018-2020…  Racial equity work is drastically underfunded by K-12 philanthropy… Investment in racial justice work—the efforts to solve the systemic inequities that racial equity work ameliorates—remains vanishingly small, especially compared to the scope of the challenge.”

In a March 2024 column in the Stanford Social Innovation Review, the Schott Foundation’s President and CEO, Dr. John Jackson and Nicole Rodriguez Leach explore the data: “The latest Justice Is the Foundation data, covering grants made from 2019-2021…. paints a stark picture. Between 2019 and 2021, racial equity grants were $2.7 billion, just 14 percent of the $18.9 billion granted by K-12 funders over that period.  Racial justice, the very category of funding that aims for the highest level of transformation, were a vanishingly small slice of the pie at $62 million, or 0.3 percent.  If there was a racial justice reckoning in 2020, K-12 education philanthropy as a sector was slow to act upon it.”

Jackson and Rodriguez Leach examine what has happened since 2018: “First, the American classroom has changed… Data from the National Center for Education Statistics tells us that as of 2021, public school students in the U.S. are now majority non-white…. Second, the education justice movement has changed…. As the public school community has diversified, parents, young people, and educators have increased their demands for equitable funding, an end to discriminatory and punitive school discipline policies and (for) the wraparound services and supports needed to make the promise of quality education real for every child…. (Third) the larger racial justice movement, too, has changed… reaching its most recent peak in the summer of 2020 after the police murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. Institutions large and small have shifted their rhetoric, and to a lesser extent their practices, in response to their members, customers, donors, and constituents. The fourth factor is a backlash to the first three, in a pattern that extends back to the Reconstruction Era…. Advances in racial justice are being met with harsh reaction from the radical right.”

In a separate column for the Schott Foundation for Public Education, Jackson discusses the urgent importance of building up philanthropic investment in this work: “Our public schools are not only places of learning but also the place for the next generation to establish, co-create and evolve their civic governance and societal norms. This is what the far right knows and what philanthropies who won’t fund pubic education advocacy must reconcile. The drop in philanthropic support for racial justice work in education has left a void that those who oppose a multi-racial democracy are more than happy to fill. They spread narratives that public education is a failing effort and draft policy proposals designed to send public dollars to private schools. Groups like Moms for Liberty try to pass policies to ban books, whitewash curriculum….  What they frame as anti-CRT are a host of policies rooted in anti-Black, anti-LGBTQ, and anti-democratic values. They are trying to weaponize public education to dismantle the values of a multi-racial democracy: equity, fairness, and inclusion.”

It is encouraging that the Schott Foundation and others are pressing for an increase in philanthropic funding for organizations supporting inclusive and equitable public schools. Inside Philanthropy‘s Connie Matthiessen reported last week on the launch of the Education Future Fund, a new philanthropic coalition that aims to cool the culture war flames and protect public schools.  Seven philanthropic foundations, each with a history of  funding pro-public schools initiatives, have announced the launch of the new campaign and a new website that centers “public education as the cornerstone of an inclusive, strong democracy” and condemns “politicized attacks on inclusive education.”  Joining in the new philanthropic initiative are the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, W.K. Kellogg Foundation, Lozier Foundation, Raikes Foundation, Charles and Lynn Shusterman Family Philanthropies, Spencer Foundation, and Pivotal Ventures. The seven philanthropies already have history of working together, but now declare their commitment to the joint initiative:  “Responding to the urgent needs raised by our partners in the field, we came together… to collaborate on an aligned strategy and grantmaking. We strive to support the field in advancing a proactive and positive agenda and narrative, in defending against censorship efforts, and in mitigating the chilling effect on educators and system leaders.”

The Schott Foundation for Public Education has been a leader in the effort to expand wider philanthropic investment to oppose the culture war disruption of public schooling and support racial justice. The Schott Foundation is a partner in H.E.A.L. Together (Honest Education Action & Leadership) , a project of Race Forward.  H.E.A.L Together’s website describes how the project supports work to overcome the culture wars: “By joining H.E.A.L. Together, you will receive tools and trainings to help you organize your school and community for educational equity — countering those bringing the culture wars to our schools under the guise of “Critical Race Theory,” by banning books and censoring educators who teach honestly about race, gender, and sexual orientation.”

In her report for Inside Philanthropy, Mathiessen quotes Dr. John Jackson about how the past year’s effort to rejuvenate philanthropy for racial justice in public schools made a difference in last November’s election in which the majority of Moms for Liberty-endorsed candidates were defeated: “We haven’t been sitting on our hands… This happened because there were investments, many organizations and activists and racial justice organizations were pushing back … and engaging voters around elections. Moms for Liberty lost a lot of traction in the last election cycle, but they aren’t going to stop. Still, we are confident that if we have the infrastructure to elevate the truth and to engage a large base of voters, they will see the same level of defeat that they saw in the last election.”

Will Untenable Voucher Expansion Threaten Public School Funding in Ohio?

The Cleveland Plain Dealer‘s Laura Hancock reports this week that the enormous expansion of EdChoice vouchers in Ohio will bring the state’s investment in its five private school tuition voucher programs to at least a billion dollars by the end of Fiscal Year 2024 on October 1. In Ohio, a total of 152,118 students, according to Hancock’s data, now attend private schools using tax funded vouchers.

Ohio began offering private school vouchers to students in a relatively small program in Cleveland in 1996. Ohio now has five school voucher programs, one program for children with autism, another for students with disabilities, the original Cleveland program, and two statewide school voucher programs, including EdChoice Expansion by which any student can now qualify to carry public tax dollars to pay private school tuition.

This year, after the legislature expanded eligibility for EdChoice vouchers in the state budget—by raising the income qualification to include students with family income up to $135,000 and offering partial vouchers to students in families with income above $135,000—the number of students and the diversion of state tax dollars skyrocketed.  Hancock explains: “As of March 18, state spending on all five scholarship programs was $980.4 million, with several months yet to go in the state’s fiscal year. ”

In a column that appeared in Crain’s Cleveland Business, education reporter Patrick O’Donnell documents how voucher use has grown in the last decade: “Voucher use in Ohio has grown more than 400 percent in the last 10 years, from 30,000 students in 2013-14 to more than 120,000 today. The state tax dollars going to families and private schools have grown from $175 million then to potentially $1 billion a year now. The most dramatic leap… came just this school year after the Ohio legislature eliminated the last income cap for families to receive a voucher in the summer of 2023.”

There are a lot of explanations and rationalizations and lies floating around right now to justify the enormous diversion of tax dollars from the state budget, and eventually the shortage of funds needed for the public schools that serve 1.6 million public school students.  There are also a lot of gullible people who believe the fast-talking cynical people who are trying to obscure what’s happening.

Did the State Intend that the EdChoice Voucher Expansion Would Create Opportunity for Poor Students?

On March 8, the Plain Dealer‘s Editorial Board quoted Ohio House Majority leadership celebrating last June’s expansion of EdChoice vouchers: “(T)he budget makes a landmark investment in school choice…. This program is designed to safeguard lower-income families and offers options beyond traditional public schools.  By expanding access to vouchers, Ohio ensures parents can make the best decisions for their children’s education.”  The newspaper’s editorial board immediately and explicitly refutes that myth: “But data from implementation of this ‘landmark investment in school choice… designed to safeguard lower-income families’ suggests it did very little to provide school choice or to help low-income families. Instead, parents in affluent communities… with kids already in private and parochial schools appear to have taken immediate advantage of the new eligibility rules.” The editors appear to recognize that by raising the income-eligibility qualification to 450% of the federal poverty level, our legislators were qualifying upper income children for the vouchers, while doing nothing to give poor kids greater access.

However, in a follow-up column, the Plain Dealer‘s executive editor, Chris Quinn reinforces the assumption that legislators meant to help poor kids.  He assumes the whole scheme was just a mistake—that our legislators tried to help poor kids but merely made an error in the program’s design: “Lawmakers and Gov. Mike DeWine changed the rules on school vouchers this year with a goal many find laudable, to give students in under-performing school districts a chance for a better education. Once the rules went into place, however, the vouchers were overwhelmingly grabbed by people in good districts like Rocky River.  Did lawmakers or DeWine admit they got it wrong, that the rules they created did not help the people they say were their targets?… The answer is no.” (We’ll ignore for the moment that Quinn also trusts test scores as the definition of a “good” school district and calls the districts that serve our poorest kids “under-performing.”)

Let’s get real and assume that legislators knew what they were doing when they designed a program to help upper income families qualify for private school vouchers.  Hancock quotes Bill Phillis, who leads the Vouchers Hurt Ohio lawsuit, “We have a situation where the lower-income people of the state are subsidizing the wealthy, picking up the tuition costs of the wealthy.”

So… What Was the Real Goal of the Ohio Senate’s Voucher Expansion Plan?

It would appear that key legislative leaders believe in the ideology of parental choice. Some are also promoting parochial schools. Patrick O’Donnell reports that, “more than 95 percent of voucher dollars in Ohio go to … religious schools.” He also notes that, “After years of enrollment declines and closures, private school operators, particularly religious schools, are filling seats, adding students and even looking to expand.” O’Donnell notes that Senate President Matt Huffman hopes, “the latest increase in voucher will help older (private) schools build up enrollment and even add new classrooms.” Key voucher-supporting lobbyists share Huffman’s goal: “Some school choice advocates, including the conservative Buckeye Institute, have started calling for the state to start paying for private school construction, as it does with public schools. Brian Hickey, executive director of the Ohio Catholic Conference, said schools would welcome help building schools in rural areas that don’t have existing Catholic schools.”

ProPublica‘s Alec MacGillis points out that this year’s voucher expansion has caused private schools to pressure parents already paying tuition for their students to apply for state vouchers to reduce the schools’ own scholarship costs: “The surge has been propelled by private school leaders, who have an obvious interest: The more voucher money families receive, the less schools have to offer in financial aid. The voucher revenue also makes it easier to raise tuition.”

O’Donnell quotes Senate President Matt Huffman defending private schools as being more accountable than public schools: “Huffman said it’s not really fair for public schools to call for the same accountability for private schools because public school districts never close. Private schools have had to close after losing students, he said.” Describing public schools, Huffman continued, “They’re not held accountable… They in fact, continue to operate, especially schools that don’t perform academically. That’s not true for private schools, because parents take their kids out.”  (Michigan State University’s Josh Cowen shows that parents haven’t been an effective source of accountability. He presents academic research showing that students fall behind academically when their parents use vouchers to send the children to private schools.)

Does the State Really Have So much Money We Don’t Need to Worry about the Cost of Vouchers?

Hancock quotes Ohio Senate Education Committee Chair, Senator Andy Brenner, who doesn’t worry about the diversion of a billion dollars from the state budget because, “Tax revenues over the past year have exceeded projections.” “There’s plenty of money. It’s not an issue.”  She also quotes John Fortney, a spokesman for Senate President Huffman, lying about the impact of the voucher expansion on the state budget: “These scholarships save the state money compared to the average cost of per pupil spending.” Fortney is trying to make the public forget that while each voucher is worth less than the state’s per-pupil base cost in public schools, voucher students are not leaving public schools and saving the state money as Fortney claims. Earlier this month, Laura Hancock reported that in Cuyahoga County, voucher use, “has increased nearly four-fold, from about 2,300 students last year to nearly 9,200 this year. Those (public school) districts, however, have not seen a corresponding loss in student population, indicating that most of the families newly benefiting form the vouchers were already enrolled in private schools, rather than fleeing a school district….”  The state has simply established a new annual gift of tax dollars to thousands of new families to offset the tuition they are already paying.

Fortney also justifies the voucher expansion by reminding the public that legislators have also supported public schools by implementing the first two parts of the three year phase-in of a new public school funding formula—investing, he says, $2 billion into public education. His point? We supported the public schools in the state budget, so why shouldn’t we support private schools?  Fortney neglects to mention, however, that Ohio had been operating for years without an adequate and equitable school funding plan before the legislature began phasing in the state’s new Fair School Funding Plan, and three years ago, under Huffman’s leadership, legislators refused to establish the new public school funding formula under separate enabling legislation. They insisted that it be phased in one step at a time over three biennial budgets (six years) in order not to lock future legislators into a firm public school budgetary commitment.  The Ohio Capital Journal‘s Susan Tebben quoted Senator Huffman reiterating his commitment to a step-by-step phase-in: “Senate President Matt Huffman said, ‘the out-year costs are still a significant concern.'” Legislative leaders insisted on letting future legislatures off the hook in case of a future economic recession or a future change of plans.

A lot of people in Ohio today worry that, as a result of an uncapped commitment to future EdChoice vouchers for upper-income families, the rising cost of the vouchers might well constitute that future change of plans.  Won’t the rapidly growing expense of EdChoice vouchers threaten the final phase-in and future funding of the Fair School Funding Plan, which was designed to make good the Ohio Constitution’s promise of a thorough and efficient system of common schools for the 90 percent of Ohio’s young people enrolled in the public schools?

Public Education Budgets at State and Federal Levels Leave K-12 Public Schools in Hard Times

I suspect you have not seen a lot of details about the budget for the U.S. Department of Education, part of the remaining FY 2024 federal budget that had to be passed by Congress over the weekend and signed by President Biden in time to avoid a government shutdown.

The only report I’ve seen with any detail came from K-12 Dive’s Kara Arundel on Friday after a budget agreement had been reached but before it was passed by both houses of Congress: “The U.S. Department of Education would get $500 million less for fiscal year 2024 compared to the previous year—the agency’s first potential cut since FY 2015… The tentative agreement comes more than six months after the Oct. 1 deadline to finalize Education Department and several other agencies’ annual appropriations. A series of continuing resolutions has shielded the federal agencies from a government shutdown in the meantime… Under the proposal, Title I and state grants for special education services—two of the largest K-12 federal funding programs—would each get a $20 million increase over FY 2023 allocations. While a bump of $20 million for both does not seem like a financial victory…. a Republican-led proposal last year recommended cutting Title I funding by 80%.”

So… federal funding for K-12 public education is not the catastrophe many feared when House Republicans proposed slashing Title I by 80%, but it’s nothing to get excited about.  And the budget passed six months late.

The deeper school funding problems are at the state level, where the bulk of public school funding is prescribed by the state legislatures in the school funding formulas they establish.  At the end of January, based on the most recent data available from 2020-2021, Bruce Baker (University of Miami), Matthew Di Carlo (Albert Shanker Institute), and Mark Weber (Rutgers University) released their annual report on The Adequacy and Fairness of State School Finance Systems, which explains how all this works: “In the United States, K-12 school finance is largely controlled by the states. Every year, hundreds of billions of dollars in public funds are distributed based on 51 different configurations of formulas, rules, and regulations to over 13,000 districts that vary in terms of the students they serve, their ability to raise revenue locally, and many other characteristics… Good school finance systems compensate for factors states cannot control…. (E)ducation costs vary depending on student populations, labor markets, and other factors… The key question… is not just how much states and districts spend but whether it’s enough…. Is funding adequate for students from all backgrounds…?” (emphasis in the original)

Baker, Di Carlo, and Weber report that the answer to their question is emphatically NO: “There are 39 states that devote a smaller share of their economies to their K-12 schools than they did before the 2007-09 recession… About 60 percent of the nation’s students that we identify as being in ‘chronically underfunded’ districts—the 20 percent of districts with the most inadequate funding in the nation are in just 10 states… Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, and Texas…. African American students are twice as likely as white students to be in districts with funding below estimated adequate levels, and 3.5 times more likely to be in ‘chronically underfunded’ districts…  Educational opportunity is unequal in every state… The largest gaps… tend to be in states, such as Connecticut, New York, and Massachusetts… where wealthier districts contribute copious amounts of local (property tax) revenue to their schools.”

The Education Law Center released its annual school finance report on the same 2020-2021 data late in December 2023 and added to the worrisome conclusions: “Vast disparities in per-pupil funding levels persist with the highest funded state (New York) spending two and a half times more per pupil than the lowest funded state (Idaho) even after adjusting for regional cost differences.  Far too few states progressively distribute funds to high-poverty districts: more than half of the states evaluated have either flat or regressive funding distributions that disadvantage high-poverty districts. Many states lack the fiscal effort that is required to adequately fund schools.”

Baker, Di Carlo, and Weber also focus close attention to each state’s effort to fund schools: “Fiscal effort… measures how much of a state’s total resources are spent directly on K-12 education… (E)ffort is calculated by dividing total expenditures (state plus local)… by gross state product (GSP).” What worries these school finance experts is that when education funding fell in the 2007-2009 recession, state legislatures allowed their fiscal effort to fund education to fall as well, and in many places it has never recovered: “What’s truly disturbing—and unusual—is the fact that effort never recovered.  Between 2013 and 2021, when our data end, effort in the typical state remained mostly flat…. These trends since the 2007-2009 recession are in no small part the result of deliberate choices on the part of policymakers in many states to address their recession-induced revenue shortfalls primarily with budget cuts rather than a mix of cuts and revenue-raising.  In fact, a number of states actually cut taxes during and after the recession.” (emphasis in the original)

In a June 2023 column, Aidan Davis of the Institute on Tax and Economic Policy and Wesley Tharpe of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities explore the impact of state tax cuts: “There’s a troubling trend in state capitols across the country: Some lawmakers are pushing big, permanent tax cuts that primarily benefit the wealthy…. These tax cuts will deplete the funding available for schools, infrastructure, health care and other public services. They will worsen inequality by making state tax codes less equitable and enriching those at the very top of the income scale. Meanwhile there will be cuts to public assets that are crucial for poor and middle -class families and less money for teachers in the classroom and for public safety personnel… The specific policies vary, but the outcome is the same: windfalls for disproportionately white households at the top and less public funding for education, health care, public transit, and emergency response , and other services that benefit all of us, but are particularly crucial to providing pathways to opportunity for low-income people of all races.”

In my state, Ohio, and many others, the impact of years of tax cuts on public school funding is being magnified by an enormous new diversion of state tax dollars to private school tuition vouchers that have proven to benefit wealthy families whose children already attend private schools. It is in this context that the federal education budget becomes extremely important.  The budget signed by President Biden over the weekend will not only prevent a U.S. government shutdown, but it will at least maintain Title I—a modest funding enhancement once it is spread across the states for school districts serving concentrations of poor children—and IDEA funding that partially supports programs for disabled children. It is not much compared to the enormous need, but the modest federal support is at least targeted for services for the vulnerable children that too many state legislators are failing to prioritize. When public school funding drops, class sizes grow, school districts shutter school libraries, counselor case loads rise to untenable levels, and teachers’ salaries fail to keep pace with those of other professionals.

Will Reforms by Texas and an Audit by Federal Charter Schools Program Be Enough to End Shady Practices at IDEA Charter Schools?

The IDEA network of charter schools was founded in 2000 by two Teach for America alums, Tom Torkleson and JoAnn Gamma, who subsequently became the network’s co-CEOs.  Even though Texas describes IDEA Public Schools a “school district,” IDEA charter schools are privately operated schools, not public schools. And this multi-state charter school network is definitely not managed like a school district. Like many of the giant charter school networks, IDEA has earned the reputation of operating like a business—a pretty unscrupulous business!

Even if your state does not have IDEA charter schools, the story of IDEA is a cautionary tale about charter school management organizations and also about inadequate oversight of the grants made by the federal Charter Schools Program, which has awarded IDEA $300 million since 2010.

Shady Business Practices

Back in 2020, the Houston Chronicle reported that the network’s co-CEO, Tom Torkelson would resign: “Some of Torkelson’s financial and operational moves led to criticism over the past several months. Torkelson’s desire to lease a charter jet as a method of reducing travel hassles between the network’s hubs drew sharp backlash in December 2019. One month later more scrutiny followed the disclosure that IDEA spent about $400,000 annually on luxury boxes and tickets for events at San Antonio’s AT&T Center.  IDEA officials said more than 1,000 employees received tickets each season as a reward for performance…. During Torkelson’s tenure, several relatives of IDEA executives and board members also engaged in business dealings with the charter, including a company co-owned by Chief Operating Officer Irma Munoz’s husband that billed more than $600,000 for uniforms, other clothing and gear.”  In 2019, Torkelson and his board also purchased a boutique hotel, in which they said they planned to house an environmental school, and the real estate agent, the wife of an IDEA board member, received a real estate transaction fee despite the conflict of interest. After he was pushed out, Torkleson was awarded $900,000 in a separation agreement. His annual salary as co-CEO had been lavish: $554,060.

When Torkleson left, according to a Houston Chronicle report, “IDEA’s board members promised to make several financial and governance reforms.” They launched a forensic review of IDEA’s management, which resulted a year later in the firing of CEO JoAnn Gama and Chief Operating Officer Irma Munoz.

As all this was happening, in April of 2020, U.S. Congressman Mark Pocan (D-Wisc.) complained about the awarding of a federal Charter Schools Program expansion grant awarded to IDEA schools.  The Washington Post‘s Valerie Strauss reported: “A U.S. congressman is demanding answers from the U.S. Education Department, alleging department employees complained to his office about political interference in the awarding of a multimillion-dollar federal grant to the controversial IDEA charter school network… Pocan said ‘three whistleblowers’ told his office that professional staff evaluating applications for 2020 grants from the federal Charter Schools Program had rejected IDEA for new funding, deeming the network ‘high risk’ because of how IDEA leaders previously spent federal funds. But according to these whistleblowers, Pocan said, professional staff was overruled by political appointees who ordered the funding be awarded to IDEA.”

Strauss continues, reminding readers about the federal grant IDEA had recently received: “Earlier this month, the Education Department announced it was awarding millions of dollars in new grants to charter schools…. IDEA was the top recipient, receiving $72 million over five years. IDEA had previously received more than $200 million in funding over the past decade through the program.”

What’s Happening with the IDEA Charter School Network in 2024?

The IDEA network of charter schools has continued to grow. Today, according to IDEA’s website, the network includes 143 charter schools. Most are located in Texas, with five schools in Florida, four in Louisiana, and 2 in Cincinnati, Ohio.  But as the network grows, controversy about the operation of IDEA charter schools continues today.

K-12 Dive‘s Anna Merod reports that in early March, the Texas Education Agency imposed state oversight by appointing two conservators to monitor and regulate the operation of IDEA charter schools: “(F)ollowing investigations into multiple allegations of ‘financial and operational impropriety’… the Texas Education Agency (TEA) appointed two conservators to oversee and direct the charter system.”  TEA Commissioner Mike Morath explained the conservators’ role as “improvement of financial systems and controls” in the IDEA network.  The conservators are authorized to help “create a plan to address corrective action concerns” and to order “the board to remove and replace board members if misconduct occurs.”

However, on March 14 the San Antonio Express News‘ Edward McKinley  announced the following news: “Just days after putting the state’s largest charter school network under conservatorship for misusing public funds, the Texas Education Agency agreed to let the network, IDEA Public Schools, carry out a major expansion. IDEA is allowed to increase student enrollment from 78,200 to more than 90,000 by the 2025-2026 school year. The 10 new campuses will be mostly in Fort Worth and the Permian Basin with two in Humble, near Houston. The application went in (from IDEA to the Texas Education Agency) on March 6—the day TEA assigned a pair of conservators to oversee IDEA—and was approved on March 8.”

Critics have been quick to question the Texas Education Agency’s move to permit the sudden expansion of a financially troubled enterprise. McKinley quotes Patty Quinzi, the public affairs director of the Texas American Federation of Teachers: “This is an insider deal, behind-the-scenes, shady transaction that had no public input whatsoever.”

Concurrent with imposition of Texas Education Agency conservators over IDEA’s operations has also been a U.S Department of Education crackdown on IDEA’s federal Charter Schools Program grant. McKinley reports: “(T)he U.S. Department of Education recently closed an audit into IDEA that ran from 2016-2021… Since 2010, IDEA has received nearly $300 million in federal Charter School Program grants. IDEA was required to pay back nearly $29 million received from federal grants.

K-12 Dive‘s Merod explains further: “The (IDEA ) charter district said in a statement that it will return $28.7 million in federal grant funds to the U.S. Department of Education under the  (new) settlement, via payments made through December 2026… IDEA… also touted a range of leadership, staffing and policy changes.”

The slipshod and shady practices that have been permitted to go on for nearly 25 years at IDEA charter schools would immediately be prohibited in any public school district in the United States. In our system of public schools, the state constitutions; federal, state, and local laws; and democratically elected local boards of education operating with public transparent rules and regulations protect the stewardship of our tax dollars.  The contrast is astounding. Scrutiny of the federal Charter Schools Program must be increased. In Texas we’ll all have to watch to see if the Texas Education Agency and its conservators will prevent future abuses by IDEA charter schools.

President Biden Proposes Urgently Needed Federal Education Budget Increases for FY 2025

On Monday of this week, President Joe Biden released his budget proposal for the upcoming federal fiscal year beginning on October 1, 2024.  President Biden’s priorities define our society’s obligation to ensure the well-being of our children. The President asks Congress to increase funding for Title I, for Disadvantaged Pupil Impact Aid and other services for disabled students, and for full-service, wraparound Community Schools. The President asks Congress to increase spending on public education by $3.1 billion, a 4% increase over current allocations in the Fiscal Year (FY) 2024 annualized Continuing Resolution level.

The Current Federal Budget Morass

That term, “Continuing Resolution level” describes what has been happening with the budget due to political dysfunction in Congress. Each year in February or early March, the President is supposed to propose his federal spending priorities. The expectation is that in subsequent months Congress will debate and pass a final budget, and that as of October 1 (the first day of the new fiscal year), the new budget will become operational. In the current year—FY 2024, however, Congress never agreed on the final budget.

Congress has been kicking the can down the road for months now with a series of continuing resolutions that keep the government operating. To prevent a federal shutdown, Congress must vote on a number of remaining spending bills, including Education and Labor, by March 22 to finalize federal appropriations for FY 2024. For K-12 Dive, Kara Arundel describes this year’s “budget limbo,” due to sharply conflicting values between the Republican-dominated U.S. House of Representatives and the Democrat-dominated U.S. Senate:

“After four continuing resolutions, Biden signed an appropriations bill Friday (March 8) to fund several agencies. The remaining agencies—including the Education Department—are still running on a continuing resolution that expires March 22. It wasn’t supposed to be this complex. Last June, the Biden administration, the Republican-led House and the Democrat-led Senate agreed to flat-fund education in FY 2024 as part of a deal to prevent the nation from defaulting on its debt. That deal also limited nondefense spending, including for education, to a 1% increase for FY 2025.  But shortly after that agreement, Republicans on the House  Appropriations Committee  recommended an 80% spending cut to Title I funds… The threat to Title I mobilized educators and advocates who said the cut would result in 220,000 fewer classroom teachers and drastic reductions in other education programs.  Looking forward to FY 2025, GOP House leaders have already said they will ‘sound the alarm’ on what they call ‘already bloated’ spending levels and ‘out of control’ debt levels.”

Biden’s Proposed FY 2025 Education Budget

It is in this context that the President’s proposed FY 2025 education budget request must be understood as an urgently needed statement of values—a declaration of support by the President and professionals in the Department of Education for addressing the needs of the approximately 50 million children and adolescents enrolled in the nation’s public schools. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona describes the importance of the proposals in the President’s new budget: “This is a budget that unapologetically strives to raise the bar for education in America… And it stands in stark contrast to the staggeringly reckless cuts to education others have championed.”

Here are merely some of the President’s most important budgetary increases for the nation’s K-12 public schools:

• Increase Title I by $200 million.
• Increase special education funding including DPIA by $220 million and add an additional $10 million to current funding to help prepare and support special education teachers.
• Increase funding for Full-Service Community schools by $50 million.
• Increase funding for English language acquisition by $50 million.
• Increase funding for career and technical education by $40 million.
• Increase funding for the Office of Civil Rights by $22 million.
• Add a five-year, $8 billion grants program to help states and school districts support students’ needs that were exacerbated by COVID.  This fund would help schools address chronic absence, pay for high-dosage tutoring, and expand summer and after school learning opportunities.

The President proposes to reduce funding for a program that has operated since the 1990s with insufficient oversight: the federal Charter Schools Program (CSP).  The Charter Schools Program has been shown to have wasted our federal tax dollars on charter schools that have never opened or that quickly shut down, and on charter schools whose for-profit management companies engage in outrageously expensive real estate transactions with the schools they manage or otherwise engage in conflicts of interest. The President proposes cutting $40 million from this $440 million program.

The Network for Public Education has researched problems with the Charter Schools Program and released the following statement: “The Network for Public Education fully supports the decreased funding for the CSP program…. As the program rapidly expanded, so did the opportunity for grift and fraud. ‘The Department’s recent demand that the IDEA charter chain return $28 million is just the latest example of how the CSP has been abused..,’ said Carol Burris (NPE’s executive director). This is the first time an administration has recommended a decrease in the CSP since the program began.”

Educators, parents, and concerned citizens need to demand that Congress enact the President’s proposals.

Plain Dealer Editorial Correctly Condemns Voucher Entitlement for the Rich But Fails to Consider Strategies to Help Ohio’s Poorest Students

Last Friday, the Plain Dealer‘s editors correctly condemned what the Ohio Legislature did in last summer’s two-year state budget, when it raised the income eligibility cap on Ohio’s largest private school voucher program and thereby diverted hundreds of millions of our tax dollars into a massive private school tuition entitlement for wealthy and middle-income families.

The newspaper’s editors quote a statement from the Ohio House Republican leadership: “This program is designed to safeguard lower-income families and offers options beyond traditional public schools.  By expanding access to vouchers, Ohio ensures parents can make the best decisions for their children’s education.”  The Plain Dealer’s editors, however, confront the truth. Our legislature expanded vouchers for wealthy families but did nothing for the poor.  The legislators grew the program by raising the income eligibility cap to enable families up to 450% of poverty to qualify for a full voucher and families with even higher incomes to qualify for a partial voucher.

There are, however, two serious problems with the editors’ assumptions and their suggestions for the program’s reform:

First, the editors seem to assume that in the state budget, the legislature capped the growth of expenditures on the new vouchers.

The editors quote reporter Laura Hancock’s article last week on the fact that already most of the money the legislature planned to spend this year on the voucher expansion is nearly gone:  “‘The legislature budgeted $397.8 million for EdChoice-Expansion this year,’ Hancock reports. ‘As of Feb. 26, the state had spent $387.5 million.'” While the newspaper’s editors seem to assume the legislature capped the amount to be spent on the EdChoice-Expansion for the current year, in reality the amount of $397.8 million was more like an estimate.  The voucher funds come out of the school foundation budget, and if there is an overrun in the cost of the vouchers, it will come from the same part of the budget that is needed for funding the state’s public schools. It will also likely imperil enactment of the third step in the phase-in of the Fair School Funding Plan, the state’s new public school funding formula.

When legislators set up the Fair School Funding Plan in the FY 2022-2023 state budget, they chose not to set up the new formula by passing separate enabling legislation. Instead legislators left the new formula’s funding and full enactment up to the will of future legislators to fund each of the next two steps in upcoming state budgets. Many public school educators and parents now worry that legislators will prioritize the rapidly growing universal voucher program at the expense of fully funding of the final phase of the new public school funding formula in the FY 2026-2027 state budget.

Second, the Plain Dealer‘s editors suggest that there is a solution to the legislature’s mistake in creating a program that entitles primarily wealthy families tax dollars for paying private school tuition.  The editors propose that the legislature, “should rewrite the rules to guarantee that this money goes to children in underperforming schools, possibly relying on the state report cards to set the standard.” The newspaper’s editorial board deserves criticism for once again branding the schools in communities where poverty is concentrated as “failing” schools.

Experts will tell you that there is a long and comprehensive compendium of research demonstrating that standardized test scores DO NOT primarily reflect the quality of a district’s public schools. And more important, test scores do not present any picture of what is happening in anybody’s schools.  They don’t tell us anything about how teachers work with students. Neither do they describe a school’s strategies for school discipline; nor do they reflect the richness of the curriculum. Years of research instead clearly show that, when individual students’ standardized test scores are aggregated by school district, the rankings correlate with the family and neighborhood income of the community itself.

A school district’s test scores are primarily a measure of privilege. We have known for years that No Child Left Behind’s focus on test score achievement gaps embodies an inaccurate understanding the factors that shape opportunity in children’s lives. In September, 2022, in an article for Commonwealth Magazine, Jack Schneider, a professor at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell and Joel Boyd, the superintendent of the Lowell Public Schools explain: “As research indicates, test scores are highly indicative of the inequalities that afflict our communities, and are not a valid basis for determinations about overall school performance… Scholars have repeatedly shown (that) the leading predictors of student standardized test scores are demographic variables like family income and parental educational attainment.”

I wonder why the Plain Dealer‘s editors didn’t highlight the likely future competition for state funding between the Fair School Funding Plan’s full phase-in and the future explosive growth in EdChoice vouchers instead of suggesting that future voucher eligibility should be tied to public school district ratings on the state school district report card. Why not propose at least that the legislature set a hard cap on the future growth of school vouchers? And why not emphasize the urgent need to protect funding for the public school districts serving concentrations of poor children? Experts all agree that school districts serving masses of poor children need extra funding for services like more school social workers, smaller classes, and programs for English learners and disabled students as well as curricular enhancements and the arts.

Until the Fair School Funding Plan has been fully established and fully funded, the new formula won’t have the capacity to achieve its two primary purposes: prescribing the adequate provision of state funding and distributing state funding for equity across the state’s 610 school districts. While Ohio’s exurbs can more easily add extras for the students in their school districts by passing local property tax operating levies, for as long as I can remember the state has neglected to fulfill its responsibility to our state’s poorest urban and rural public school districts. One of the elements that has not yet been fully phased in, for example, is additional Disadvantaged Pupil Impact Aid (DPIA), a state funding stream  that allocates money for support services needed in public school districts serving concentrations of poor children. In a report at the end of 2022, school funding experts Howard Fleeter and Greg Browning documented that in Ohio: “(F)rom 2001 through 2021 total state aid for economically disadvantaged students has increased by 23.3%… while the number of economically disadvantaged students has increased by 57.5%….”

I commend the Plain Dealer’s editorial board for denouncing Ohio’s wildly expanded EdChoice vouchers, which now divert hundreds of millions of state tax dollars to reimburse upper-income parents for the tuition they are paying to the private schools where their children are already enrolled.  However, I wish the editors had explained what the massive loss to the state’s school foundation budget will mean for the 1.6 million students enrolled in Ohio’s 610 public school districts, and especially for the public schools in Ohio’s poorest communities.

Ohio’s recently expanded EdChoice vouchers epitomize the flaws identified in the 2023 book, The School Voucher Illusion, an authoritative analysis from Teachers College Press of widespread voucher expansion across the states:  “As currently structured, voucher policies in the United States are unlikely to help the students they claim to support. Instead, these policies have often served as a facade for the far less popular reality of funding relatively advantaged (and largely White) families, many of whom already attended—or would attend—private schools without subsidies. Although vouchers are presented as helping parents choose schools, often the arrangements permit the private schools to do the choosing… Advocacy that began with a focus on equity must not become a justification for increasing inequity. Today’s voucher policies have, by design, created growing financial commitments of taxpayer money to serve a constituency of the relatively advantaged that is redefining their subsidies as rights—often in jurisdictions where neighborhood public schools do not have the resources they need.” (The School Voucher Illusion: Exposing the Pretense of Equity, p. 290)