In Case You Missed It – October 14, 2024

Here are links to last week's^† articles receiving the most attention on NEIFPE's social media accounts. Keep up with what's going on, what's being discussed, and what's happening with public education.

Be sure to enter your email address in the Follow Us By Email box in the right-hand column of our blog page to be informed when our blog posts are published.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK

"...Ninety-eight percent of Indiana’s voucher schools are faith-based, with restrictive admissions policies that prove “school choice” is, in practice, the “school’s choice.”

Last year, 36% of new state tax funding for K-12 education flowed to voucher schools educating about 7% of Indiana students. Public schools, including charter schools, educated 93% of students but received only 64% of the new funding, according to legislative budget estimates at the time." -- by Karen Francisco in the Colorado Sun

PRIVATE SCHOOLS' CHOICE

Colorado families already enjoy school choice. Amendment 80 would open door to school vouchers.

Private schools choose their students.

From Retired FW Journal Gazette Editorial Page Editor, Karen Francisco, in the Colorado Sun.

In Indiana, I watched a fledgling school choice movement grow from a handful of public charter schools to a voucher entitlement program expected to cost state taxpayers $600 million this year.

The money diverted from public schools is not going to students who live in poverty. An investigation by the University of Notre Dame’s Gallivan Program for Journalism, Ethics and Democracy found the average Indiana voucher recipient is a white female who has never attended public school and comes from a family earning more than $99,000 a year. A family of four earning as much as $220,000 a year now qualifies for vouchers, in a state where the median household income is a paltry $66,800.

None of this comes as a surprise. Indiana’s near-universal voucher program was always the end game for former governors Mitch Daniels and Mike Pence, the legislature’s Republican super-majority and a nationwide network of wealthy donors that included Betsy DeVos, Donald Trump’s former secretary of education.

Emails obtained by The Associated Press under open records law revealed private meetings involving politicians and some of Indiana’s wealthiest powerbrokers — strategy sessions held over cocktails at high-end restaurants to plot out the voucher bill’s passage. A black-tie event at an Indianapolis hotel celebrated the misnamed “Indiana Choice Scholarship Program” — not a scholarship, but a handout to families already sending their children to private and parochial schools.

2024 ELECTION AND EDUCATION

Read the following articles for information about the Harris/Walz and Trump/Vance federal education plans.

Only a Harris-Walz Administration Would Protect Equity and Inclusion in the Public Schools

From Jan Resseger

In 1899, on the first page of The School and Society, John Dewey defined educational equity as essential for the public schools : “What the best and wisest parent wants for his own child, that must the community want for all of its children. Any other ideal for our schools is narrow and unlovely; acted upon, it destroys our democracy. All that society has accomplished for itself is put through the agency of the school at the disposal of is future members. All its better thoughts of itself it hopes to realize through the new possibilities thus opened to its future self. Here individualism and socialism are at one. Only by being true to the full growth of all the individuals who make it up, can society by any chance be true to itself.”

Certainly, John Dewey didn’t fully anticipate the ugly conversation we are having today—where an attack on Dewey’s principle of equity and on public schooling itself has been mounted by well funded billionaires in philanthropies like the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation and Americans for Prosperity, well supplied with ideology and policy developed by the Heritage Foundation and other so-called think tanks, and spouted by billionaire-funded proxies like Moms for Liberty and Parents Defending Education. The ethos underneath the wave of school vouchers passed by far-right state legislators as well as the specific educational policies promoted in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 includes individualistic consumerism and white ethno-nationalism. There is a lot of money being invested today to help us all forget about Dewey’s vision.

One of the most troubling aspects of today’s far right attack on public schooling is that it appears to be a another in a long a series of political reactions against the principle of equity in our public schools. Since the Civil War, according to constitutional scholar Derek Black in his powerful book, Schoolhouse Burning, our society has struggled to realize our long declared principle that all children, no matter their race, gender, or immigrant status have an equal right to education. Black writes that after the Civil War in order to join the union, states were required to guarantee in their state constitutions that no child would be denied the opportunity for education...”

If Trump wins, count on continued culture wars, school vouchers, and a fixation on ending the federal Department of Education

From The Hechinger Report, by Josh Cowen

...With the former president and his allies still denying that he lost the 2020 election, with Trump and his running mate embracing unfounded stories about Haitian immigrants eating household pets and with Trump’s obsession with the size of his cheering crowds, any analytical projection about his future agenda is all but impossible. With such an absence of facts or evidence-based policy designs, we must turn to past actions, current rhetoric and the priorities of Trump’s political alliances for a hint of what could come.

On that basis, we could expect more debates about bathrooms and women’s sports, more inexplicable musings about whether slavery had benefits for enslaved Americans, more spending of scarce resources to put Bibles in public schools and more singling out of kids because of their immigration status.

Many Republican proposals have been well-covered, starting with Project 2025 — the policy agenda assembled by the conservative Heritage Foundation for a new Trump term. Although Trump denies that controversial document speaks for his candidacy, more than 140 former members of the first Trump team had a hand in its crafting.

The key education points in the platform Trump does claim as his own — the so-called Agenda47 and the GOP party platform — strike the same notes of emphasis as those in Project 2025. Indeed, the one-page education “chapter” in the 16-page party platform is all but a summary of its much larger Project 2025 counterpart.

Trump Describes His Plans for Education

From Diane Ravitch

When Donald Trump appeared recently in Milwaukee, he described his plan for the future of the Department of Education. It’s not quite the same as the scenario in Project 2025, which envisions the total elimination of the U.S. Department of Education. Trump imagines it as a “department” with only two employees: A Cabinet Secretary and a secretary.

The severely shrunken Department would focus solely on the three Rs and would somehow mysteriously have the power and personnel to prevent public schools across the nation from teaching anything connected to “woke.” That is, anything related to race, gender, or social justice. How this fictional Department would impose bans on curriculum when federal law prohibits any federal interference in curriculum is not explained. Actually, it’s nonsense.

Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling writes in The New Republic about Trump’s vision for the federal role in education.

^†Note: NEIFPE's In Case You Missed It is posted by the end of the day every Monday except after holiday weekends or as otherwise noted.

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In Case You Missed It – October 7, 2024

Here are links to last week's^† articles receiving the most attention on NEIFPE's social media accounts. Keep up with what's going on, what's being discussed, and what's happening with public education.

Be sure to enter your email address in the Follow Us By Email box in the right-hand column of our blog page to be informed when our blog posts are published.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK

"I think that teacher shortages have existed in the United States for a long time. The pandemic has certainly made the teacher shortage worse in many ways, right? In particular, what we’re seeing is that enrollments and completion in teacher preparation programs have decreased 30 to 35 percent over the last 10 years, so the number of people who are enrolled to become teachers have just decreased substantially over the last 10 years." -- Tuan Nguyen, associate professor of Education at the University of Missouri in Teacher shortages improve, but not everywhere

TEACHER PAY

Yes, What We Pay Teachers Matters

Who is going to teach your children and grandchildren when there are no more teachers? Why would someone choose teaching as a career?

From Nobody Wants This Substack by Anne Lutz Fernandez

Public school teachers once took home salaries in line with workers in similar professions. Through the eighties and into the nineties, they paid a small penalty for choosing to teach; in 1993 the average salary of teachers was about 5% lower than that of others with college degrees. A new report by economist Sylvia Allegretto at the Economic Policy Institute reveals that three decades later, that penalty has grown to nearly 27%—an all-time high.

This penalty has worsened as teacher salaries began a prolonged stagnation.

There are those on the right who argue that this gap isn’t all that meaningful. A recent piece in Reason tries to downplay the impact of the teacher pay penalty by pointing out that averages obscure state-by-state differences. It’s hard to see how this helps their case, though, when teachers pay a penalty in every state and when more than a dozen states across various regions—New Hampshire and Colorado, Oklahoma and Oregon, Georgia and Arizona among them—pay penalties worse than the national average.

Opponents of raises for teachers frequently claim that teachers’ benefits balance out their low pay, but Allegretto’s analysis shows they don’t. When total compensation packages are accounted for, the teacher pay gap is reduced, but only to 16.7%.

Then there’s the argument that teachers aren’t motivated by money...

SCARING THE PUBLIC ABOUT EDUCATION

Cynical Politicians Try to Frighten Us with Inaccurate Stories about Teachers and Public Schools

Attacks on public education continues during this election season. Lies abound.

From Jan Resseger

In the current polarized political season, the press is filled with articles spawned by desperate politicians looking to frighten voters with stories about the collapse of our society. In this narrative of collapse, attacks on the public schools loom large.

The Wall Street Journal‘s Matt Barnum and Melissa Korn quote Donald Trump: “Our public schools have been taken over by the radical left maniacs… We will cut federal funding for any school or program pushing critical race theory.” “The former president has said he would deploy federal powers to pressure schools and universities that he considers to be too liberal. One strategy that he has described would launch civil-rights investigations of schools that have supported transgender rights and racial diversity programs.”

It doesn’t seem to matter in today’s political environment that the extremist political rhetoric about what’s happening in public schools has been shown to be inaccurate. Here is Education Week‘s Sarah Schwartz reporting the response of the American Historical Association: “The longstanding battle over how to teach America’s past has been particularly contentious over the past few years. Conservative commentators have accused history teachers of rampant left-wing bias, ‘indoctrinating’ students into hating their country and rejecting its founding ideals… But this portrait of American classrooms as ideological incubators is largely a fiction… Instead, the research, from the American Historical Association, finds that teachers overwhelmingly say they aim to develop students’ historical thinking skills—teaching them how to think, not what to think—and value presenting multiple sides of every story… The finding echoes history teachers’ responses to attacks on their work…. (I)n interviews with AHA researchers, teachers explained that it was important for them to remain neutral and nonpartisan. ‘I am going to teach the good, the bad, and the ugly. I’m going to tell it like it is and how it happened.’ one teacher from Texas told the researchers. Another, from Illinois, said they didn’t want ‘students knowing my views.'”

INDIANA'S NEXT GOVERNOR

Gubernatorial candidates far apart on education

Mike Braun, Republican candidate for Governor of Indiana, proposes to continue the same right-wing anti-public education plan that has damaged the state's public schools since 2011. A vote for Jennifer McCormick is a vote for Public Education.

From School Matters

The two major-party candidates for governor of Indiana have released their education agendas, and they couldn’t be any more different.

Republican Mike Braun wants to further expand Indiana’s already radical school choice programs, protect “parent rights” and double down on the culture wars. Democrat Jennifer McCormick wants to strengthen local public schools, increase support for preschool and hold accountable all schools that receive state funding.

Both say they want to raise pay and benefits for teachers – a worthwhile goal but likely a tough sell with a legislature intent on cutting taxes.

Their most substantive differences are over funding private schools. Braun wants to expand the state’s nearly half-billion-dollar voucher program to include the wealthiest 3% of Hoosier families. He would also double funding for the “education scholarship account” program, which pays for tuition and services for students with disabilities and their siblings.

VOUCHERS ARE DRAINING INDIANA'S PUBLIC SCHOOLS

Vouchers nearly universal at half of Indiana private schools that take them, data shows

Indiana started with a small voucher program, and expanded it year by year until almost every child in the state is now eligible for a voucher. Voucher advocates in Indiana hope that the only remaining limits are soon removed so that all students in the state, rich and poor alike, will qualify for a voucher.

Most of the students who use vouchers were already enrolled in private schools. The cost of the voucher program is near $500 million for about 70,000 students. The public schools of Indiana enroll one million students.

Indiana's Constitution requires the legislature to fund a single public school system.

"Knowledge and learning, generally diffused throughout a community, being essential to the preservation of a free government; it shall be the duty of the General Assembly...to provide, by law, for a general and uniform system of Common Schools, wherein tuition shall be without charge, and equally open to all."

From Chalkbeat Indiana

...critics like Fuentes-Rohwer of the Indiana Coalition for Public Education say the $439 million price tag for the program in 2023-24 represented a costly diversion of public resources from public schools that the state is constitutionally obligated to fund.

According to the state’s 2023-24 voucher report, if all 70,000 students receiving vouchers had attended public schools, the state would have added over $500 million in public education funding. But most voucher students receiving vouchers have never attended a public school.

“There are so many things you have to go through as a public school system to be transparent,” Fuentes-Rohwer said. “We are very concerned that funding leaves public schools that have the obligation to educate everyone.”

^†Note: NEIFPE's In Case You Missed It is posted by the end of the day every Monday except after holiday weekends or as otherwise noted.

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In Case You Missed It – September 30, 2024

Here are links to last week's^† articles receiving the most attention on NEIFPE's social media accounts. Keep up with what's going on, what's being discussed, and what's happening with public education.

Be sure to enter your email address in the Follow Us By Email box in the right-hand column of our blog page to be informed when our blog posts are published.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK

"When lawmakers consider expanding or creating private school voucher programs, their projections often dramatically underestimate the actual costs. They sell a false promise that vouchers will save money, do not budget adequate funds, and then wind up with million dollar shortfalls, necessitating cuts from public education and even tax increases… First, it costs less than the average expenditure to educate some students...The students who are most expensive to educate...tend to remain in public schools, because they cannot find a private voucher school willing to accept them. Yet, because of the voucher program, the state now pays tuition for private school students who never attended public schools...This all adds up to more, not less spending." -- from the National Coalition for Public Education, quoted in Voucher Programs Prove Again and Again What We Already Know


THE COST OF VOUCHERS

Voucher Programs Prove Again and Again What We Already Know

Voucher costs in Indiana...two-thirds of which go to students who never attended public schools and who can afford the cost of a private education...are approaching half a billion dollars a year. That money goes to mostly religious schools even though the Indiana Constitution states (in Article 1, Section 6) that...

"No money shall be drawn from the treasury, for the benefit of any religious or theological institution."

Note also that the state allows voucher accepting schools to reject students on the basis of "religion, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity, or academic ability."

From Jan Resseger

As we all know, state legislators across the country originally justified passing small, experimental voucher programs as a way to help poor kids escape from their so-called “failing” public schools. A year ago, at the end of The School Voucher Illusion: Exposing the Pretense of Equity, an authoritative collection of essays by experts on school vouchers, here is what the editors conclude instead:

“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… ”

In states like Ohio, where the legislature made vouchers universal by raising the income eligibility level to 450 percent of the federal family poverty level (with partial vouchers for even wealthier families), the state simply started paying the private school tuition bills that families had been undertaking for generations. In other states like Arizona, the state has been awarding Education Savings Account vouchers for the private educational expenses of children who are not enrolled in public schools, whether to pay for private school tuition vouchers or homeschooling costs...Here is the primary fiscal problem of all these programs, according to Josh Cowen, a professor of education policy at Michigan State University: “It’s not that there is a mass exodus from public to private schools… (W)hat these states are doing is obligating themselves to expenditures that were previously borne by the private sector.”

Indiana is a classic example of a state that has made its old fashioned private school tuition voucher program universally available. This week for Chalkbeat Indiana, Aleksandra Appleton and Mia Hollie report: “Voucher use has soared in Indiana since lawmakers made nearly every student in the state eligible, with more than 90% of students at more than half of all participating schools using a voucher during the 2023-24 school year…. That was true in just 11% of private schools before lawmakers made the Indiana Choice Scholarship available to nearly every student in Indiana by relaxing income eligibility and removing other requirements to participate…. Since lawmakers approved the expansion last year, the number of schools where 100% of students receive a voucher rose from just one in 2022-23 to 28 in 2023-24. Last year, in 178 of the 349 private schools that accept vouchers, more than 90% of students enrolled use a voucher to pay for tuition.” The program cost the state of Indiana $439 million for the 2023-24 school year.

Peter Greene: Why Sex Scandals Matter

From Diane Ravitch

...How could someone who had inveighed against “the woke agenda” and urged the adoption of vouchers to escape that agenda have done what the rumors said? I didn’t think I would touch it with a ten-foot pole. I don’t care what others do in their private lives. I believe in Tim Walz’s credo: “Mind your own damn business.” But I was troubled by the hypocrisy.

Corey worked for Betsy DeVos and was her leading salesman for vouchers. DeVos and her family are rabidly anti-LGBT. For years, they have funded anti-LGBT organizations like the Family Research Council, Focus on the Family, and Alliance Defending Freedom. Yet the rumor was that Corey had performed in gay porn, and there were many videos online to prove it.

One of the alleged virtues of vouchers was that they enable students to escape pedophile teachers and to attend schools that ban LGBT students. I couldn’t make sense of these two lives.

Peter Greene wrote about Corey’s apparent double life.

NEWS FROM THE NETWORK FOR PUBLIC EDUCATION (NPE)

Network for Public Education launches the National Center for Charter School Accountability

The National Center for Charter School Accountability provides research and recommendations on increasing transparency and accountability for charter schools.

From The Network for Public Education and Diane Ravitch

Having spent years covering charter scandals and seeking accountability for charters, the Network for Public Education realized that it could not compete with the high-powered corporate public relations firms representing the charter school industry. So, we decided, the only way to get accountability is to do it ourselves.

So NPE established the National Center on Charter School Accountability, which will produce reviews of charter school performance.

Network for Public Education 2025 National Conference

From The Network for Public Education

Registration is now open for NPE/NPE Action’s 2025 national conference, Public Schools: Where All Students Are Welcome. We can’t wait to see you in Columbus, Ohio, on April 5-6!

Stay tuned for more info about keynote speakers and session topics.

BANNED BOOKS WEEK

Banned books week is over...but book banning continues.

It's Banned Books Week

NOTE: A Facebook account is required to access this article.

From Michael B. Shaffer on Facebook

So here we are in the third day of Banned Books Week 2024, and I want to give a huge shout-out to all of the great teachers in Indiana who have resisted the mandate to clear their shelves of books that one person might find objectionable, in favor of keeping the books that speak to the hearts of kids. What those who want to restrict access to the kinds of books students want, do not realize is that if we are serious about literacy, we must have the books that mean something, books that students want to read, books that students will read!

When we ban books, or sit still while it happens, we are not only giving up a precious freedom, we are also depriving our students the ability to do what my friend Alan Boyko, the retired President of Scholastic Book Fairs, used to say that students need the ability to "find themselves in a book, and then lose themselves in that book."

Banned Books Week

From American Library Association

In a time of deep political divides, library staff across the country are facing an overwhelming number of book ban attempts. In 2023 alone, the American Library Association's Office for Intellectual Freedom tracked 1,247 efforts to censor books and other resources in libraries—an increase of 65% from the year before. In total, 4,240 unique book titles were targeted, many of them representing LGBTQIA+ and BIPOC voices and experiences.

As we gear up for Banned Books Week 2024 (September 22-28), with the theme "Freed Between the Lines," we’re reminded how much is at stake. The freedom to explore new ideas and different perspectives is under threat, and book bans don’t just restrict access to stories—they undermine our rights. Now is the time to come together, celebrate the right to read, and find freedom in the pages of a book. Let’s be "Freed Between the Lines."

LOCAL NEWS

Wells County school district scores Red Wagon status

From the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette**

The Bluffton-Harrison Metropolitan School District has once again earned Red Wagon Corporation status for its fundraising efforts for Riley Hospital for Children, a news release said.

Districts receive this designation when their fundraising equals $1 per student per building in an academic year, the release said. State enrollment data shows Bluffton-Harrison had about 1,800 students last year – the year its recognition honors.

The Wells County school system has contributed more than $300,000 to the Indianapolis-based children’s hospital since 1993, the release said. It indicated each school annually hosts special events – including dress-up days, boat races and an auction – to support the cause.

Note: The Fort Wayne Journal Gazette is behind a paywall. Digital access, home delivery, or both are available with a subscription. Staying informed is essential; one way to do that is to support your local newspaper. For subscription information, go to fortwayne.com/subscriptions/ [NOTE: NEIFPE has no financial ties to the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette]

^†Note: NEIFPE's In Case You Missed It is posted by the end of the day every Monday except after holiday weekends or as otherwise noted.

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