Ira David Socol wrote a provocative post that ties together how we educate children on a daily basis with how we live in a democracy. At heart, he argues against the adult authority structure that imposes control over children. His argument echoes John Dewey, the progressive education movement, and the free-school reformers of the 1960s.
Mercedes Schneider explores a paper published by Carl Davis of the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, in which he explains how tax credits for vouchers allow the rich to cut their taxes and make a profit. With such an alluring inducement by the states and the federal government, people of great means are able to reduce their taxes and undermine public schools at the same time. And, as they do great harm to the majority of children enrolled in increasingly underfunded public schools, they will be celebrated as “philanthropists,” when they are, in reality, raiders of the public good.
Davis’ paper begins like this:
<blockquote>One of the most important functions of government is to maintain a high-quality public education system. In many states, however, this objective is being undermined by tax credits and deductions that redirect public dollars for K-12 education toward private schools. Twenty states currently divert a total of over $1 billion per year toward private schools via special tax credits and deductions. These tax subsidies are essentially backdoor voucher programs, or “neovouchers,” as they use the tax code to provide what amount to private school vouchers even when traditional voucher programs are unpopular with the public or outright unconstitutional.
Because of the ways that state and federal tax law interact, the subsidies offered in ten of these states turn the concept of a charitable “donation” on its head by offering upper-income taxpayers a risk-free profit on contributions they make to fund private school scholarships. In these cases, even taxpayers who would not ordinarily be interested in contributing to private schools may find the incentive too strong to ignore.
Nancy E. Bailey, who teaches in Tennessee, posted a blog about the legislature’s habit of using poor Memphis as its experimental district, where disruption is the rule and failure is persistent. Jim Gifford, a high school English teacher in Murfreesboro wrote the post on Nancy’s blog.
http://nancyebailey.com/2017/04/05/tennessee-legislators-cry-thank-god-for-memphis/
Tennessee had the bad fortune to win a bundle of Race to the Top cash, so some district had to be the donkey where everyone pinned the tail. It was Memphis. Every bad reformer idea lands on the students, teachers, and schools of Memphis (Shelby County).
Bill Gates dumped a barrel of money into Memphis to try out his pet ideas about teacher evaluation. Oops!
Then came the so-called Achievement School District. A total disaster!
Now legislators have decided to experiment with vouchers. Where? Memphis, of course.
The people who live in Memphis don’t like the idea of vouchers. But nobody cares what they think.
In this illuminating podcast, Jennifer Berkshire (formerly known as EduShyster) and Jack Schneider (historian of education) explain how the tax credit programs work. They are proliferating as a way to adopt vouchers without using the V word.
Schneider gives a thumbnail history of the state Blaine amendments.
Then the pair introduce tax policy expert Carl Davis to explain how tax credits are a poorly disguised way of laundering money to religious schools that the state constitution forbids. Since no state has ever approved a voucher referendum, the voucher advocates have been forced to come up with euphemisms and backdoor ways to implement what they want: Public money for private and religious schools. If they were honest, they would put the question to voters and ask them to change the state constitution, but they know the public is not on their side. Thus, the ruse.
The Bangor Daily News in Maine reports that Trump’s push for school choice in Maine would be a disaster for rural schools. This article helps to explain why rural legislators are not enthusiastic about school choice. It would destroy the schools they have and leave everyone worse off.
Mt. Abram Regional High School, north of Farmington, is a small school, with only around 150 students. But the teenagers who step off the bus each morning come from dozens of towns, some 50 or 60 miles away. That can mean a long bus ride for some.
Senior Olivia Scott says it has created a tight knit community.
“Here, you get a really strong sense of who you are individually,” she says. “You get to know all of your classmates and all of your peers and all of your teachers, even.”
“Everything happens there, town meetings happen there,” says Susan Pratt, the superintendent of MSAD 58, which contains Mt. Abram. In an area that’s been hard-hit by a loss of jobs and people, she says the schools are much more than a place to hold classes.
“They’re the center of the community,” she says. “It’s really the only gathering place for some of these little towns.”
And that has Pratt worried about a new push for school choice in the president’s budget proposal.
While it’s still unclear what exactly school choice would mean, a common approach is to give families vouchers for a certain amount of money and let them choose where they want their kids to go to school. It has been tried in places such as Wisconsin and Florida, to mixed results.
Pratt says in rural western Maine, where schools are hours away from each other, getting students to another destination would be close to impossible. Experts say that means the law would likely benefit more affluent students who could supply their own transportation.
“There aren’t a lot of options for many of the school systems,” she says. “Your options are limited. And so their choices are limited for folks, just because of the distance, as much as anything else.”
But for many educators, the bigger worry is what happens if students do leave their current public school district. Tina Meserve, the superintendent of RSU 16 in Poland, says she’s concerned it would leave schools without enough students and revenue to provide a quality education.
“You’ve got to have a certain student population to offer AP chemistry, AP physics, AP calculus. Plus your regular algebra and geometry class,” she says. “So again, you run into that problem of needing to have a certain student population to provide a well rounded education for kids.”
Joshua Starr, a former school superintendent who is now chief executive officer of Phi Delta Kappa, reports that the American public opposes vouchers. They like the idea of “charters,” but most don’t know what charters are, that they may be run by for-profit or run by national corporations. They like the generic idea but they are not asked what they know about it. Perhaps they have nmagnet schools in mind.
Starr writes:
“Since 1969, PDK International has conducted an annual poll of the public’s attitudes toward the public schools. The methodology is rigorous, the questions are vetted by a politically diverse group of advisers, the data are robust and the results suggest that DeVos hasn’t been listening very carefully.
“Consider school choice, which DeVos has placed at the top of her policy agenda. Our poll reveals that, in general, Americans like the idea of choice in public education. On the specifics, though, DeVos’s positions are out of tune with majority opinion, particularly when it comes to school vouchers. Most respondents tell us that they disapprove of using public funds to support voucher programs. Since 1993, we have asked Americans 20 times whether they support allowing parents to choose a private school at public expense, and every time a majority has said “No.”
“DeVos is equally tone deaf when it comes to charter schooling, which is her other favored means of promoting choice. While charter schools themselves are quite popular — 64% supporting, 25% opposing in 2015, the last time we asked this question — the secretary’s views on charter school governance (specifically her fierce resistance to any kind of public oversight of these schools) are less mainstream. We asked Americans four times in the early 2000s whether they wanted charter schools to be held accountable to the same standards as traditional public schools and the response was overwhelmingly “yes.” The country is more split now, but 48% still say they want the same standards to apply to charters, compared with 46% who don’t.
“The bottom line: While DeVos may claim to be speaking for millions of average Americans (and at her Senate hearing, she lauded herself as “a voice for parents”), the evidence suggests otherwise. If she hears an insistent clamoring for new investments in voucher programs and unregulated charter schools, then she’s listening to the wrong station.
“If not vouchers and unregulated charters, then what do Americans want? In general, the poll results are complicated, suggesting that attitudes toward public education are much more nuanced, even conflicted, than policymakers admit. On some key issues, though, public opinion is quite clear. For example, a clear majority of Americans tell us that they trust teachers, value their work highly, respect their skills and expertise and want teachers to be paid more. Further, our data have shown consistently over many years that a majority of Americans favor spending more money on the public schools, especially on their local schools (which people tend to rate much more highly than the public schools in general). A majority of people even say that they would be willing to pay higher taxes as long as the money goes directly to education.
“Secretary DeVos may have her reasons for wanting to cut back on some federal programs and to ramp up funding for her preferred forms of school choice. But let’s be honest: Those reasons are grounded in ideology, not in practical experience (she has none) or evidence (she cannot cite any). Her enthusiasm for the president’s budget proposal has nothing to do with the will of the American people and it is more than a little disingenuous for her to claim that she has listened to or speaks for millions of moms, dads, teachers and students.”
The Washington Post reported that the government is spending about $1 million per month for Betsy DeVos’s security.
How many people are assigned to protect her?
The government already owns the vehicles.
Assume the full amount is the cost of personnel.
Assume that a security guard earns $48,000 per year.
One month of his or her time is $4,000.
How many security guards are protecting her?
This is not a trick question.
Show your work.
Arthur Goldstein has been teaching for more than 30 years in the New York City public schools.
He has a terrific blog about teaching in New York City.
Here, he describes how he will be rated as a teacher by an insane system.
He begins here:
NY City’s brilliant and infallible Engage system has mandated that I be rated on a test the overwhelming majority of my students will not be taking. As far as I can determine, this is a side effect of the rather awful regulation called CR Part 154. You see, I’m an ESL teacher, but teaching ESL isn’t real teaching. That’s because under Part 154 anything not regarded as “core content” is utterly without value. After all, if it can’t be measured with a standardized test, what proof is there that it even exists?
And yet, in fact, there is a standardized test to measure ESL progress. Sure it’s a stinking piece of garbage, but it exists. This test is called the NYSESLAT. It used to test language acquisition, albeit poorly, but it’s been redesigned to measure just how Common Corey our students are. For the last few years I’ve lost weeks of instruction so I could sit in the auditorium and ask newcomers endless questions about Hammurabi’s Code. I’m not sure what effect this had on non-English speaking students, but I know more about Hammurabi’s code than I ever have.
You may have read me lamenting the fact that I’d be measured on such a poor test once or twice. Last year, in fact, I must have done OK with it since I got an effective rating. I have no idea how exactly I did this. I don’t teach to that test nor do I go out of my way to learn what’s on it. With the oral part is so outlandish and invalid it doesn’t seem worth my while to study the written part. So why the hell aren’t I rated on this test?
It’s complicated, and I can only guess. But Part 154 largely couples ESL with another subject area. In my school, that area is English. It’s kind of a natural pairing, until you realize the high likelihood of ELL newcomers sitting around trying to read To Kill a Mockingbird when they can’t yet tell you what their names are. After all, when English teachers take the magical 12 credits that render them dual-licensed, how can we be sure part of that training entails instruction to NOT give ELLs materials they CANNOT READ? Maybe the focus is on making stuff more Common Corey. Who knows?
Did Trump order the strike against a Syrian airbase to boost his sagging poll numbers? Did he do it to divert attention from the glacial investigation of his ties with Putin? Did he do it to show he is not colluding with Putin?
Reports today say that Syria war planes bombed the same town again, taking offfrom the airfield that our missiles allegedly destroyed.
Syria strikes: Site of chemical attack hit again – CNN
https://apple.news/AHhbLlTtcQu6K8mm5_7vNcA
An ineffectual gesture. Nothing like the appearance of decisive military action to give the impression of leadership.
This symbolic action is known as Wag the Dog. It generically means change the subject of discussion to divert attention from something you don’t want discussed
http://www.gingersoftware.com/content/phrases/wag-the-dog/#.WOkQ9oEpCaM
A reader posted a comment yesterday asking why I had a problem with religious schools receiving public funding. Aren’t there good religious schools. I pointed out that most of the religious schools that are funded by vouchers are not very good schools. The very good religious schools don’t have many seats available. The ones that do have seats available and need the money tend to be a certain type of Christian school that teaches creationism and uses textbooks that do not teach modern science, math, or history.
Then another comment arrived, this one from a man who is writing a book about education in Arizona.
I post this quote from a work in progress for the nice lady who wrote about Diane’s piece and asked whether there are good religious schools. Diane used a quote from me in the blog today.
Here are the Organizations already providing “scholarships” on the “tax credit” dime here in AZ. I am a proud Catholic School Graduate and I have grandchildren in Catholic Schools in New Hampshire.
Those choices were my parents and my children’s RELIGIOUS choice. They wanted their children indoctrinated into the Catholic Faith.
Catholic schools have their history in anti-Catholic sentiments going back to the KNOW NOTHING PARTY and anti-immigrant attitudes in the 1840s. There was a time when it was a “mortal sin” for Catholics to attend public school if a Catholic School was available..
We in AZ live in a state that allows a “Christian Scholarship” fund that doesn’t include any Catholic, or for that matter Mormon schools, that is a RED FLAG.
I ask the following.
How is it that the Senate president of the Arizona State Senate, can simultaneously be the executive director of a $17,064,168 organization, The Arizona Christian School Tuition Organization Inc., while having control over all of the bills that come up for voting in the Senate including those that benefit his organization?
o This while collecting a salary and other compensation of $145,705 per annum in 2014-2015 for directing the ACSTO.
Source IRS Form 990 FY 2013: http://www.guidestar.org/FinDocuments/2014/860/931/2014-860931047-0b056c5d-9.pdf
o Again the question is asked, “Politically would this be considered “permissible” if the organization was dedicated to promoting Catholic Schools and run by the Senate President who happened to be the Bishop of the Diocese of Phoenix?
o Researching the Organization in question one finds a list of the “participating schools”. That list which is provided below is devoid of any Catholic or Mormon Schools. Do they not fit the organization’s definition of Christian Schools? Would having a Muslim or Hindu Tax Credit group be okay with the legislature? How about an ATHEIST School?
Bethany Christian School
Christian Academy of Prescott
Flagstaff Community Christian School
Joy Christian School
North Valley Christian Academy
Northwest Christian School
Paradise Valley Christian Prep
Scottsdale Christian Academy
Trinity Christian School (Prescott)
I am sure these are good programs but I have met some of their leadership and a lot of them ascribe to the philosophy that the world is 6000 years old.
• Catholic Education Arizona is an IRS 501(c) (3) nonprofit charitable organization and has never accepted gifts designated for individuals. Per state law, a school tuition organization cannot award, restrict or reserve scholarships solely on the basis of donor recommendation. A taxpayer may not claim a tax credit if the taxpayer agrees to swap donations with another taxpayer to benefit either taxpayer’s own dependent. This new law changes that.
o The rules for donating to a Catholic Educational Program speak volumes to the previous complaint regarding what is a Christian School. It required separate rules to “allow” the donations to go to Catholic Schools. The restrictions make it impossible for one to donate for their own child’s (or grandchildren’s) tuition.
This is a taxpayer funded way to provide the scholarships that Catholics used to provide in their donations to the church of their choice.
The leadership at this charity received compensation of $131,115 in 2013-2014. This was on revenue of $16,269,022.
Source: IRS FORM 990 See: http://www.guidestar.org/FinDocuments/2014/860/937/2014-860937587-0b8e0571-9.pdf
“Freedom to choose” for religious purposes has always been an option in this country. Catholics chose to create Catholic Schools. Jewish parents chose schools based at their Synagogues. There are Hindu Schools and Muslim Schools. These faiths funded this choice with sacrifice and tuitions that were subsidized by their church, synagogue or mosque, not by diverting funds meant to support the public schools to their religion.
• Jewish Tuition Organization is another 501 C specifically to provide Scholarship or Grants to Attend Jewish Primary and Secondary Schools. http://www.jtophoenix.org/take-the-credit/
o The Executive Director at the Jewish Tuition Organization has a salary of $70.000 as of the 2013-2014 Fiscal Year. This is on Revenue of $2,922,316.
o Form 990 FY 2013 JTO: http://www.guidestar.org/FinDocuments/2014/860/970/2014-860970081-0b26cdec-9.pdf
