Tag Archives: vouchers

Charters Aren’t Vouchers

The media recently reported the results of a recent study of schools in Indiana and other states, and found that children attending public charter schools had better learning outcomes than those in traditional public schools or voucher schools.

When I saw the headlines, I cringed–not because of the study’s findings, which seem credible, but because I’d be willing to bet that nine out of ten people reading those reports don’t understand the difference between charter schools and voucher schools–and it’s a critical difference.

Charter schools are independently run public schools that are granted greater flexibility in their operations than traditional public schools. (Theoretically, at least, that flexibility is in exchange for greater accountability for performance.) In the Indianapolis Public School system, leaders at these schools have independent control of policies and academics while still being part of the public school district. 

Because they are public schools, charters are not allowed to charge tuition. They are not allowed to teach or favor any religion. And importantly, since charter schools are public schools, they are constrained by the Constitution and Bill of Rights, and prohibited from discriminating on the basis of race, sex, gender, socioeconomic status, previous academic scores, or special education status.

Vouchers–as I have explained repeatedly on this site–are very different. Voucher programs send public money–tax dollars– to private schools to offset the tuition charged by those schools. A vast majority of the private schools that accept vouchers are religious, and a vast majority of students employing those vouchers use them to attend religious schools. Furthermore, virtually all of those voucher schools discriminate on some basis–either limiting enrollment to members of a particular faith, excluding students with special needs, or–in several high-profile situations–excluding gay children, or children with gay parents. 

There are problems with charter schools, particularly with those that have contracted with for-profit entities to manage them, but those problems differ substantially from the issues presented by voucher programs. Vouchers weren’t developed in an effort to improve education; they were meant to be “work-arounds.” The First Amendment, along with many state constitutions, prohibits the use of public funds to support religion or religious institutions. Voucher proponents argued that the millions of tax dollars going into the coffers of religious schools are “really” going to the parents, and that the parents are individual citizens who should be free to spend those dollars to send their children to the school of their choice. (And I have a bridge to sell you…)

Courts bought that argument.

The study found that students who attended charters  in Indianapolis had somewhat stronger educational outcomes than those in either traditional public schools, or in IPS “innovation” schools, which are a different type of charter. (Numerous studies have found that children attending voucher schools do no better–and often do more poorly–than similar children attending traditional public schools.)

Indianapolis students in poverty who attend charter schools showed stronger academic growth in math and similar growth in reading compared to the state average, according to the study. 

CREDO’s own metric for comparison also found that students at Indianapolis charter schools gained more days of learning in math and reading during a typical academic year than similar students at traditional IPS district schools and innovation charter schools within the district. Other comparisons in the study include:

Black and Hispanic students at charter schools had stronger academic growth in math and reading compared to Black and Hispanic peers at district schools. No significant difference in learning gains were found between the same student groups in innovation charter schools compared to district schools.

Students in poverty at charter schools had more learning gains in math and reading compared to their peers at district schools. No significant difference in learning gains were found between the same student group in innovation charter schools compared to district schools.

No matter what type of school English Language Learners in Indianapolis attend from the study, they show similar learning gains in reading and math.

The theory behind charter schools was that their greater flexibility would allow them to experiment with curricula and other aspects of the educational environment, and that successful experimentation could then be “imported” into the traditional public schools. According to the linked article, that is precisely the approach being taken by the IPS Superintendent.

I do welcome the study–and for that matter, all evidence of what works and what doesn’t– but I’d be a lot more enthusiastic if i wasn’t convinced that it will be intentionally mischaracterized to support voucher proponents’ efforts to defame and de-fund our public schools….

Comments

Shades Of Texas

Back before the Internet and e-books, when school textbooks were hard-back volumes printed by educational publishers, Texas had a wildly disproportionate influence on the lessons those books conveyed. Even then, Texas was an anti-intellectual wasteland, but because of its size–and the need to standardize publication of schoolbooks nationally– it had an outsized influence on what went into the nation’s textbooks. (I often think we should give Texas back to Mexico, but they probably wouldn’t take it…)

Today, of course, school districts have access to a wider variety of educational resources, so the minority of Americans who are firmly opposed to giving children an accurate understanding of history or science have pursed a different tactic: educational vouchers. Vouchers–as readers of this blog are aware–allow parents to use tax dollars to send their children to private–almost always religious–schools, a large number of which use textbooks that are even less accurate than those once influenced by Texas.

Time Magazine recently reported on the most widely-used of those “textbooks.”

The report began by noting that the singer-songwriter who wrote the controversial “Try that in a small town” shouldn’t have been so surprised by the outcry the song triggered. After all, he’d attended a religious school that used

textbooks produced by Abeka, a publishing company that has long been part of the effort among conservative institutions to teach an airbrushed version of history—one that presents a narrow vision of a heroic, Christian, capitalist America. For the most part, these books have been limited to private schools and homeschools, though the founders of these networks always hoped to influence public life…

Abeka’s roots go back to the 1925 Scopes Trial, which pitted evolutionary science and expert academic knowledge against local control and religious dogma. After the trial, which produced reams of journalistic mockery of conservative religion, prominent fundamentalists like Bob Jones Sr. decided that America needed a new kind of educational institution, one free from the influence of mainstream academic expertise. He founded Bob Jones College in Florida (now Bob Jones University in South Carolina) to provide white conservative Christians with a “fighting base.”

Eventually, even Bob Jones University was deemed too “progressive” by religious fanatics, and a network of white-dominated private religious schools grew rapidly.

These schools promised to maintain prayer and traditional teaching. Most importantly, they promised a refuge from court-ordered desegregation efforts. These schools needed textbooks that would teach the lessons that parents who opposed such measures wanted their children to learn.

In response, Abeka expanded its publishing efforts. The company eventually published original textbooks in every subject, for every grade. The goal was to provide an alternative kind of curriculum, one that—in the words of one Abeka leader in 1979—would teach students to cherish the Bible, “master the three R’s,” maintain a healthy “respect for authority,” and develop “pride in America.”

As the Time article notes, Abeka textbooks teach a history that is “dramatically distinct from mainstream books.”  They omit the violence that doomed Reconstruction, instead explaining that it failed because many formerly enslaved people were “not prepared for political responsibility.” “The book does briefly note that “some Southern whites used illegal methods” and “terror tactics,” including forming the KKK. Yet, that mention of white terrorism is buried within an overall message of white victimhood.”

In 2019, Abeka’s texts were used by a majority of America’s 1,689,726 homeschooled students plus nearly three-quarters of a million students in conservative Christian private schools. It isn’t just Abeka–Hillsdale College and PragerU, among others, produce wildly slanted versions of America’s history, and have been making inroads in even public schools in Red States.

And it isn’t just history: textbook publishers serving these Christian voucher schools also produce anti-Darwin, anti-evolution. “science” books.

In 2010, NBC reported that Christian-based materials that omit any mention of evolution had come to dominate the home-school education market; that year, that market was more than 1.5 million students. As the article notes, most home-school parents want a “Bible-based version of the Earth’s creation.”

“Those who do not believe that the Bible is the inspired, inerrant Word of God will find many points in this book puzzling,” says the introduction to “Biology: Third Edition” from Bob Jones University Press. “This book was not written for them.”

The textbook delivers a religious ultimatum to young readers and parents, warning in its “History of Life” chapter that a “Christian worldview … is the only correct view of reality; anyone who rejects it will not only fail to reach heaven but also fail to see the world as it truly is.”

That is the worldview being supported by Hoosier tax dollars that have been siphoned off and sent to “voucher” schools by Indiana’s legislators.

And we wonder why educated people leave Indiana…

Comments

Another Day, Another Voucher Study…

Okay–I know it’s just one more time beating that horse (an animal quite probably dead by now…), but I can’t resist. Brookings has just issued yet another study confirming the educational downsides of voucher programs.

The study was prompted by the recent expansion of voucher programs and “education savings accounts,” (ESAs) which are functionally the same thing–the use of public money to allow parents to send their children to private schools. That expansion has occurred primarily in states that voted for Trump in 2020, which should be a clue that these programs are based on ideology; their proponents simply ignore that pesky inconvenient thing called evidence.

(The Brookings report has multiple links to the previous academic research on each of the following points; I’m not including them, but if you click through, you will be able to easily access them.)

This study confirms a number of the findings of previous research: for example,  that after expansion of a voucher program or implementation of an ESA, pop-up schools immediately appear, many of which will close rather quickly, and that existing private schools raise their tuition.

The study notes that a decade of research has confirmed that vouchers reduce student academic achievement. Brookings cites studies from Louisiana and Indiana, among others, that found quite substantial declines in student test scores. (Indiana’s pathetic legislature simply ignored the fact that Indiana’s voucher program had demonstrably failed to perform as promised. In its recent session, the legislature made the program available to virtually  all of Indiana’s schoolchildren, and is now promoting it heavily.)

Perhaps because the reality fails to match the rhetoric, exit rates from the private schools accepting vouchers are high; in Indiana, as in several other states, some 20% of students who use a voucher to enroll in a private school depart every year–and interestingly, their return to public schooling improves their academic performance.

The research also notes the high percentage of private schools that are religious, but fails to make a point that I consider pivotal: when students leave public educational institutions where–despite residential segregation–they are more likely to interact with children whose races, cultures and religions differ from their own than in the more racially and religiously segregated voucher schools, their “tribal” identities are strengthened. That lack of diversity not only hampers their later interactions in a diverse society, it fosters precisely the sorts of polarization that bedevil contemporary society.

A problem that was highlighted in the research was the lack of accountability of these private schools, both educational and fiscal. In Arizona, “educational” costs that have been reimbursed under their program have been, shall we say, questionable, and  in North Carolina, schools have claimed payment for more vouchers than students actually used. (While this study didn’t mention the problem, others have noted that a lack of public reporting requirements  makes it very difficult for parents to determine how well a given private school is really performing. Too often, they end up making a choice based upon surface impressions–or more frequently, PR and marketing.)

As the study concludes, recent expansions of these programs will test prior findings–one of which, interestingly, is that “the larger the program, the worse the results.”

What is so discouraging about the persistent Red state expansions of these voucher programs is that these legislatures utterly ignore credible research, and–rather than applying those millions of tax dollars to the improvement of public education–throw millions of dollars into programs that demonstrably do not improve academic outcomes.

When voucher programs were first introduced, they were promoted as a way to allow poor children to leave failing urban schools. Recent program expansions have given the lie to that original argument; virtually every child in Indiana (and elsewhere) now qualifies to use public money to attend private schools–very much including children who had never attended a public school, and whose parents had previously been paying private school tuition.

Perhaps some of the proponents of vouchers remain unaware of the mountains of evidence and truly believe the hype. But given the other research I’ve cited about the segregating effects of educational “choice,” you’ll forgive me if I am cynical.

Comments

The Right’s Educational Agenda

As regular readers of this blog know, Morton Marcus and I recently co-authored and published a small book on the women’s movement. (If you haven’t purchased it, I really wish you would…) We discovered that–despite our very different preoccupations–we work together well, and we’ve been considering another project, this time, an examination of educational privatization–aka the voucher movement.

But researching the consequences that most concern us ranges from tricky to impossible. There’s plenty of research demonstrating that privatization has failed to deliver what proponents promised: better test scores. Researchers can access that sort of data; many have, and the results are pretty straightforward–which is why voucher cheerleaders now talk about parental choice rather than improved educational outcomes.

We have another concern: that vouchers facilitate and encourage the polarization of the polity, undermining civic cohesion at a time when increasing population diversity makes civic unity both more difficult and more important.

The research problem is what academics call “self-selection.” Even if we were able to test the thesis that graduates of private, mostly religious voucher schools emerge less civically knowledgable or more religiously biased or more prone to misogyny, etc., there would be no way to attribute those outcomes to the schools; the likelihood is that parents choosing such schools considered those outcomes to be a feature, not a bug.

I ran into a similar roadblock several years ago; I’d hoped to research the effects of the built environment on social capital. Did people living in gated communities have measurably different connections to, or interactions with, other people? Again, the “chicken and egg” issue confounded me: it was likely that most people who chose to live in those gated communities already had similar levels of social capital.

We may or may not develop a data-driven analysis of the anti-democratic results of school privatization. We both recognize that our public schools are far from perfect–years of neighborhood segregation, among other things, created huge differences between schools. Some of the charter schools that were initially intended to be more innovative public schools have become indistinguishable from private academies. And not all parents who place children in a private or charter school are doing so in order to indoctrinate their offspring (or protect them from Black or Brown classmates).

That said, many of these schools are teaching a very Whitewashed American history.

One recent report traces the sharp, Rightward turn of a new breed of Charter schools.

NPE identified hundreds of charter schools, predominantly in red states, that use the classical brand or other conservative dog whistles to attract white Christian families to enroll in the school. From featured religious music videos to statements that claim they offer a faith-friendly environment, these charter schools are opening at an accelerated rate, with at least 66 additional schools in the pipeline to open by 2024. While some of these schools, such as the Roger Bacon Academies, are long-standing, nearly half of the schools we identified opened after the inauguration of Donald Trump.

Hillsdale College is a small, conservative Christian college that has long been noted for far-Right indoctrination, and it is one of the most influential organizations pushing these charters.

The small conservative Christian college in Michigan has become a major player in Ron DeSantis’s Florida; as the report says, “Tug any thread of Florida’s present education policy, and you will find this small Michigan college at the other end.”

Hillsdale’s president Larry Arnn was tagged by Donald Trump to head his short-lived 1776 Commission, charged with creating nationalistic history curriculum (a version of which is now offered by Hillsdale). He has made the occasional misstep, as when Hillsdale’s charter move into Tennessee was stalled after Arnn was caught saying that “teachers are trained in the dumbest parts of the dumbest colleges in the country.”

Hillsdale works through its Barney Charter School initiative as well as providing its classical curriculum to member charters at no cost. In some cases, as with the Optima chain in Florida, the charter may be operated by a for-profit charter management firm (in the case of Optima, both the charter chains and the charter management organization are owned by the same person). The report found that among this new wave of conservative charter schools, the percentage of those operated by for-profit charter management companies is twice that in the charter sector as a whole.

Not every charter that advertises a classical curriculum is Rightwing; here in Indianapolis, Herron High School is an admirable example–and proudly public. But the morphing of charters into Rightwing indoctrination academies continues to gather steam.

I’m convinced that this movement endangers American democracy–but convincing data proving my hypothesis isn’t likely to emerge until Americans are living with the very undemocratic results.

Comments

Calling Out The Lie

It appears that the World’s Worst Legislature is succeeding in its goal of destroying–or at least fatally wounding– public education in the Hoosier state. An inconvenient side-effect of that success is the now-clear evidence that initial arguments for the state’s voucher program were always bogus.

Participation in Indiana’s taxpayer-funded private school voucher program jumped to the highest level since its start over a decade ago – even as the number of low-income and families of color using vouchers decreased. 

According to a new state report, the Choice Scholarship Program totaled $311.8 million in grants for 53,262 students in the 2022-23 academic year. That’s 9,000 students and $70.4 million more than the previous school year. 

But those increases will be dwarfed over the next two years, as nearly all Indiana students will become eligible for vouchers in the coming weeks. Those changes, enacted by new state law, are estimated to qualify 41,800 additional students for the program and cost $1.136 billion in total.

Those of us who have followed the General Assembly’s persistent efforts to privatize education will recall the original, pious justifications for “school choice.” Vouchers, they assured us, were a mechanism that would allow poor minority students to leave those underperforming “urban” (read “ghetto”) schools. The educational voucher program was sold as an effort to “level the playing field” for the underprivileged.

Right–and I have a bridge to sell you…

What also proved to be untrue was the claim that vouches would improve educational outcomes. Years of academic research–previously shared on this blog and elsewhere–have demolished the claim that the “private” (basically, religious) schools benefitting from those vouchers would do a better job of imparting academic skills. 

In the face of incontrovertible evidence that vouchers are actually used by middle and upper-middle class families–a significant number of whom had been paying to send their kids to private schools before our legislative overlords kindly eased their financial burden–and similarly overwhelming evidence that educational outcomes were not improving, the justification changed.

Now it’s enabling “parental rights.”

(I will restrain myself from pointing out how hypocritical Republicans are when they talk about “choice” and parental rights….parents who might want to take their kids to Drag Queen story hour, or who want them to learn accurate American history sure don’t get rights or respect for their choices…but I digress.)

As with other policies flying in the face of evidence, the GOP’s fondness for vouchers can best be understood if we follow the money.

In Indiana,

In the program’s 12th year, the average student is described as White, elementary school-age, and from a household of around four people with an income of $81,818, according to the Indiana Department of Education. Indiana’s median household income is around $62,000.

The report found the high-income eligibility likely led to the 9.3 percent decrease in the number of participating families with an income of $50,000 or less. Families earning $100,001 to $150,000 saw the largest increase in voucher use at about 8.4 percent.

As the Indianapolis Star reported,

The increase in participation will likely only continue in the coming years now that the state legislature expanded the income limit threshold to 400% of the free-and-reduced-lunch threshold, enabling a family of four making $220,000 a year to get a voucher, whereas the program currently cuts off families of that size at an income of $166,500.

It’s interesting that the Hoosier lawmakers who are so generous to upper-income constituents when it comes to siphoning students from the public schools suddenly become “fiscally conservative” when it comes to helping poor Hoosiers. Look, for example, at the income limits for pre-school vouchers. Those are limited to families with household income below 127% of the federal poverty limit, or about $32,700 for a family of four — and in order to be  eligible, parents must be working, attending school or participating in some sort of job training.

In Indiana, government works best for the well-off. It’s a lot more punitive when dealing with the working poor.

The worst part of this travesty , however, isn’t fiscal. It isn’t even the substandard educational results provided by those private “academies.” It’s the deepening of social polarization, the deliberate encouragement of tribalism.

Public education–as political scientist Benjamin Barber emphasized–is constitutive of a public.In an interview before he died, Barber cited Jefferson:

Jefferson saw a profound connection between the Bill of Rights — the document embodying the rights of citizens — and education as the foundation which made democracy work and made the Bill of Rights work. The founding of the common school, the public school, in America was for Jefferson the foundation for an effective and successful democracy. I think we have lost sight of the connection between the schooling, citizenship and democracy.

In an increasingly fragmented and hostile America, that connection is more important than ever. Indiana’s GOP supermajority doesn’t understand that. Or care.

Comments