Are Community Schools the Positive Disruptor Public Education Needs?

The following is an excerpt of an article that was originally published on the Progressive.

Click to read the full article online.

Trust in public schools has eroded, but community schools in La Crosse, Wisconsin, may show how it can be restored.

It’s important for people to know they can trust schools,” Jenna Fernholz told The Progressive during a call over Zoom in early March. “That’s a hard thing in this time and in this administration. But there are people on the ground who are really working hard for our families and our kids.”

When Fernholz, a school principal in La Crosse, Wisconsin, talks about “people on the ground,” she undoubtedly includes herself and her colleagues at Hamilton Elementary School. The administration she referred to is, of course, the presidential administration of Donald Trump, which has accused K-12 public schools of “radical indoctrination” and has proposed redirecting government money for public schools to privately operated alternatives.

Although surveys have found that a vast majority of parents throughout the country trust public school teachers, evidence suggests that the public’s trust in the nation’s public education system is being eroded by years of culture-war attacks on schools and an oft-repeated narrative that public schools are failed institutions filled with educators who are lying to parents to cover up that failure.

But for Fernholz, trust isn’t just a sentiment—it’s essential for the success of the difficult work of school improvement. Her school is implementing an approach to improvement commonly referred to as community schools.

The community schools approach looks different depending on location, but the basic idea is that schools should serve as local hubs not only for education services, but also meet the broader needs of students and families such as physical and mental health, housing, transportation, after-school care, and neighborhood improvement. To provide these services, schools partner with local organizations, including nonprofits and businesses. And students, parents, community members, and school staff help to determine school policies and activities, such as curriculum offerings and sports programs.

Fernholz knew Hamilton was a community school when she became principal in 2022, but she wasn’t certain about what that designation entailed. “I kind of felt like all schools were community schools, because they’re in a neighborhood,” she recalled. “But I didn’t fully realize how the model works and how impactful the approach is.”

“In my previous school, we did things like food drives and handed out free clothing, like we do at Hamilton. But the community schools approach requires us to dive in deeper, to look for what is at the root of the academic and social-emotional problems our kids are having, and what we need to do to help address those problems,” Fernholz said.

Fernholz knew, for instance, that Hamilton serves generally low-income families—nearly 85 percent are considered economically disadvantaged—and has an unusually high percentage of students, nearly one in three, with disabilities. But she was surprised to learn how many of her students and their family members struggle with mental health, and how challenging it can be for some Hamilton students just to get to school.

“We want students to learn to read and do math,” Fernholz said. “But there is a whole other side we have to tackle first in order for them to be ready to learn.”

Fernholz and her colleagues wouldn’t have learned any of this about their school’s community if Hamilton students and families didn’t trust them enough to speak up.

[…]

Read the rest of this article on the Progressive.

Jeff Bryant is a writing fellow and chief correspondent for Our Schools. He is a communications consultant, freelance writer, advocacy journalist, and director of the Education Opportunity Network, a strategy and messaging center for progressive education policy. His award-winning commentary and reporting routinely appear in prominent online news outlets, and he speaks frequently at national events about public education policy. Follow him on Bluesky @jeffbinnc.

Photo Credit: Mariquitas CK via Wikimedia Commons

How a Struggling Boston School Found Success in the Roots of its Haitian American Community

The following is an excerpt of an article that was originally published on the Progressive.

Click to read the full article online.

The school’s success is a counterpoint to Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant campaign and a testament to the resiliency of public schools when they embrace their local communities.

In 2016, Boston’s Mattahunt Elementary was a school on the brink. A letter from the Massachusetts state education commissioner sent to Boston superintendent Tommy Chang threatened to use “state receivership”—essentially, a takeover of the school—unless the district could present “an effective plan” to “move the [school] out of underperforming status.” 

As WBUR, Boston’s public radio station, reported that year, Mattahunt had scored in the bottom 1 percent of public schools in Massachusetts for at least three years in a row. And since 2012, Mattahunt had been classified as a “turnaround school,” a designation given to schools and districts that have to be monitored by the state because of chronic underperformance.

Flash forward to 2024, and Mattahunt is one of only three finalists for a School on the Move prize, an annual award given by local nonprofit Edvestors that “spotlights the most notable school-wide improvement efforts happening across Boston Public Schools.”

Being considered for the prize, which includes a $100,000 cash award, is “like the Super Bowl of Boston Public Schools,” Alphonso Campbell tells The Progressive. Campbell is Mattahunt’s community hub school coordinator, a position he has held for the past three years after previously working as a paraprofessional in the school. Mattahunt is no longer designated as a turnaround school, he says.

How did Mattahunt go from being a school on the verge of a state takeover to being considered a district champion?

Although a number of factors have contributed to Mattahunt’s improvement, one overriding variable has been the school’s determination to search for solutions within the surrounding community—the largely Haitian American neighborhoods in Boston’s Mattapan district—rather than bring in an outside management firm or adopt a reform model drawn up by a policy think tank.

At a time when Haitian Americans are being targeted by an anti-immigrant campaign, driven largely by presidential candidate Donald Trump and his running mate, J.D. Vance, Mattahunt’s success story is a positive counterpoint and a testament to the remarkable resiliency of public schools when they embrace the local communities they serve. 

[…]

Read the rest of this article on the Progressive.

Jeff Bryant is a writing fellow and chief correspondent for Our Schools. He is a communications consultant, freelance writer, advocacy journalist, and director of the Education Opportunity Network, a strategy and messaging center for progressive education policy. His award-winning commentary and reporting routinely appear in prominent online news outlets, and he speaks frequently at national events about public education policy. Follow him on Twitter @jeffbcdm.

Photo courtesy of City of Boston Mayor’s Office (by John Wilcox)

Chicago Teachers Want to Transform Their City into a ‘System of Care’—Will Dems Go Along?

Charles Edward Miller from Chicago, United States, CC BY-SA 2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

Click here to read the article on LA Progressive.

Headbutting and friction continue in the battle of big ideas vs. entrenched leadership.

There was an ironic moment in former President Barack Obama’s speech at the 2024 Democratic National Convention (DNC) in Chicago when he brought up the passing of his wife Michelle’s mother Marian Robinson who, he noted, was raised in the South Side of Chicago and attended Englewood High School.

He likely brought up the details of Robinson’s upbringing as bona fides of her roots in a big city Black community. But the irony was that Englewood High School was closed in 2005 by Obama’s basketball friend—who later served as his secretary of education—Arne Duncan when he was the CEO of Chicago Public Schools from 2001 to 2008. That moment, as obscure as it was, came across as yet another signal—not lost to other astute observers—of how the Democratic Party is struggling to turn from its love affair with neoliberal policy to embrace a new politics of progressive populism that claims to care about families and workers.

That struggle is especially tricky in the education policy arena where Democrats have a lengthy history of imposing neoliberal policy ideas such as charter schools, vouchers, and standardized testing that led to labeling public schools as failures, closing them down, and ramping up charter school industry corruption.

Nowhere has that neoliberal agenda been more controversial than in Chicago, where Democratic political leaders such as Duncan and the city’s former Democratic mayors, including Richard Daley and Rahm Emanuel, imposed deeply unpopular policies largely driven by budget austerity, business narrowmindedness, complicated financial deals with Wall Street banks, and the privatization of public assets.

In the city’s newest political flare-up, the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) and leaders of Chicago Public Schools (CPS) are engaged in a contentious contract negotiation in which the union has called for a progressive agenda that not only includes pay increases for teachers and school staff but also steps to mitigate climate change, end the gender pay gap for CPS employees, eliminate homelessness for families of CPS students, provide paid parental leave for CPS employees, and aid new immigrant families.

So far, negotiations over pay have drawn the most media attention. The union has asked “for a 9 percent pay increase,” Chalkbeat reported in August 2024. The CPS CEO Pedro Martinez appeared poised to offer raises of “between 4 percent and 5 percent,” according to WBEZ. However, CTU stated in its September 9 contract negotiations update that CPS has yet to address about 50 percent of the union’s proposals.

CPS’s resistance is especially frustrating to progressive advocates in Chicago who’ve been advocating for strengthening the public schools system since at least the 1990s. Despite their success, the hurdles these advocates continue to face have left them frustrated.

Over the decades of their activism, CTU and public school advocates fought for and won previous contracts that resulted in reduced class sizes, salary increases for teachers and school staff, funding for more social workers, nurses and librarians in schools, and a commitment from the district to fund and pilot the community schools approach.

CTU and its supporters doggedly opposed and finally toppled adversarial mayors to elect one of their own in Mayor Brandon Johnson, a former school teacher and CTU organizer. They advocated and pushed through progressive policies such as enacting a moratorium on new charter schools, transitioning school governance from mayoral control to an elected school board, and “ending student-based budgeting” that formed the basis of the city’s school choice agenda.

While Chicago teachers were successfully making progressive change in Chicago, Democrats took control of the Illinois state legislature, and with the election of J.B. Pritzker in 2018, elected one of the nation’s most progressive governors, although he has rejected calls for the state to help make up the budget shortfall for CPS.

Despite these wins, Chicago teachers and public school advocates find themselves in the same position they’ve long been in—butting heads with an entrenched leadership status quo, created largely by Democrats.

What’s at stake is enormous for Chicago but also important to the Democratic Party nationally as it attempts to remake itself into the party that now claims to care the most about workers and families.

‘Good Enough’ Schools

What’s stymieing negotiations between CTU and the district, according to Chalkbeat and other media outlets, is that the union’s “demands come as the district and city face budget deficits, with no clear path to securing extra funding for schools.”

Martinez has claimed that CTU’s contract proposals would “result in a deficit of at least $2.9 billion for the 2025-26 school year,” WBEZ reported, leading to “a hole more than five times the current projection and growing as large as $4 billion by 2028.”

And although the state increased funding for CPS in 2024 by $25.8 million, Chalkbeat reported, that’s still “$1 billion short of what the state’s formula considers adequate funding.”

Yet not everyone agrees that money is the issue.

According to CTU President Stacy Davis Gates, who Our Schools interviewed, “The push and pull you’re seeing in CTU’s negotiations with the district is mostly indicative of a years-long struggle to remake the district into a system of care.”

“It’s about challenging an education system that, from the beginning, was designed to be just good enough,” she said. “‘Good enough’ meant [providing] workers for the business elites who wanted the district to operate as a system to train future workers for their factories and stockyards. But ‘good enough’ doesn’t really work for [today’s] families.”

Remaking schools into better systems of care was not on the agenda when Chicago leaders closed Englewood and scores of other Chicago schools. Those schools were closed due to “underperformance” (although displaced students often fared even worse in their new schools) and financial inefficiency (which was also not alleviated by school closures).

Davis Gates conceded that what her union is asking for will cost the city and the state a lot more money. But she expressed frustration with how any political regime that claims to care about the well-being of families and children’s academic success could not come up with money to address the adverse conditions that Chicago families often face.

“My experience teaching social studies… clarified that the work I did in the classroom as a teacher was only a percentage of what was needed for students to have a full opportunity to access high-quality education,” she told Our Schools. “For instance, we have 20,000 students in our district who are unhoused. This creates many challenges for how we educate them when they spent the night in a car, a shelter, or couch surfing with relatives or friends. Being unhoused also creates social and emotional challenges for students.”

When questioned about the need to spend more money on innovations like community schools, she pointed to Cameron Magnet School of the Arts, an elementary school in the Humboldt Park neighborhood. When an influx of about 100 migrant students suddenly enrolled in the school, Cameron could respond more effectively because it was reorganized and funded to operate as a community school.

In a system of care, Davis Gates said, “You have a restorative justice coordinator in every school. You have librarians, nurses, and social workers in every school.”

‘They Fired All of Us, Even the Lunch Ladies’

Davis Gates began her teaching career in 2004 at Englewood High School and was in her second year when Duncan announced the school would be shut down and replaced by smaller schools, a neoliberal policy fad that many big-city school districts fell for at the time.

Jackson Potter, current vice president of CTU, started teaching at Englewood in 2002 and told Our Schools what it was like to have Englewood shut down.

“It was extraordinarily traumatic for our families,” he recalled. “Duncan called our school a ‘cultural failure,’ which was deeply felt as an insult by the entire community. Yes, Englewood was a school with problems. But Duncan inflicted deep trauma on teachers and students.”

“The mantra at the time was all about low test scores and graduation rates. As a new teacher it struck me as absurd,” he said. “So you’re saying I caused this, and you’re blaming these veteran Black teachers? And these were incredible teachers with deep roots in the community who knew our families and knew just what to do when one of our students was in a crisis.”

“The years of disinvestment our school had endured, the economic dislocation of our community, and the racial disparities of the city, all of that was discounted,” he said. “So they fired all of us, even the lunch ladies.”

Like Davis Gates, Potter said that in the current union contract negotiations, “Money is a piece of the puzzle but not the whole issue.” He brought up examples where CTU has collaborated with the district to acquire additional funding from federal and state sources, including a federal grant of $20 million for electric buses. “But we always have to push for it,” he said.

Potter told of how CTU proposed, as a cost-saving measure, for the district to change its teacher evaluation cycle from every two to three years. Due to its limited staff, the district already fails to evaluate some 2,000 teachers each year, Potter explained, so why not stretch the limited number of evaluators over a longer period? “But they won’t agree to that,” he added.

He also questioned why CPS has never applied for grants given out by the state’s Illinois Shines program for retrofitting public school buildings with solar panels.

“It’s not just lack of funds. It’s obstinance,” he said.

Potter agrees that more recently there’s been a turning away from some of the past school reform ideas that drove CPS policymaking. But he questions why staff positions created during the reform era are still there, such as an Office of Portfolio Management, a reference to a neoliberal approach in which school leaders run school districts as if they were Wall Street managers overseeing a portfolio of investments.

“A lot of resistance has hardened over decades, and we’re trying to create a new pathway forward. But that’s going to mean the city has to take on local power brokers, big banks, and powerful opponents in state government,” he said.

Both Sides Are Right

Which side is right in this back-and-forth on funding between CTU and the district? “Both,” said Ralph Martire in an interview with Our Schools.

Martire is executive director of the Center for Tax and Budget Accountability, a Chicago-based think tank that analyzes public policy through a social and economic justice lens. He also served on the legislatively established Professional Review Panel that was charged with monitoring the implementation of Illinois’s evidence-based funding (EBF) formula for the state’s K-12 public schools.

“In 2017, Illinois went from the worst to the best in education funding by enacting EBF,” he said.

According to Martire, EBF identifies a funding adequacy target for every school based on 27 research-based targets that include factors like the presence of students from low-income households, the percentage of students who are English language speakers, and school staffing levels.

“The priorities CPS is pushing for in its contract negotiation are all good,” he said. “In fact, many are the very things that EBF prioritizes in its funding formula. And there’s no doubt that the state’s funding of CPS is not adequate even as defined by the EBF model.”

“But under current circumstances, it would be really tough for CPS to come up with the necessary funding to support [all of the union’s priorities]” he said. “Unless the state makes a big jump in funding, it’s hard to see how the district gets out of this situation.”

What’s preventing that “big jump,” according to Martire, is that both the city of Chicago and the state of Illinois don’t have a graduated income tax. Every tax and fee that governments have available, he explained, are regressive except for two: a graduated income tax and an inheritance tax. But when Illinois voters had the chance to change the state’s income tax from a flat rate to a graduated tax in 2020, they rejected it.

“Illinois taxation is still mostly overreliant on local property wealth,” Martire said. Consequently, “growth in funding is not keeping pace with public needs.”

Cassie Creswell, executive director and president of Illinois Families for Public Schools, generally agrees with Martire’s assessment.

“[CPS’s] fundamental fiscal situation, created by decades of privatization on top of under-resourcing its schools, isn’t truly in the CPS board or CTU’s hands,” she wrote in an email to Our Schools. “Illinois’s structural deficit means we are underfunding all of our social and human services, and until we have the ability to levy a graduated income tax at the state level, I’m not optimistic about [CPS’s] finances, and, as a result, [the district’s] ability to make the resources available that CPS students need and deserve.”

Yet, despite the fiscal difficulty of paying for the schools “CPS students need and deserve,” to use Creswell’s words, there are other political dynamics at play as well.

Paul Zavitkovsky former CPS principal and retired EdD program leadership coach for the Center for Urban Education Leadership told Our Schools it’s not clear to him why CTU isn’t finding common ground with the current CPS board.

Since 2019, there have been new CPS board appointees and central office staff hires who would embrace greater collaboration with teachers, according to Zavitkovsky. “They are working hard to redress problems of assessments that weren’t working. They’ve recognized that sanctions alone aren’t helpful.”

He doesn’t disagree that what the teachers are asking for would make positive contributions to student achievements and create much greater academic gains than seen during the neoliberal reform agenda.

But he wonders if CTU isn’t trying to push a political advantage.

“CTU has had lots of good reasons to be adversarial,” he said. “Perhaps they believe they’ve been beaten up for so long that it’s time to make the best of what advantage they have.”

‘A Philosophical Problem’

Arne Duncan once bragged about what he did to Englewood High School.

In 2011, New York City math teacher and blogger Gary Rubinstein caught Duncan at a national conference of Teach for America—a private, nonprofit that flourished, in part, because of policies Duncan enacted as secretary of education—saying that one of the charter schools that had replaced Englewood had produced better results with the “same children.” As Rubinstein explained, that wasn’t really true because the charter, Urban Prep, cleverly manipulated its student enrollment and graduation statistics to make itself look better.

Since 2022, at least, CPS has been trying to shut down two campuses of Urban Prep due to “allegations” that the school had “mismanaged finances and failed to comply with special education laws, as well as accusations that the school’s founder, Tim King, sexually abused a now-former student,” Chalkbeat reported in 2023. Another article by Chalkbeat in 2024 said that a state appellate court allowed the closure to proceed.

Another school that replaced Englewood, TEAM Englewood, was shut down by the district in 2018 after years of losing students and funding.

It’s not at all clear that the current acrimony between CPS and the union resembles a political grudge match, as Zavitkovsky suggested. But what’s obvious is that Democratic lawmakers, both nationally and in Chicago, who claim the party is pivoting to a policy agenda driven by care rather than political calculation will need to prove that the party’s past isn’t a prologue.

Martire, for one, expressed deep frustration with the situation Democratic leaders have put themselves into, calling it “a philosophical problem.”

“Chicago has a fiscal crisis that conservatives had the brilliance to create,” he said. They understood, according to him, that once government institutions have inadequate capacity to pay for things, they will have inadequate outcomes. But paying for improvements is always a problem because tax increases are unpopular.

So they steadfastly fought any tax increases, realizing that eventually cutting off money would rob government systems of the capacity to produce desirable outcomes, make institutions like public schools dysfunctional, and help convince people that pouring more money into them was wasteful.

Conservatives played the long game Martire described so well that even Democrats, like Duncan, started calling public schools “cultural failures.”

“So now,” Martire said, “neither Illinois nor CPS currently has the financial capacity to do the job of educating students.”

This isn’t to say that campaigning to raise everyone’s taxes would be a winning political strategy.

But should Democrats want to make good on their new promise to be a champion for families and working people, patching up the party’s tattered relationship with organized teachers seems like a good idea, and Chicago is a great place to start.

Click here to read the article on LA Progressive.

Jeff Bryant is a writing fellow and chief correspondent for Our Schools. He is a communications consultant, freelance writer, advocacy journalist, and director of the Education Opportunity Network, a strategy and messaging center for progressive education policy. His award-winning commentary and reporting routinely appear in prominent online news outlets, and he speaks frequently at national events about public education policy. Follow him on Twitter @jeffbcdm.

Photo Credit: Charles Edward Miller / Wikimedia Commons

Can Vice-Presidential Pick Tim Walz Make Democrats the Education Party Again?

Click here to read the article on LA Progressive.

Harris’s decision to choose a teacher as her running mate creates an opportunity to remake the Democratic Party’s image for public schools.

In choosing Minnesota Governor Tim Walz to be her running mate, Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris has not only picked a progressive governor and a Midwestern populist to lead the party’s national ticket but she also may have signaled that the Democratic Party is ready to take back its reputation as the education party.

Walz, a former public school teacher and football coach in Mankato, Minnesota, draws on his experience as an educator to inform his political persona and policy beliefs, saying in a 2007 interview with Education Week—after he was elected to Congress—that teachers are “more grounded in what people really care about.”

As governor of Minnesota, he acted on that philosophy of caring by pushing for and signing into law a $72 billion state budget in May 2023 that significantly increased funding for the state’s public schools, provided for a new $1,750-per-child tax credit, free college tuition for families earning less than $80,000 per year, funding for free school meals for K-12 students statewide, and paid sick leave for workers, as well as a paid family and medical leave.

The “historic” education spending Walz approved included a $5.5 billion increase over the next four years, a substantial raise to the state’s per-pupil funding formula, and an increase in funding for full-service community schools consisting of $7.5 million for two years and then $5 million per year in the future. Community schools practice a holistic education approach that entails attending to the non-academic needs of students and families, including access to technology, social services, physical and mental health care, adult education, and after-school and summer programs.

It’s also telling that in picking Walz to be her running mate Harris rejected Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, who prominent centrist Democrats claimed was Harris’s “best chance” of wooing political moderates in an election that is expected to be a close race to the finish.

But Shapiro had set off alarms among public school advocates. In a letter sent in July 2024 to the Harris campaign, which was picked up by numerous media outlets, more than two dozen grassroots education groups warned against selecting Shapiro because of his support for taxpayer-funded private school vouchers.

The letter stated that Shapiro “has supported education policies mirroring Project 2025,” the right-wing manifesto from the Heritage Foundation that is expected to provide a blueprint for a new Trump administration and “includes measures to funnel federal education funds directly to families through education savings accounts,” stated WITF.

“Through Project 2025,” the letter further read, “[conservatives] have made it abundantly clear the end goal of gutting public education and privatizing what is left via irresponsible voucher systems like those in Florida and Arizona.”

“Walz has pretty much been the best governor on education in Minnesota in decades,” wrote Sarah Lahm in an email to Our Schools. Lahm is a veteran education journalist based in the state and an Our Schools contributing writer. Choosing Walz to be the nominee “is good news,” she said, “especially compared to Shapiro and his school choice record.”

No doubt, in selecting a running mate, the Harris team weighed numerous issues, but the fact that opposition to school vouchers came to the fore is unusual in Democratic political circles where education is often not considered to be an important national issue.

When Democrats Were the Education Party

The last time the Democratic Party had a former K-12 school teacher running for vice president was in 1960, and the candidate was Lyndon Johnson. Although most experts insist that vice presidents have little influence on federal policies, Johnson ultimately became president and was instrumental in pushing through the landmark Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) in 1965 that is still, in its current version called Every Student Succeeds Act, and is the blueprint for federal education policy today.

The Democratic Party burnished its reputation as the education party in 1979 when then-Democratic President Jimmy Carter approved legislation to create the U.S. Department of Education as a Cabinet-level entity.

In 2004, Frederick Hess and Andrew Kelly of the right-wing American Enterprise Institute wrote, “Historically, Democrats have enjoyed a substantial advantage over the Republicans on education due to their support for education spending and their decades-old alliance with unions and public employees.”

But that advantage began to erode in the late 1980s, Hess and Kelly contended, due to “Reaganite critiques of liberalism and expensive social programs.” Democrats responded to those attacks by “seek[ing] a more moderate course on domestic policies, including education,” they noted, and by late 2002, when Congress passed the bipartisan No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law, popular opinion on which party was best on education was nearly split.

Nevertheless, Democrats seemed to have regained the advantage by 2012 when polling by Pew Research Center found, “By about two-to-one (53 percent to 27 percent), more [voters] say Democrats can do a better job improving the education system in the country.”

But the Democrats’ resurgence as the favored party for education didn’t last, and when Pew surveyed voters again in 2014, the party had only a 4 percent advantage over Republicans in handling education.

“Taken as a whole, the data suggest that Democrats are struggling more on education than at any other time in the past two decades,” Hess wrote in 2022 when he again examined which party had the best education cred.

The Democratic party’s declining reputation for supporting public schools did not mean Republicans were gaining much favorability, Hess found, but “Democrats have been losing voters’ confidence for a half-decade, and that decline has become noticeably steeper over the past two years,” he wrote, noting that nearly one in five voters didn’t trust either party.

Also in 2022, a poll of voters in key battleground states conducted by Hart Research for the American Federation of Teachers found 39 percent of voters trusted Republicans compared to 38 percent who showed confidence in the Democrats on education issues. Another poll conducted the same year by Democrats for Education Reform, an organization that advocates for privatizing schools with charters and vouchers, found a more lopsided Republican advantage, with 47 percent saying they trusted Republicans “to handle education” and 43 percent saying they trusted Democrats.

What Happened?

Republicans would have you believe that the source for the shift in popular approval on education policy away from Democrats was due to mask mandates that Democratic government officials supported during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Another narrative that right-wing operatives like to spin is that when the pandemic forced students to shift to remote learning, parents saw firsthand that their children were being instructed in so-called leftist ideology and “Democratic indoctrination.”

Although many media outlets have reported these narratives as factual, they really aren’t.

First, surveys of parents during the pandemic years found that they were mostly supportive of how schools responded to the situation, and when schools went back to face-to-face learning, parents remained satisfied with the schools.

Also, as the above survey data from Pew in 2014 show, voters started to sour on the Democratic Party’s education politics before the COVID-19 outbreak.

Without a doubt, the Democratic Party’s declining popularity related to education has something to do with the policies the party supported or failed to support. During the years that Pew was tracking the party’s declining reputation on education issues, the Obama presidential administration’s education agenda and his ham-handed Secretary of Education Arne Duncan were so disastrous that Congress was spurred to rewrite ESEA to rein in some of the federal government’s powers to shape local education policies.

Further, during President Trump’s administration, while Republicans coalesced around so-called school choice policies that give parents taxpayer funds to pull their kids out of public schools, the Democratic Party countered with, well, basically nothing.

It bears noting that when Joe Biden ran for president, he did not continue with the education policies of the Obama administration, and his administration, likely at the urging of the strong public school advocacy of First Lady Jill Biden, returned to a relatively safe narrative of education as an essential “investment.” But he never really gave the Democrats a programmatic education brand the party could hang its hat on.

Having Tim Walz on the Democratic Party’s presidential campaign is an opportunity to change that.

‘Sitting on the Edge of Our Seats’

Based on his accomplishments in Minnesota, Walz has demonstrated his inclination to back education policies that matter most. He also eschews policy gimmicks that have been favored by both parties.

In his 2007 interview with Education Week, Walz criticized NCLB as a “bureaucratic nightmare” and said “the application of it [had] very little impact on real student achievement.”

As governor, he has “stood firmly against school voucher programs,” according to the Baltimore Sun, and opposed Minnesota’s Republican-controlled Senate that wanted to create education savings accounts that give parents taxpayer money to pull their children out of public schools and use other education options.

With Walz now elevated to a vice-presidential nominee, public education advocates and policy experts are “sitting on the edge of our seats to see the policy implications of a teacher as the vice president of the United States of America,” wrote education professor Phelton Moss in an August 2024 op-ed for Education Week. “A Harris-Walz administration could be a historic next phase in education policy,” he wrote.

Of course, it’s still early in the long presidential campaign season to say whether or not education becomes a prominent issue. A Harris-Walz victory is far from being assured, and vice presidents often have little influence over policy directions in a presidential administration.

But Harris’s decision to choose Walz as her running mate creates an opportunity to overhaul the outdated education policies of the Democratic Party establishment and remake the party’s image of being a genuine hero for public schools and children.

Click here to read the article on LA Progressive.

Jeff Bryant is a writing fellow and chief correspondent for Our Schools. He is a communications consultant, freelance writer, advocacy journalist, and director of the Education Opportunity Network, a strategy and messaging center for progressive education policy. His award-winning commentary and reporting routinely appear in prominent online news outlets, and he speaks frequently at national events about public education policy. Follow him on Twitter @jeffbcdm.

Photo Credit: Office of Governor Walz & Lt. Governor Flanagan / Flickr

Observatory Special Report on How Investors Are Exploiting Public Education

Click here to read the article on the Observatory.

For-profit operators and their investors use complex business arrangements and networks of related companies to enrich themselves and do little to improve education.

Ever since charter schools were created in the 1990s, there’s been a persistent question1 of whether or not the schools introduce an element of profit-making into the public education sector. In statutory law, legislatures have generally ruled that charter schools must be operated as nonprofits. In fact, only one state,2 Arizona, technically allows for-profit organizations to be licensed to run charter schools. Yet, the charter school industry has proven to be an innovator in developing business arrangements in which third-party and related organizations profit handsomely off a nonprofit charter.

One such entryway for profit-making enterprises to exploit charter schools, according to an in-depth examination conducted by Our Schools in 2021, occurs when for-profit charter school operators partner with private investors intent on turning quick profits from public dollars meant for educating children.

Our Schools examined the relationship between Pansophic Learning, owner of the Accel Schools chain of for-profit charter schools, and Safanad Limited, a private equity firm, originating in the Middle East, with extensive investment holdings in K–12 education, senior living, and other public sector-related enterprises.

What Our Schools found was that for-profit businesses like Pansophic Learning are providing entryways for wealthy investors from abroad to flood the U.S. with money to buy up struggling taxpayer-funded enterprises and put into place elaborate business schemes and networks of interrelated companies that hide their profiteering while doing little to improve the quality of services to the public.

A request for comment regarding Pansophic’s relationship with Safanad and the partnership’s potential for conflicts of interest that was left as a press inquiry at the Pansophic website did not receive a reply.

The combination of for-profit operators backed by private equity has become prevalent in other publicly funded sectors that have traditionally been operated by federal and/or state governments or nonprofit organizations. And the results have not been beneficial to the public or the individuals the publicly funded system was intended to serve.

For example, in the government-funded prison system, “The involvement of private equity firms, which manage large investment portfolios, presents a conflict between the financial and social goals of some investors,” reported Prison Legal News in 2019, citing two studies—one from the nonprofit Worth Rises, which advocates for “dismantling the prison industry,” and the other from the American Federation of Teachers, a national teachers’ union.

Another analysis, by the ACLU, found that for-profit prison operators backed by private investors are more apt to create profit for their investors by maintaining high rates of incarceration, which results in significantly higher social and fiscal costs to the public.

Our Schools found that this combination of for-profit entrepreneurs backed by private investors is having a similarly corrosive impact in the charter school industry.

Ron Packard and K12 Inc.

The genesis of Accel Schools goes back to 2014, when Education Week reported that Ron Packard, the former CEO of K12 Inc., had formed a new education enterprise called Pansophic Learning. K12 Inc., which changed its name to Stride Inc. in 2020, was then, and as of this writing still is, the largest for-profit charter school operator in the U.S.

Packard, a former Goldman Sachs executive who specialized in mergers and acquisitions, departed K12 Inc., which he founded, at a time when the company was besieged with negative publicity.

In 2011, K12 Inc. was the subject of a scathing story in the New York Times revealing that “only a third” of the students enrolled in its online charter schools “achieved adequate yearly progress, the measurement mandated by federal No Child Left Behind legislation,” while the company employed multiple ways to “squeeze profits from public school dollars by raising enrollment, increasing teacher workload, and lowering standards.”

The withering critique, which ran on the newspaper’s front page, “caused” the publicly traded company’s stock price “to drop precipitously,” Education Week reported in 2012, and prompted a shareholder to file a federal lawsuit accusing K12 Inc. executives, including Packard, of “misleading investors with false student-performance claims.”

More negative publicity came in 2013 when Politico reported K12 Inc. was one among many online charter schools that “posts dismal scores on math, writing, and science tests and mediocre scores on reading.” Another blow came that year when influential hedge fund manager and charter school proponent Whitney Tilson announced he was shorting K12 Inc. stock, betting the company would fail.

In 2014, K12 Inc. became the target of yet another lawsuit accusing the company of “misleading investors by putting forward overly positive public statements… only later to reveal that it had missed key operational and financial targets,” Education Week reported. The lawsuit also charged Packard, whose relationship to the company had become unclear, of selling off his own stock before revealing the negative financials, and, thus, earning a windfall of $6.4 million before the stock price plunged.

But as Packard disengaged from one troubled education enterprise, he started another with a financial partner that would provide the capital to quickly scale up.

As Education Week reported in 2014, Packard’s new company, Pansophic Learning, included a partnership with a holding company, Safanad Education, a subsidiary of Safanad Limited, a New York- and Dubai-based real estate and investment firm. Packard and Safanad spent an unknown sum to purchase part of K12 Inc.’s assets, mostly in higher education, and acquire an international brick-and-mortar private school. The two entrepreneurs were “on the hunt for acquisitions,” according to Education Week.

A Charter School Shopping Spree

Initially, Packard and Pansophic Learning kept a low profile until, in 2016, a visit by then-Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump drew attention to a Cleveland, Ohio, brick-and-mortar charter school “that usually escapes notice,” reported the Plain Dealer, a Cleveland newspaper.

According to the Plain Dealer, the school, the Cleveland Arts and Social Sciences Academy, was one of 27 schools in Colorado, Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, and Ohio that had been recently acquired by Accel Schools, a new for-profit network of charter schools owned and operated by Pansophic Learning.

Packard is listed as the CEO of both Pansophic Learning and Accel Schools. Two other C-suite executives of both Pansophic Learning and Accel Schools are COO Maria Szalay and CTO Eric Waller. Pansophic Learning and Accel Schools also have street addresses within 5 minutes’ walking distance of each other in McLean, Virginia.

Prior to the news about Trump visiting its school, Accel Schools had been “amassing an education empire” in Ohio, the Akron Beacon Journal reported.

Among its acquisitions were, in 2014, the “troubled K-8 schools” of White Hat Management, which had previously been, according to the Akron Beacon Journal, Ohio’s largest charter school chain. In 2018, Accel Schools purchased White Hat’s last remaining online charter school as well.

In 2015, Accel Schools also acquired the assets of another financially struggling charter management firm, Mosaica Education, and bought Cleveland-based I Can Schools, which, Packard told the Plain Dealer, were also “struggling financially.”

The charter school shopping spree Accel Schools went on undoubtedly benefited from the financial support of Safanad.

“We are fortunate to partner with Safanad,” Packard is quoted saying in Safanad’s official announcement of its partnership with Pansophic Learning in 2014. “Safanad’s extensive resources will allow us to pursue opportunities of all sizes,” he said.

The Bahamdan Connection

According to the firm’s website, Safanad’s founder and CEO is Kamal Bahamdan, a Saudi national. Kamal Bahamdan “was the CEO of the Bahamdan [investment Group],” according to his profile.

Kamal Bahamdan’s current relationship with the Bahamdan Investment Group is unclear, but the Bahamdan firm maintains a controlling interest in Safanad. According to its SEC filings brochure, Safanad is “controlled by Bahamdan Investment Group and KB Group Holdings Ltd.” KB Group Holdings Ltd., according to Safanad’s SEC filing form, is owned by the Bahamdan Investment Group.

The Bahamdan Investment Group is a Saudi-based investment firm founded by Salem Bahamdan, Kamal Bahamdan’s father, according to ZoomInfo. Kamal Bahamdan is the grandson of Abdullah Bahamdan, according to Wikipedia.

In numerous online profiles, Abdullah Salem Bahamdan (also Abdullah S. Bahamdan, Abdullah Salim Bahamdan, and Abdullah Bahamdan) is described as a “seasoned banker” and one of “the Middle East’s most prominent and influential financiers.”

Abdullah Bahamdan also spent more than 50 years as the chairman of “Saudi Arabia’s National Commercial Bank, the largest lender in the Arab world,” according to Institutional Investor. National Commercial Bank (NCB), which merged with Samba Financial Group in 2021 to form Saudi National Bank (SNB), was established in 1953 by royal decree, according to the SNB website, with the Saudi government as its major shareholder.

Despite its close relationship to the Saudi government, NCB was one among 16 financial institutions that were fined by the Saudi Monetary Authority in 2019 “for violating principles of responsible finance,” according to Reuters. “[T]he violations were related to exceeding debt burdens imposed on people in proportion to their monthly income.”

In 2020, the U.S. Treasury Department settled a lawsuit with NCB accusing the bank of violating U.S. sanctions against Syria and Sudan between November 2011 to August 2014.

The bank and Abdullah Bahamdan have been the subjects of at least two lawsuits accusing them of financing terrorist groups, which may have been part of what prompted the Saudi government to, in 2017, “crack down on corruption” in its banking industry, Reuters reported.

Perhaps as a result of the crackdown, SNB, as of 2019, claimed on its website that it “developed a Bank-wide Anti-Money Laundering and Combating Terrorist Financing Policy.”

Mixing Charter School Investments With Subpar Senior Care

Aside from its investments in Pansophic Learning, Safanad has made some of its biggest commercial real estate deals in the health care sector, principally in senior care facilities, including assisted living, independent living, memory care, and nursing homes, frequently called skilled nursing facilities.

Senior Housing News reported that Safanad teamed up with investment firm Formation Capital, an Atlanta-based health-care-focused private investment company, to purchase 36 senior care facilities in 2011, and, in 2012, the partners spent $750 million to acquire 68 more nursing homes located in East Coast states. The acquisitions made the two investment firms “one of the United States’ largest standalone skilled nursing portfolios,” according to Senior Housing News, with “more than $1 billion worth of senior care assets in the U.S.”

In 2013, the same two investment firms purchased a “36-property senior housing portfolio for approximately $400 million,” reported Senior Housing News, and in 2014, the two firms struck another deal to buy “14 skilled nursing facilities in the mid-Atlantic for about $150 million,” according to Senior Housing News.

The deals Safanad and Formation Capital struck to acquire senior care facilities are strikingly similar to the business transactions Safanad conducted with Pansophic Learning in the charter school sector, principally, buying up financially struggling service businesses that receive large amounts of public funding—in the case of the senior care sector, from Medicare and Medicaid—and that also happen to include significant holdings of real estate.

The nursing home and senior living facilities industry was struggling financially before the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a report by the Pew Charitable Trust. Facilities had been cutting corners for years, skating by with too few staff, due to stagnating wages, and sometimes hiring unskilled workers instead of highly trained personnel.

COVID-19 simply revealed an industry that was already “broken,” reported NBC News, citing “low pay, high turnover, and tough working conditions” as chronic problems in the senior care facilities industry.

Yet the growing presence of private equity investors in the senior care industry has done little to help the industry and appears to have done mostly harm.

A 2020 study3 found that private equity ownership of nursing homes and other kinds of senior living facilities increased costs to the public by 19 percent while shortening the lifespans of patients.

Patients in facilities with substantial private equity backing tended to have less access to nurses, declining mobility, and greater use of antipsychotic medications, the study found. Consequently, “private equity ownership increases short-term mortality by 10 percent,” the authors claimed, “which implies about 21,000 lives lost due to private equity ownership over our sample period.”

As with the for-profit prison industry, many of the problems posed by private investment firms in the senior care industry, according to the study, can be sourced to “high-powered for-profit incentives… [being] misaligned with the social goals of quality care at a reasonable cost.”

The study distinguished private equity for-profit ownership from “generic” for-profit ownership because “private equity ownership confers distinct incentives to quickly and substantially increase the value of their portfolio firms.” It is this form of intense, high-powered profit-maximizing incentives, the authors asserted, “that characterize[s] private equity… [and could lead to] detrimental implications for consumer welfare.”

Investor-driven senior care facilities were especially hard hit by the COVID-19 pandemic, a 2020 article in the New York Times reported.

“Decades of ownership by private equity and other private investment firms left many nursing homes with staggering bills and razor-thin margins,” according to the article.

“The toll of putting profits first started to show when the outbreak began,” the article continued. “[S]ome for-profit homes were particularly ill equipped and understaffed, which undercut their ability to contain the spread of the coronavirus.”

Among the for-profit operators that appear to have fared poorly in the pandemic is Consulate Health Care, one of the providers that were snapped up by Safanad and Formation Capital in 2014, according to Senior Housing News. In a 2020 report, the Private Equity Stakeholder Project listed Formation Capital as the owner of Consulate Health Care.

Nursing homes operated by Consulate Health Care and Formation Capital have been hotspots for COVID-19 outbreaks, according to numerous news reports from Florida and Virginia. The high incidence of outbreaks prompted, in part, a U.S. House committee to launch an investigation into the country’s five largest for-profit nursing home companies, including Consulate Health Care, Politico reported in 2020.

‘Creative Ways to Wring Profits’

As the New York Times reported in 2020, while senior care facilities often struggle financially, their private equity-backed owners have “found creative ways to wring profits out of them.”

Some of these creative ways include charging their operators “hefty management and consulting fees”; buying the real estate from the operators and then leasing the buildings back to the operators, while upping the rents; and pushing their operators to buy products and services from companies that are controlled by the investors.4

The real estate plays these firms pull off are particularly lucrative, the New York Times noted, because the buildings are often “more valuable than the businesses themselves.”

A 2018 article in the Naples Daily News described how these arrangements work in Consulate Health Care facilities owned by Formation Capital, the state’s largest provider.

Consulate Health Care and Formation Capital both operate a network of other related businesses—including “real estate, management, rehabilitation and other companies”—that they use as subcontractors for the nursing homes they own.

So when “[t]axpayer money flows to Consulate nursing homes,” the article explained, some of the money also goes to subcontractors that are related to the owners, Consulate Health Care and its controlling company, Formation Capital. “[A]nd profits earned go to the chain’s owner, the Atlanta-based private equity firm Formation Capital,” the article stated.

One of the Consulate Health Care nursing homes highlighted in the article pays its owner and management fees to two Consulate companies and also pays its lease payments and rehabilitation service fees to providers that are both related to Formation Capital.

“In each case,” the article said, “the money flows back to Formation Capital and its wealthy investors,” which include Safanad.

Pansophic Learning and Accel Schools operate similar business arrangements that help their organizations maximize their profits, according to a 2021 report by the Network for Public Education (NPE).[2]

Much in the same way Consulate Health Care facilities and Formation Capital push their nursing homes into contracts with their other related businesses, Accel and Pansophic use “a complex web of corporations,” according to NPE, to “control the operations of the school and in doing so, steer business to their related services.”

The report highlighted Accel-managed Broadway Academy, in Cleveland, a charter school previously owned by White Hat Management, according to the Accel Schools contract with the school.

Under the “fees” section in the terms of that contract—originally with for-profit management company Chippewa Community School, LLC, which is now a subsidiary of Accel Schools Ohio LLC—the school, referred to in the contract as the corporation, pays the operator (Accel, by way of its subsidiary Chippewa Community School, LLC) 96 percent of the school’s monthly qualified gross revenue, which is the per-pupil revenue the school receives from the state. In return, Accel is the sole source to provide the school with school staffing and professional development, school management and consulting, textbooks, equipment, technology, student recruitment, building payments, maintenance, custodial service, security, and capital improvements.

In other words, there’s nothing that stops Accel or Pansophic from creating yet more subsidiaries and other related companies that can do business with Broadway Academy. According to the contract, Accel can subcontract services “without the [Broadway Academy] Board’s approval,” and property purchased by Accel “shall remain… [Accel’s] sole property.”

According to NPE, these kinds of contracts, known as “sweeps,” are commonplace in the for-profit charter school industry.

“Sweeps contracts give for-profits the authority to run all school services in exchange for all or nearly all of the school’s revenue,” said the NPE report.

Taxpayer funding for the Broadway Academy that isn’t swept up by Accel’s continuing fee must be deposited into a “Student Enrichment Fund” for “educational services in the areas of student cultural activities[,] … supplemental tutoring services[,] and other programs.” Accel has sole authority to “propose uses for such funds,” and 85 percent “of all Student Enrichment Funds not spent during the fiscal year in which they are received shall be paid over to [Accel].”

While Accel’s contract with Broadway Academy doesn’t include real estate, the authors of the NPE report searched the database of Ohio charter school contracts, called “community schools documents,” and found that “Global School Properties Ohio, LLC holds the leases for many Accel charter schools. The… [landlord] is at the same 1650 Tysons Blvd. address in McLean, Virginia, as Pansophic [Learning].”

Profiting From D- and F-Rated Schools

School choice and charter school advocates are often quick to defend for-profit charter companies and their private investors, arguing that they are “sector agnostic”5 about who owns and operates a school and care only about the school’s “results.”

But what constitutes good results in education is a much-debated topic,6 and studies about the results of for-profit charter schools have found mixed results at best.

A 2017 report from Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) found that students who attend for-profit charter schools have weaker growth in math than they would have in a district public school and similar growth in reading.7 Students in nonprofit charter schools experienced stronger academic growth in both subjects than their peers enrolled in for-profit charters. The differences were “significant,” according to the study.

Also in 2017, Chalkbeat reported, “studies comparing for-profit schools to nonprofits and traditional public schools in the same area don’t find consistent differences in performance, as measured by test scores.”

None of these studies examined the performance of Accel Schools or the impact of private equity in the for-profit charter industry.

Nevertheless, an ongoing investigation by Our Schools has revealed charter schools operated by for-profit operators like Accel Schools cycle struggling charter schools through a series of private entities that, in turn, strip the schools of resources, run them at bare-bones costs, and reap whatever assets that remain before handing the schools off to the next private operator, or shutting them down completely. The result is charter operators and their investors may achieve the results they want, while the children caught up in this investor-driven enterprise often have their education significantly disrupted, or even permanently impaired, perhaps with lifelong impact.

References

  1. Network for Public Education, “Do Charter Schools Profit From Educating Students?” (April 2021).
  2. Network for Public Education, “Chartered for Profit: The Hidden World of Charter Schools Operated for Financial Gain” (July 2021).
  3. Atul Gupta, Sabrina T. Howell, Constantine Yannelis, and Abhinav Gupta; NYU Stern School of Business; “Does Private Equity Investment in Healthcare Benefit Patients? Evidence from Nursing Homes”​​ (2020).
  4. Matthew Goldstein, Jessica Silver-Greenberg, and Robert Gebeloff; New York Times; “Push for Profits Left Nursing Homes Struggling to Provide Care” (May 7, 2020).
  5. Nicole Stelle Garnet, Notre Dame Law School, “Sector Agnosticism and the Coming Transformation of Education Law” (April 2017).
  6. W. James Popham, ASCD, “Why Standardized Tests Don’t Measure Educational Quality” (1999).
  7. James L. Woodworth et al, Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO), “Charter Management Organizations” (2017).

Jeff Bryant is a writing fellow and chief correspondent for Our Schools. He is a communications consultant, freelance writer, advocacy journalist, and director of the Education Opportunity Network, a strategy and messaging center for progressive education policy. His award-winning commentary and reporting routinely appear in prominent online news outlets, and he speaks frequently at national events about public education policy. Follow him on Twitter @jeffbcdm.

Photo Credit: jonathan mcintosh / Flickr

The Right’s Long Game to End Public Education

The following is an excerpt of an article that was originally published on the Progressive.

Click to read the full article online.

Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona finally said the quiet part out loud.

On February 13, President Joe Biden’s Secretary of Education, Miguel Cardona, did something Democratic officials seldom do in public: He spoke the truth about what’s behind the relentless attacks on public schools by rightwing advocacy groups and their financial backers.

As HuffPost reported, one of the topics that came up during a meeting between Cardona and Black journalists that took place at the Department of Education, was the recent wave of new laws passed in mostly red states that target programs in K-12 schools and institutions of higher education that address diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).

Advocates for DEI programs say they are needed to ensure positive academic, health, and social outcomes for students who often face discrimination and fewer educational opportunities due to their race, class, religion, gender, or ability level. Opponents say they shame white students and cause “reverse discrimination.”

Cardona called new laws passed by Republican state lawmakers to eliminate DEI programs “a deliberate attack on efforts to try to make sure schools are inclusive, welcoming places for all students—in particular, students from different backgrounds.”

But more than just defending schools for embracing DEI, Cardona went further to call out the intention behind these attacks on the programs, calling them “very deliberate attempts to seek division in our schools so that a private option sounds better [emphasis added] for parents.” 

“Every year, there’s something to stoke division in an attempt to disrupt our public schools and decrease the confidence in our public schools,” he said. “Four years ago were the masks. [Critical race theory] was a year after that. [Now,] DEI, [and] banning books.”

The serial crises that groups like Moms for Liberty and the Heritage Foundation string together year after year to inflame the populace with fear and suspicion about public schools have been the subject of extensive reporting.

But when major news outlets report on these outbursts of rightwing rage, the articles tend to focus solely on the legitimacy of specific grievances rather than considering whether the attacks themselves could be a tactic in a much longer game.

[…]

Read the rest of this article on the Progressive.

Jeff Bryant is a writing fellow and chief correspondent for Our Schools. He is a communications consultant, freelance writer, advocacy journalist, and director of the Education Opportunity Network, a strategy and messaging center for progressive education policy. His award-winning commentary and reporting routinely appear in prominent online news outlets, and he speaks frequently at national events about public education policy. Follow him on Twitter @jeffbcdm.

Photo Credit: U.S. Department of Education / Flickr

A Tale of Two Federal Grants for Public Education

The following is an excerpt of an article that was originally published on the Progressive.

Click to read the full article online.

The Department of Education has separate grant programs for funding either charter or community schools; the latter provides money for what schools and families really need, the former, not so much.

Two education-related grant programs operated by the U.S. Department of Education—both of which dole out millions in federal tax dollars for educating K-12 children every year—present two opposing truths about government spending on public education: that it can be wasteful and misguided, or innovative and informed. 

The first program enjoys the significant backing of industry lobbyists and wealthy foundations, and allows private education operators—some that operate for-profit—to skim public money off the top. It also adds to racial segregation in public schools, and squanders millions of dollars on education providers that come and quickly go, or simply fail to provide any education services at all.

The second program helps schools expand learning time and opportunities for students, especially in high-poverty and rural communities; promote parent engagement; encourage collaboration with local businesses and nonprofits; and become hubs for child- and family-related services that contribute to students’ health and well-being.

These strikingly different outcomes result from two different intentions: the first program’s goal to promote a type of school that is vaguely defined versus the second’s goal to expand a way of doing school that is supported by research and anecdotal evidence.

The first grant program is the Charter Schools Program (CSP), which funds privately operated charter schools and their developers and advocacy organizations. The program, started during the Clinton Administration and greatly expanded during the Obama years, gives money directly to charter schools and to state education agencies and charter school-related organizations to distribute to new, existing, or proposed charters.

In October, the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, the nation’s top lobbyist for the charter school industry, hailed the federal government’s release of $572 million in taxpayer dollars from the CSP, calling the money “the most essential funding to enable the existence of public charter schools.”

In New Mexico, local press outlets reported that a $52 million CSP grant went to a charter industry advocacy group called the Public Charter Schools of New Mexico, which in turn would award subgrants to individual charter schools. One reporter quoted the group’s leader who said, “There was a large application with several requirements in there. And we were scored based on, you know, how well we met the requirements and a peer review process.”

In Idaho, Idaho Ed News reported about the $24.8 million CSP grant going to Bluum, which the reporter called “a nonprofit charter support organization.” The grant is to be used “to grow and strengthen Idaho’s charter school network,” the article said.

Maryland’s top charter school industry booster, the Maryland Alliance of Public Charter Schools, celebrated its $28.7 million CSP saying it would provide “subgrants to open new charter schools and/or replicate and expand charter schools.”

Not all CSP grants went to advocacy groups. The largest—totaling $109,740,731—went to the Indiana Department of Education. According to Chalkbeat, one out of three charter schools in Indiana have closed since 2001.

A 2019 analysis conducted by the Network for Public Education, a pro-public schools advocacy group, found that over its lifespan CSP has wasted as much as $1 billion on charter schools that never opened or opened and quickly closed.

Another CSP grant of $37,579,122 went to the Minnesota Department of Education. In Minnesota, courts have grappled for years with the question of whether racial imbalances in public schools, caused to a great extent by the expansion of racially segregated charter schools, violate the constitutional right of students of color to receive an adequate education.

Other CSP grants went to credit enhancement for charter school facilities, essentially giving public money to real estate development firms and investment companies that finance and build new charter schools.

[…]

Read the rest of this article on the Progressive.

Jeff Bryant is a writing fellow and chief correspondent for Our Schools. He is a communications consultant, freelance writer, advocacy journalist, and director of the Education Opportunity Network, a strategy and messaging center for progressive education policy. His award-winning commentary and reporting routinely appear in prominent online news outlets, and he speaks frequently at national events about public education policy. Follow him on Twitter @jeffbcdm.

Photo Credit: Fry1989 / Wikimedia Commons

How Right-Wing Brainchild ‘Universal School Vouchers’ Are Blowing Through State Budgets

Photo Credit: Overpass Light Brigade / Flickr

Click here to read the article on the LA Progressive.

Newly enacted universal school vouchers are greatly exceeding state budgets, and it’s not clear where the money to pay for cost overruns will come from.

By Jeff Bryant

In 2023, Republican state governors went to unprecedented lengths to enact universal school voucher programs in legislative sessions across the country and made support for these programs into rigid party ideology. Republican Texas Governor Greg Abbott, for instance, went so far as to recall the state’s legislature for a fourth special session, a historically unprecedented action in the Texas Legislature’s 176-year history, according to a November 7 article in the Texas Tribune. According to the report, “[t]he biggest point of contention” is a universal school voucher bill that House Republicans have repeatedly rejected. Previously, Abbott warned any Republican holdouts that they would be challenged from within the party in the 2024 primary elections if they didn’t get in line and extend their support for vouchers.

Abbott calls his voucher plan “education freedom,” echoing a term favored by former President Donald Trump’s Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, who used her office to push for a federally funded nationwide school voucher program.

School vouchers can take on many forms, including tax credit programs—which give tax credits to anyone who donates to nonprofits that provide school vouchers—and so-called education savings accounts (ESAs), which allow parents to withdraw their children from public schools and receive a deposit of public funds into an account that they can tap for education expenses. Abbott is attempting to push through an ESA in Texas.

When voucher programs were initially enacted in early adopting states, such as Florida and Arizona, eligibility was limited to low-income families or to children with special needs or circumstances. But the trend over the last few years has been to make these programs open to all or nearly all families. What Abbott is proposing, in fact, would allow all families to apply for vouchers.

Nine states have enacted universal school vouchers as of November 2023, including Arizona, Arkansas, Iowa, Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Utah, and West Virginia, according to State Policy Network, a school choice advocacy group. Indiana’s voucher program is “near universal,” as 97 percent of families are eligible under the scheme.

Republicans who oppose universal school vouchers, in Texas and elsewhere, have expressed concerns about diverting tax dollars from public schools, especially in rural communities, to private education providers that have little or no accountability for how they spend the money. They’ve also questioned the constitutionality of giving parents public funds to spend on private religious schools.

But Republican state lawmakers who claim to be strict watchdogs on government purse strings should also be concerned about another consequence of enacting these programs—their potential to quickly run through estimated costs and produce sizable deficits.

According to multiple reports detailed below, states that have been among the earliest to adopt universal voucher programs are finding that their costs are far exceeding estimates primarily due to the high numbers of families taking advantage of the programs. These families mostly never had their children enrolled in public schools.

In state after state, the number of families using vouchers to “escape” so-called failed public schools—an original argument for vouchers—is dwarfed by a larger population of families who already had their children enrolled in private schools and are using voucher money to subsidize their private school tuition costs.

Another large percentage of voucher users are parents who homeschool their children and use voucher funds to cover expenses they would previously have been shouldering themselves. Vouchers also appear to be incentivizing parents with rising kindergartners to choose private schools instead of their local public schools.

Other reports have raised concerns about the financial wisdom of giving parents free sway over how they use voucher money, citing evidence that parents have used the funding to make extravagant purchases or buy products and services that have dubious educational value.

In the meantime, policy leaders and experts alike warn that universal voucher programs are sending states, which are constitutionally obligated to balance their budgets, into uncharted financial waters.

‘It Depends on the State and Is Hard to Know’

Where will funding to cover cost overruns of voucher programs come from?

“It depends on the funding mechanism in the voucher law,” according to Jessica Levin, an attorney and director of Public Funds Public Schools, an organization that opposes efforts to redirect public funds for education to private entities.

“For programs that divert funds earmarked for public schools… the voucher funding would dip further into public school funds and/or appropriations,” Levin explained in an email to Our Schools. “For vouchers that are funded with general revenue funds, more money would come out of the state general fund.”

Funding for Abbott’s proposed voucher plan, for example, draws from the state’s general revenue rather than the main source of funding for K-12 education.

Levin added that there could be other mechanisms to prevent cost overruns, including spending caps written into the voucher law and separate appropriations laws that could limit the total funding.

But in terms of what a state might cut to balance out the impact of voucher costs, Levin said, “It depends on the state and is hard to know.”

So far, Republican lawmakers have either denied the existence of these cost overruns, or they’ve been unclear about where money to cover the deficits will come from.

“I haven’t seen coverage of that question,” said Joshua Cowen, a professor of education policy at Michigan State University, who replied to a query from Our Schools.

Cowen has been an outspoken critic of voucher programs primarily because of their tendency to have a negative impact on student achievement.

Cowen has also expressed concerns about the potential financial impacts of these programs, noting in an April 2023 interview, that “[T]he real issue is that you’re getting the state standing up new budgetary obligations to prop up private school tuition where otherwise [those costs] have been borne by the private sector.”

And he has warned of the dangers of vouchers to incentivize a market for “sub-prime” private schools that would quickly open to get the money but then prove to be unsustainable and just as quickly close.

On the issue of voucher program cost overruns, Cowen told Our Schools, “I assume states have different rules about what amounts to deficit spending. But I’m not sure. Arizona is obviously the massive one.”

‘Arizona… the Massive One’

In Arizona, the first state to pass a universal school voucher program, according to the New York Times, Democratic Governor Katie Hobbs has raised an alarm about the enormous cost overruns coming from ESAs, according to KTAR News.

In a memo issued from her office, Hobbs declared that the voucher program “may cost taxpayers up to $943,795,600 annually, resulting in a potential $319,795,600 general fund shortfall in FY 2024.”

It would appear that these cost overruns would have to eventually be covered by the state’s general fund. According to Common Sense Institute Arizona, an organization that advocates for school vouchers, “The ESA program is fully funded by the state’s general fund.”

For that reason, Hobbs maintained that the impact of these costs will go beyond funding for public schools, KTAR reported. “Public safety, all the big budget priorities are going to be impacted if [the cost overrun] continues to grow at this pace,” she said.

In May 2023, Andrés Cano, who was then the Democratic state representative and House Minority Leader, seemed to agree with Hobbs and told ABC15 Arizona, “We’ll either have to tap into the rainy day fund, or we’ll have to cut core state priorities.”

Despite these unplanned costs, “Republicans who have the majority in the state legislature refused any attempt to cap or cut ESAs,” ABC15 Arizona reported. Arizona’s universal voucher program was created by the state’s former Governor Doug Ducey who called it the “gold standard of educational freedom,” according to the Washington Examiner.

Republicans also offer differing opinions on whether the voucher program is leading to overruns, and if they are, where the funding to offset costs will come from.

Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne, a Republican, insisted that money to plug the budget breach for the voucher program “comes out of basics of state aid for the schools.”

He added, “The burden on the budget will be much less because we’re talking about students who would be educated in one place or another, and if they choose ESAs, it costs the state 10 percent less.”

Horne’s math seems suspect based on the memo issued by Hobbs, which blamed the cost overruns largely on the high percentage of parents who receive voucher money despite never having had their children enrolled in public schools.

“More than 50 percent of ESA voucher funding represents a newly incurred cost to the [s]tate,” the memo read, “due to new applicants that were previously enrolled in private school, homeschooling, or were attending non-state aid schools prior to transferring.”

Horne’s claims of savings are even more suspect given that the Arizona Association of School Business Officials, according to multiple reports from 2023, has calculated that the cost of a basic voucher for a student in elementary and middle schools is approximately $424 more per pupil than what the state pays to public school districts and around $540 more than what the state provides for high schoolers.

Arizona’s universal voucher program also seems to be incentivizing the private school market in Arizona to expand, as Cowen predicted.

ABC15 reported that an unknown number of new private education startups have recently opened to take advantage of the funding. The rapid expansion of unaccountable education providers prompted Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes to warn parents that many of the new vendors “may be fraudulent,” according to the news outlet.

Another concern among Arizona Democratic lawmakers and public school advocates has to do with what parents are spending their voucher money on.

ABC15 examined state records of what parents have bought with voucher money in October 2023 and found “millions of dollars in expenses that could be considered extracurricular.”

Examples include “approximately $57,000 in purchases to Universal Yums,” a subscription service that peddles snacks with a trivia hook from a different country monthly, and $400,000 on “aeroponic indoor gardens” which families use to grow their own food—at a cost of $900 each.

Parents used voucher funds to pay for passes to a ski resort, ninja warrior training, trampoline parks, climbing gyms, and martial arts instruction.

According to an investigation of the 2022-2023 ESA transactions by ABC15, families also made a $3,400 “transaction at a golf store,” incurred a “$10,000 expense at a sewing machine company,” and purchased appliances for freeze-drying food that cost around “$3,000 each.” Parents spent voucher funds on costly items such as pianos as well.

When public schools occasionally buy these kinds of items, the products are used to educate hundreds of students for a whole school year or more and are not meant for single-family use or for small groups of students.

When ABC15 asked whether these purchases qualified for taxpayer reimbursement, ESA Executive Director John Ward replied, “[I]f that’s how… [parents are] going to choose to use… [the money], that’s their prerogative.”

Universal voucher programs are quickly running up costs and exceeding budget estimates in other states that have adopted them as well.

A DeSantis ‘Priority’

Florida was an early pioneer of school voucher programs and now spends more on school vouchers than any other state, according to Public Funds Public Schools. The state offers five different programs that, historically, have targeted specific populations of school children, such as students with disabilities or those from low-income or middle-class families.

That changed in March 2023, when Governor Ron DeSantis opened Florida’s ESA-style voucher program, created in 2019, to every family in the state.

The new law, which also eliminated the program’s enrollment cap and exemptions, was a “priority” for DeSantis, according to the Washington Post. And on the day he signed the universal voucher bill into law, he declared it would ensure Florida remained “number one when it comes to education freedom.”

The cost of the new program, however, is far from clear. Florida’s Senate Appropriations Committee initially proposed that the universal voucher program would need a budget of $2.2 billion with an additional $350 million in reserve “in case more students then [sic] we expect enroll in the program.”

But an analysis by the independent nonprofit Florida Policy Institute (FPI) and the legal advocacy organization Education Law Center (ELC) puts costs of universal school vouchers far higher, requiring an additional $890 million to pay for new public school students enrolling in the program who were previously not eligible, an additional $1.9 billion for private school students enrolling in the program for the first time, and $85 million for homeschooled students who are newly eligible for vouchers.

Those additional costs, added to the $1.1 billion current costs of the ESA program, would result in the state spending nearly $4 billion to introduce a universal voucher program in the first year alone, according to the FPI-ELC analysis.

Should the FPI-ELC estimate for voucher costs be closer to the truth, the substantial cost overrun would have to be covered with dollars from the public school budget, according to a different analysis by FPI.

“While voucher programs are often funded as line-item appropriations in the state budget or through state tax credits,” FPI’s analysis found, “the… [universal] voucher is funded from [Florida Education Finance Program] state allocations that would otherwise be directed to the student’s resident public school district.”

FPI added, “The movement of public funding to private education occurs in the context of Florida’s substantial underfunding of the state’s public schools, as highlighted in Making the Grade 2021.” In that analysis, provided by ELC, “Florida receives an F on an A-F scale on all three funding metrics: funding level, funding distribution, and funding effort.”

As with Arizona’s universal voucher program, much of the estimated overrun in Florida can be sourced to new voucher users who were never enrolled in public schools. There are also similar concerns over what Florida parents are using voucher money to buy.

As the 2023-2024 school year got underway, NBC6 reported that the nonprofit agency tasked with administering Florida’s universal voucher program, Step Up for Students, issued a report finding that the program had attracted nearly 123,000 new students. Most new voucher users, 69 percent, previously attended private schools, and 18 percent were entering kindergarten. Only 13 percent of voucher recipients had used them to transfer from public schools. (There was no figure given for the percentage of homeschoolers using vouchers.)

The Step Up for Students report also found voucher money was used to purchase items that have questionable educational value such as “theme park passes, 55-inch TVs, and stand-up paddleboards,” according to the Orlando Sentinel.

‘A Grand Experiment’

Like Florida, Ohio is an early adopter of school voucher programs, having launched vouchers in Cleveland in 1996. In 2023, under the leadership of Republican Governor Mike DeWine, the state enacted an ESA-style statewide universal voucher program.

DeWine initially may have had some reservations about the potential cost of universal vouchers—warning it “would be very, very, very significant,” according to a February 2023 article in the Cleveland Plain Dealer. But a spokesman quickly walked back the comment, saying, “the governor neither endorses nor opposes” universal vouchers, and his “attempts to expand vouchers [were] a possible precursor to seeking universal vouchers.”

Republicans in Ohio’s state legislature claimed that making the state’s voucher program universal “allows educational freedom.”

Supporters of universal vouchers in Ohio coined the name backpack scholarships to help promote the program. But regardless of the different branding, Ohio’s universal voucher program may come with the same financial problems other states adopting these programs are experiencing.

When the backpack program was still under consideration, the nonpartisan Ohio Legislative Service Commission (LSC) that monitors government spending warned that the program would need $1.13 billion in the fiscal year 2025 if all 185,400 newly eligible students applied for vouchers.

That report by LSC readily contends not all eligible students will take advantage of the program. For that reason, Aaron Churchill, of the Fordham Institute, an Ohio nonprofit that advocates for vouchers, called the $1.13 billion estimate a “ceiling,” according to the Dayton Daily News, and not a true cost assessment.

But after the backpack program was enacted in July 2023, the Associated Press reported that an analysis by the Columbus Dispatch found that by September the state had received applications totaling approximately $432 million for the 2023-2024 school year—$34 million more than what the Legislative Service Commission estimated.

“When Ohio’s two-year budget was drafted, the commission estimated income-based vouchers would cost $397.8 million for fiscal year 2024 and $439.1 million for fiscal year 2025,” stated the AP report.

In Ohio, the state’s contribution to education funding, including its voucher programs, comes from the state’s general revenue fund, which means overruns from the backpack program may need to come from the same source that funds public schools and other state expenses.

A similar story is playing out in Indiana, another state with a long history of vouchers that began to accept nearly all family applicants in 2023. A family income threshold that limited eligibility for the previous voucher program was lifted to allow all but a small percentage of the wealthiest households to qualify, according to Chalkbeat.

Making its voucher program nearly universal may cost Indiana as much as $1.1 billion over the next two years, according to The 74. But “no one knows” what the final tab may be, Chalkbeat reported.

“One reason for the uncertainty: Universal vouchers are, in effect, a grand experiment states are conducting in real time,” said Chalkbeat. “Budget analysts have scrambled to predict the programs’ eventual price tags, but they can only guess at how many freshly eligible families will participate.”

‘Open Season on Private Entities Spending Your Tax Dollars’

Iowa is yet another Midwestern state that enacted an ESA-style universal voucher program in 2023.

Republican Governor Kim Reynolds—who declared vouchers a “top priority,” according to the Des Moines Register—signed the state’s universal voucher program into law in January 2023, calling it “just the first step in giving educational freedom to Iowa’s students and parents.”

In June, the Des Moines Register reported, “More students have applied for Iowa’s state-funded education savings accounts than expected, meaning the cost of paying for the private school scholarships could exceed what the state budgeted.”

In July, Iowa Starting Line reported costs surpassing the original state estimate of $107 million and rising to $133.5 million based on 17,481 approved applications. In October, the Iowa Department of Education reported that 18,893 ESA applications had been approved, which, at $7,600 per voucher, brought costs to more than $143 million for the 2023-2024 school year.

As costs for universal vouchers soar, it’s also not clear where Iowa lawmakers will come up with funds to cover the program’s overruns.

According to Sioux Land Proud, when Iowa lawmakers passed the state’s budget, money for universal vouchers was already “spoken for” in the state general fund. But that doesn’t answer the question of where money to cover the cost overruns will come from.

Meanwhile, there are reports of private schools in Iowa jacking up tuition costs to take advantage of newly available voucher funds. Such revelations prompted Iowa State Auditor Rob Sand to warn that there will be “[o]pen season on private entities spending your tax dollars with no oversight.”

Education Freedom Has a Cost

In May 2023, North Carolina’s Democratic Governor Roy Cooper declared a “state of emergency for public education” in a special address. “Legislative Republicans propose pouring billions of dollars in taxpayer money into private schools that are unaccountable to the public and can decide which students they want to admit,” Cooper warned.

Four months after Cooper’s declaration, Republican state lawmakers in the Tar Heel State passed a budget that included a universal voucher program, which Cooper allowed to become law, realizing his veto would quickly be overturned.

Cooper’s warning, absent from any kind of national campaign by Democrats against school vouchers, was a lone voice lost in the chorus of calls for “education freedom” coming from Republicans. And Democratic party leaders remain all over the place on education policy.

U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona has been openly opposed to vouchers, calling them a form of “privatization,” according to Politico. But other prominent Democrats, such as Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, have spoken in favor of vouchers—although Shapiro reversed his position on vouchers when confronted with a budget that included them.

When voucher programs result in cost overruns in multiple states, Republican lawmakers will likely conceive of some sort of unified strategy to shift the focus from the issue. But the financial fallout of universal voucher programs will give Democrats an opportunity to call out their political opponents for being reckless with public money intended for children.

Click here to read the article on the LA Progressive.

Jeff Bryant is a writing fellow and chief correspondent for Our Schools. He is a communications consultant, freelance writer, advocacy journalist, and director of the Education Opportunity Network, a strategy and messaging center for progressive education policy. His award-winning commentary and reporting routinely appear in prominent online news outlets, and he speaks frequently at national events about public education policy. Follow him on Twitter @jeffbcdm.

What the NY Times Got Wrong About a Key Party Switch in North Carolina

Click here to read the article on EdPolitics.

Tricia Cotham’s defection to the Republican Party wasn’t about her relationships with fellow lawmakers; it was about the influence of big money and the charter school industry.

By Jeff Bryant

A July 30, 2023, headline in the New York Times promised to give readers an “inside” story about why North Carolina lawmaker Tricia Cotham changed her political allegiance from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party in April and handed conservatives a veto-proof majority in the state House. But the ensuing story shed little new light on what motivated her decision to flip and overlooked how her deep dive into the right-wing networks promoting charter schools was likely instrumental in steering her change in political leanings.

For sure, Times journalists Kate Kelly and David Perlmutt are correct in reporting Cotham’s actions as having profound impacts in a purple state, but they erred in adopting an unlikely storyline about who and what lured her to jump.

As I’ve previously reported, Cotham’s own explanation for her party switch strains credibility. And just because Republican officials encouraged her to run in 2022—the Times article’s supposed big reveal—doesn’t mean they, or the Democrats with whom she had purportedly grown disenchanted, were the only, or most important, actors who mattered in her decision.

Yet Kelly and Perlmutt chose to amplify that narrative rather than delve more deeply into Cotham’s legislative record and the business associates she cultivated in the years she was out of office, from 2016 to 2022.

As I reported, Cotham’s split from the Democratic Party first became evident toward the end of her legislative tenure from 2007 to 2016. At the end of that period, Cotham had already decided to leave the North Carolina House to seek office in Congress. But she was soundly drubbed in the Democratic primary contest and returned to Raleigh, perhaps facing joblessness.

It was at that time that Cotham, who had voted strictly the Democratic Party line on legislation related to charter schools, chose to buck her party’s majority to join with just four other Democrats to vote for the creation of the Achievement School District (ASD). The ASD, whose name was eventually changed to Innovative School District (ISD), was created to take charge of low-performing schools and hand them over to charter school management companies.

But Kelly and Perlmutt either didn’t look back that far into Cotham’s legislative record or didn’t believe that vote was important. “In office, Ms. Cotham had criticized charter schools, but now her firm supported private investments in the public school system and charter schools,” was their open-and-shut assessment.

Nor did they bother to note to whom that vote would have mattered the most—Oregon billionaire John Bryan, who not only bankrolled the lobbying effort to enact the ASD/ISD but also founded the Challenge Foundation, a nonprofit that advocates for charter schools, operates a firm that builds charter schools, and started a charter school management company called TeamCFA.

Bryan has also been described as “a national figure in libertarian circles when it comes to charter schools” and a donor who “contributes heavily and regularly to conservative causes.”

Cotham’s vote for the ISD preceded a series of career opportunities for her, which the Times article mostly ignored.

The first, beginning in 2017, was a stint at McGuireWoods Consulting, a highly influential lobbying firm whose clients include a long list of organizations closely associated with the charter school industry and right-wing school choice advocacy, including at least one organization funded by the Challenge Foundation. McGuireWoods was also the lobbying firm pushing the bill to create the ISD.

The second in Cotham’s series of business opportunities, which Kelly and Perlmutt did report on, came in 2019 when she was hired to lead Achievement for All Children. Achievement for All Children, the reporters noted, was picked to “turn around” Southside-Ashpole Elementary, a “foundering public school” in the state.

But what Kelly and Perlmutt left out of their reporting was that Achievement for All Children was a charter management company previously led by Tony Helton, who, as I reported, had previously worked for Bryan’s firm TeamCFA. Also, they completely left out the fact that Southside-Ashpole was under the control of the state because it was a school—the only school—incorporated into the ISD.

While Kelly and Perlmutt noted Cotham’s years as a lobbyist included a business relationship with C. Philip Byers, whom the article called “a major donor to state Republicans” and “president of a company that built charter schools,” the reporters didn’t mention that the company he led (Challenge Foundation Properties) was part of Bryan’s Challenge Foundation enterprises.

Cotham’s ties to right-wing individuals and organizations promoting charter schools don’t stop there, as my article reported. But wouldn’t it stand to reason that if Kelly and Perlmutt were to examine all the various possible influencers in Cotham’s decision to switch parties, then focusing on the billionaire in the room would make the most sense?Further, reporting that Cotham’s switch to the Republican Party was mostly because of her changing relationships with fellow legislators, on both sides of the aisle, as the Times article suggests, trivializes a matter of huge import in a state that figures to be pivotal in the 2024 elections. It also overlooks the growing influence of the big money behind the charter school industry in American politics and its destructive force in the Democratic Party.

Click here to read the article on EdPolitics.

This article was produced by Our Schools.

Jeff Bryant is a writing fellow and chief correspondent for Our Schools. He is a communications consultant, freelance writer, advocacy journalist, and director of the Education Opportunity Network, a strategy and messaging center for progressive education policy. His award-winning commentary and reporting routinely appear in prominent online news outlets, and he speaks frequently at national events about public education policy. Follow him on Twitter @jeffbcdm.

Families Getting Government Funding to Switch From Public to Private School Put Their Rights at Risk

The following is an excerpt. Read the full article here.

The harrowing story of a Maine family shows the potential perils families face when they transfer to privately run schools that are less subject to government oversight.

By Jeff Bryant

“I am the type of parent who always made sure my kids had the good teachers and always took the right classes,” said Esther Kempthorne in an interview with Our Schools. So, in 2014, when she moved with her husband and two daughters to their new home in Washington County, Maine, in a bucolic corner of the state, near the Canadian border, she made it a top priority to find a school that would be the right educational fit for their children.

“We settled in Washington County hoping to give our children the experience of attending one high school, making lasting friendships, and finally putting down some roots,” said Esther’s husband, Nathan, whose career in the military had sent the Kempthorne family traveling the world, changing schools more than 20 times in 17 years. “Both of our children were born on military bases while I was on active duty with the U.S. Navy and the U.S. Air Force,” said Nathan, whose role in military intelligence often meant that he was deployed to high-risk assignments in war zones.

“We said that when we got to Maine, we weren’t going to keep bouncing from school to school,” said Esther.

But after some firsthand experience with the education programs provided by the local public schools, the Kempthornes decided to investigate other options the state offers. One of those options was the state’s provision that allows parents who live in a district that doesn’t have a school matching their child’s grade level the choice to leave the public system and transfer their children to private schools, with the “home” public school district picking up the cost of tuition and transportation, subject to state allowance.

Because the rural district the Kempthornes lived in did not have a high school, they took advantage of that option to enroll their daughters—at taxpayer expense—in Washington Academy, an elite private school founded in 1792 that offers a college track curriculum and access to classes taught by faculty members from a nearby university.

Their decision to leave the public school system for Washington Academy seemed all the better when Esther, a naturalized U.S. citizen born in Mexico, got a full-time job teaching Spanish at the school.

Thinking back on how the Kempthorne family negotiated the school choice landscape in Maine, Nathan recalled, “I thought we were finally going to be okay.”

But the Kempthornes weren’t okay. Far from it, in 2021, the Kempthornes found themselves in the front seat of their car while they were traveling in another state, using Nathan’s iPhone to call in via Zoom and provide testimony to a Maine legislative committee on why Washington Academy, and other schools like it, pose significant threats to families like theirs and how the state needs to more heavily regulate privately operated schools that get taxpayer funding.

Read more here.

Jeff Bryant is a writing fellow and chief correspondent for Our Schools. He is a communications consultant, freelance writer, advocacy journalist, and director of the Education Opportunity Network, a strategy and messaging center for progressive education policy. His award-winning commentary and reporting routinely appear in prominent online news outlets, and he speaks frequently at national events about public education policy. Follow him on Twitter @jeffbcdm.