Extreme Privatization

If you are wondering what it looks like when school privatizers are close to total victory, Tennessee is a prime example. Here, the forces that want to take public money and hand it over to private entities are on the verge of completing their conquest. 

Tennessee’s current legislative session features a range of attacks on public schools. Some of these would have immediate impacts, while others take a longer-term approach to fully privatizing K-12 education in the state.

First, it is important to understand that groups backing privatization in the form of charter schools and vouchers are among the top spenders when it comes to lobbying state legislators. For example, the American Federation for Children—an organization founded and previously led by the family of Betsy DeVos, a school privatization advocate and former President Donald Trump’s Secretary of Education—spent $887,500. Another big spender, the Tennessee Charter School Center, spent $732,500.

Based on this year’s full-frontal assault, these investments appear to be paying off. There are three key issues that currently pose the most significant threat to Tennessee’s public schools. They include: a partnership with Hillsdale College, a private fundamentalist Christian college in Michigan, to run fifty or more charter schools; legislation that would create a charter school real estate grab; and school funding reforms that set the stage for a statewide voucher program.

In his State of the State address, Governor Bill Lee restated his commitment to set aside $32 million to help launch new charters in Tennessee and announced the Hillsdale College partnership, which could bring close to fifty Hillsdale-run charter schools into the state. 

Beyond the use of public funds to open schools run by a private, Christian college, there is reason to be concerned about the nature of the Hillsdale curriculum. As educator and blogger Peter Greene explained,  “[Hillsdale President Larry] Arnn has been a Trump supporter, and the college has fallen right into MAGAland as well. . . . The college uses Trump mailing lists to raise money. They used to sponsor Rush Limbaugh’s show. They get grads placed on the staff of legislators such as Jim Jordan and Kevin McCarthy.” 

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Of course, any charter schools—Hillsdale or otherwise—must be approved by a local school board, right? Wrong! Tennessee’s State Charter Commission, created by Lee, can override local decisions. And Lee is now seeking to expand the authority of this unelected body. 

Legislation currently advancing in the state Senate (SB2168/HB2833) would allow charter schools to apply directly to the State Charter Commission. This means a group of unelected appointees of a pro-privatization governor could decide to place charter schools in districts where the local elected officials and public don’t want them.

Another part of the same bill creates a real estate grab for charter operators. The relevant section states:

The proposed legislation authorizes a public charter school operating in the LEA to have a right of first refusal to: lease at an annual cost not to exceed the annual capital funding received by the public charter school leasing the building; or purchase at or below fair market value any underutilized or vacant property submitted by the LEA under this section. 

Just to be clear, public money in the form of local property taxes pays for facilities run by public schools. Should this new legislation pass and become law, an unelected state board will be able to place charter schools in a district, and those charter schools can take over public buildings at a reduced cost. So much for the free market.

Potentially millions of dollars worth of real estate assets in local districts across Tennessee could soon be up for grabs at prices below market value. No wonder privatizers tied to the charter industry have spent $8 million lobbying the legislature.

The final element in the push for privatization is being billed as a “reform” of the state’s school funding formula. Governor Lee recently released his plan to revamp how the state directs money to local school districts for public schools. The bottom line, according to Lee, is that the approach is “student-centered” and that funds “follow the child” no matter what. This plan is based on model legislation from the rightwing American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).

This statement, first of all, creates the erroneous impression that charter schools operate as “public” schools. Although called public schools under Tennessee law (as in most states), these schools function with less government oversight and an array of private operations, from real estate management to the sourcing of substitute teachers to overall school management.

Second, the proposed change to school funding is quite simply the gateway to a full-on voucher scheme. As Tennessee teacher Mike Stein wrote on his personal blog, the final form of funding reform is a workaround for a school voucher law that Lee enacted and was ruled unconstitutional

Step one, according to Stein, is to create a funding allocation for each individual student; step two is to allow that funding to follow the individual student to whatever “public” school they attend; and step three is to let parents take these funds to any school, public or private.

The short-term impact of this formula would be an influx of funds to charter schools and their operators. In the long term, a transition to a fully operational “choice” economy of schools seems likely.

Lee has been fighting to redirect public money to private schools since before he was elected governor. It now looks like a fight he’s poised to win. And if he does, defenders of public education should learn to resist next time the small, subtle cuts to public education that he used to lay the groundwork.

This piece originally appeared in The Progressive

An Open Door to Grift and Corruption

Members of the Tennessee Public Education Coalition spoke out in opposition to Gov. Bill Lee’s education agenda which includes sending public money to private schools by way of school vouchers and charters.

In an OpEd, the group said:

We have a clear choice in Tennessee. We can choose to adequately fund our public schools, pay our teachers a fair wage, and support our neighborhood schools — or we can choose grift.

Here are some of the examples offered by the group to demonstrate the danger of rapid expansion of charter schools:

  • Memphis Academy of Health Sciences closed, displacing 750 students, after three leaders were indicted for stealing $400,000 for personal use – for trips to Las Vegas, a hot tub, NBA tickets, and auto repair.
  • New Vision Academy in Nashville shut down after state and federal investigation into financial irregularities, failure to comply with federal laws concerning special needs students and English language learners, and cramming too many children into classrooms in violation of the fire code. The husband/wife team leading the school of 150 students earned $563,000 per year.
  • Gateway University Charter School in Memphis shut down after it was accused of falsifying grades, using uncertified teachers, giving credits for a geometry class that didn’t exist, and pulling children out of classes to clean the school’s bathrooms and other areas.
  • Knowledge Academies in Nashville lost hundreds of thousands of tax dollars in an online phishing scheme (after which its founder and CEO suddenly disappeared); used uncertified teachers; understaffed the school and stopped paying teachers; operated with a deficit of $835,878, despite an annual revenue of $7.1 million; failed to meet federal requirements for English language learners and special needs students; and ran side businesses out of the school building. Nashville shut the school down, but the state forced it back open. It’s now operating with a $7.9 million deficit.
  • Nashville Global Academy forgot a child on a bus parked offsite all day, misappropriated funds to the tune of $149,000, and collapsed over $400,000 in debt with unpaid bills worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.

READ MORE from Tennessee Public Education Coalition on Lee’s efforts to privatize our state’s public schools.

Of course, Lee has some powerful (and wealthy) friends pushing privatization:

And, TC Weber has some pretty solid analysis about why the scheme offered by Lee will lead to vouchers and school district takeovers:

For more on education politics and policy in Tennessee, follow @TNEdReport

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Bill’s Besties

NewsChannel5’s Phil Williams has been following the money to find out who is behind efforts to privatize Tennessee’s public schools. It’s no surprise that Lee’s longtime friend Betsy DeVos is among the key backers of privatization.

As Williams notes, among the big spenders on school privatization efforts when it comes to lobbying the General Assembly is the American Federation for Children. That group is funded by Betsy DeVos. In fact, Bill Lee has even been a donor in the past.

In fact, the American Federation for Children appears to be funded by billionaire Betsy DeVos and her family.

DeVos, who has worked with Tennessee Governor Bill Lee, previously suggested to a gathering of evangelicals that part of her goal is taxpayer funding for religious schools.

“Our desire is to … confront the culture in which we all live today in ways which will continue to advance God’s kingdom,” she said.

Another name that came up in Williams’ story was that of Tennessee’s Shaka Mitchell, now serving in a multi-state lobbying role with the American Federation for Children.

Readers of TNEdReport may remember that Mitchell once led the Rocketship Charter Schools in Nashville.

Here’s what Mitchell had to say about his work on behalf of school privatization when he talked to Phil Williams:

Who speaks for the children? We really view that as our job,” said Shaka Mitchell with the American Federation for Children.

It’s not exactly clear that Mitchell is the best choice to talk about what’s good for kids. At least based on his record as a school leader.

In fact, while Mitchell was failing in his attempts to expand Rocketship, the State Board of Education noted:

In fact, Rocketship’s appeal to the State Board was rejected last year in part because of low performance:

“They did have a level 5 TVAAS composite, which is the highest score overall you can get in growth,” Heyburn said. “But their achievement scores are really low, some of the lowest in their cluster and in the district.”

The MNPS review team addressed this as well:

In summary, with no additional state accountability data to consider, and no compelling evidence presented that provides confidence in the review team, converting an existing low-performing school before Rocketship has demonstrated academic success on state accountability measures would not be in the best interests of the students, the district, or the community.

And then there’s this:

According to the Metro Schools letter, Rocketship is not providing services to children with special learning needs, like English language learners and students with disabilities.

The notice was sent from Metro Nashville Public School’s top administrators after a monitoring team with the Tennessee Department of Education came in to conduct a routine audit of special services, primarily programs adhering to The Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) and The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA).

A Michigan billionaire proposing using public funds for religious indoctrination and a guy who repeatedly failed at serving kids while running a questionable charter operation – that’s who Bill Lee is counting on as he continues to push his radical education agenda.

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The Charter Agenda

In two tweets, Metro Nashville Councilmember John Rutherford explains the school privatization agenda by way of charter schools:

Gov. Bill Lee has always been a proponent of privatization:

The call Rutherford received and his summary of it in two tweets makes it abundantly clear: The agenda is to circumvent local school boards and allow the state to funnel public money to private entities.

Lee even outlined such a scheme in his State of the State:

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About Hillsdale

Gov. Bill Lee is proposing to hand over millions in Tennessee tax dollars to a private, Christian college in Michigan to run between 50-100 “charter schools” in the state.

Lee wants charter schools because they won’t need a voucher plan to be funded – they can just apply for charters (possibly directly from a state charter authorizer, bypassing local school boards) – and then receive public money.

Sure, handing over public money to a private entity to run schools is problematic. But what is Hillsdale all about? I mean, if TN is going to go down this road, we should certainly understand more about the college that has been chosen by Lee to run schools.

Good news! Peter Greene digs into Hillsdale and offers a useful exploration of the history of Hillsdale and how it runs the schools it runs.

Here are some highlights:

[Hillsdale President Larry] Arnn has been a Trump supporter, and the college has fallen right into MAGAland as well. Or as Politico Magazine put it in 2018Trump University never died. It’s located in the middle of bucolic southern Michigan, halfway between Lansing and Fort Wayne, 100 miles and a world away from Detroit.

The college uses Trump mailing lists to raise money. They used to sponsor Rush Limbaugh’s show. They get grads placed on the staff of legislators such as Jim Jordan and Kevin McCarthy. In 2017, for some reason, Senator Pat Toomey created a little piece of tax reform that would have carved out a tax treat for Hillsdale alone.

If you want to see Hillsdale really letting its freak flag fly, scan through its newsletter Imprimiswith articles like “The Disaster at Our Southern Border” (VP Harris’s report is “bunk”), “The January 6 Insurrection Hoax” (Donald Trump was awesome and robbed and Jan 6 has been overhyped as part of a vast conspiracy), and an explanation of inflation that rests on Milton Friedman’s awesomeness. All of these, it should be noted, are versions of lectures delivered at the college. 

It should come as no surprise that Hillsdale is home to a lot of privatizing thought about education, like a 2018 piece by Professor Gary Wolfram explaining why schools should be run via the free market. And then-secretary Betsy DeVos made Hillsdale the site of one of her most explicit speeches arguing that schools should be taken back from the government and run by free-market Christianity.

This line from Politico may more clearly explain Lee’s enthusiasm for Hillsdale:

Trump University never died. It’s located in the middle of bucolic southern Michigan, halfway between Lansing and Fort Wayne, 100 miles and a world away from Detroit.

READ MORE from Greene on the Hillsdale experiment Bill Lee wants in Tennessee.

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Trump’s Voucher Emergency

Unable to convince federal lawmakers to pass a voucher scheme despite the persuasive talents of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, President Trump today issued an Executive Order calling on the Department of Health and Human Services to create a school voucher program from CARES Act funds.

Peter Greene writes about this and provides the reassuring analysis that President-elect Biden can simply reverse this Executive Order on January 20th when he becomes President Biden (yes, despite Gov. Bill Lee’s reticence to acknowledge it, Joe Biden will be the President on January 20th).

Here’s some of what Greene has to say:

Today the White House (if Donald Trump wrote this thing, then I’m the Queen of Rumania) issued an executive order “expanding educational opportunity school choice” to create “Emergency Learning Scholarships for Students.”

The argument in favor of this is that January 20th is coming and the administration wants their damn vouchers now, dammit. Okay, not really. The argument for this is

1) We totally identified effective measures for resuming face-to-face and we gave you $13 billion whole dollars to do it (never mind the part where we tried to divert a bunch of that to private schools)

2) Continued distance learning is bad. Here are a few statistics we found. 

3) Building closures are extra hard on students with special needs, because they cut off not only education but support services. They’re not wrong on this one. Of course, another solution would be to give public schools the resources they need to fix this. In fact, that would be the solution that would make sense, since the public system already knows who and where the students are and what they need. Bringing in another batch of service providers means that they should be done with needs assessments right around June.

READ MORE from Greene on the “Voucher Emergency”

I’m eagerly awaiting the press release from Gov. Lee’s office enthusiastically supporting this ridiculous effort. Next, Tennesseans for Student Success will chime in to support the Gov.

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DeVos’s Reverse Robinhood Act

Jim Hightower writes in OtherWords about Betsy DeVos’s scheme to rob from poor school districts and funnel the money to private schools.

Times of great adversity not only bring out the best and worst in society, but they also flush out some of the stinkiest and slimiest creatures. Think of war profiteers, hucksters who prey on poor hurricane victims, or Betsy DeVos.

Even in the Trump Kakistocracy, DeVos stands out as an especially loathsome plutocrat, constantly trying to weasel her far-right corporatist agenda into law.

As Trump’s education secretary, the billionaire heiress has been an out-of-control wrecking ball of America’s public schools, constantly conniving to drain tax dollars from public education into for-profit private schools — including some she personally invests in.

Worse, she keeps trying to rig the rules so fly-by-night for-profit colleges can more easily defraud their low-income students to enrich Wall Street investors who own these educational chains.

Now, the devilish DeVos is using the national coronavirus relief program as a way to impose her ideological agenda on American education, quietly pushing school districts to use some $58 billion in COVID-19 education money to fund wealthy private schools at the expense of lower-income families.

Officials in New Orleans, for example, say her plan would put 77 percent of their school relief allocation in private entities, and Pennsylvania says more than half of its school relief money would flow from the “most disadvantaged to more advantaged students.”

In addition to perverting the disaster program into a slush fund for her privatization agenda, DeVos has tried to pervert logic into Orwellian Newspeak. If the public money went primarily to public schools, her political staff explained, it would place wealthy, non-public schools “at a disadvantage.”

Yes, in DeVos World, the needs of the poor rich must come first, so they’re not discriminated against by the… you know, the actually poor.

“Kakistocracy” is government by the very worst people in society, and now it has a proper name: Betsy DeVos.

OtherWords columnist Jim Hightower is a radio commentator, writer, and public speaker. Distributed by OtherWords.org.

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TEA Responds to Lee’s Backdoor Voucher Scheme

Amid reports that Gov. Bill Lee will go along with Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’s scheme to divert federal CARES Act funds to private schools, the Tennessee Education Association offered this response:

“We have a strong system of public schools in Tennessee that serve one million Tennessee children. Our students, families and educators are counting on local, state and federal officials to provide the funding needed to safely reopen public schools. Our public schools are the foundation of the communities they serve. Strong, financially stable local public schools are an important factor in rebuilding Tennessee’s economy.

The coronavirus pandemic should not be used as an excuse to advance bad ideas that siphon funding from public schools. Tennesseans have repeatedly rejected privatization schemes that use tax payer dollars to fund private school education. Our state leaders should prioritize providing a quality public education for every child in Tennessee, instead of following the lead of a woman who has repeatedly prioritized corporate profits over students’ education.”

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Jeff Bryant on DeVos’s Disruption

Education writer Jeff Bryant writes about how Betsy DeVos is using the COVID-19 pandemic to advance her school privatization agenda.

COVID-19 has shuttered public schools across the nation, state governments are threatening to slash education budgets due to the economic collapse caused by the outbreak. But the charter school industry may benefit from its unique status to seek public funding from multiple sources and expand these schools into many more communities traumatized by the pandemic and financial fallout. As school districts reported huge problems with converting classroom learning into online instruction delivered to students’ homes, often due to lack of funding, charter operators rolled out new marketing campaigns to lure families to enroll in their schools. Teachers have urged their districts to stop charter school expansions and co-locations, which they believe worsen the trauma that children in their communities are experiencing due to the virus. But the Trump administration and U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos have shown no signs of easing up their campaigns to further privatize public schools. “This is an opportunity,” said DeVos in an interview with right-wing radio talk show host Glenn Beck, “to collectively look very seriously at the fact that K-12 education for too long has been very static and very stuck in one method of delivering and making instruction available.”

MORE>

Betsy DeVos testifies before the Senate Health, Education and Labor Committee confirmation hearing to be next Secretary of Education on Capitol Hill in Washington, U.S., January 17, 2017. REUTERS/Yuri Gripas

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DeVos the Destroyer

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is using the COVID-19 pandemic to further her school privatization agenda. Chalkbeat reports that DeVos is tying the awarding of certain CARES Act funds to a state’s willingness to further school vouchers and virtual schools.

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos will use $180 million in federal coronavirus relief earmarked for the hardest-hit states to create voucher-like grants for parents and to expand virtual education.

State education agencies can apply for federal money by proposing one of three things.

The first is “microgrants” — what some would call “vouchers” — meant to give families more options for remote learning. Those grants could be used to pay for tutoring, summer programs, tuition to a private or public school online program, counseling, test prep, or textbooks, among other things. The state must allow private organizations to provide those services.

The second option is for states to create a statewide virtual school or another program allowing students to access classes that their regular school doesn’t offer. States can either expand an existing program or create one from scratch.

Tennessee is already seeing the proliferation of virtual providers as long-time troublemaker K12, Inc. is facing stiff competition from Pearson to gobble up state dollars.

DeVos wont’ rest, it seems, until her dream of destroying public education has been realized. In a time of pandemic-induced panic and uncertainty, our nation’s Education Secretary is seeking to disrupt the stability and sense of community provided by public schools.

Betsy DeVos testifies before the Senate Health, Education and Labor Committee confirmation hearing to be next Secretary of Education on Capitol Hill in Washington, U.S., January 17, 2017. REUTERS/Yuri Gripas

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