SCOTUS Takes on Vouchers

AMERICA’S PUBLIC SCHOOLS ARE (STILL) NOT FAILING

Charter and voucher schools, while touted as panaceas for the “sorry state” of America’s education system, don’t do any better than public schools when based on similar populations of students. In fact, the so-called “sorry state” of our public education system is pretty darn good when you realize that we work to educate everyone who walks in our public school doors.

Back in 2017 Steven Singer, who blogs at Gadfly on the Wall, told us that our public schools are among the best in the world. He wrote…

Let me repeat that in no uncertain terms – America’s public schools are NOT failing. They are among the best in the world. Really!

Here’s why: the United States educates everyone. Most other countries do not.

We have made a commitment to every single child regardless of what their parents can afford to pay, regardless of their access to transportation, regardless of whether they can afford uniforms, lunch or even if they have a home. Heck! We even provide education to children who are here illegally.

Now is a good time to remind ourselves of that fact…especially after the difficult experience of “pandemic education” (or are we still “during?”).

We should also remember that private, voucher schools don’t have to accept everyone. They can pick and choose who gets to attend their school. In Indiana, more than 95% of our voucher schools are run by religious organizations. They can refuse service to religious “others”, low achievers, and students with special needs.

And they can do all that while still filling their sectarian wallets with your money…and my money…which, in the past, had been earmarked for public schools, for the common good.

In other words, when supporters say that they need vouchers so they can “choose” private schools, what they mean is, they’ll take our public education tax dollars and let private, religious schools “choose” which students get to attend. Your children might be able to attend because they’re white, they have high test scores, or they belong to the same religion. Someone else’s children, on the other hand, might not be able to attend because they are not the same religion, not white, or are more expensive to teach because they have some high-cost learning need.

Public education reflects society. The so-called “sorry state” of public education is not in our schools, it’s in our commitment to the support of the public good.

Supreme Court likely to drop school voucher bombshell

Schools in traditionally operated school districts are not allowed to violate Maine’s anti-discrimination laws, but a school run privately by a religious organization may be able to under such a ruling. The Supreme Court has in recent years laid the legal groundwork for courts to require authorizers of charter schools to allow religious organizations to be granted charters without regard to their religious status.

“The Supreme Court is just a few small steps away from transforming every charter school law in the U.S. into a private-school voucher policy,” [Kevin Welner, director of the National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder’s School of Education] writes. “Further, the nation may be facing a future of religious organizations proselytizing through charter schools that have been freed from obeying anti-discrimination laws — with LGBTQ+ community members being the most likely victims.”

The particulars of the case before the Supreme Court underscore why we need to prioritize public education. When a state, Maine in this case, doesn’t support a system of public education (in direct violation of their state constitution), substituting private, religious schools, does not necessarily support the common good.

PAUL WELLSTONE ON EDUCATION

The late Minnesota Senator Paul Wellstone spoke to the concept of the common good when he said…(emphasis added)

That all citizens will be given an equal start through a sound education is one of the most basic, promised rights of our democracy. Our chronic refusal as a nation to guarantee that right for all children, including poor children, is a national disgrace. It is rooted in a kind of moral blindness, or at least a failure of moral imagination, that we do not see that meeting the most basic needs of so many of our children condemns them to lives and futures of frustration, chronic underachievement, poverty, crime and violence. It is a failure which threatens our future as a nation of citizens called to a common purpose, allied with one another in a common enterprise, tied to one another by a common bond. — 3/31/2000

The primary mission of public schools is not to teach individual students what their parents want them to learn. It’s to prepare the next generation for the task of running our society. It’s for the benefit of all of us…the common good.

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2021 Medley #10 – I’m Back Edition

New York Times and Disclosures,

First Responders, COVID-19, and why I missed a month of blogging,

Textbooks in Voucher Schools,

Keep out of my air-space,

Know your rights

CONFLICTS OF INTEREST AT THE NEW YORK TIMES

Leonie Haimson: Columnists at NY Times Report on Gates Projects While Benefitting from Gates’ $$$

I yesterday’s post, It’s not as though we don’t know what works, I discussed an editorial in the New York Times about standardized testing and the low test scores achieved during the current (and ongoing) pandemic.

This morning, Diane Ravitch posted twice on her own blog about the New York Times and the financial conflicts of interests with some of their journalists. In the first she lets us know of the close ties between writers and both the Gates Foundation and the Aspen Institute. Readers of my blog know of Bill Gates and his foundation’s close ties to privatization. The Aspen Institute is also among the cheerleaders of privatization.

The second post, quoted below, reiterates the conflicts of interest, but also includes important information for news-reading/watching public school advocates about the Gates Foundation. This doesn’t mean that every Gates Foundation-funded organization will be pro-charter and anti-public schools. I have personally been assured by members of the Chalkbeat staff that they are not influenced by their donors. On the other hand, I still read their posts with the understanding that they get funding from not only Gates, but the Walton Family Foundation, EdChoice, and other privatizers.

In the quote below, Schwab refers to Tim Schwab, a writer for The Nation.

The Gates Foundation provides millions of dollars to many journalistic enterprises, which Schwab argued in an earlier 2020 piece helps to explain the kid glove treatment the Foundation has received over the last twenty years. The media outlets that get funding from Gates and regularly cover his education projects and investments include Chalkbeat, Hechinger Report, The 74, and Education Post, as well as K12 school reporting by NPR, Seattle Times, and others. The Foundation also helps to fund the Education Writers Association, which frequently features speakers friendly to various policies favored by Gates.

IN WHAT UNIVERSE DO FIRST RESPONDERS GO UNVACCINATED AND UNMASKED?

Cops must get vaccinated. Full stop.

I noticed this post on Fred Klonsky’s blog and it reminded me that, depending on where you live, “all city workers” — who are the subject of the Chicago Mayor’s vaccine mandate — doesn’t mean all first responders. At the same time I’ll explain why this blog went quiet for a month without any warning.

Late last spring I began to feel sick — suffice it to say that I needed minor surgery (which for someone my age means major recuperation time). I was taken to the nearby hospital by ambulance. (The following is a retelling of my spouse’s story since I can’t remember) When the two EMTs walked into our house they were unmasked. One began to work on me, and the other was peppered with questions from my panicky spouse: “Why aren’t you wearing masks?” “Are you vaccinated?” The EMT who was not tending to me put on his mask and answered that yes, he was vaccinated and vaguely reassured her. The man tending to what we assumed at the time was an emergency never answered the question, but he did don his mask.

I will assume that all the EMTs in my house (several more arrived later, masked) had recently been tested for COVID-19, but I don’t know that for sure. I am immune-compromised with several health issues, and I was and still am, susceptible to COVID-19, or any virus for that matter. Furthermore, it’s easy to see just by looking at me that I’m old enough to be seriously ill if I contracted the virus.

Masks and vaccinations should be required for all first responders…anyone who might have emergency contact with members of the community.

What could possibly be a reason that vaccination and proper medical procedure (masks, for example) should not be required for first responders, whether in a practice, or at a treatment facility or at an emergency scene, whether working with patients or sitting at the front desk, or driving the emergency truck? Other than the fact that I live in Republican, anti-science, Indiana.

Maybe Illinois isn’t that different.

[Chicago’s] Mayor Lightfoot issued the order yesterday that all city workers must be vaccinated.

The response by Fraternal Order Of Police president John Catanzara was predictable.

“We’re in America g—–n it. We don’t want to be forced to do anything. Period. This ain’t Nazi f—ing Germany (where they say) ‘Step into the f—ing showers. The pills won’t hurt you.’ What the f—?”

The language of this Trump loving fascist comparing vaccination mandates to gassing Jews by the Nazis has nothing to with mandating or union bargaining.

WHAT’S IN YOUR TEXTBOOK?

Vouchers And Disinformation

Here in Indiana, and in many other private-school-voucher-allowing states, kids are learning that humans lived with dinosaurs and that slaves were immigrants…using public funds.

The textbooks reviewed by the Guardian are used in thousands of private religious schools–schools that receive tens of thousands of dollars in public funding every year. They downplay descriptions of slavery and ignore its structural consequences. The report notes that the books “frame Native Americans as lesser and blame the Black Lives Matter movement for sowing racial discord.”

As Americans fight over wildly distorted descriptions of Critical Race Theory–a manufactured culture war “wedge issue” employed by parents fighting against more inclusive and accurate history instruction- -the article correctly points out that there has been virtually no attention paid to the curricula of private schools accepting vouchers.

…The U.S. Constitution gives parents the right to choose a religious education for their children. It does not impose an obligation on taxpayers to fund that choice, and we continue to do so at our peril.

KEEP OUT OF MY AIR-SPACE

Your Liberty To Swing Your Fist Ends Just Where My Nose Begins

A famous quote, or groups of quotes, which in today’s world might read…

“Your liberty to not go unvaccinated and not wear a mask thereby possibly spreading COVID ends where my air-space begins.”

John B. Finch, the great constitutional amendment advocate, was wont to settle this point by a single illustration. He said, “I stand alone upon a platform. I am a tall man with long arms which I may use at my pleasure. I may even double my fist and gesticulate at my own sweet will. But if another shall step upon the platform, and in the exercise of my personal liberty I bring my fist against his face, I very soon find that my personal liberty ends where that man’s nose begins.”

KNOW YOUR RIGHTS

Know Your Rights! A Tale Of Two Prayer Policies, One Forced And One Free

Americans United for Separation of Church and State have issued information about the rights of students, teachers, and parents in public schools. This post and the next are some examples of what they stand for.

I was glad to be free of compulsory prayer and school-sponsored religion. And even though I knew little about the law back then, I had an instinctive understanding that it was simply wrong for public school teachers and staff, who are agents of the state, to sponsor or pressure anyone to take part in religious activity.

Yet I also knew that our school was no “religion-free zone.” One of my favorite classes was an elective I took about World Religions. The approach was strictly objective, and there was no proselytizing. This was the first time I had been exposed to the doctrines of non-Christian faiths. It was an eye-opener.

Know Your Rights! How A Fourth Grader’s Request Sparked A Classroom Lesson On Tolerance

But when the Pledge ended, the students instead started asking questions – first, to Michael, about his decision to sit, his faith and why he couldn’t say the Pledge of Allegiance. And then they started asking me questions too: about the Pledge, why we do it, and what it means. After talking for 20 or 30 minutes, all of us – my students, Michael and I – had a greater understanding of what the Pledge was, why we said it and what it meant to each of us.

Dissent, in the form of religious difference or non-religion, can be scary. It can feel uncomfortable or disorderly. But that day in a class of fourth-graders, I saw how creating space for those with non-majoritarian beliefs doesn’t just protect those believers (or non-believers). It also presents us all with an opportunity to reflect on and gain a greater understanding of our own views and traditions. In other words, the rights of dissenters protect all of us. And I’m proud to work at Americans United, where through our Know Your Rights campaign and other vehicles, we protect those rights every day.

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2021 Medley #7 – Playing catch up

Teacher shortage, Punishing schools, Privatization, Facts, Rationality

Apparently, retirement is needed so there’s enough time to go to all the doctor appointments you’re going to need as you age.

Things have been quiet on this blog lately…for a variety of reasons. Now that things are a bit better I have a backlog of unposted Medley entries. To make it a bit easier, I’ll limit my own comments to one, or sometimes two, sentences max (Warning…prepare yourself for compound and run-on sentences)…

THE TEACHER SHORTAGE HASN’T GONE AWAY

‘Perfect storm’ of events causing teacher shortage crisis in Michigan

Who would have guessed that demonizing, overworking, reducing job security, and underpaying an entire profession of people would make that profession unattractive…leading to a shortage of teachers nationwide. Legislatures in large part caused the problem, and are now scrambling to fill classrooms with anyone, even those who are unqualified.

Carol Baaki-Diglio, Assistant Superintendent of Human Resources Oak Park Schools, says districts across the state are seeing an increase in retirements. She says it is part of a trend schools have seen for the past decade, that has been made worse by the pandemic creating more work, stress, and health fears.

“Our staff has also experienced loss. Loss of parents. Loss of colleagues,” said Baaki-Diglio.

She says we are seeing the perfect storm for a crisis.

“The perfect storm being far fewer people are choosing education, so we have fewer coming in, and then we have a mass exodus going out,” she said.

PUNISHING SCHOOLS FOR THE FAILURES OF SOCIETY

In Camden, School Closures Revealed How Unequal the System Can Be

Public schools are name-called as “failing” while legislatures, unable or unwilling to solve problems of unemployment and poverty, ignore their own impact on student achievement. It’s much easier to blame public schools than to accept one’s own responsibility.

During the Obama Administration, thousands of public schools were closed due to being deemed “low performing” because of their students’ test scores [Blogger’s Note: This is also true for the Bush Administration’s No Child Left Behind plan]. This was part of Obama’s Race to the Top initiative, and it resulted in school closures in cities across the United States—including Chicago, Cleveland, New York City, and Philadelphia—in a misguided attempt to improve the education of Black and brown children.

In 2012, Race to the Top caught on in New Jersey, where state officials determined that twenty-three of Camden’s twenty-six traditional public schools were “failing.” After taking over the Camden school district in 2013, state lawmakers made school closures their go-to strategy to remedy poor academic performance or budget shortfalls, despite the negative consequences school closures often led to.

Closing schools continues to be a popular “school improvement” strategy well into this new decade. But based on results in Camden, it’s clearly failed.

Education “ratings” are inherently biased against schools serving racially minoritized and economically marginalized students.

I heard a quote recently (forgot where and from whom) that goes something like, “The way to get rid of high poverty schools is to get rid of high poverty schools.” Legislatures insist on “rating” schools without doing anything to ease the problems of economic and racial segregation. In Indiana, the legislature passed a law that will end the punishment of “F” schools. Now it’s just a tool for shaming them. (I know…more than two sentences. Further down is one with no comment, so we’re even.)

The correlation between the percentage of “at-risk” students and standardized test score “proficiency” (high school) is 0.8

That’s…massive. That’s like the correlation between rain and rainclouds.
Meanwhile…

The correlation between the % of at-risk students in a school and that school’s GROWTH RATE on standardized test scores is…like…zero.

Wow.
OK not wow. Because…well…that’s exactly the point of growth scores. They are designed to take into account the uneven distribution of students across schools.
Schools serving privileged kids are not “better” just because they have higher test scores. Those students would score roughly the same no matter where they went to school.

We can’t say, just by looking at proficiency rates, what the quality of a school is. Because…demography.

CONSERVATIVE PRIVATIZATION AT THE UNIVERSITY LEVEL

Why Conservatives Want to Cancel the 1619 Project

Conservatives claim that America’s public universities are hotbeds of liberal (or socialist) subversion, and UNC is willing to do what they can to “suppress ideas they consider dangerous.”

The prevailing conservative view is that America’s racial and economic inequalities are driven by differences in effort and ability. The work of Hannah-Jones and others suggests instead that present-day inequalities have been shaped by deliberate political and policy choices. What appears to be an argument about reexamining history is also an argument about ideology—a defense of the legitimacy of the existing social order against an account of its historical origins that suggests different policy choices could produce a more equitable society.

Campus Cancel Culture Freakouts Obscure the Power of University Boards

One only needs to look at the billions of dollars of influence the Koch brothers have had on public schools and especially on college campuses to see how the fringe right-wing, now the base of the Republican Party, has had an impact on education in America.

…the right is not underrepresented in higher education; in fact, the opposite is true: The modern American university is a right-wing institution. The right’s dominance of academia and its reign over universities is destroying higher education, and the only way to save the American university is for students and professors to take back control of campuses.

Judge: Betsy DeVos Cannot “Quash” Deposition About Her Actions Re: Defrauded Corinthian College Students

Koch supporter, and billionaire anti-public school advocate, Betsy DeVos is stymied by a federal judge.

Former US ed sec Betsy DeVos did not want to give a formal, in-person account of her decision to side with defunct, for-profit, California-based Corinthian Colleges by not granting monetary relief to hundreds of thousand of students defrauded by this federal-aid-sucking monster.

However, on May 19, 2021, US District Judge William Alsup refreshingly denied DeVos’ “motion to quash a subpoena for her deposition.”

FACTS HAVE A WELL-KNOWN LIBERAL BIAS

Opinion: The Trumpy right is violating everything our children are taught

…only a quarter of U.S. students are proficient in civics, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress. And apparently, the right wants to keep it that way.

A bipartisan bill in Congress sponsored by Republican Sen. John Cornyn of Texas and Republican Rep. Tom Cole of Oklahoma (Disclosure: My wife’s stepmother, Rep. Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut, is one of the bill’s Democratic sponsors), would authorize $1 billion a year in grants to pay for more civics and history programs that teach children “to understand American Government and engage in American democratic practices as citizens and residents of the United States.” It’s as American — and as anodyne — as apple pie.

But, as The Post’s Laura Meckler reported over the weekend, “Conservative media and activists are pelting the Republicans who support the bill to abandon it. They call the grant program a ‘Trojan horse’ that would allow the Biden administration to push a liberal agenda.”

Fossil Fuel Interests Caught Peddling Propaganda to Schoolchildren

Science teachers, who work to help students understand climate change, are undercut by propaganda from the fossil fuel industry — funneled through the Heartland Institute — denying science.

Fossil fuel companies and climate denial groups have long sought to shape how the next generation perceives climate change, turning the classroom into a battleground for what the country’s future ideology will be. In 2012, leaked documents revealed that the oil and gas-funded Heartland Institute, a conservative and libertarian public policy think tank that promotes climate denialism, planned to spend $200,000 over two years to sow doubts about the scientific consensus on climate change in K-12 classrooms. Years later, the think tank mailed 350,000 booklets titled, “Why Scientists Disagree About Global Warming” to students across the country.

The Heartland campaign is an overt example of fossil fuel interests attempting to influence children’s understanding of climate change, but groups also employ more subtle methods to paint a favorable picture of the fossil fuel industry.

The Age Of Misinformation

Will teachers be able to leave their own tribal biases behind and help students become critical thinkers? If not, will we ever live in a nation with a shared fact base again?

In one particularly troubling analysis, researchers found that when a fact-check revealed that information in a post was wrong, the response of partisans wasn’t to revise their thinking or get upset with the purveyor of the lie.

Instead, it was to attack the fact checkers.

TIME FOR SOME RATIONAL THINKING

19 Rules for Life (2021 Edition)

Read all 19 of Peter Greene’s rules for a refreshing taste of rational thinking.

1. Don’t be a dick.

There is no excuse for being mean on purpose. Life will provide ample occasions on which you will hurt other people, either through ignorance or just because sometimes life puts us on collision courses with others and people get hurt. There is enough hurt and trouble and disappointment and rejection naturally occurring in the world; there is no reason to
deliberately go out of your way to add more. This is doubly true in a time like the present, when everyone is already feeling the stress.

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More Money, More Privatization

INDIANA’s NEW BUDGET BILL — MORE PRIVATIZATION

The Indiana General Assembly has passed the 2021 budget bill, and once more, the Republican super-majority has done its best to line the pockets of religious schools with a large increase for unaccountable school vouchers.

This year, they have added money to the privatization piggy bank in the form of Educational Scholarship Accounts (ESAs), a plan fraught with fraud possibilities (and actualities) that have already been tried in various states across the country. ESAs allow parents to purchase unaccountable “educational services” from essentially anyone who says, “Here, buy my educational service” with no accountability for how the money is spent. Meanwhile, public schools must account for every penny of the public dollars they spend.

In order to pacify the Indiana State Teachers Association (ISTA) with the increase in vouchers, the legislature included a substantial pay increase for teachers. In their report, ISTA mentions the increase in vouchers without editorial comment but focuses on the pay issue. They also share the “positive” news that the ESAs, which are only for students with special needs, are funded separately from the rest of the education pot.

I’ll make a prediction right now that within five years the ESAs will be available to anyone, and will drain money from the state’s education budget just like any other voucher. This is just a “foot-in-the-door” plan like the original voucher plan was in 2011. For those who don’t remember, to qualify for a voucher in 2011 a student had to have spent at least a year in a public school (no longer required), be low-income (about $45,000, as opposed to the new $145,000 for a family of four), and attend a “failing school.”

[NOTE: “Failing school” equals a state-neglected school filled with low-income, mostly students of color, who score low on standardized tests.]

ISTA is happy over the teacher pay increases which are well-deserved. Indiana has had the slowest growth of teacher salaries in the country since 2002. The actual funding increase, however, merely brings the state budget for education up to the same level it was in 2012!

Indiana blogger Steve Hinnefeld writes…

A budget glass half empty

While Holcomb and Republican legislative leaders are praising the budget as “transformational” and suggesting it solves Indiana’s K-12 funding woes, the truth isn’t that rosy. A preliminary analysis by Ball State economist Michael Hicks finds the budget gets Indiana’s inflation-adjusted school spending more than halfway back to where it was a decade ago, but not nearly all the way.

And the vouchers…

My main beef with the budget is that it radically expands Indiana’s already radical private school voucher program and creates a new, voucher-like K-12 education savings account program.

The positive revenue report means the voucher expansion will start this July rather than being phased in over two years. Families that make up to 300% of the limit for reduced-price school meals – about $145,000 for a family of four – will qualify for tuition vouchers worth about $5,500 per child or more.

Nearly all voucher schools are religious schools, and they are largely unregulated. They can turn away students on grounds of religion, disability, language, sexual orientation or gender identity. They can, and do, use tax dollars to teach religious dogma. They can teach that humans shared the earth with dinosaurs, enslaved people were happy, and the New Deal was a “half-way house to Communism.”

WHAT’S THE POINT?

The point is that…

• It doesn’t matter that we’re giving hundreds of millions of tax dollars a year to unaccountable schools run by churches and religious organizations.

• It doesn’t matter that the earlier promise to “save poor kids from ‘failing schools'” has morphed into providing entitlements to families that can already afford private schools.

• It doesn’t matter that private schools don’t provide a better education than public schools and voucher kids don’t get a better education (see here, here, and here).

The goal of privatization isn’t better schools for kids and communities, it’s privatization. Period.

Charles Siler, a former lobbyist for the pro-voucher Goldwater Institute, talked to Diane Ravitch and Jennifer Berkshire. He, like Ravitch, used to believe in school choice until he saw that equitable schools and improved education weren’t what the choice proponents were really after. Here he explains the goal of the Republican majorities in the various states (at around 23:40 in the video)…

Diane Ravitch in Conversation with Jennifer Berkshire and Charles Siler

The purpose isn’t to improve education by expanding school choice and giving people more opportunities, it’s to dismantle public schools.

What they’re trying to do is to implement a model of competition…telling the public schools that they need to race against charter schools and race against these private schools…then what you do is you weigh down the public schools with all these regulations and other burdens.

…then you complain about the administrative costs of all the things that you’ve burdened the public schools [with]…and talk about how inefficient they are…it’s intended to cripple the public schools so that they can’t compete.

…the most important thing to remember is that they are trying to destroy public schools and that is done by crippling them and making them ineffective as much as possible.

Privatization will continue to chip away at our public schools, year after year like it has since 2011. The privatization lobbyists have the money.

All we have are the voters.

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No Pause in Indiana’s Push for Privatization

Should we give a cheer that the Indiana Senate eased up on the offensive expansion of vouchers that the Indiana House passed in its 2021 Budget bill?

THE HOUSE VERSION

The House version gave nearly 40% of all new education money to the less than 5% of the state’s students in the form of increased voucher spending, including money for unaccountable ESAs (educational savings accounts).

It also provided an increase in voucher availability to a family of four making nearly $150,000 a year. This House plan was not the “save poor children” voucher plan that Mitch Daniels proposed ten years ago. It very definitely expanded voucher money for wealthier students.

It’s probably good that Indiana Republicans are no longer trying to pretend that their voucher program is so that “poor kids can escape from terrible schools.” Instead they’re all but admitting that public schools don’t interest them. Privatization is the goal no matter what that pesky state constitution says. At least now they’re being honest about it.

THE SENATE VERSION

The Senate still included an increase in vouchers so they’re not backing off entirely. Families of four with six figure incomes would be able to get a 90% voucher allowing their kids can enroll in mostly segregated private schools that teach creation science and that slavery was a good investment. This assumes of course, that the school will have their child since private schools can reject students for nearly any reason.

The Senate version, while not as extreme as the House, still contains a significant increase in voucher support, including a foot-in-the-door new ESA plan that lets parents use tax dollars to buy “educational” services without public oversight or accountability. Hmmm…I wonder if they might try to increase money for that in years to come?

HOUSE WILL BE “AGGRESSIVE”

The bill now goes to a conference committee where House members will try to put back what the Senate took out. Speaker of the House Todd Huston, whose campaign contributions include $35,000 from Betsy DeVos’s Hoosiers for Quality Education (see also here), said that the house will “be negotiating very aggressively” to get back what was taken out so they can satisfy their lust for privatization.

One might even think that the plan all along was for the House to propose an extreme expansion of vouchers, then have the Senate back off a bit to pacify public school advocates (and more than 170 school boards around the state), and settle on a more “modest” increase in voucher money and an ESA plan.

It’s still an increase in Indiana’s ever increasing move towards total privatization.

For Further Reading

New Indiana budget proposal scales back private school voucher expansion

After a chorus of opposition from public school districts and advocates, Indiana Senate Republicans significantly scaled back an expansion of the state’s private school voucher program under their budget proposal Thursday.

The Senate plan would not extend private school vouchers to as many middle-class families as suggested in the House budget proposal and other legislation discussed this session. It also would dramatically curtail a proposal for education savings accounts, which would give stipends to parents of children with special needs who do not attend public schools.

Senate budget would dial back voucher expansion

…the Senate budget would partially roll back the ambitious expansion of Indiana’s private school voucher program that was included in the House budget.

Like the House budget, it would create a new K-12 education savings account program, but it would limit participation and costs. Also important: It would remove a House-approved cap on the complexity index, the funding formula feature that favors districts and schools with more disadvantaged students.

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