For your drive! Hey, check out this track on SoundCloud: LatinX TalX: A Sharing LatinX Journeys Podcast Episode 14: Community Schools, Charter Schools & Cloaking Inequality chat with Will Ortiz-Febus and Dr. Julian Vazquez Heilig
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We’re in a watershed moment for public education.
Donald Trump has committed to spending $20 billion on market-based school choice, including charter schools and vouchers. He’s also proposed cutting afterschool programs, as well as college grants and federal work study programs for college students.
But the most significant move away from public education our country is making right now is in the expansion of school vouchers—a direct transfer of public money to private schools. Conventional voucher programs simply give parents taxpayer dollars to apply toward private-school tuition. Education Savings Accounts, or “neovouchers,” allow states to circumnavigate constitutional language that bans public funding for private and religious organizations.
In a recent article, Kevin Welner, a professor at the University of Colorado specializing in education policy and law, reported that conventional voucher policies now exist in 16 states, producing about 175,000 vouchers annually. Education Savings Accounts are in 17 states and generate about 250,000 vouchers every year.
Here’s what’s important to know about vouchers:
Voucher proponents usually ignore the insidious history of the idea. Milton Friedman, the University of Chicago economist and apostle of free-market fundamentalism, believed corporations should be able to profit from education. In 1997, he wrote “Public Schools: Make Them Private,” arguing that vouchers were “a means to make a transition from a government to a market system,” to enable “a private, for-profit industry to develop” and to abolish the public system of schools.
In 1955, Friedman also wrote that he didn’t believe in government sponsored integration of schools. Friedman saw vouchers as a way to stack schools by race if communities so chose. This is, in fact, what happened. The South used vouchers to create “segregation academies” for whites only.
This history is overlooked by current proponents of school vouchers, who usually frame vouchers as a “limited” approach that would help poor children in cities—even claiming they are a civil right.
The political argument that market-based school choice is the answer for longstanding inequalities in the American education system for the poor and youth of color is at odds with the positions of most national civil rights organizations. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Urban League, League of United Latin American Citizens, Journey for Justice, Movement for Black Lives, and many other civil rights organizations all agree that public school privatization and vouchers are far from a civil rights remedy, and instead “siphon away all-too-limited public education funds and fail to provide protection from discrimination and segregation.”
The school choice movement has worked hard to foster African American and Latino leaders who support vouchers and other forms of privately managed school choice. One example is the Black Alliance for Educational Options in Milwaukee, which is heavily funded by politically conservative foundations. Another, the Libre Initiative, was founded in 2011 and claims to be a “non-partisan, non-profit grassroots organization that advances the principles and values of economic freedom to empower the U.S. Hispanic community.” But Media Matters has reported that Libre’s senior staff are almost all Republican Party campaign veterans, and the organization is backed by more than $10 million in Koch brothers funding—suggesting that Libre is neither non-partisan nor grassroots. Libre representatives place op-eds in newspapers in states with substantial Latino populations, making simplistic, convincing-sounding claims about the benefits of school “choice” for communities of color.
You can find the rare peer reviewed study—typically funded with resources from pro-voucher organizations and philanthropists—showing a very small positive statistical effect of vouchers for students. However, Martin Carnoy, a Stanford University Professor of Economics and Education argued recently, in a report released by Economic Policy Institute, that the predominance of peer-reviewed research for 25 years shows that vouchers don’t improve student success. “Choice” proponents harp on the limitations of traditional public schools, but they never seem to get around to mentioning the predominance of the peer-reviewed literature demonstrating that vouchers don’t lead to better outcomes.
In Chile, which has a large voucher program, research has shown that the voucher policy experiment has generated creaming effects, benefiting some groups, but damaging others—especially low-income students in urban areas. Overall, the market-based approach appears to benefit wealthier students and students with the best academic abilities living in mixed or upper income areas.
The data is clear: more than two decades of school vouchers for every child in Chile has resulted in an education system where low-income students have fewer opportunities and even greater barriers to choosing a high-quality school.
Why are well-heeled conservative philanthropies and organizations such as the Koch brothers, American Legislative Executive Council, Walton Foundation, Heritage Foundation, and Foundation of Educational Excellence spending millions of dollars funding studies and lobbying heavily for vouchers?
Vouchers align with a neoliberal focus on “open markets, privatization, deregulation, and decreasing the size of the public sector while increasing the role of the private sector in modern society.” Vouchers purposefully move the responsibility and funding of public education into the hands of for-profit and nonprofit organizations—and away from the traditional democratically controlled public school system.
Publicly funded voucher programs gained some momentum after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled vouchers were allowable under the U.S. Constitution in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris. However, the majority of voucher funds are provided by state tax dollars. As a result, the legal debate continues in the states. For example, the Nevada State Supreme Court ruled in 2016 that the funding mechanism for Education Savings Accounts were unconstitutional.
In 2014, the NAACP filed an amicus brief challenging the constitutionality of North Carolina’s voucher program. In the civil-rights-movement era, private school “segregation academies” were created in states across the South, and they still exist today! In fact, they are often very prominently segregated in African American majority counties. Some legacy segregation academies in North Carolina even advertise on their website that you can use a voucher to attend a predominately white school. In essence, as Friedman originally envisioned, vouchers continue to promulgate de facto segregation in schools.
Choice is a two-way street. You can choose Stanford, but Stanford also has to choose you. Vouchers empower private schools to have greater control over the demographic population of their students. Practices known as “creaming” and “cropping” are demonstrated extensively in the research literature as ways private schools choose to enroll the best and least costly students. Creaming is the mechanism through which private schools can choose to enroll the best and least costly students. Cropping occurs when private schools deny services to diverse learners on the basis of their disability, socioeconomic status, and language learner status. These students are costly to educate, and private “choice schools” can legally decide not to allow them to enroll or to continue in the school. These issues are a cause for concern if we hold equity, equality, and demographic representation as essential for public education— and if believe that families and parents should do the choosing instead of schools.
Donald Trump and US Secretary of Education Betsy Devos are clearly enamored with privately-managed school choice funded by public tax dollars. Their commitment persists despite a sordid racial history, opposition from the civil rights community, state constitutional problems, evidence that vouchers hurt communities of color, and the proven failure of the approach to help students.
This article appeared here first at The Progressive Magazine.
Read more about school vouchers here.
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School choice is so seductive. Like a chocolate cake with the double chocolate frosting. There are many forms of school choice, and the media has been telling us for a few decades now that they are all fantastic alternatives to democratically-controlled local schools. One of the most prominent of forms of choice is school vouchers.
I am a really big Sci-Fi fan. When things quiet down in the evening, I grab my remote and go searching for a streaming film. This can be quite hard nowadays because the streaming services are full of films that college students made as a class project. I should know better because the ratings on the Sci-Fi films that I choose are half of a star, but honestly I am usually hoping that I might find some diamonds in the rough. This does occasionally happen (I have actually been thinking about starting a film blog but I didn’t a replicant of myself to find the time to write for it) For example, one Sci-Fi/Horror diamond in the rough that I recently found was Alien Valley. Please don’t blame me if you hate it.
Anyways, maybe one of the best all time Sci-Fi films would have to be Back to the Future. I am not as keen on the two follow up films in the trilogy, but the original was incredible. Of course we know the plot, Marty McFly learned from his missteps and addressed his weaknesses in the past so that he could have a vibrant future.
Thanks for staying with me during my expressed love of Sci-Fi films. Before I move on, its my parents fault— you see we’d watch Star Trek originals while we ate dinner. I remember my parents would roll around the RCA tube TV. Also, late saturday nights my Dad would rent the really old school Sci-Fi, you know the ones where giant ants attacked Los Angeles and a glutinous blog, err blob, enveloped humans.
Okay, back to Marty McFly. So you’d think with vouchers we’d learn from the past. But we haven’t! If Marty McFly could have gone back in time to Chile in the 1980s have would have encountered Pinochet, a military dictator deciding that every student in country should have “choice.” Of course, the conversation wasn’t really about choice but instead because he wanted to reduce his fudiciary responsibility to education and turn it over to private organizations. We have published two peer review papers on the intense stratification and segregation that has resulted from vouchers in Chile in the posts
Did you know that a decade of ongoing (and often violent) protests have been occurring in Chile? (See Will Market-Based Education Produce More or Less Student Uprising?) The media in the United States have failed to share with the public that two decades of vouchers has had disastrous results. Check out Fault Lines, a short piece from Al Jazeera.
Voucher proponents have been selling them as a remedy for inequality— but in actuality they actually maginify the inequality. See Universal School “Choice”: Schools Ultimately Do the Choosing
When I gave a lecture at the University of Arkansas, I mentioned the Chile case to Patrick Wolf, a voucher proponent and University of Arkansas professor, who is funded by ideological choice advocates, foundations and think tanks. His response?
“I don’t study Chile.”
Vouchers have also been racial political football. Milton Friedman, the father of vouchers and Nobel prize winner, made this very clear in his early conception of vouchers.
Race is still political football for vouchers. More recently, the Black Alliance for Education Options has taken hundred of thousands of dollars from privatizers to make the case that vouchers are about Civil Rights. It’s a deception. See Reframing the Refrain: Choice as a Civil Rights Issue
The big news recently is that the Louisiana voucher program has failed spectacularly (goes hand in hand with the other failures in neoliberal education reformer policy in Louisiana See Flood of Lies: Education reform crescendo at #Katrina10).
The Economist proffered that “An enlightened scheme to benefit poor children seems to do the opposite.” They reported on the study School vouchers and student achievement: first-year evidence from the Louisiana Scholarship Programme by Atila Abdulkadiroglu, Parag A. Pathak and Christopher R. Walters:
IN THEORY it works perfectly. Rather than oblige parents to send their children to the nearest state-run or –funded school, give them a voucher to be spent at a private school of their choice. “The adoption of such arrangements”, argued Milton Friedman in 1955, “would make for more effective competition among various types of schools and for a more efficient utilisation of their resources.” As part of its recovery from Hurricane Katrina, which destroyed many schools in New Orleans, Louisiana undertook one of America’s largest school-choice schemes. According to a new paper by Atila Abdulkadiroglu of Duke University, Parag Pathak of MIT and Christopher Walters of Berkeley, it has not gone well.*
Increasing school choice is a favourite policy of Republican governors and state legislatures. Since the party’s bumper election year in 2010 the number of voucher schemes has increased from 25 to 59, according to the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice. The thinking behind this is sound: the well-off already exercise school choice by moving into neighbourhoods with better schools. Why not allow poorer families to do the same? Yet the evidence from the voucher programmes that have been evaluated has been underwhelming: parents like them, but they often do little for their children’s test scores.
Louisiana’s scheme, brought in by a conservative governor, added a feature that ought to delight progressives: a lottery to assign the vouchers. In 2014 12,000 students from low-income families applied for more than 6,000 vouchers to attend 126 private schools. Lotteries are loved by social scientists because the winners and losers, distinguished by chance alone, are statistically identical. That means differences in outcomes can reasonably be attributed to the programme rather than, say, differences in family circumstances.
It turned out that this was a lottery to lose. The three economists found that those who received vouchers and moved to private schools had worse test scores in maths, reading, science and social studies than those who missed out.
Ouch. Having a voucher actually hurt the achievement of children. You might hear someone argue that the new Louisiana voucher study is just one study. So what does the predominance of the research literature say?
Here is a policy brief that review the research on vouchers domestically
Here is a policy brief that reviews the research on vouchers internationally
Marty McFly learned from his errors and the past— despite the seductive allures that he encountered. We should too. The evidence is clear on vouchers, while the parental choice and Civil Rights framing is almost convincing— it is a false and wrong narrative.
For all of Cloaking Inequity’s posts on vouchers click here.
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In the post, Exclusive: Students Tear Gassed By Police While Protesting School Inequality I asked
Are you ready for more protests?
School “reformers” have argued that the Baltimore uprising is a call for more market-based education. I argue the opposite is actually true.
First, Baltimore. Then, Chile.
I was involved in crafting the Network for Public Education’s response to the Baltimore Uprising. Here is our statement:
The death of Freddie Gray while in police custody is a national tragedy. We support his family and the millions nationwide who call for justice in his case. We support the thousands who have peacefully joined protests for justice. The national media coverage of the Baltimore uprising continues to sensationalize the violent responses of some of those protesting while ignoring the thousands of people across the country peacefully gathering to demand an end to violence inflicted upon our communities.
We will watch intently the outcome of the charges filed yesterday against six police officers allegedly involved in the death of Freddie Gray.
However, the pursuit of justice must not be isolated to this single case. Cries for justice should not only surround Gray’s killing, but also include many people of color who are disproportionately targeted, arrested, and killed by police across the nation.
We also seek justice and fairness for millions of students who are subject to inequitable treatment in our nation’s schools. At the Network for Public Education, we fight for strong public schools and the right of all students, current and future, to receive a quality education.
Notably, across the United States, there are educators implementing restorative justice practices in schools to build affinity and de-escalate tensions before they lead to additional violence and a school-to-prison pipeline. Schools often exacerbate the criminalization and dehumanization of our youth, but they can and must be part of the solution.
At our recent national conference, many spoke on the need for communities of color and education organizations to coalesce to fight for social justice. Some spoke on the need for us to address racial injustice and inequities more directly. We encourage our members and educators everywhere to teach, discuss and learn with and from our students about these issues.
We stand with the people of Baltimore crying out for a nation to see their pain from persisting injustice and inequality. We stand with the students of Baltimore who live in a school system inequitably funded and resourced, who have expressed to the nation that they feel oppressed and ignored.
Also, check out the Baltimore Uprising syllabus for teachers in this tweet
Are you aware that students have been protesting/uprising/rioting against unregulated market-based education over the past several years? The ongoing protest is called the Chilean Winter. Not surprisingly, CNN, FoxNews, MSNBC and other US-based network media doesn’t cover the ongoing student protests/uprising/riots in response to a failing market-based education system in Chile. The students have demanded more training for teachers, less privatization and more government regulation of schools. Are student uprisings across the United States our market-based education future?
Here are videos of 2014 Chilean student protest from my YouTube feed that UT-Austin students took while conducting research in Chile on vouchers.
Then this happened: Exclusive: Students Tear Gassed By Police While Protesting School Inequality
Lourdes Perez Ramirez from Hispana.edu was in Santiago when the Chilean police responded to ongoing Chilean Winter protests in 2014 by tear gassing students protesting 3 decades of market-based education policies that they argue have accentuated inequality. Here are the email report I received:
We have been in the middle of a student demonstration; got tear gas; were hidden by a business woman so we did not get wet with water cannons.
Students were occupying the Ministry of Education on Wednesday August 20 (we almost we didn’t get in to see our contact) and the protest today was relatively peaceful (the part we observed) but we all got tear gassed. Metro subway exits were blocked preventing us from getting to street level because of the protest.
My research concurs with the students. Market-based policies foment segregation and help the few at the expense of the many. I have discussed the failures of markets, specifically vouchers, in the research literature on vouchers in the US and in Chile. We also published a peer reviewed paper on the segregation and ill effects of a universal vouchers system last year in the journal of Educational Policy Analysis Archives. I profiled the paper in the post New Research: Vouchers Increase Segregation and Offer Benefits to the Few. A second paper examining market-based education reforms is forthcoming in another peer-reviewed journal. When it’s published, I will release it here at Cloaking Inequity.
There is no mystery what market-based education does and who it serves— we have plenty of evidence on unregulated choice markets. In the essay entitled National experiment in school choice, market solutions produces inequity Alfredo Gaete and Stephanie Jones wrote,
Indeed, Chilean education reform from the 1980s to the present provides the writing on the wall, so to speak, for the United States and we should take heed. Chile is now engaged in what will be a long struggle to dig its way out of the educational disaster created by failed experimentation and falsely produced miracles. The United States still has time to reverse course, to turn away from the scary language of crisis and the seductive language of choice and accountability used in educational reform, and turn toward a fully funded and protected public education for our nation.
They then responded to the Cato Institute’s criticism of their initial essay in Why competitive model fails schools. No one should lose in education. They wrote,
Not everything is a competition, not everything should be designed as a competition, and education – especially – should not be treated as a competition where there are guaranteed winners and losers. No one should lose in education. Education is a public necessity that calls for collaboration; the sharing of resources, information and practices; and justice. It should be the job of a healthy state aiming for the common good, not a game for businesses with a focus on profits, losses, and hedging financial bets.
If school “choice” supporters get their wish for an unregulated market for schools in the United States— I believe we will likely see more student uprisings. Why? After 30 years of market-based policies, that is what is happening in Chile— students have protested (often violently) the glaring inequities in their system. Supporters of school “choice” want you to believe that school vouchers and charters “work” and promote civil rights. I wrote in the post Billionaires co-opt minority groups into campaign for education reform that the reality is just the opposite.
p.s. Considering the success of the Newark Student Union, the Chilean student protest et al. My latest project is a new one-day social justice and media workshop for high school students. I will pilot the workshop on May 17 here in California for a group of students from a national civil rights organization.
For all of Cloaking Inequity’s posts on charters click here.
For all of Cloaking Inequity’s posts on vouchers click here.
Please Facebook Like, Tweet, etc below and/or reblog to share this discussion with others.
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Twitter: @ProfessorJVH
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I have a question for you… Can you use your finger and identify Chile on a map? I only ask because there are lots of ideas and theories in the US educational policy discourse about schools choice and what would happen if we had a universal school “choice” market. Well, we don’t actually have to imagine or theorize what a universal school choice market would look like. All we have to do is put our finger on Chile— it has been happening there for the past few decades since a dictator prioritized “choice” to reduce the government’s role in education funding. The universal school “choice” market has actually enhanced segregation and inequality instead of remedying it (See New Research: Vouchers Increase Segregation and Offer Benefits to the Few). As you might remember, we asked you the readers of Cloaking Inequity to support a student led research trip to Chile to get a better picture of the reforms that have been rumored to the Chilean privatization of education (See Sponsor a Student!: Inform Your Policymaker Why Vouchers Have Failed). To my knowledge, mainstream US media haven’t discussed the reforms being contemplated in Chile for the universal school “choice” system and the reasons for them. While the team was on the ground in Chile, this happened: Exclusive: Students Tear Gassed By Police While Protesting School “Choice”
The students are back from Chile. Unfortunately I had to cancel the ticket I bought due to my departure from the University of Texas at Austin to accept a promotion at California State University Sacramento. However, the research team has submitted a blog post for you the readers of Cloaking Inequity as a thank you for your support of the Chile research. Here is what they have to say about the new reforms in Chile.
Chile is not repealing its voucher system… not just yet anyhow.
Chileans have, however, begun an important national conversation about opportunity, segregation, and outcomes within what is essentially an unregulated market based education system. It is a system, within which, the majority of stakeholders are not happy. The competition of the open market place has not improved test scores; school choice has led to further socioeconomic segregation; and school stability is dependent on the marketplace. And yet, the idea of choice is still very popular in the country.
Chileans are in the very early stages of exploring regulatory fixes to this system that many people hope will make choice, and the voucher system, more equitable. Presently, there are three reforms they are trying to pass and implement within the next year, and they all seek to mitigate the inequities resulting from an unregulated market system that has been in place for more than three decades.
The first reform focuses on eliminating extra fees that private voucher schools charge students and families. Chile no longer wants to allow private schools to charge more than the price of the governmental voucher amount. This is widely seen as something they should have never allowed. All descriptive evidence has shown that after the government allowed these “add-on fees” school segregation, by social and economic class, grew rapidly. Although no one disputes the increase in segregation in the Chilean school system, there are debates about the cause of this segregation, and whether schools or parents are at fault for the resulting homogeneity found in schools.
The next major reform push is for the government to revoke and outlaw for-profit voucher schools. No one is really quite sure about how to make all schools “not for profit” at this point. People are angry that schools can profit from education. Secondary and university students are particularly vocal on this point. “No Más Lucro” and “Educación Gratuita” were well represented in the protests we encountered. Some have suggested for-profit schools be phased out gradually, while the government pays the difference between the voucher and the school tuition during the next several years. While others want the government to effectively “buy-out” the for profit schools.
The last reform focuses on creating a regulatory system that requires schools to follow the laws that were passed in 2009. In 2009, the Chilean legislature passed a number of laws making it illegal for primary schools to engage in the pre-selection of students. They could no longer test students, prior to enrollment, in order to weed out those that would be more difficult and costly to educate. They could also no longer engage in parent interviews prior to selection. Unfortunately, private voucher schools have not given up the practice, as there is no regulatory mechanism in place to keep them from doing so. Schools not only continue to engage in pre-selection, but do so openly, at both the primary and secondary levels. One academic we interviewed proposed that if they are going to continue with the school choice model, that the choice must be removed from the schools, and student placements should be handled by a third party municipal entity. Other powerful players are calling for “U.S. American style accountability” as a regulatory mechanism, using the country’s SIMCE test as the measure by which schools are evaluated and possibly sanctioned.
What is not prominent, presently, in the conversation is a call for strengthening the public school system through investment; instead, the conversation is heavily focused on making that market place more fair. Conversations, at the policy level, are not presently about making greater investments in students, nor the teacher labor force. Though, there is still time for these issues to become part of the conversation, and bills are currently being drafted to address these issues and bring them into fold.
Chileans like the idea of school choice; there is a long history of private schooling in the country that stretches well before Pinochet’s 1981 voucher system. However, many Chileans recognize that it is the schools that are ultimately doing the choosing, and moderate and low-income families are losing out. The volatility of the free-market education system means there is a school there one day, but not necessarily the next. Schools can fold at any time due to finances, or even the death of the founder. And there is still a great distrust that the public school system can operate well. There is extensive public relations work to be done if the public school system is to become viable for the broad population. At this time, less than 50 percent of the school-aged population attends public school in Chile.
Thank you all for your support in this important work. The reform discussion in Chile will continue and we will be following the progress closely to see how the situation unfolds in the coming months.
My thoughts. I doubt the US courts would permit a regulated voucher system in the United States that would allow the government to control what private schools charge for tuition and also outlaw for-profit schools. Since these controls wouldn’t be on the table, advantaged students would be the “winners” in the market— students with capital (such as high test scores, $, transportation means, parents who can volunteer in school) could access desired schools in a universal market. Sounds like a familiar paradigm, well, actually the one we currently live under in the United States— just with the potential to be even MORE segregative and unequal than the system we already have— as demonstrated over several decades in Chile.
For all of Cloaking Inequity’s posts on vouchers click here and charters here.
Please Facebook Like, Tweet, etc below and/or reblog.
Want to know about Cloaking Inequity’s freshly pressed conversations about educational policy? Click the “Follow blog by email” button in the upper left hand corner of this page.
Twitter: @ProfessorJVH
Click here for Vitae.
Please blame Pinochet for any typos.
p.s. Thank you to the hundreds of readers from Chile who have visited Cloaking Inequity.
p.s.s. A couple of photos that I took on Easter Island of the Moai (which is under the control of Chile) a few years ago. It is one of the most amazing places I have ever been. Please add to your bucket list.
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