Warren Releases Solid New Education Plan

Spoiler Alert: Unlike in 2016, DFER is not happy!  We shall see what the Dem platform eventually looks like, but if Warren is the candidate, it will look nothing like 2016.

I am going to do several posts on Warren's new education plan, which kicks in the ass anything released so far by the other candidates.  

The first thing I checked out in the new plan was the charter school section.  Among the best news is the promise to eliminate the half-billion federal dollars a year being handed out to corporate charter operators under the Charter Schools Program (CSP).

From The Intercept:

Warren’s new education plan sends a strong signal of how her administration would think about not only charter schools but also other forms of school privatization. 

Her plan calls to end the diversion of tax dollars from traditional public schools through vouchers and voucher-like tax credits. A campaign spokesperson clarified that this means both working to stop the expansion of voucher programs and working towards ending existing ones. 

Biden and Sanders’s plans do not mention vouchers or tuition tax credits, though Sanders told The Washington Post that he would not support using public money in the form of vouchers or tax credits for private or religious school education, which he has a long record of opposing. Biden did not answer the same question when he was asked. 

In her plan, Warren frames her opposition to the 2016 charter school ballot initiative as an example of “fight[ing] back against the privatization, corporatization, and profiteering in our nation’s schools.” 

She pledges to “go further” and now calls for eliminating a federal grant program used to promote new charter schools. She pledges to see if there are any other federal programs that subsidize new charters and would “seek to limit the use of those programs for that purpose.”

From Huffington Post:

Warren pledges to fight to ban for-profit charter schools, which represent around 15% of the sector. But she also goes after nonprofit ones, promising to end a federal program that provides funding for new schools and opposing provisions that allow them to sometimes evade the same level of transparency and accountability as traditional public schools. The plan seeks to ban nonprofit charters that employ or outsource operations to for-profit service providers and calls for the IRS to investigate these schools’ nonprofit tax status.

From the Warren Plan:

To keep our traditional public school systems strong, we must resist efforts to divert public funds out of traditional public schools. Efforts to expand the footprint of charter schools, often without even ensuring that charters are subject to the same transparency requirements and safeguards as traditional public schools, strain the resources of school districts and leave students behind, primarily students of color. Further, inadequate funding and a growing education technology industry have opened the door to the privatization and corruption of our traditional public schools. More than half of the states allow public schools to be run by for-profit companies, and corporations are leveraging their market power and schools’ desire to keep pace with rapidly changing technology to extract profits at the expense of vulnerable students. 

This is wrong. We have a responsibility to provide great neighborhood schools for every student. We should stop the diversion of public dollars from traditional public schools through vouchers or tuition tax credits - which are vouchers by another name. We should fight back against the privatization, corporatization, and profiteering in our nation’s schools. I did that when I opposed a ballot question in Massachusetts to raise the cap on the number of charter schools, even as dark money groups spent millions in support of the measure. And as president, I will go further: 

• Ensure existing charter schools are subject to at least the same level of transparency and accountability as traditional public schools: Many existing charter schools aren’t subject to the same transparency and accountability requirements as traditional public schools. That’s wrong. That’s why I support the NAACP’s recommendations to only allow school districts to serve as charter authorizers, and to empower school districts to reject applications that do not meet transparency and accountability standards, consider the fiscal impact and strain on district resources, and establish policies for aggressive oversight of charter schools. Certain states are already starting to take action along these lines to address the diversion of public funds from traditional public schools. My administration will oppose the authorization of new charter schools that do not meet these standards. My administration also will crack down on union-busting and discriminatory enrollment, suspension, and expulsion practices in charter schools, and require boards to be made up of parents and members of the public, not just founders, family members, or profit-seeking service providers.
• End federal funding for the expansion of charter schools: The Federal Charter School Program (CSP), a series of federal grants established to promote new charter schools, has been an abject failure. A recent reportshowed that the federal government has wasted up to $1 billion on charter schools that never even opened, or opened and then closed because of mismanagement and other reasons. The Department of Education’s own watchdog has even criticized the Department’s oversight of the CSP. As President, I would eliminate this charter school program and end federal funding for the expansion of charter schools. I would also examine whether other federal programs or tax credits subsidize the creation of new charter schools and seek to limit the use of those programs for that purpose. 
• Ban for-profit charter schools: Our public schools should benefit students, not the financial or ideological interests of wealthy patrons like the DeVos and Walton families. I will fight to ban for-profit charter schools and charter schools that outsource their operations to for-profit companies.
• Direct the IRS to investigate so-called nonprofit schools that are violating the statutory requirements for nonprofits: Many so-called nonprofit schools – including charter schools – operate alongside closely held, for-profit service providers. Others are run by for-profit companies that siphon off profits from students and taxpayers. The IRS should investigate the nonprofit status of these schools and refer cases to the Tax Fraud Division of the Department of Justice when appropriate. I would also apply my plan’s ban on for-profit charter schools to any of these so-called “nonprofit” schools that actually serve for-profit interests. And my plan would ban self-dealing in nonprofit schools to prevent founders and administrators from funneling resources to service providers owned or managed by their family members. 
• Expand enforcement of whistleblower actions against schools that commit fraud against taxpayers: Our federal laws allow whistleblowers to bring actions to expose fraud and retrieve stolen federal money. The Department of Justice should expand its enforcement of these whistleblower actions to address fraud that appears all too common in certain charter schools, including online charter schools that falsify or inflate their enrollment numbers.

Why Elizabeth Warren Was Right about MA Charter School Expansion

Jonathan Chait has a piece in New York Magazine that attacks Elizabeth Warren's decision in 2016 to support the continued cap on charter schools in urban areas of MA (there is no cap for the suburbs or rural areas).  What Chait knows about education policy in general and charter school policy in particular, he probably learned from his wife, Robin Chait, who did stints as a charter cheerleader at the Center for American Progress and WestEd before landing a job as Director of Performance Management and Human Resources, Center City Public Charter Schools, in Washington, DC. 

As with other disingenuous and/or delusional Democrats, Mr. Chait is promoting the idea that Warren sold out to "special interests" by backing public school parents, teachers, unionists, and small "d" democrats of all varieties who want their public school tax dollars in Massachusetts to support public schools, rather than the charter school industry.

Had Warren sided with billionaire charter zealots, hedge funders, real estate moguls, venture philanthropists, and other paternalist elites who wanted the charter cap in Massachusetts removed, that would have demonstrated, according to Chait, that she is a real progressive.  If Warren were a real progressive, according to Chait, she would be cheering on the efforts of the Waltons, Broads, Fishers, Gates's, etc. to remove all constraints on the spread of "no excuses" charter schools in urban areas.

Chait demonstrates the kind of thought disorder that binds together the neoconservatives at the Fordham Institute with the neoliberals at the Center for American Progress--or the RNC's Republicans for Education Reform with the DNC's Democrats for Education Reform.

Both of these advocacy groups share today the conclusion that Lyndon Johnson reached way back in the 1960s--that there is no appetite among the majority of the electorate to alter the structures that keep the urban poor, poor.  
So if we can't bring ourselves to risk our political capital to 1) provide a minimum income for families in poverty, 2) provide universal health care, 3) end barriers to integrated housing (which would serve, in turn, to integrate schools), minimize income inequality, and 5) institute anti-racist public policies at all levels, then the most viable solution, following Lyndon Johnson, is to focus on education funding and school quality, while offering lip service, at least, to fair housing policy and school desegregation.

The Johnson Administration was not the first to believe, or pretend to believe, in the power of schooling to achieve equality. Horace Mann in 19th Century Massachusetts wrote that education is “great equalizer of the conditions of men—the balance wheel of the social machinery.”   

What the Johnson Administration found out (and then suppressed) from James Coleman's massive report published the second year into the War on Poverty, is that more money for schools is not enough to put a serious dent in the achievement gaps or educational inequality.  In fact, more financial resources is not even the most important factor in closing the gaps.  

Six years after the study was published, Coleman said in a 1972 interview  "a child's performance, especially a working-class child's performance, is greatly benefited by his going to a school with children who come from educationally stronger backgrounds. . . . A child's learning is a function more of the characteristics of his classmates than those of the teacher." 

If Jonathan Chait ever heard of James Coleman's research, there is no evidence of it. The research that Chait references to make a case for more charter schools in urban areas examined testing performance in over-subscribed charter schools in Massachusetts that use a lottery to determine student enrollment:

Professors Sarah Cohodes and Susan Dynarski conducted a study proving the massive gains produced by charter school students in the Bay State. Because Massachusetts has a cap on the number of students allowed to attend charters, its students have to enter a lottery to apply. This allowed Cohodes and Dynarski to compare the performance of students who won the lottery with those who lost, a perfectly randomized sample, across a broad suite of metrics. The students who won the lottery and attended a charter outperformed the lottery losers in every way: state test scores, SAT scores, number of advanced placement classes and test scores in those classes, and college attendance.

Test performance comparisons of lottery winners who attended charters to lottery losers who attended public schools would seem to offer an air-tight case  for establishing the superiority of MA charter schools over the public schools.  But when we look again to Coleman's finding over fifty years ago (which have never been refuted), we are reminded of factors that Cohode and Dynarski (or Jonathan Chait) have not considered.  

Both lottery winners and lottery losers represent a self-selecting group of students whose parents obviously are willing to exhaust every avenue in search of better education.  Lottery winners end up attending school with other lottery winners, while lottery losers must return to neglected public schools that have been labeled as failures for the past two decades and regularly targeted for intervention or even closure. 
 

As Coleman noted in 1966, “if a minority pupil from a home without much educational strength is put with schoolmates with strong educational backgrounds, his achievement is likely to increase” (p. 22).  The social capital that accrues in classrooms with students whose parents are motivated to seek out what they believe to be better options (whether real or mythical) for their children should not be underestimated.  Nor should we underestimate the effect grouping together black and brown children in demoralized, financially-strained school environments with low social capital, low expectations, and minimal support. 

The question researchers and opinion writers should be asking is this: Can higher test score results in over-subscribed "no excuses" charter schools continue to be used to justify taxpayer funding for "no excuses" charter schools' dehumanizing learning and teaching environments, where children are culturally sterilized and neurologically altered to suit the social control program goals of billionaire paternalists?  Are we really willing to continue public support for eugenics-inspired visionaries like Angela Duckworth and David Levin to "fix" those children made unfit by poverty?  

Whether or not Elizabeth Warren knew why she was answering "no" to these questions is of less importance than the fact that she did, in effect, say NO. Maybe by 2020 she will have figured out all the reasons that she was right.

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The Next President of the United States

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