Schools Matter: Vouchers in FL Create Black Christian Madrassahs in Strip Malls

Schools Matter: Vouchers in FL Create Black Christian Madrassahs in Strip Malls

Vouchers in FL Create Black Christian Madrassahs in Strip Malls

Although this commentary by Billy Townsend describes a seed of hope in Florida's education desert, the bigger message points to what you get with laws that allow unregulated and unaccredited private "schools" to replace public schools that have been malignantly-neglected by segregationists who want to close them.

Orlando Sentinel, May 16 

Jones High success story illustrates inadequacy of voucher schools

Six years ago, essentially zero Jones High School students took physics. Today, more than 250 do. That means 250 Orlando-area young people per year now have a better chance of becoming engineers or scientists or doctors. We should celebrate that. Physics is crucial to many educational and professional journeys. 

Unfortunately, as a recent former Polk County school board member, I know all too well the rarity of serious growth in Florida’s education capacity. Our state is steadily dismantling education capacity everywhere through its contempt for public schools and indifference to voucher-school performance. Capacity destruction drives Florida’s chronic educator shortages. 

It’s one reason Florida has among America’s worst state test score “learning rates,” according to The CONTINUE READING: Schools Matter: Vouchers in FL Create Black Christian Madrassahs in Strip Malls

"Capacity-ism:" Florida spends $1 Billion per year on a fraudulent voucher marketplace that has created zero private education capacity. A documentary. - Public Enemy Number 1

"Capacity-ism:" Florida spends $1 Billion per year on a fraudulent voucher marketplace that has created zero private education capacity. A documentary. - Public Enemy Number 1

"Capacity-ism:" Florida spends $1 Billion per year on a fraudulent voucher marketplace that has created zero private education capacity. A documentary.

$1 billion per year has produced few -- if any -- products worth buying in Florida's voucher marketplace. That's because markets alone don't create capacity; and there is no equity without capacity.

Put aside what you think about Jeff Bezos and Amazon as person and company. This article isn’t about either; it’s about school vouchers. But I saw Bezos use a thought-provoking phrase in his annual stockholder letter. I find it quite helpful in assessing the catastrophic human and economic failures of Florida’s school voucher programs.

“If you want to be successful in business (in life, actually), you have to create more than you consume. Your goal should be to create value for everyone you interact with.” 

Again, put aside whether you think Bezos or Amazon do that. Put aside how easily that statement can lead you to eugenics if you follow its logic into human existence. Put aside the fuzzy definitions of creation and consumption. Let’s just take it on business/economics/marketplace terms.

Doug Tuthill’s schools and organization consume *infinitely* more than they create — here’s a documentary

No institution of any kind in America consumes more money and creates less value than Florida’s voucher school provider network. None. Florida’s failed voucher schools have the worst consumption-to-creation ratio of any large-scale business or private function I have ever seen. Step up for Students, as an organization, consumes so much more than it creates that it’s virtually impossible to quantify the disproportion. Here’s a taste, from an organization that provides zero active quality oversight of its schools or marketplace.

Step Up has the money to spend. It takes a 2.5-3% administrative fee on every CONTINUE READING: "Capacity-ism:" Florida spends $1 Billion per year on a fraudulent voucher marketplace that has created zero private education capacity. A documentary. - Public Enemy Number 1

Voucher tax money follows the grift, not the child: a case study - Public Enemy Number 1

Voucher tax money follows the grift, not the child: a case study - Public Enemy Number 1

Voucher tax money follows the grift, not the child: a case study

A "Sparrow Academy" experience demonstrates why the Step Up for Students voucher school "marketplace" needs a grand jury, a Grady Judd task force, and fundamental reform -- not an expansion.

I’ll be referring to the mother in this article by her initials, CS. And I’m using the pseudonym “Terry” for her son.

On April 1, CS received a strange note about her son’s “McKay” special needs voucher from the school secretary of Lakeland’s Sparrow Academy. Sparrow is a voucher school with 100 percent special needs/ESE enrollment that Terry had formerly attended. You can see some of Sparrow’s marketing content above.

Good morning, I was about to put [Terry’s] packet in the mail when the scholarship checks arrived. If it would be OK when you come to sign the check can I give you his packet?  There isn't school tomorrow, Good Friday.

Sparrow principal Vance Linholm had kicked Terry out of school via text on March 16, two weeks before that email. I’ll show you that text in a second. Since that day, CS had been struggling to get any documentation of Terry’s performance and discipline record for his 18 months or so with the school. She had been going back and forth with the secretary. Now, the school was saying it would give her a packet of his work “when you come to sign the check” — weeks after the school had dismissed Terry.

The money follows the student. LOL

“The money follows the child” is a well-worn cliche of voucher grifters like Jeb Bush and Kelli Stargel and Richard Corcoran and basically all Republican and a few Democratic CONTINUE READING: Voucher tax money follows the grift, not the child: a case study - Public Enemy Number 1

Jeb Crow, pt. 5: Reformers, you long ago stopped being the good guys -- if you ever were. Will you join us now? - Public Enemy Number 1

Jeb Crow, pt. 5: Reformers, you long ago stopped being the good guys -- if you ever were. Will you join us now? - Public Enemy Number 1

Jeb Crow, pt. 5: Reformers, you long ago stopped being the good guys -- if you ever were. Will you join us now?

Help us end Big Test/Jeb Crow. We could create equity together by rebuilding the capacity you've helped bad people destroy. You may have to swallow some pride; but what's most important to you?

Part 1: Florida's voucher segregation factories imitate pre-Brown American education - only worse

Part 2: What "Jeb Crow" has wrought for FTC, McKay, and Gardiner kids -- and everybody else

Part 3: How to shop in a Jeb Crow voucher marketplace built to cheat and grift and harm your child

Part 4: The dark story of "Failure Factories" and "Schools without Rules" shows how power dominates education journalism, narrative, and humanity

Today is the final installment of this series, which evolved in its focus as I wrote it. And that has led me to change its name from “Segregation Factories” to “Jeb Crow.” That’s the title I want readers to take with them when they leave. I appreciate everyone who has read the first four pieces. I tend to ask a lot from readers in what I write because I respect readers very much; and I know it’s my job to make the complex and long fun to read. I hope I’ve done that here. And I hope this series serves as resource for a long time to come.

Adam Miller was the Florida Department of Education’s Office of Independent Education and Parental Choice for nearly six years until July 2019. That gave him official state government oversight of both voucher schools and charter schools.

I had two substantive conversations with Miller during my time as an elected Polk County School Board member. One was strained because I was asking about the CONTINUE READING: Jeb Crow, pt. 5: Reformers, you long ago stopped being the good guys -- if you ever were. Will you join us now? - Public Enemy Number 1

Segregation factories, pt 4: The dark story of "Failure Factories" and "Schools without Rules" shows how power dominates education journalism, narrative, and humanity - Public Enemy Number 1

Segregation factories, pt 4: The dark story of "Failure Factories" and "Schools without Rules" shows how power dominates education journalism, narrative, and humanity - Public Enemy Number 1

Segregation factories, pt 4: The dark story of "Failure Factories" and "Schools without Rules" shows how power dominates education journalism, narrative, and humanity

Power used the Tampa Bay Times' Pulitzer tagline to strip mine Florida's public schools. It largely ignored the Orlando Sentinel's better, further-reaching voucher reporting. Why?

Part 1: Welcome to Jeb Crow Florida, 2021

Part 2: What "Jeb Crow" has wrought for FTC, McKay, and Gardiner kids -- and everybody else

Part 3: How to shop in a Jeb Crow voucher marketplace built to cheat and grift and harm your child

Today’s Part 4 is a comprehensive history and accounting of the consequences from Florida’s two most important pieces of newspaper journalism since 2015. Both concern education; and both illustrate how power determines the impact of journalism, in different ways. This article may be truncated in email delivery; so you should plan to click through to the website.

It would take a reporter at the Tampa Bay Times, to which I am a subscriber, a couple of days at most to go through the Step Up for Students website and compile a spreadsheet of voucher schools for the counties in their coverage area — with the same information I put together in this spreadsheet. (I will send you the full sheet if you want it, TBT, for a template.)

I would bet my house that every county would have a giant list of racially and ESE-segregated voucher schools with no accreditation or oversight or capital. These voucher schools exist only because of direct taxpayer funding or because big corporations get a public dollar-for-dollar tax break for funding them directly rather than funding real public schools.

In Polk County, 16 voucher schools have enrollments that are at least 76 percent black. Twelve of the 16 schools are at least 95 percent black or greater. Six are 100 percent black. Not one of those schools has accreditation, of any kind. More than 800 black children attend these segregated, no-capital “schools.”

Beyond purely black segregation, 30 out of 65 Polk voucher schools are at least 70 CONTINUE READING: Segregation factories, pt 4: The dark story of "Failure Factories" and "Schools without Rules" shows how power dominates education journalism, narrative, and humanity - Public Enemy Number 1

Segregation factories, pt. 3: how to shop in a Jeb Crow voucher marketplace built to cheat and grift and harm your child - Public Enemy Number 1

Segregation factories, pt. 3: how to shop in a Jeb Crow voucher marketplace built to cheat and grift and harm your child - Public Enemy Number 1

Segregation factories, pt. 3: how to shop in a Jeb Crow voucher marketplace built to cheat and grift and harm your child

Grift inflation is coming. Know your voucher grifters now to avoid them in the ESA future. Also regulate voucher schools like banks so public schools don't have to be the FDIC of education.

Part 1: Florida's Low Capital, Jim Crow Voucher and ESA programs imitate pre-Brown American education - only worse

Part 2: What "Jeb Crow" has wrought for FTC, McKay, and Gardiner kids -- and everybody else

The smartest way to shop for a voucher school is not to shop for one at all. There are very very few worth buying. This is why the education savings account (ESA) concept is doomed as anything but grift.

When Kelli Stargel dismantles your educational Publix this legislative session and gives you a dollar store debit card for educational groceries instead, it doesn’t mean the dollar store gets anything better on its shelves. The dollar store doesn’t have the capital or product development systems that Publix has built over decades. The dollar store doesn’t have supermarket capacity.

There is almost nothing worth buying today in the ESA dollar store; and there will be almost nothing worth buying in the future.

Opaque grift inflation is coming; I have a tool to help

Testing and mass 3rd grade retention and forced busing away from neighborhood-turned-magnet-or-charter schools will keep driving vulnerable kids away from the capital of public schools (and eroding education capital and capacity for everyone, including the rich).

And the same group of grifter garbage voucher providers will just take more money from you, the taxpayers, to cheat and harm and segregate the socially, economically, CONTINUE READING: Segregation factories, pt. 3: how to shop in a Jeb Crow voucher marketplace built to cheat and grift and harm your child - Public Enemy Number 1

A Florida Blogger You Should Read | Diane Ravitch's blog

A Florida Blogger You Should Read | Diane Ravitch's blog

A Florida Blogger You Should Read

I said I won’t repost blogs anymore, except for very rare occasions. I intend to stick to my promise.

So don’t consider this a repost. Consider it an introduction.

An ally in Florida sent me two blogs by Billy Townsend.

Here are the ones I read. I subscribed to his blog.

He wrote this blog for the benefit of Jennifer Berkshire, co-author of A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door.

He says that Florida is the state that put the nation at risk. He explains why. Great reading.

In this one, he lays out exactly how to get Biden’s attention: prepare to run a primary against him for ignoring/betraying the parents and teachers devoted to public education. Active opposition, he says, will get the wolf away from the schoolhouse door.

In this one, he describes how the voucher schools that Florida wants more of include a large number of segregated and unaccredited schools. How cynical that Florida figured out a clever way to restore segregation by lying to black parents. He asks: CONTINUE READING: A Florida Blogger You Should Read | Diane Ravitch's blog