Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Ohio's public schools serve 1.6 million children - 90 percent of students in the state! What happens in the classroom has impacts far beyond the walls of the K-12 school building or higher ed lecture hall. So, on behalf of the 120,000 members of the Ohio Education Association, we're taking a deeper dive into some of the many education issues facing our students, educators, and communities. Originally launched in 2021 as Education Matters, Public Education Matters is your source for insightful conversations with the people who shape the education landscape in Ohio. Have a topic you'd like to hear about on Public Education Matters? Email us at educationmatters@ohea.org
Intro - Various members and students speaking 0:08
Public Education Matters. Public Education Matters. Public Education Matters because every student matters. Public Education Matters. Public Education Matters because it is the foundation of our democracy. Public Education Matters because we are stronger when we speak in one voice. Public Education Matters. Public Education Matters. Public Education Matters, public Education Matters. This is public Education Matters, brought to you by the Ohio Education Association.
Katie Olmsted 0:41
Thanks for joining us once again for Public Education Matters. I'm your host Katie Olmsted, and I'm part of the communications team for the Ohio Education Association and the nearly 120,000 public school educators OEA represents across the state. Unfortunately, Ohio's educators know all too well the challenges facing Ohio's public schools, especially the challenges that are being created by the state legislature, which frequently attacks the profession and educators' professional autonomy, and which drains necessary resources from Ohio's public schools by exponentially expanding private school voucher schemes while pushing privatization just for privatization's sake. That track record from the legislature has earned Ohio a dubious distinction. We're now near the very bottom of the list of states when it comes to support for public education, according to a new report from the Network for Public Education, a national organization dedicated to supporting and improving public education. Dr. Carol Burris is the executive director of the Network for Public Education Action. She's a retired public school teacher, author of three books on education equity, and was the 2013 New York State High School Principal of the Year. She joins us for this episode to take a deeper dive into the NPE report's findings, and why Ohio's charter schools should be raising red flags for everyone.
Katie Olmsted 2:10
Carol Burris, thank you so much for joining us and sharing your expertise with us. Unfortunately, you're also here with some bad news for us here in Ohio. What can you tell us?
Dr. Carol Burris 2:21
Well, we have a new national report card that's going to be coming out next month. In the past, our focus on the report cards has been on privatization, basically on charters and vouchers. And Ohio, as you would imagine, did not do well. This year, we added a few more features. We added homeschooling laws; freedom to teach and learn, we measure things like is corporal punishment allowed in this state? What are the bullying laws like? Divisive concept laws, which banned the teaching of CRT and other things. And then also financial support for public schools. Now on some of these new factors, Ohio is not terrible. But privatization via vouchers and charters, drag your state down to number 42 in the nation with an overall grade of F, which is the grade that we gave to any state that could not achieve even half of the points that were needed. You have eight voucher programs in your state. No other state even comes close. And in many cases, your parents are allowed to double dip. You can get a tax credit if you homeschool in the state of Ohio. Businesses can get tax credits if they contribute to scholarship funds. Individuals can get tax credits. And then you have five separate voucher programs, including the universal voucher program. Here's something I think that's interesting, though, is that even with all of those voucher programs, still only about 10% of Ohio kids go to private schools. And that's just a little bit higher than the national average. For example, in New York, which doesn't have any voucher programs, 13% of the kids go to private school. So I think that's really an important point to make with lawmakers, because that shows you're not accruing any, any savings, right? You know, they'd like to argue, well, if kids don't go to public schools, you save money because they're getting blessed with the voucher. But that's not really true. You're not, the kids that are getting the money are kids who would have gotten there anyway.
Katie Olmsted 4:40
Well, and in Ohio, we know of a number of places where the voucher is is more than the school is getting from the state for their public school students. Not to mention their their argument that it's cheaper at private schools - a big part of that is because they can take who they want to take and they don't take the kids that are expensive to educate. So not at all surprise. Ising that Ohio ended up with an F because it seems like we have sort of an F understanding in our legislature about how it all works, among many other things.
Dr. Carol Burris 5:09
Right. And then of course, you have charter schools, yes. And they take about 6% of your school population. Now, what's really disturbing where you guys lost a lot of points was on your charter school laws, because nearly 50% of your state's charters are run by for-profits. And that's both small for-profits, as well as the big chains like Accell, which is pretty awful, which bought up the old White Hat for-profit charter chain and National Heritage Academy. Then you have multiple authorizers and all of these authorizers, people don't realize, they get it cut, right, for authorizing the school. So one of the authorizers in Ohio is St. Aloysius Orphanage. I like to refer to it as the orphanage with no orphans. And that is an organization that authorizes especially the for-profit charter schools.
Katie Olmsted 6:12
How does that work? Honestly, I think a lot of people don't really understand how these systems work, because we think private school or public school, but we're not thinking about where the charter schools are falling into this one. There are nonprofit charters, and there are for-profit charters. And all - let's be, let's be clear, all of these schools, public private charters all come out of the same line item in Ohio's budget. So that's its own animal of sort of a house of horrors potential there. But then when we add this, this for-profit element to it, it just doesn't sound right with education. It shouldn't be a for-profit venture.
Dr. Carol Burris 6:58
No, it shouldn't. In fact, it's very interesting, because what they're they're very tricky about it. There used to be charter schools that were themselves for-profit entities. And then the court stepped in, as well as the department, US Department of Ed. And they said, uh uh uh, right? So what they did to get around the law was they formed these corporations, and you have a nonprofit, technically a nonprofit board, for the charter school. But then they give, in some cases, all of their money to the for-profit entity, and the for-profit entity, owns the building, hires the teachers, fires the teachers, does Special Education hearings, essentially does everything. And in Ohio, what you find sometimes when you really dig into it is, is they give the board an allowance of like $5,000, and then the rest of the money they keep. So it's really a scam. And it's worse in Ohio to be honest than it is in most states. Some states outlaw the practice. But for whatever reason, Ohio has really enabled the practice. And a lot of the studies that come out, even studies sponsored by Fordham, which is not an organization that I would consider to be public school friendly. But even even they've questioned it. I mean, they even came out with a report and they said these for profit schools do not do as well as regular charter schools. And it makes sense because somebody's skimming, right? They're in existence to make some folks rich. And even though a lot of that goes on in the nonprofit charter says well, but especially in the poor product, and she really can't see where the money's going because they don't have to do the same filings that a nonprofit has to do.
Katie Olmsted 9:04
But they are taking public dollars, and again, taking it right out of that same line item as our traditional public schools. Now, the devil's advocate, the Fordham's of the world will tell you that when you run something like a business and schools compete, everybody gets better, I say, with quite a bit of skepticism in my voice. U hope that's coming across. What is the problem with that argument?
Dr. Carol Burris 9:29
Well, I think let's just look at the facts. Charter schools have been around now for what, 26 years, 27 years? My gosh, we should just be, you know, exploding with success in every sector. Truth of the matter is charter schools do do about the same as public schools do across studies. There was one study from Credo that showed some slight gains. I totally debunked that study. We have a report on that. But when you look at NEAP scores, when you look at the plethora of studies that have happened over the years, you don't see this great advantage with charter schools. Nor do you see the whole sector of public education getting better. And you know, you guys have to be careful too, in Ohio. One thing I wanted to bring up is, I think your 6% is going to grow because of something that happened in July 1 of 2021. It's didn't get a lot of press. It used to be that you could only open up a charter school in Ohio ikn what was called a challenge district. And then they passed Ohio House Bill 110, which remove the restriction, which enabled that horrible Hillsdale charter school that maybe some of y'all have read about, the Cincinnati CAcademy. And I have a feeling what you're going to see now is more charter schools in suburban, exurban and even rural areas in Ohio and they will be right wing charter schools.
Dr. Carol Burris 10:14
Yeah, so let's talk about Hillsdale. People who are not familiar with this. What is going on with Hillsdale?
Dr. Carol Burris 11:16
Oh, my goodness. Well, Hillsdale is a Christian college located in Michigan, extraordinarily conservative. They make they make no pretense of supporting anyone other than right wing politicians and Donald Trump. And they, what they did was they started an initiative, a charter school initiative called the Barney charter school initiative. They got a boatload of money from a guy named Barney who's a billionaire. And what they're doing is they're helping to open charter schools all over the country. Now, they may come to them, families may come to them and say, Look, we want a charter school in our area, and we want to be affiliated with Hillsdale. And then what happens is Hillsdale provides the curriculum, if it's a curriculum school, or if it's a member school, like Cincinnati Classical Academy, it trains the teachers, it usually picks the school leaders. I mean, it's it's kind of running the place in the background. And they're, they're really growing and the places where they're growing are not in inner cities. They're growing in the exurbs, they're growing in some suburbs. And what they tend to be is magnets for I think, my opinion, Christian nationalist families that are predominantly white. In Ohio, what you have now is there are three schools that are Hillsdale charter schools, two that are member schools, and one, according to Hillsdale, that's a curriculum school. And then there are another four that are slated to open up.
Katie Olmsted 13:15
They're taking public tax dollars to support these schools.
Dr. Carol Burris 13:19
Let's talk a little bit about Cincinnati Classical Academy. We did a report last year on right wing charter schools and came across it. And I spent time on the website and I thought I was looking at a Christian private school. The front of the website said nothing about it being a charter school. It zoomed in on this cross on the top of the building. When you go through the pictures that they had in their slideshow on the top, there's pictures of a gymnasium with a crucifix. They show pictures of the Madonna and Child, Botticelli's Madonna in order to teach the virtue of humility. They show a family praying in order to teach the virtue gratitude. And I'm looking at this and I'm going oh, wait, this can't be a charter school.
Katie Olmsted 14:16
Right? That's a private religious school.
Dr. Carol Burris 14:19
It sure sounds like it, doesn't it. So you know, I looked it up in the Ohio database. And sure enough, this was a charter school. So lo and behold, we feature it in the report. And then I always look at the federal charter school program, who gets the grants. It's a program we could do a whole program on the federal charter school prom. It is extremely destructive, especially in your state. Anyway, I find out that they give Cincinnati Classical Academy a $2 million grant to expand. So we're going to wait a minute. I decided to look at their application. And this is an application that talks about how they want to help underserved children. And, and it's there because the Cincinnati Public Schools "are so bad," and they're going to help you know, all of these kids that don't have this opportunity. And then I go, and I take a look at the demographics from the school, and it was jaw dropping. I mean, if you compare it to Cincinnati Public Schools is 60% Black students, 80% students on free and reduced price lunch. Well, this charter school was 16% free or reduced price lunch children, and 2% Black students. The demographics of this charter school were so different, not only from the Cincinnati Public School, they were different from all of the schools in the county. I mean, I did this whole deep dive overall. And they were certainly different than any other charter school in the area, right? So, you know, I'm kind of scratching my head reading this application from a charter school that had just signed off on a statement saying that it would conduct public hearings to show how it would not make segregation worse.
Katie Olmsted 16:25
Sorry, I'm very sorry, I totally believe them.
Dr. Carol Burris 16:26
I know! You know and the bottom line is if it was a magnet, right, or for very conservative families. Everything, all of the all of the little invitational pieces on social media, they were putting out 99% of them had featured no children of color. They were basically just pictures of young white girls. Everything on the website was screaming to to people, you know, if you want a white school, that's kind of Christian, this is the place to go.
Katie Olmsted 16:31
It's very right wing ideology at a time when Ohio's legislature is saying, ideology has no place in our classrooms. And that's why public schools are quote, unquote, whatever they're saying about public schools, that's how we ended up with an F on the report card, because the you have this idea about public schools and the the ideology and all the divisive concepts bills that we have fought back against over and over and over again and the fight just keeps going and going. Meanwhile, our public dollars are paying for something that is founded on these kinds of ideologies, just the ones they tend to agree with it sounds like.
Dr. Carol Burris 17:53
Absolutely. I mean, they're using the 1776 curriculum that you know that Donald Trump wanted as a response to the 1619 curriculum. Larry Arne is the guy who's in charge at Hillsdale. I think he's the president of the college, very involved in the charter school movement. And he was the one who down in Tennessee made this statement that teachers come from the dumbest parts of the dumbest colleges. I mean, it was, it was horrific it. It kept Hillsdale charter schools that day in Tennessee for about six months. But now they're still coming forward again. In fact, Larry Arne in March is going to Cincinnati Classical Academy to speak. So, you know, since the we, we wrote a letter, I mean, it was great. A lot of our friends including OEA co-signed a letter that we put together to the US Department of Education. Cincinnati NAACP signed on, AfT signed on, Honesty in Ohio, and seven state legislators, and Congressman Landsman, and we sent the letter to the Department and we said, you know, they should not they should not be getting this grant. So, you know, supposedly the Department's taking it seriously. We did have a meeting with them scheduled, which they canceled because of the snow in DC and I'm bugging them for a new date. But you know, it's, it's a mess. And we are now if you look at their website, since our article came out, they've cleaned it up a bit. They don't have to zoom in on the on the cross excuse me anymore.
Katie Olmsted 19:53
They're not changing what they do though.
Katie Olmsted 19:55
Of course not! Of course not.
Katie Olmsted 19:58
Honestly, this drives home how important it is to have organizations like NPE, just really keeping an eye on things because we can't let the foxes police the hen house or whatever that saying is. And especially here in Ohio, where we are it, it seems like our legislature is antithetical to actual oversight of where these public dollars are being spent for anything other than traditional public schools.
Dr. Carol Burris 20:27
Yeah, and you know, there's a lot of churn in Ohio, too. We did, we did a report a couple years ago ago on charter schools that close, looking at them as cohorts. Right, so all of the charter schools that opened in a particular year, how long did they stay open, Ohio was one of the worst. And nationally what we found was by year five, 25%, of all charter schools close by year 10, it's over 40%. And, you know, you feel bad for kids, because when they start going to school, and then all of a sudden, you know, somebody stole some money and took off or the school is just a terrible school. And the school winds up closing, and you see it, I mean, especially in the city, with, with people, corporations, excuse me, like Accell, it's almost like the schools are kind of trading cards. You know, one closes, then they buy up the building, they open up another one, they don't get any better. And these poor kids, they, you know, they think they're gonna get some special that shiny and wonderful. And really, they're just kind of scammed along with the taxpayers.
Katie Olmsted 21:46
Well, that is very disheartening. Um, but also, really just galvanizes all of us in our mission. We know public education matters. And we have to remain steadfast advocates, we have to remain watchdogs. And we have to remain activists to really make sure that we're delivering on the public education that every student deserves. Now, I do want to talk briefly about what is happening in 2025. You guys are coming to Columbus. What's going on?
Dr. Carol Burris 22:20
Yeah, we're really excited about that. We just had our conference, which was wonderful success in Washington, DC. So, you know, much to my chagrin, and exhaustion, as soon as when ends, the board starts talking the next one.
Katie Olmsted 22:37
How it always goes, yep.
Dr. Carol Burris 22:40
And we're doing we're waiting a year and a half with the upcoming election. We can't have it again next October, nobody would be paying attention. So we're going to push it to the beginning of April, I believe it's the fourth and fifth of April, that first weekend. And we looked at Austin. And we also looked at Columbus at the urging of Dan Greenberg, who's very active in your organization. He said, Hey, take a take a look at my state! Dan's on our NPE Action Board. And, yeah, it's looking pretty good. I'm getting very close to signing a contract. And we need y'all to be there. It's not going to get better. Not anytime soon. But I really, I am also optimistic. I mean, I really do think as parents become more aware, as teachers become more aware of what's happening with privatization, I do think we're going to see the tide turn. And while we may not get rid of, you know, charter schools or voucher programs overnight, what we can do, I think, is to start changing some of the laws. Now could you imagine if all of a sudden Ohio no longer allowed for profit entities to run their charter schools? That would really be helpful, right? They become more public. And my guess is a lot of them would just kind of go away because nobody could make a profit.
Katie Olmsted 24:19
Right, they don't care about the kids, they care about the profit.
Dr. Carol Burris 24:22
Exactly. And you got to even even with vouchers, if voucher schools were no longer allowed to discriminate based on religion, based on LGBTQ status, probably a lot of the schools that take vouchers would say, though, yeah, no, sorry. We, we want to be able to do our thing, and in some cases, that ain't pretty. So you know, I think that there's a lot that we can still do if we put our mind to it. We'll see how this next election goes. If we have another Republican sweep, it's going to be problem. And I mean, I'm just saying that now as just an observer, not telling anybody who to vote for. Because we know what the history was last time when Betsy DeVos was in charge. And now, it's become even a bigger part of that party's platform. So we need to be vigilant.
Katie Olmsted 25:28
And there's a lot of work to do between now and 2025, which is also a budget year in Ohio. We'll see how things shake out in terms of funding for the voucher programs versus our public schools and all of that, so much to keep an eye on. But I thank you for your work, and I thank you for your time.
Dr. Carol Burris 25:48
Oh, you're welcome. It was great chatting with you. And we remember, together, we can save our public schools.
Katie Olmsted 25:57
Together, we can do anything. And together we can fight back against the attacks on public education in Ohio, the attacks on an honest education in Ohio and on the education profession. A new professional development series from Ohio's New Educators - or ONE - is helping bring educators of all backgrounds together to work on ways to respond to one line of attacks: book bans across our state and country. The "Beyond the Classroom: Banned Books" series kicked off this week, with the next session scheduled for March 12 via Zoom. ONE Member Ambassador Jacquia Hearn, who teaches first grade in Columbus, explains.
Katie Olmsted 26:41
Jacquia, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us about this really exciting opportunity. What's going on?
Jacquia Hearn 26:49
Beyond the Classroom is a part of Ohio's New Educators. And so we host monthly virtual professional development. So people can join us anywhere they are. And it's for members and by members. And so we really like to listen to things that are going on and problems we keep hearing or things that come up so we can kind of address that. And so we know that book banning has been happening very often. You can't really go anywhere without hearing about books that are being banned or censored. And so we really felt that it was really important that we held some sessions about book banning so that we can kind of have some critical conversations because we know how hurtful and divisive these book bannings are. And we really wanted to hold these sessions so that we could empower other educators, we could uplift our students. And then we can kind of fight back against those oppressive stakeholders and people who keep trying to ban these important books.
Katie Olmsted 27:47
So it's a two session thing. The first one just happened in February. The second one's coming up in March. That first one was looking at some of the commonly banned elementary school books. Why these books? And also I want to get into a little bit, why does this matter? What do these book bans or even the threat of book bans mean when it comes to your ability to do your job, and the education our students receive?
Jacquia Hearn 28:13
Well we know that it matters because we have these students are in our classrooms, they're on our buses, they're in our school buildings. And so we really want to make sure we're uplifting all of our students. A lot of times, these band books are targeting our most vulnerable and underrepresented students and communities. And so we really just want to uplift them by simply saying we see you, you are worthy of everything, and really pointing out to students and everyone that we are all beautifully diverse and we want to take that in, but also seeing that we have things that are in common between all of us. And that's ultimately, that's what's going to bring us together. We also want to make sure that we are empowering educators, because just because they ban a book, doesn't mean you don't need to prepare for these students to not be sitting in your buildings, for you to not come across some of these situations. So we want to make sure that we're hosting this session so we give educators a time so that we can have discussions about strategies and ways that they can be prepared to support what is going on, and also knowing that sometimes our own members are going to need some of that education, our own family members, our own friends, we're going to need some education. We don't all know all of this and that is okay. So this is that community and that space to kind of have those hard, important discussions.
Katie Olmsted 29:35
And who can take part?
Jacquia Hearn 29:38
Anyone can take part and that's the greatest thing is that this is a community of learners from everyone. So we can have first year educators all the way to 30 year educators. We can have educator support professionals who are joining us. We want as many different, we want as many different people there so we can have all those beautiful discussions about diversity and hear all those different perspectives so that we can have that real feel. So everyone is invited and encouraged to join us for our next session, which will be in March. And the way that you would join is by going to ohea.org/one. And there will be a winter PD series and you would click that so that you can register and join and have these important and essential conversations with us.
Katie Olmsted 30:31
Jacquia, thank you so much for having this conversation with us today. This sounds like a really incredibly important exciting series for professional development.
Jacquia Hearn 30:42
Thank you very much.
Katie Olmsted 30:46
For more information about the Beyond the Classroom sessions and for more on the Network for Public Education's ongoing work, check out the show notes for this episode. New episodes drop every other Thursday this season. Until next time, stay well. And remember in Ohio, public education matters.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai