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arne duncan
Democrats Rebuked for Backing GOP War on Public Schools, Trump Voucher Expansion
"Don't let the far right's demonization of public education fool you," said one commentator. "People support their local public schools."
Aug 06, 2025
Evidence is mounting across the United States that school vouchers are harming public schools—and numerous studies have shown they largely do not benefit students academically as proponents have long claimed—leaving education advocates to wonder why the issue of so-called "school choice" is a fault line within the Democratic Party.
The Trump administration's recent cave on K-12 public education funding, more than $6 billion of which President Donald Trump was pressured to release after temporarily freezing it, showed that "public schools are a winning issue, everywhere," wrote commentator David Pepper at his Substack blog, Pepperspectives last week.
Yet when Education Week asked the governors of all 50 states and Washington, D.C. whether they would opt in to the nation's first federal school voucher program that was passed last month as part of Trump's so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act, only one Democratic governor—Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham of New Mexico—clearly stated she would not take part in the $26 billion program, which allows taxpayers to claim a 100% tax credit for up to $1,700 in donations to scholarships to private schools, and allow lower-income families to receive scholarship funds.
Lujan Grisham expressed concerns about the lack of accountability measures for private schools that would be funded with tax dollars, a loss of funding and enrollment for public schools, and the possibility of private schools discriminating against children with special needs.
Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker also expressed doubt that his state would participate, saying "it doesn't seem fair" to support a program that "is taking away money from people who can't afford to go to a private school, who would like to go to a public school."
But several other Democratic governors didn't respond to Education Week's query, and others who have been supportive of school vouchers in the past, including Colorado Gov. Jared Polis and Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, said they were "reviewing" the program, which does not go into effect until 2027.
"Governor Polis is still reviewing the details of this legislation, but is excited by the possibility of unlocking new federal tax credits for donations to help low-income kids achieve," said Polis' office.
The survey of governors was taken as two reports in The New York Times and The Washington Post detailed the damage school vouchers have already done to public school districts.
As the Times reported Wednesday, a decline in the number of babies being born in the U.S. and the rise of the "school choice" movement, particularly in Republican-controlled states, have led public schools in cities including Orlando, Florida; Newark, New Jersey; and Memphis, Tennessee to confront their emerging enrollment crisis by hiring consultants to help combat right-wing claims that children will suffer if they attend public schools.
Although Florida is one of a few states that has a growing instead of shrinking population of children, its public school systems are facing "significant declines," reported the Times, with more than 400,000 children in the state using the Florida school voucher system, called the universal education savings account—the largest voucher program in the United States.
In Orange County, where Orlando is located, the school-age population has grown by 5% since 2020—but the school district is expecting a 25% decline in kindergarten enrollment this year—and a potential loss of $28 million in federal funding, since schools are funded according to the number of students they enroll.
In Arizona, the Post reported, nearly 89,000 students receive vouchers the state government calls Empowerment Scholarship Accounts, while 62,000 receive taxpayer-supported scholarships for private schools through another voucher program and more than 232,000 students attend charter schools, which are publicly funded but independently run.
The state's embrace of the "school choice" movement left just 75% of Arizona children attending public schools in 2021, according to the Post, and school districts are responding by closing schools. Roosevelt Elementary School District in the Phoenix area will operate just 13 schools this year—a third less than last school year.
"You're taking the same size pie and cutting it into more pieces," Rick Brammer, a consultant who analyzes school enrollment, told the Post. "As we've created and funded alternatives, we've just emptied out school after school from the districts."
Instead of adopting an anti-voucher, vehemently pro-public school stance as a signature issue, the Democratic Party is split on the issue, with a number of Democratic governors backing charter schools and vouchers and some veterans of the Obama administration, including former Education Secretary Arne Duncan, backing a group called Democrats for Education Reform (DFER), which has advocated for states to embrace the federal voucher program in Trump's domestic policy agenda.
As the Times reported Monday, DFER's chief executive, former Democratic Providence, Rhode Island Mayor Jorge Elorza, traveled to a Democratic Governors Association in Madison, Wisconsin this past weekend with the goal of convincing governors who are still "reviewing" the federal voucher program, as many told Education Week, to opt in.
"This is literally free money that is broadly supported by the majority of voters who have steadily drifted away from the party," Elorza told the Times, referring to Black and Latino voters, who some polls have shown believe public schools are failing children. "It just makes sense."
Other Democratic strategists who have previously been involved with DFER have shifted their focus to growing charter school networks in southern states.
Former Georgia state lawmaker Alisha Thomas Searcy, who co-founded the Center for Strong Public Schools Action, which is pushing the charter school effort, told Chalkbeat Tennessee on Monday that the group will not embrace vouchers.
"I want to be clear about what sets us apart," Searcy told the outlet. "It's our commitment to public education. It is foundational for us, and it's nonnegotiable. We're committed to remaining focused on strengthening public schools, not creating pathways that take away from them."
Public education advocates have warned charter schools, like vouchers, drain funding from public schools with less oversight, and research has shown mixed results in terms of academic improvements.
Many Democratic lawmakers, said Tennessee state Rep. Gloria Johnson (D-90), "have an education plan, it’s fully funding public education so every child has a well-resourced classroom, providing wraparound services so families have needed resources, smaller class size, and teacher autonomy."
Jennifer Berkshire, host of the education-focused podcast "Have You Heard," noted that popular Democratic politicians including Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear and former North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper have been vehement critics of school vouchers and defenders of robust funding for public education.
"And yet there is intense pressure to get Democrats to embrace vouchers in order to 'stay relevant,'" said Berkshire last week.
Vouchers were resoundingly defeated in a number of states last November—including those that votes for Trump.
A ballot initiative in Kentucky that would have sent public money to private schools was defeated by a 30-point margin, and in Nebraska, nearly every county voted to repeal an existing voucher program. Colorado voters, despite their Democratic governor's support for school vouchers, voted against adding a "right to school choice" to the state constitution.
Considering the broad public disapproval of school privatization, Pepper offered advice to Democrats last week.
"Don't let the far right's demonization of public education fool you," he wrote. "People support their local public schools. Whether it's an attack from Washington, an attack from your statehouse, some new privatization scheme, a billionaire-backed referendum or a candidate who is all-in on attacking public schools—oppose them fiercely and call them out bluntly. Go on offense for public schools, and against efforts to attack public schools."
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The Federal Government Has Poured Millions into Failing Charter Schools in Louisiana
Parents in New Orleans are sick of the instability that temporary charter schools have brought to their community, calling the schools an "illegal experiment" on their children
May 19, 2019
When Arne Duncan, the U.S. Secretary of Education under President Barack Obama, said Hurricane Katrina was the "best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans," he was no doubt referring in part to how the storm and its aftermath led to the spread of charter schools across the city.
The very first charter school created in the post-Katrina era to close was Free Academy, which shuttered in early 2009... due to financial problems, lack of academic progress, and disputes with the school's for-profit management company.
But if he had looked more closely before making his remark (he eventually apologized for his poor word choice), he would have noticed some of the new charter schools being created in New Orleans were already failing.
The very first charter school created in the post-Katrina era to close was Free Academy, which shuttered in early 2009--well before Duncan made his remarks--due to financial problems, lack of academic progress, and disputes with the school's for-profit management company.
After Free Academy closed, many of the students scrambling to find new schools likely ended up in the Crocker Arts & Technology School, another charter school, which opened in the fall in the same building. But that school proved to be a false promise too when, on a Thursday evening in early December, parents learned Crocker had to close, literally overnight, due to its unsafe building.
The century-old structure was close to collapse, a condition that existed no doubt when the school was Free Academy and when Crocker decided to occupy the building. Officials at both schools either didn't know or knew but didn't bother to warn parents their children were in an unsafe building.
Duncan should have been concerned about these failed charters not only because of the potential harm the schools posed to students but also because the federal government helped to fund the schools.
Government Funds for Failed Schools
In 2006, barely a year after Katrina's devastation, Duncan's predecessor Margaret Spellings awarded $24 million to Louisiana to create charter schools, primarily in New Orleans.
The grant came from the Department of Education's Charter Schools Program (CSP), which provides grants to individual charter schools and charter school management companies, and for states to award to charter subgrantees. Louisiana used its 2006 grant to fund individual charters, mostly in New Orleans, including $283,847 awarded to Free Academy and $600,000 to Crocker.
After two more relocations, Crocker would eventually close for good in 2014.
Another reason Duncan should have been more inquisitive about how charter schools had used federal grant money in Louisiana is because his department, during the first year under his leadership, awarded the state yet another huge grant--this time totaling $25,576,222, mostly to bolster the state's existing charters and start new ones in Baton Rouge.
Since Duncan's tenure, the CSP's annual budget has ballooned to $440 million, in the current budget year, and the total amount spent by the program since inception exceeds $4 billion.
But like those early grants to charters in post-Katrina New Orleans, much of that money has gone to schools that eventually closed--and some that never opened at all.
According to a recent report, up to $1 billion of the money given out nationwide by the CSP was wasted on charter schools that never opened, or opened and then closed because of fraud, poor performance, financial mismanagement, and other reasons. The report, Asleep at the Wheel: How the Federal Charter Schools Program Recklessly Takes Taxpayers and Students for a Ride, was published by the Network for Public Education and written by this author and Carol Burris, NPE's executive director.
In compiling our report, we found the grant program that provides federal dollars to state departments of education, or other approved "state entities," is the largest of the CSP funding streams and presents some of the worst examples of federal tax dollars being wasted on charter schools that failed. Louisiana has one of the worst records for slipshod management of its federal grants.
In a follow-up to our report, Burris looked at the grants given to create and expand charter schools in Louisiana between 2006 and 2014. She found that of the 110 charters that received the money, at least 51 (46 percent) were closed. Some may have never opened at all, but because the Louisiana Education Department doesn't provide a list of closed schools, that figure is unknown. The total amount of money given to those closed and never-opened schools is at least $23,819,839.00.
An 'Illegal Experiment' on Children
While the numbers alone are startling and a cause for concern, individual examples of charters in Louisiana that received CSP money and then closed throw into further doubt the prudence of using federal seed money to spread schools that open and close, repeatedly, and fund charter organizations that churn through districts and neighborhoods without any obvious regard for what parents and local officials want.
One of the examples I singled out from Burris' research is Benjamin Mays Prep School in New Orleans, which received a $600,000 CSP grant. Mays Prep had long-standing academic issues and persistent budget shortfalls. The school had to move to a different building in 2012 and then lost that location in 2014 when its charter wasn't renewed and a different charter moving into the space refused to enroll the Mays students. The school closed officially in 2014.
Another New Orleans charter, Miller McCoy, received a $600,000 CSP grant but eventually closed in 2014 after "a long downward spiral," according to a local news source. The charter school's two founders left in 2012 under alleged ethics allegations, and the school had a series of unsuccessful leaders after that. An "F" academic rating from the state seemed to have been the final straw.
The school had promised to be equivalent to a prestigious all-male private prep school in New Orleans, only free. Its closure left the teachers and remaining students and families with "a sense of loss, sadness, a grieving for what could have been," reported a different local news outlet.
Another New Orleans charter, Gentilly Terrace, received a $600,000 CSP grant. The school was operated by a charter management group, New Beginnings Schools Foundation, that was cited for being out of compliance with several federal laws, including misdirection of federal funds for Title I schools--money earmarked for high-poverty students. New Beginnings also had chronic problems with employee turnover in its schools and non-transparent practice by its board of directors.
Gentilly Terrace closed in 2014 with a "D" rating from the state's academics report card. Recently, the CEO of New Beginnings resigned amid allegations of falsifying public records and allowing one of its three remaining schools to engage in grade-fixing.
CSP grants that were awarded to schools in Baton Rouge often led to the same results.
When the Recovery School District that transformed New Orleans started taking over "low-performing" Baton Rouge schools in 2008, one of the first seven schools taken over and handed to charter operators was Glen Oaks Middle School. Glen Oaks received $772,750 from the CSP.
Parents in New Orleans who are sick of the instability that temporary charter schools have brought to their community are organizing to repeal the state law that legalized charters, calling the schools an "illegal experiment" on their children.
By 2013, the takeover effort was already "rebooting," and Glen Oaks was closed, supposedly temporarily, for the 2014-15 school year in order to find a different charter management group. Students were told to transfer to a different school operated by a different charter but were presumably able to return to Glen Oaks the following year.
But instead of reopening as a middle school, Glen Oaks was occupied by three new charters: a kindergarten, an elementary school, and a different middle school operated by a different charter management company.
Glen Oaks closed officially in 2016, according to state reports, and by 2018, both the kindergarten and the elementary schools had moved elsewhere too.
Today, what remains inside Glen Oaks Middle School is a much smaller middle school under a different name. That school is currently rated "F" academically by the state, which recently recommended the school be handed over to yet another charter management group.
Some Louisiana charter school CSP grant recipients that have managed to stay open seem on less than firm ground.
Baton Rouge's Tallulah Charter School, which was awarded a CSP grant of $75,000, was threatened with shutdown in 2018 for persistent low academic performance and testing errors.
What saved the school was an offer from an online learning charter school to move students to a blended curriculum that included more computer-based instruction. The online charter recently dropped its affiliation with an out-of-state for-profit company and changed its name. The school has a 54 percent graduation rate compared to the state's 79 percent.
Parents in New Orleans who are sick of the instability that temporary charter schools have brought to their community are organizing to repeal the state law that legalized charters, calling the schools an "illegal experiment" on their children.
Widespread Violations of Federal Laws
These kinds of examples eventually drew the attention of the education department's own Office of Inspector General to examine the agency's oversight of the federal Charter Schools Program in 2016, after Duncan had resigned and John King became secretary.
The audit made recommendations for improvement on the oversight of federal grants given to charters that close, but it's not at all clear how those recommendations were implemented under King's leadership, or under Betsy DeVos, who took over as secretary in 2017.
In 2018, OIG published another examination of how states with charter schools that closed accounted for federal grant funds. This time, Louisiana was included in the audit because it was the state with the highest ratio of closed charter schools to total charter schools.
The audit found charter schools in Louisiana that received federal money and then closed likely had widespread violations of federal laws and regulations for closing out their grants, disposing of property purchased with federal funds, and ensuring student information and records had been protected and maintained.
The audit found charter schools in Louisiana that received federal money and then closed likely had widespread violations of federal laws and regulations for closing out their grants, disposing of property purchased with federal funds, and ensuring student information and records had been protected and maintained.
In its comments included at the end of the report, the department did not explicitly agree or disagree with the findings but stated it "did not consider charter school closures to be a risk to federal funds" and that OIG's recommendations "would be inconsistent with the federal role in education." The department asked instead for "a single recommendation that recognizes the balance between federal and state responsibility for the oversight of charter schools."
Recently, House Democrats proposed a substantial cut to CSP grants, declaring the education department has not been "a responsible steward" of taxpayer dollars. House members cited, as part of their rationale for the cuts, evidence of financial waste and mismanagement like those Burris and I found. And the Democrats directed the education department implement recommendations from the 2018 OIG report.
Among those recommendations are for the department to determine which states receiving charter school grants pose the most risk to federal funds and help those states develop and implement effective charter school closure procedures. Should the House bill pass, you can be sure Louisiana will be on that list.
But the legacy of the federal government's charter school grants in Louisiana should not be understood just by the sheer waste of precious education funds, but also by the real human consequences of spreading makeshift charter programs that throw communities into confusion, distress, and a sense of betrayal. That's probably something you won't hear Arne Duncan apologize for.
To learn more about school privatization, check out Who Controls Our Schools? The Privatization of American Public Education, a free ebook published by the Independent Media Institute. Click here to read a selection of Who Controls Our Schools? published on AlterNet, or here to access the complete text. This article was produced by Our Schools, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
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3 Questions That 'Created Havoc' in Betsy DeVos' Department of Education
My latest brush with the education policy edifice's imperviousness to outside inquiry occurred while researching the Education Department's Charter School Program
Apr 07, 2019
U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos is famous for giving a nonresponse to fairly straightforward questions. More than one commentator has had fun with her contorted evasions, but her inability to explain the rationale for current education policies isn't confined to her own personality and ideology.
It's actually been endemic in the education policy world for years, particularly in how the federal government continues to hide its agenda to further privatize the nation's public school system by creating and expanding charter schools.
Arne Duncan, who served as secretary for the longest period of time before DeVos, was famous for being the consummate non-listener, often talking over people with his prepared remarks and ignoring the advice of teachers and education experts.
This is not a partisan issue. Teachers demanded Duncan's resignation, and Republican members of Congress have complained that DeVos' department isn't responsive to requests for information.
Of course, any comparison between DeVos and Duncan can find some very big differences, but a constant throughout both administrations has been to ignore, wall-off, or obfuscate when confronted with any inquiry aimed at the federal government's efforts to create and expand charter schools.
A History of Hiding
My latest brush with the education policy edifice's imperviousness to outside inquiry occurred while researching and writing a new report on the Education Department's Charter School Program (CSP). I coauthored the report Asleep at the Wheel: How the Federal Charter Schools Program Recklessly Takes Taxpayers and Students for a Ride with Network for Public Education executive director Carol Burris.
Burris and I found that up to $1 billion awarded by the CSP--in more than 1,000 grants--was wasted on charter schools that never opened or opened for only brief periods before being shut down for mismanagement, poor performance, lack of enrollment, and fraud.
During our investigations, we came across a previous report published by the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) in 2015, during the Obama presidential administration, that found similarly disturbing results, where federal grants had gone to hundreds of charter schools that had basically taken the money and run.
To compile its report, CMD had submitted 33 Freedom of Information Act requests with the Department of Education and was told these records would be forthcoming. The promised records never came.
The department also refused to provide CMD with public records regarding communications between federal and state officials about charter school grants and oversight. The largest grants by far had gone to state education agencies (SEAs) to disburse in subgrants to charter school startups and expansions. Federal officials claimed releasing such information would "constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy."
After CMD repeated its requests, the department released a list of some charter schools receiving the SEA grant money in a PDF that was "partly illegible." Other information CMD requested related to the applications for the state grants never came. CMD concluded in its report summary, "Public information about funds received and spent by charters is severely lacking."
The information CMD was eventually able to piece together came out in its report in October 2015, receiving widespread coverage by education policy blogs and community organizers.
Two months after the CMD report appeared, the Charter School Program released a dataset showing all grants awarded between school years 2006-07 and 2013-14, with information on grants given to start-up, replicate, and expand charter schools. The dataset was released on Dec. 23--just two days before the holiday break--to minimize attention.
Also in the same year, perhaps in anticipation of the CMD report, the department issued a "Dear Colleague" letter to SEAs emphasizing the importance of financial accountability for charter schools receiving federal dollars. The letter recommended SEAs conduct regular independent audits and strengthen authorizing practices. And the department provided an "Overview of the 2015 CSP SEA Review Process" explaining how the program awarding charter grants to states is administered.
Given the department's 2015 efforts to disclose information on charter school grants and provide guidance in how the grants should be administered, it seemed only fair, before issuing our report, to ask the agency what had been done since, especially under this new administration.
Three Seemingly Simple Questions
Consequently, on March 8, I sent emails to contacts provided for three CSP grant programs that were the subject of our report. The three emails repeated basically the same three questions, but the email I sent to the contact overseeing the SEA grants, now called "Grants to State Entities," follows:
This is to inquire about the current grant application review process used for the Charter Schools Program Grants to State Entities. Specifically, in 2015, the Department published an "Overview of the 2015 CSP SEA Review Process." My questions:
- Can you provide a similar document describing how the grant review process is currently being conducted for the Charter Schools Program Grants to State Entities?
- If not, can you briefly comment on how the grant review process used for the Charter Schools Program Grants to State Entities aligns with or varies from the Overview referenced above?
- Regarding a "Dear Colleague" letter sent to State Education Agencies in 2015 emphasizing the importance of financial accountability for charter schools receiving federal dollars, was there any follow-up by the Charter School Program to ascertain how many SEAs complied with this request and what was the nature of the new systems and processes put into place by SEAs to provide for greater accountability?
On March 15, I received a voicemail message from an official in the public affairs division of the department asking me to call her back. The message started out nice enough but then veered toward criticism. "Apparently you have sent his request to multiple people," she said (emphasis original), "and that just creates havoc for everyone."
When I immediately called her back, I explained I had merely sent my inquiry to the contacts provided on the relevant sections of the department's website. "That's understandable," she replied, but for "future reference" I was told to send inquiries to "a director"--though I'm not sure who that is. And I was told again my questions had "created havoc" in the office but that department staff members were "working on it" and would "take a few days."
As of this writing, I've yet to receive any other replies.
One Thing Clear
What followed my phone exchange with the department official was, among other things, a very bad, awful day for the secretary when news of our report broke on page A4 of the Washington Post on the very same day she had to appear on Capitol Hill before a House committee hearing.
During the hearing, Rep. Rosa DeLauro, a Democrat of Connecticut, referred directly to our report, citing the $1 billion stain on the department's charter school grant program, and told DeVos, "This budget is full of cruel cuts to education programs, and it baffles me that you found room for a $60 million increase to the Charter School Program... especially when you consider recent reports of waste and abuse in the program."
When Rep. Mark Pocan, a Democrat from Wisconsin, asked DeVos what was being done to recover the $1 billion in alleged financial mismanagement involving charters, DeVos said she "would look into the matter."
On the issue of how a federal agency could allow charter operators to rip off American taxpayers with impunity, and generally suffer no adverse consequences for their acts, DeVos acknowledged that waste and fraud in the charter grant program had been around for "some time."
That much is true.
It was under Arne Duncan's watch that the federal charter grants program was greatly expanded, states were required to lift caps on the numbers of charter schools in order to receive precious federal dollars, and the administration Duncan served in insulted public school teachers by proclaiming National Charter School Week on dates identical to what had always been observed as Teacher Appreciation Week.
And most of the wanton charter fraud we detailed in our report that ran rampant during the Duncan years is now simply continuing under DeVos, with little to no explanation of why this is allowed to occur.
So at least we have that clear.
To learn more about school privatization, check out Who Controls Our Schools? The Privatization of American Public Education, a free ebook published by the Independent Media Institute.
Click here to read a selection of Who Controls Our Schools? published on AlterNet, or here to access the complete text.
This article was produced by Our Schools, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
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