Victim of the vouchers
When Hurricane Katrina rampaged across New Orleans in 2005, it scattered families across the country and wreaked havoc on the city’s schools. Years later, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal proposed a fix: Under his Louisiana Scholarship Program, students could use taxpayer-funded vouchers to flee troubled public schools and enter private ones.
With a $40 million yearly price tag, it was one of the most ambitious school choice programs in the U.S. But as this week’s new episode shows, it has failed to deliver on a key promise.
In fact, the roughly 7,000 students who have left public schools have been placed into a system with numerous failing private schools that receive little oversight. And two-thirds of all students in the voucher system attended schools where they performed at a D or F level in the last school year.
These troubles are due in part to the opacity of the voucher schools’ grading system, which is supposed to alert the public about a school’s success or failure. Louisiana doesn’t publish the grades, and the Department of Education keeps them secret. So parents such as Dominique Martin end up relying on word-of-mouth recommendations when choosing schools for their children. Between kindergarten and fourth grade, Martin moved her daughter, Demi, through four charter schools. As Demi struggled with reading comprehension, Martin had no idea that several of the schools she’d chosen had received D grades.
“I don't know where to go or, you know, who to talk to to get her the help that she needs,” she told reporter Jess Clark of WWNO.
Although Louisiana’s voucher system has struggled to move kids from bad schools to better ones, it has been successful in another arena: filling empty seats in private schools. At the for-profit McMillian Academy, for example, the state picks up the tab for every single student. In 2017, that added up to more than $1.3 million – more than the state would’ve paid to keep those kids in public schools.
This episode is the first to grow out of Reveal Local Labs, an initiative that supports lasting investigative reporting collaborations in communities across the United States. It was produced in collaboration with WWNO, NOLA.com and FOX 8 New Orleans.
Hear the episode.
You can read more of our partners’ reporting here:
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Fact-based journalism is worth fighting for.
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Leaked immigration court official’s directive could violate rules that protect families from deportation
A high-ranking immigration court official has issued a requirement to judges in New York City that deportation cases involving families “MUST BE COMPLETED WITHIN 365 DAYS,” according to documents we obtained. The order may violate due process, as well as long-standing rules that protect families from deportation before their cases have been adjudicated fully.
The discovery of Assistant Chief Immigration Judge Daniel Daugherty’s email to judges illustrates the inner workings of one of the nation’s busiest immigration courts, days after the Department of Justice filed a petition to disband the immigration judges union.
The department and union have been battling over judges’ independence. Immigration court cases involving parents and children – such as those separated at the border or in the recent Mississippi workplace raids – can take several years to adjudicate. Binding case law effectively gives immigration judges the discretion to add time to a case by granting continuances, if the circumstances demonstrate “good cause.” Yet as the backlog of cases continues to grow, immigration judges have faced tightening restrictions on how much time cases can be given.
In mid-November, James R. McHenry III, director of the Executive Office for Immigration Review, the Justice Department agency that runs its immigration courts, issued a memo stating family cases in 10 cities, including New York, would be tracked, “with the expectation that they will be completed within one year or less.” McHenry’s memo, like most of his office’s policy memoranda, was made available online to the general public – including immigration attorneys whose job it is to be aware of rule changes that may affect their clients.
Two weeks after McHenry’s memo, Daugherty sent the previously undisclosed email to judges under his jurisdiction, using a combination of all-capital letters, boldface and underlined text. Several New York-area immigration attorneys we contacted were not aware of the email or the strict directives it contains.
“REQUIRED time frames,” Daugherty wrote, outlining several deadlines that were not included in McHenry’s memo. “JUST MAKE SURE YOU COMPLETE THE CASE WITHIN 365.” He signed the email with his nickname, “DOC.”
Read the story.
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Lasting impact
As part of a February episode, we investigated the laws surrounding concussions in high school sports – and where they fall short. We learned that school districts across the country are surprisingly inconsistent when it comes to tracking concussions.
To help you learn more about your own district’s concussion policies, we built a simplified public records request with a list of questions for administrators. You can find that here.
Since our show first aired, nearly 150 parents, students and journalists across the U.S. have downloaded our form. Last week, reporters who joined our Reveal Reporting Networks released two stories in their communities based on information they got from the form.
More are on the way. Stay tuned.
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Hunting for whales
Facebook recently received a $5 billion fine from the Federal Trade Commission for mishandling users’ personal information. But how does Facebook’s handling of personal information affect its users?
In a partnership with PBS NewsHour, we examined how Facebook is partnering with social casino games to monitor and analyze the behavior of vulnerable players. The companies are using big data and advanced software to predict which people will spend massive amounts of money on the games, then targeting these people with aggressive marketing.
For some people, these games result in financial ruin. Suzie Kelly, a grandmother from suburban Dallas, ultimately spent $400,000 playing a virtual slot machine game on the Big Fish Casino app on her iPhone. She took out two home equity loans, spent her family inheritance and borrowed money from her husband’s 401(k), all to pay off credit card debt from the game.
And the kicker? She can’t win any money in the game. It’s not traditional gambling. Players can never cash out their virtual chips for real money. They’re paying only to buy more chips, which allows them to spend extra time in the game.
“So this is, in some ways, pure addiction,” says Keith Whyte, executive director of the National Council on Problem Gambling.
Social casino games, such as slot machines and poker games on Facebook and mobile devices, have become a $5 billion-a-year business, with revenues nearly as large as all the Las Vegas Strip casinos combined. But because the games are classified as entertainment, they are not subject to any gambling regulations. So there is nothing stopping tech companies from monitoring, analyzing – and targeting – those with addictive personalities.
Do you know someone who has lost money on social casino games? We want to hear from you. Tell us your story here.
Watch the video.
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Documents show: Forwarding this email to a friend will help you protect your assets.
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