Federal Voucher Money Will Not Go To Public Schools

Remember "backpacks full of cash"? It was a phrase coined by reforster Jeanne Allen that captured the way that taxpayer-funded vouchers turned private school students into couriers, bagmen who simultaneously delivered and laundered taxpayer dollars so that public money could be directed to private religious schools. We may someday be nostalgic for the era in which such manipulations were necessary-- "Once upon a time, not only was the government not required to fund religious organizations, but they were actually rquired NOT to."

Vouchers were always an elegant solution to the question of "How do we get public money to private schools?" Private schools were already funded by a stream of students carrying backpacks stuffed with their parents' cash. To get government-to-school funding going would require a whole other stream to be created, but vouchers could just hop onto the stream that already existed. Parents could stuff the backpacks with taxpayer dollars as well as their own. 

It's important to keep this model in mind when discussing one of the hot issues around the federal voucher system.

Voucher fans argue that federal vouchers will benefit public schools, which is a careful choice of wording because the federal vouchers will not go to schools-- they will go to families, to shove into their child's cash backpack.

For private schools, that's a distinction without much difference, because vouchers pack new cash into the same old funding stream. But for public schools, it's a completely different issue.

The public school funding stream is taxpayer to government to school district. There is no public school version of a funding stream fed by individual students carrying backpacks full of cash. That is, in many ways, antithetical to the public school mission.

In the private school backpack model, the size of the student's backpack determines where they can go with that load of money. A large backpack full of loads of cash? You get to go to Philips Exeter. A fanny pack loaded with a small, lonely stack? You gete to go to Bob's Strip Mall Academy. 

How the market treats you depends on how big and how stuffed your backpack full of cash is.

The public system is designed to work differently. All the cash comes into one big pool, and every student gets to swim in it regardless of what their familiy's contribution might have been. (Does it work perfectly? No, particularly because of the ties to housing. The irony here is that the public mission is undermined by market forces in the housing market).

Point is-- federal voucher dollars are not going to go to public schools unless the public schools can figure out a way to create the new funding stream for students carrying cash backpacks, and that create a whole new set of issues. If a special tutoring program is available to Susie because she has a backpack of federal voucher money, then why shouldn't that tutoring available to any or all students, regardless of backpack status? 

If a public school sets up a program for backpack-bearing students pay for a basic service, how do we square that with the mission of providing the same basic service for all? If a public school sets up a program for back-bearing studets to "buy" an extra service, how do we justify only providin that soecial service to some students?

These dilemaa are unavoidable because, again, the federal voucher program will not give money to schools, but to students. For private schools, that wioll mean business as usual. For public schools, that will mean a new business model that will have to somehow co-exist with the traditional public service mission. There are undoubtedly some public districts out there well-positioned to wrestle with this issue, but it would be great if governors and districts put some real thought and discussion into the issue, because federal voucher dollars will only make it to public schools via a new and potentially troubling path. 

More Excuses for Screens in Schools

At first glanece, the recent Matt Barnum interview with Richard Culatta, the CEO of ISTE, might seem to feature the head of that tech-pushing giant backpedaling (or maybe even backpeddling) on the big tech push that has drawn such backlash lately. But let's look at what he says again:

On the backlash:

You know, in some ways I’m surprised it’s taken this long. I was watching how we were managing technology in the wake of COVID, and we were not doing it very thoughtfully. When you start handing out devices very quickly without preparing teachers, without carefully selecting the tools, without monitoring them for quality, stuff starts to go off the rails.

 On bad tech in schools:

People very quickly want to focus on the tools, on the screens, and it just doesn’t line up with what we see. It’s almost entirely about how the technology is used. In some cases, we have kids just clicking next through PowerPoint, and that’s terrible learning. That’s just the equivalent of a worksheet on a screen.

So I think we just need to have a moment where we go back and say ‘we did things wrong.’ Unfortunately, what we’re hearing are far less effective strategies. I mean, our friends in L.A. are doing the worst possible approach to trying to course correct.

He's referring to recent policy decisions in LAUSD calling for limits on screen time.  Which Culatta thinks is a bad idea. 

But is he saying here that we made a mistake putting all those screens in front of youthful eyeballs? 

He is not. He is, in fact, using one of the most popular dodges in the annals of bad education policy ideas, fully recognizable to anyone who was teaching during the Common Core backlash.

Our product is awesome! You're just implementing it wrong.

Culatta admits that somebody, somehow, might have overpromised with ed tech, but, hey now-- let's not get crazy:

I don’t think it was oversold. It was oversimplified, and so this idea that you could just put some software in front of a kid with no need for a teacher anymore — I mean, we’d hear stuff like that. What happens is when there are big sweeping statements like ‘oh technology will solve everything’ and then it doesn’t — of course it doesn’t — then people think technology is garbage, and we should ban it.

Yes, it was absolutely oversold. Hell, it's still being oversold. And not in a "we'd hear stuff" from who-onows-where way, but in a pushy deiberate ed tech company marketing way. We've got entire schools (looking at you, Alpha School) selling themselves as "No teacher needed-- magical AI ed tech will do it all, and in only two hours a day."

Notice that he also skips right over the question of whether there is something fundamentally problematic about ed screens. It is true that not all tech packages are created equal, that software (like paper books) come in both well-designed and stunningly crappy varieties. But it is also true that we haven't dealt nearly enough with the ways in which parking a student in front of a screen turns a process that rests of social and human dimensions into a process that is isolating and humanity-deprived. I don't care if you have the best damned software in the world-- I still don't want my child spending a huge chunk of his school day staring into the electronic abyss.

Screens are inevitable. Screens are good. You just have to make sure you do screens the right way. This practice is as old as a Studebaker dealership-- it's called assuming the sale, and it gets the customer to talk about how they're going to buy your product rather than question whether or not they ought to. Ed tech just layers on "Well, if it's not working, that's because you're using it wrong." None of this is particularly helpful right now. I get that, to  edit a phrase, there's no point in hoping someone will ask questions when his livelihood depends on not asking those questions. But somebody has to ask them, and we all have to pay better attention to the answers we get.

ICYMI: Lakeside Edition (8/9)

The Institute continues its remote operation this week, so output is down a bit. We are conducting some deliberate field tests of enforced boredom, a parenting technique in which one refuses to provide one's offspring with constat entertainment, thereby forcing them to create their own activities. This actually works pretty well for the Board of Directors, which is encouraging. 

But I've still got a reading list for you. Make the best of it.

Science of Reading Mandates: Who’s Listening to The Experts?

Nancy Bailey breaks down the spread of Science of Reading and offers up a handy list of actual experts who deserve some attention while this wave is rolling through.

Trump’s Dept. of Ed. Rescinds Longstanding Formal Federal Rules Protecting Black, Brown, and Native American Students’ Civil Rights

Jan Resseger looks at the end of "disparate impact" policies-- basically, it now only counts as racism if someone annunces that they are introducing a policy for racist reasons.

The Trump team gives Head Start the DOGE treatment

Checker Finn may be a long time reformster, but he has also turned out to be a fairly reliable measure of what actual conservatives think of MAGA policies like gutting Head Start.

Florida AG’s threat to Catholic schools ‘clear violation’ of the First Amendment, law scholar says

The violation in question is not allowing religious exemption from vaccine requirements, because religious freedom means the state gets to tell you how to practice your religion.

The Silly Season Comes to School

TC Weber looks at some beginning of year shenanigans, and even if you aren't in Memphis, you're going to recognize some of them.

An alphabet without an F: AI slop seeps into Teachers Pay Teachers curriculum marketplace

Can't say I was ever a huge fan of Teachers Pay Teachers, but now Lily Altavena at Chalkbeat reports it's one more place crowded with AI inaccurate slop.

Art Made Us Human

From history professor Steven Mintz, one more answer to why AI is bad for us and some excellent historical context for the importance of art.

Why the Democrats Probably Won't Save the Humanities

Cultural Knowledge explains why the Dems are not going to rescue the humanities. Famliar problems with a slightly different framing.

Texas Republican Platform: Leaving Children Uninsured, Underserved, Unheard, and Unprotected

Bruce Lesley finds the Texas GOP platform less than great for children.

Give Them an Inch...

Jess Piper looks at the Heritage Foundation's desire to get rid of women's sports (because they make women all uppity)

The Phonics Gambit: The Zombie Reading Policy that Fails but Won't Die

Paul Thomas has the numbers for yet another phonics-forward policy that doesn't actually seem to work.

Primary schools to be told to identify children at risk of future unemployment

This is from the UK, but it can certainly serve as a cautionary tale for the US.

I love a good cross-genre cover.

Covid-19: Once Upon a Time...

Lord knows I don't really want to revisit those halcyon days of 2020, but we are apparently going to be subjected repeatedly to fantastic tale of What Happened iBack Then The rough outline goes something like this:

In 2020, Dr. Fauci manufactured a panic over Covid-19 which was A) basically harmless, B) manufactured by the Chinese and/or C) some sort of Deep State plot. The teachers union forced (somehow) schools to close and then proceeded to keep them closed practically forever for no good reason at all, because teachers were excited about getting a paycheck for doing nothing. 

I'm going to skip over some aspects of this fairy tale other than to point out that A) the leader of the US government in 2020 was President Donald Trump and B) millions of people died, including millions of people in countries all around the world, which is a hell of effort to make for a conspiracy aimed at fooling the American people.

But I do want to write down my own narrative from those days, jsut so that I can get it out every time US politicians are making me feel as if I'm nuts.

Covid-19 dropped for realsies in March of 2020. We had just started to hear about it, and then we were all on lockdown. Spring musicals all across the country were shut down. It was sudden and scary. "Just for two weeks," at first, and then indefinitely, when it became clear the spread wasn't slowing. Local districts here scrambled to cobble together some sort of distance learning. For districts like the one my wife works in, that sometimes meant teachers hand-delvering packets to student homes. 

My newest grandson was born in March. I was booked to fly to Seattle to meet him. The airline postponed the flight, and then postponed it again. When the twins were exposed, it took a few days to find a place a couple towns over that could do testing. We ordered a lot of take-out in hopes it would keep our favorite restaurants in business.

Infrmation was soarse and uncertain. The feds, given a chance to show real leadership in a time of challenge, ttally biffed it. Betsy DeVos made one good call-- no Big Standardized Test in spring of 2020 (a decision that would mobilize an entire industry to launch a push to bring those tests back ASAP)-- but otherwise told local schools they were on their own. Your local newspaper was probably publishing a daily number of infected, hospitalized, and dead. Some of them were teachers. Tick, tick, tick.

It became quickly clear that the school year was over. Maybe we could regroup in time for the fall.

The summer was filled with handwringing. Nobody (with the exception of a few outliers and the ed tech industry) wanted to do more distance learning, zoom school, or otherwise continue the excrutiating experiment of the spring. But what to do instead? I wrote the following in June 2020:

We know that nobody really knows how dangerous re-opening schools will be. Will students become super-spreaders, sharing it at school and bringing it home to vulnerable family members? How great a risk will teachers be running? 

We know that “official” guidance on how to open schools is in short supply, and that what is out there is, for teachers, mind-boggling. The average teacher’s reaction to CDC guidelines is an eye roll powerful enough to shift the earth’s axis. Teachers have conjectured repeatedly that the members of the CDC must have never set foot inside a school, but that’s not the CDC’s job. Their job is to figure out what safety would require. Somebody else will have to figure out how, or if, that can be done.

Finally, we know that based on everything we think we know right now, the price tag for safely opening schools again is huge. Lots of folks are trying to run numbers, and everyone agrees that the figure will be in the billions—many of them. And simply throwing up our hands and going back to some version of distance learning is, we already know, not much of an option—unless we pour a bunch of money into getting it right.

That, of course, did not happen. Instead, the fall was marked by variations of this conversation:

Leaders: We really want to get these schools open again.

Teachers: Thank God. So what are we doing to mitigate danger to teachers, students, and families? Mandatory distancing? Regular testing? Air treatment for classrooms? School issued masks? What are we doing to keep everyone safe?

Leaders: Yeah, that stuff would be really expensive, so we thoughgt we'd, you know, open the building and let you all take your chances.

Teachers: We would really rather not do that.

Leaders: See, everyone! The teachers are refusing to re-open the building, for some unknown reason.

Remember all the fun variations in the fall of 2020? Split the student body in half and run alternate days, or morning and afternoon school. Have teachers teach half the students in person and half over the internet. Open full in person, but any time someone tested positive, send the class home for 5 days of Zoom school. All of these variations had one thing in common-- a shit ton of extra work for teachers. Betsy DeVos popped up to tell us "we're all in this together," which was some real baloney.  She was busy harnessing Covid panic and discontent to sell school choice. 

The fall of 2020 was a mass of school approaches. Cautious parents stuck to pods. Plenty of private and charter schools, as well as schools in states with powerless unions, chose to stay closed. More information about Covid suggested that children weren't in as much danger, but it was still unclear how much danger an infected Junior was to Grandma. Testing and reporting was by and large on the honor system.

By the fall of 2020, districts were pretty much on their own to make decisions. That was a challenge. It was not a good omen when administration at my old district decided to hold a planning session in person and it turned into a mini-spreader event. 

In my corner of the world, the fall and winter of 2020 were actually the worst part. Our numbers were low in September, but by December everyone knew somebody who had been hit by the virus; many folks knew someone who had died. Our local hospital was at capacity. While people were still arguing that it was just like a bad case of the flu, a former thirty-something colleague was describing how Covid made it exhausting for him to climb steps, and hard to just think clearly. 

You may have forgotten the timeline, but it was mid-December before vaccines were available. Trump could have justifiably claim them as a triumph, a win for his administration, but by then the loons were hollering at full volume, so, you know, maybe drink some bleach or have some horse worm medicine, but don't let them stick you with that secret micro-ship. Some of those anti-vax folks were teachers. 

In 2020, most people did the best they could with limited information and rudderless government. Hindsight shows that some choices could have been better, but hindsight does not set policy. Millions of people died, millions more were hospitalized, and yet six years later, we're dealing with folks who insist that it wasn't real. That the teachers union somehow kept schools closed for no good reason because, I guess, teachers wanted to collect their big fat pasychecks for doing work that was harder and more grueling than their usual work. "I don't want to go back if you won't take steps to keep us all safe" has been shortened to "I don't want to go back."

The Covid story is a variation on an old education theme-- society faces a problem, won't muster the resources to fully address the problem, leaves teachers to pick up the slack (see also IDEA). All Covid added was a layer of A) the problem was made up and B) it was teachers' fault. 

So if, like me, you hear the Covid rhetoric and wonder if your memories of 2020 are somehow defective, I'm here to tell you you're not imagining things. 

Teaching and the $1.98 Porsche

One of the most widely read pieces I ever wrote was a piece for Forbes about the need to stop talking about a "teacher shortage," which incuded this paragraph. 

You can’t solve a problem starting with the wrong diagnosis. If I can’t buy a Porsche for $1.98, that doesn’t mean there’s an automobile shortage. If I can’t get a fine dining meal for a buck, that doesn’t mean there’s a food shortage. And if appropriately skilled humans don’t want to work for me under the conditions I’ve set, that doesn’t mean there’s a human shortage.

That $1.98 Porsche line has been quoted more than a few times, and I have continued to try to argue for different framing for nthe widespread problem of staes that cannot find enough qualified people to hire for classrooms. 

The discussion of that shortage has simmering since the pandemic because COVID and the reaction to it (including the bizarro revisionist history that insists that schools were shut down for no reason at all by the teachers unions) were no help at all for the already-struggling recruit-and-retain machinery of the teaching profession. 

Matt Barnum (thank goodness he's back at Chalkbeat and out from behind the WSJ paywall) has been digging through numbers to unveil the reality of the problem, and Anne Lutz Fernandez continued the discussion with a well-sourced post asserting that yes, there is a teacher shortage. In discussing that post, a poster in Bluesky broughht up the $1.98 Porsche isn't a shortage line, and Fernandez made this sensible reply

I agree with him in principle, but I have to come to believe that if we don't call it a shortage, there is less political pressure to do something.

True enough-- especially because so many folks have tried to argue that there isn't really a shortage (these are almost always on the national level because on the state and local level everyone knows they are having trouble filling teacher spots.

But I will continue to stick up for the Porsche line. Here's why--

When I conclude that there's a Porsche shortage because I can't buy one for $1.98, I am really arguing that the problem is not me, and therefor the solution does not rest with me. And that kind of thinking continues to be a problem with the troubles with recruiting and retaining teachers. "There's a teacher shortage" is too easily interpreted by policy makers as "Kids These Days just don't have the proper attitude toward service." And the "shortage" frame leads to terrible solutions like creating a program in a box that any shmoe can deliver effectively, or hiring anyone with a pulse to stand in a classroom. 

The problem, declare policy makers, is out there somewhere. Certainly here in the room with us.

Barnum and Fernandez note several of the obvious reasons that teaching is a less attractive profession these days. Low pay, especially if you compare it to the pay for similarly-educated professions. The rising tide of bad behavior from students. The onslaught of attention-sapping technology. The insistence that good education is only for the right people and for other people we just need schools to crank out compliant meat widgets to serve corporate overlords.

There are more complex issues. Take the steadily collapsing pipeline; fewer students enroll in teacher prep programs, and colleges respond by cutting those low-yield programs.

There is the absolute unrelenting negativity directing at the profession. Twenty years ago, American schools were failing, and it was all teachers' fault. Then teachers were run down as groomers and pedophiles. Then they were part of the evil conspiracy behind COVID. Commies and traitors! If you aren't on the ground, in schools, I'm not sure you can realy grasp just how relentless and ugly the steady denigration of teachers has been in this country for the past few decades. And the folks who could be the next generation of teachers have had a front row seat.

Couple that with the rise of test-centered schooling, in which the teachers' job was reduced to Getting Students Ready for the Big Standardized Test (which in turn would be the one measure of how good the teachers are). Micro-management and dis-empowerment stripped the profession of much of what made the profession appealing. And I don't think we too easily overlook the fact that college-age students today have never known any kind of school except test-centered schooling. Test prep and data obsession-- that's the normal they grew up with. We have raised a multiple-choice generation and now they are unprepared for an essay question profession.

There is a shortage of quality teachers in this country, but it's a mistake to accept certain implications of "shortage"-- that the teacher tree has failed to. bear fruit or that a generartion of teachers was lost to drought. It's a mistake that goes hand in hand with the notion that teachers are born and called rather than made and recruited. It's goes hand in hand with the mistake of blaming the raw materials of the profession rather than the system that is failing to support and produce them.

The teacher shortages across the country are a symptom of larger problems in our entire cultural relatuionship with education and the young. There are no quick, simple solutions, and the start of any improvement will be more discussion of the shortages by people like Barnum and Fernandez who are willing to look past the folks who are sad about the lack of $1.98 Porsches. And Fernandez is exacty right-- whatever we do, it needs to put pressure on the policy leaders who are making the decisions that are breaking the pipeline.

ICYMI: Down East Edition (8/2)

The Board of Directors, CMO, and I are currently operating from the Maine field office, an annual adventure completre with woods, water, a little ocean, and other rebalancing team building exercises designed to increase our synergistic effciiencies with extreme fidelity and also fried clams and devil dogs. But there is still reading to be done.

Ridiculous Headlines about Public Education

Nancy Flanagan takes us on a stroll through the latest is silly education headlines.

The Best Correspondent’s Dinner Message That Should Not Go Unnoticed!

Nancy Bailey caught a widely ignored speech at the correspondent's dinner from Weijia Jiang, Emmy Award-winning television journalist. 

The Alpha School Debate

Natalie Wexler has mined a considerable number of materials related to Alpha School. None of it makes them seem less snake oily, but specifics are always nice.

Who Is Watching Nevada's classroom technology?

Kelsey Penrose writes for Carson Now about the parents pushing back against ed tech in Nevada.

Arizona judge strikes down GOP ballot measure threatening teachers unions' existence

The Arizona GOP keeps trying like hell to keep the public from having any say about taxpayer=funded vouchers, but the latest attempt to screw with the voters has been struck down by a judge.

Most Adults Don't Want Standardized Testing and Neither Do Kids: So, Why Do We Still Run Schools Around It?

Bruce Lesley has done plenty of homework on this answer to the decades-old question.

How a years-long rise in teacher turnover reshaped American classrooms

Matt Barnum at Chalkbeat has been looking at the data about teacher turnover, and he's drawn some conclusions.

Three Things I Would Encourage Every Teacher To Do Going Into This School Year

Marcus Luther offers some year-launching advice for teachers. It's a good list.

Your Reading is Out of Control

Rachael Gabrield presents an altern ative view of the current handwringing over the student reading crisis.

Anthropic Launched Claude for Teachers. We Blocked It for Our District.

Want one more post slamming the advent of Claude for Teachers? This one from Joe Phillips is excellent.

At Forbes.com last week, I wrote about to make a writing classroom AI-resistant, and about a study showing the school sports are more available to some than to others.

Turn this one up.

The Bad Administrator Matrix

Teach long enough and you learn that it's a mistake after the announcement of a change in administration, "Well, at least it can't get any worse." It can always get worse. 

What's surprising is that sometimes the new boss can be totally different from the old boss, and still be terrible. How can that happen? Let me offer this matrix as an explanation of the very different ways in which a school administrator can be terrible.

We can do this with two axes. For one, we have the benign-toxic axis. Here we're charting the difference between an admin who is an actual toxic, negative presence in the district and one who is not at all angry or destructive. On the benign, we have an admin who avoids conflict and strife at every turn-- even the conflict and strife that are necessary and unavoidable. But hey-- maybe if we all get along, problems will just kind of take care of themselves. The toxic admin creates a poisonous atmosphere, hoping to stay in charge through fear and conflict. 

For the effective-ineffective axis, we're talking about how effective they are at implementing whatever idea has taken root in their head. Do they have a vision with no clear, concrete way to implement it, or are they skilled at dragging their ideas into life.

Let's look at each of the quadrants.

Benign-Effective

This administrator is loaded with ideas, and she knows how to implement them. They just aren't ideas that help teachers get education done in the building. Benign admins often focus on ideas that miss the point, like special "morale" contests that reward the teacher with the best classroom door with an extra jean day. You feel bad complaining about the benign-effective admin because they aren't scary or abusive. But when you need help with a problem student and they can't help because they're in a meeting with the parent-advisory group in charge of getting new flower pots for the front entrance, it gets kind of annoying. 

The benign-effective admin seems to be getting stuff done, but none of the stuff is particularly helpful, and sometimes (like the time she wanted your department to get all of the scores from the Practice Big Standardized Test into a cool spreadsheet) it can come with tremendous opportunity costs. The workplace atmosphere is pretty okay, but still you may feel like a hamster on a treadmill, running hard and getting nowhere and doing it all with no support.

Benign-Ineffective 

This clueless goof means well (probably) but they have not figured out that they are in charge, yet. Your tongues is almost entirely bitten through from all the times she has said some version of, "Yeah, you're right. That's definitely a problem. Someone should do something about that" and you have wanted to scream, "You!! You should so something about that!"

You have a lot of freedom under this sentient jello sculpture, but unfortunately so do your most irresponsible colleagues. And every teacher in the building knows that the admin will provide zero assistance with discipline issues. You aren't afraid that you'll be facing any danger from the front office, but you always feel as if any other corner of the building could combust at any second.

Toxic-Ineffective

Cannot figure out how to make anything, but will rant and bully the people he thinks are failing to understand. He used to be a classroom teacher who never explained his expectations to his students and then browbeat them for not meeting those expectations. Now he runs staff meetings where people shoot each other frightened glances of "Do YOU know what the hell he's complaining about." 

Often this is the admin who gets angry about things that he doesn't understand, and so he's angry a lot. His building smells like sweat and fear, his staff unsure about what might set him off next. But somebody is going to pay a price.

Toxic-Effective

At his worst, this bad admin also likes to rule through fear and threats, but he also understands that just flailing around won't get the job done. He's a snake, not a bull, and everybody had better watch their backs. He knows how to undermine a staff member or get vengeance on an employee who crosses him. He knows how to force people out just because he doesn't want them there. And he knows how to play the politics and ally-building necessary to get away with whatever wants.

He enjoys flexing his power, but like all bad admins, he's not particularly focused on the idea of educating students. He just wants to dominate and control, the feel the raw rush of power. Of the four types, this is the one most likely to be a full-blown sociopath. He gets stuff done, but he makes sure that nobody can ever really relax and feel good about it.

There are ways to deal with each of these types, from sycophantic up-sucking to staying so very still and quiet that maybe you won't be noticed. And every one of these quadrants can look actually not so bad to people stranded under the leadership of one of the other quadrants. But these folks are all bad bosses, a testament to how, yes, sadly, it can always be worse.