As we noted last week, some Nebraska fans of taxpayer-funded vouchers tried--again--to get enact vouchers, this time through the sneaky technique of putting them in the budget. Instead of getting their vouchers, they raised a controversy that sank the entire budget.
State Sen. Rob Clements of Elmwood, Appropriations Committee chair, removed the $3.5 million of voucher money, meant to bridge the gap between the end of the state's voucher program that was repealed by voters, and the beginning of the federal voucher system that Governor Pillen opted into (the voters get no say on that one). And lots of people were upset, as reported by the Nebraska Examiner.
Arguments for the voucher money were baloney. Sen. Christy Armendariz of Omaha argued that the vouchers were needed to protect poor kids who might be "kicked out" of public school. State Sen. Brad von Gillern of the Elkhorn area expressed frustration toward opponents, calling it hypocritical to oppose the measure when many of the same senators argue the state isn’t doing enough to help the poor.
“Shame on you,” von Gillern said. “If you make a pitch for poor people for any other reason, and you can’t support this, you’re a hypocrite.”
Except that vouchers are used mostly by wealthy, already-in-private-school students, and it's the private schools that get to pick their students, not vice versa. It is telling that the voucher crowd did not have anecdotes of poor children who had been kicked out of public school and had been rescued by vouchers. The program ran all this year, so those stories, if real, should have been easy enough to locate.
Sen. Myron Dorn of Adams, the only Republican on Appropriations to oppose the $3.5 million in vouchers, criticized focus on this one issue, and also criticized the whole sneaky business of trying to slip this policy into the budget when there is no bill or law behind it.
Said Tim Royers, president of Nebraska State Education Association--
This standoff is exactly why you don’t try and pass policy through the budget, especially when that policy is to extend an incredibly unpopular program that was repealed by voters in the most recent election. … We hope enough can come together and negotiate a path forward that keeps vouchers out of the budget.
So Nebraska voucherphiles managed to sink the state budget over a program that voters had already voted down. That's a bold stance to take and one can hope that Nebraska voters will deliver the reward they so richly deserve. It's yet another reminder, in a backhand way, that no matter how hard voucherphiles insist to the contrary, supporting taxpayer-funded school vouchers is not actually a winning political issue.
Our Schools Our Democracy was set up in 2024 "to protect the fundamental rights of all Texans to a free, quality public education" at a time when those rights were under a concerted attack. Now they have come up with a new organization and some excellent tools for dealing with the Texas march toward privatization.
The Texas Center for Voucher Transparency is a timely organization for Texans, as Governor Greg Abbott and his fellow voucher lovers continue to push for privatization of public education. Over the years, Abbott has had trouble getting past democracy, especially those pesky rural representatives and their tendency to represent their constituent's wishes instead of Abbott's beloved plans. Even with outside help, it has been a tough haul.
And it has been crystal clear that what the voucherphiles of Texas want is not so much actual school choice as much as it is a way to funnel taxpayer dollars to private Christian schools. Everything that research predicted-- schools that pick their students, wasted taxpayer dollars, vouchers that mostly fund families who were already in private schools-- it's all happening in Texas.
So the time is right for a center that tracks all the voucher shenanigans. A place that collects the research and tales of voucher irresponsibility. It's a billion-dollar taxpayer0funded program-- surely somebody ought to be keeping an eye on it. The TXCVT goal:
To uphold the public trust and ensure that Texans have timely, credible information about how the voucher program operates, who it benefits, and how it affects public schools and communities.
One exceptionally cool tool is the School Locator Map. The map shows the location of every school in the state-- public, charter, and private. It shows their ranking on Texas evaluation system, and you can also break it down by county or by elected representative. There's a wealth of information here, though you can see very quickly one truth about school choice in Texas-- it's really only available for families in the urban areas. The vast majority of counties in Texas have no "choice" options-- and yet, their residents get to contribute their tax dollars to help fund vouchers in the cities.
It's a great batch of resources. If you are in Texas, you should be aware of them, and if you are in any other state, you should be jealous of them-- jealous enough to either find the resources available in your state or to get something started.
A little field trip yesterday to a maple syrup producing farm, where they are boiling the last catch of the season. If you are used to the picture of a bucket hanging under a tap on a tree, I can tell you that more modern operations involve a tap hooked to a hose that runs through a network of other hoses to a main collection tank that uses some suction to collect the sap. Lot of technical steps after that, too, mostly involving some impressive machinery. However, I feel confident that AI will not take over the maple industry any time soon.
In the meantime, here's this week's reading list. In case you're new here, let me mention that A) this list generally doesn't include any pieces that I referenced or wrote about during the week and B) your mission is to take any pieces that you think are particularly valuable and amplify them through your own channels.
Texas has a voucher system that incentivizes specials needs (if your child has them, you get extra taxpayer dollars). So now a bunch of parents want their public school to certify that their child has special needs so that those parents can pull that child out of public school.
Josh Cowen hates to say he told them so, but when it comes to Texas and their taxpayer-funded vouchers, he told them so. Includes lots of useful links to research.
Maurice Cunningham caught an interesting piece of news this week-- Moms for Liberty co-founder Tiffany Justice lasted less than a year in her cushy Heritage Foundation gig.
Cooper Sved at the Albert Shanker Institute blog writes about the miserable crap that happens when someone wants to teach but they have to wrestle with tightly standardized curriculum in a box instead.
I am so glad that Matt Barnum is back at Chalkbeat. In this piece, he looks at the growing argument that points at screens as the culprits behind the great test score dip.
Kentucky is considering one of those bills that mandates letting students out of school to go attend a "moral instruction" class. Linda Allewalt argues this is, in fact, immoral.
Jen Jennings has been digging through the Arizona taxpayer-funded voucher spending and fining some real whoppers. These graphics look at just the spending on LEGOs alone.
Not good. The experience was not good. But if you are wondering why people complain about i-Ready, this will give you plenty of specifics. If you already know, this will let you know you're not alone. This is painful.
TC Weber provides a ground-level example of yet another one of these guys who never, ever suffer for their failure. Watch out, Chicago-- he's headed your way.
Emily Tate Sullivan at The 74 has an important story about the tidal wave of AI slop aimed at children who are using Youtube or other video platforms. If you are the parent of such a child, you need to read this.
It's an interview on Youtube with America's leading daily historian talking to one of the biggest experts on the problems of school vouchers. Well worth 40 minutes of your time.
I like music that finds new ways to re-create itself, and I love musicians who are having fun doing their thing, so I love this version of a song that is not exactly a classic.
Nebraska's voucher fans are bound and determined, like legislators in many states, to get around the voters so they can get vouchers installed.
In May of 2023, Nebraska’s Governor Jim Pillen signed into law LB 753, creating tax credit vouchers for subsidizing private schools.
The concept has been floated in Nebraska before, notably turning up more than once in 2022’s session. In 2023, it finally progressed through the legislature. But NSEA political action director Brian Nikkelson told the Nebraska Examiner that the public did not support the vouchers, and if the bill was passed, there would be a petition drive to force the bill to go on the ballot for voters to decide.
And so there was. It was a heck of a battle, with the pro-voucher forces have attracting a mountain of money, some of it from outside the state. Paul Hammel at the Nebraska Examiner reported that big money contributors include C.L. Werner, an Omaha-based trucking company executive ($100,000), Tom Peed and his son Shawn of a Lincoln publishing company ($75,000 each), and former Nebraska governor U.S. Senator Pete Ricketts ($25,000). Governor Pillen himself has contributed $100,000 to the campaign to save vouchers from a vote.
At the same time, Hammel reported, the American Federation for Children, the school choice advocacy group founded by Betsy DeVos, has contributed $103,000 in in-kind services and $583,000 in cash to the campaign.
It didn't matter. Support Our Schools needed 60,000 signatures to force a referendum. They ended up with about twice that number (that's roughly 10% of all eligible voters in the state). So this November, the voters of Nebraska were supposed to have their say. So you'd expect that voucher fans, who keep telling us how much everyone loves vouchers, would just sit back, secure in the knowledge that their program would win the referendum handily.
Well, no.
Instead, legislators cooked up LB 1402. This bill proposed to repeal the Opportunity Scholarships that were created under LB 753, and then to replace them with a new version of Opportunity Scholarships. This version would have been an education savings account (ESA) style super-voucher that hands over taxpayer money to send a student to a private or parochial school. It was more sketchy than last year's bill because it appropriates state funds (rather than tax-credited contributions) to pay for the vouchers.
But mostly what it did it render the petition drive moot, because it repealed the version of vouchers that the public was going to vote on. "Ha," they apparently thought. "That'll stop those damned voters."
In 67 days, the coalition of opponents gathered the necessary signatures—again. That repeal passed in November 2024, with 45 out of 49 legislative districts voting to repeal, and Nebraska's voucher law was toast. The voters had sent a clear and unequivocal message.
Surely the state's leaders would say, "Well, the voters have spoken, so that's that."
Fat chance.
Voucherphiles were back with a new proposal in January 2025. “I’m not dissuaded by the fact that it was defeated at the ballot box,” said freshman State Sen. Tony Sorrentino of Omaha.
Pillen's new idea is to sell vouchers for the "gap" year, the year between the time when Nebraska's vouchers are required to end and the time when the federal vouchers are supposed to kick in. The proposal is being sent through the state's Labor Department rather than the Department of Education because that would skirt the requirement for any sort of hearing or debate, probably because voucherphiles have a pretty good idea of how that would go.
Nebraska is one of those states where rural Republicans have opposed all attempts at vouchers, and they aren't sounding any friendlier about this one. Zach Wendling at Nebraska Examiner talked to State Sen. Tom Brandt of Plymouth, a Republican who opposed Linehan’s previous proposals; he said he is opposed to using any public money for private school choice. He’s still waiting to see how the federal tax credit program includes public schools (because, remember, there are no actual rules yet attached to the federal voucher program).
“The referendum simply eliminated that. Period, end of story,” he continued on the state policy. “There’s no other interpretation you can draw from that.”
The gap funding would cost about $5 million for around 2,500 students. Of course, with no rules in place, it's possible that not all of Nebraska's current voucher students would qualify for federal vouchers. Nor can we predict what slice of the federal money pie Nebraska would be entitled to. If it comes to that, we could expect voucherphiles to argue that more gap funding is needed to cover new gaps, or maybe to expand above and beyond the federal offerings.
Nebraska voucher fans are making a lot of "think of the children" noises, but families have plenty of time to look for new arrangements (i.e. finding the student a new school or going back to paying the full tuition with their own money).
This is the same story we've seen over and over again. Vouchers never win when voters have a chance to be heard. Every single taxpayer-funded voucher program in this country has been created without giving the taxpayers a say or ignoring the say they had already said. Taxpayer-funded vouchers are all the result of legislators backed by deep-pocketed voucher fans deciding they are going to inflict these on the taxpayers. Nebraska's taxpayers just happen to have a few more tools to fight back with, but Nebraska's voucherphiles just keep looking for a way to avoid that whole pesky democracy thing.
In Pennsylvania, a bipartisan group is pushing SB 1090, a bill "providing for disclosures and safeguards relating to the use of artificial intelligence."
It's short and sweet and doesn't go far enough, but it's something. The meat of it is in these next few bits:
Disclosure of nonhuman status.--If a reasonable person interacting with an AI companion would be misled to believe the person is interacting with a human, an operator shall issue a clear and conspicuous notification indicating that the AI companion is artificially generated and not human.
"Reasonable person" is doing a hell of a lot of work here.
The bill would also require AI "operators" to "maintain and implement a protocol" to prevent its bots from producing suicidal ideation, suicide, or self-harm content to users, or content that directly encourages the user to commit acts of violence. That protocol should include suicide hotline or crisis text line if the user expresses thoughts about self-harm.
Even better, the bill would require that if "the operator knows or should have known" that the user is a minor, they must provide notification that the user is not interacting with a human being. They must also provide a "clear and conspicuous notification" at least once every three hours that the user should take a break and, again, that they are talking to a non-human bot. The AI should also be prevented from producing sexually explicit images or giving the minor instructions on sexually explicit conduct.
Bots also have to come with a cyber-label saying "this might not be suitable for minors."
The Attorney General gets to enforce this. The state can fine an operator up to $10,000 for each violation (on top of any other remedies provided by law). $10K is, of course, couch cushion money for most tech companies, but this whole law is a hell of a lot better than one more chorus "Everyone better get their kids on AI before they are left behind in the awesome world of tomorrow that AI is going to launch any day now." Dragging them into court is the only thing that might get our tech overlords' attention, so it's encouraging to see legislatures showing a willingness to make that happen.
Jill Barshay at Hechinger took a look at the Mississippi "Miracle," specifically the question of why the miraculous 4th grade test results have not been matched by the 8th grade. She shared many theories about what might help, a conversation that Mike Petrilli continued in his substack. But I think, as always, the discussion of this topic skips an important point. I'm going to skip my usual Big Standardized Test rant and save the Mississippi thing for another day. Let's just talk about the 8th grade test scores and what they tell us about 13-year-olds and testing.
The 8th grade test dip is not news to anyone who has been paying attention. One of the great unstudied effects of the BS Test era is just how many districts reorganized their elementary. middle, or high schools in order to put their 8th graders under the same roof as another test group and hopefully blunt the effects of their lousy grades on the specific school. (If your middle school is just grades 6-8, then your 8th grade scores are the school scores, but if, say, your high school is grades 7-12, then the 8th grade scores get lumped in with 11th grade scores).
But any discussion of 8th grade scores needs to consider the Giving A Shit factor.
8th grade is the year when everything breaks loose for students. Their bodies betray them, becoming ungainly and hard to manage. They have whole new sets of feelings, whole new drama-fraught social lives to manage. They have to work out how to deal with their parents, who have somehow become way more dumb and obnoxious than they used to be. School gets hard because learning gets hard, harder than in elementary school when it just sort of happened, and it begins to dawn on students that adults are not always reliable or trustworthy.
Testing has, of course, given rise to a new set of springtime traditions. The pre-test pep rally. The pre-test hype video. The pre-test earnest talk. The elementary students may still get some inspiration from these, but now you've got eighth graders who have been through this year after year, test after test, practice test after practice test.
The entire foundation of test-based accountability is the assumption that students will sit down to take the test and actually care and actually try. Elementary kids? They are game to throw themselves at whatever you give them to do. 11th graders? They have learned that there is some senseless baloney you have to work through in the adult world. But 8th graders? Nobody has fewer shits to give about your adult nonsense than an 8th grader.
Every time this discussion comes up, I just imagine some bureaucrat in a suit standing in front of a bunch of 8th graders telling them, "I know every one of you is going to do their very best, because while this test has no stakes at all for you, how else will researchers and policy makers and academics be able to have data-based discussions about the educational effects of instructional techniques and curricular policies?"
Don't get me wrong. 8th graders can be awesome, the energy and heart of elementary students combined with the knowledge and sense of high schoolers. 8th graders will absolutely give their blood and guts and hearts to an endeavor when they can see an authentic, real reason, a reason they can see and feel in their bones.
Where in the battery of the Big Standardized Test do you think they'll find that?
All the discussions of other factors-- the screens, the social media, the knowledge-based learning, the high-quality instructional materials, test designs, the leveling of reading materials-- that's all worth having. But I wish everyone worked up about testing would--well, you know what I wish when it comes to testing, but at least I would like them to ask themselves one question:
You want students to give their best, most intense and serious effort when it comes time to take the test.
The Secretary of Education sends the President a memo (91 pages!) arguing that the Department of Education should be dismantled as part of plan to get education sent back to the states. In its zeal to promote national security and reduce inequality, argues the secretary, the federal government has adopted "an overly intrusive federal role.”
The details of the proposal include moving department functions to other departments, such as sending Pell Grants and loan programs to Treasury and the Office for Civil Rights to the Justice Department. Indian Education programs could go to Interior. The secreary explained that the move of the OCR would be with the aim of “making local and state resolution of complaints the first recourse.” Let Alabama and Georgia decide whether they are violating anyone's civil rights by promoting inequality in education.
The "large scale funding" of the department needs to be reversed because it is "one of the factors responsible for the present imbalance of the federal budget." Cutting around 27% of the federal budget should provide “encouragement to the states to shoulder a greater share of the responsibility for delivering educational services.”
And what funding remains should be provided to the states in no-string block grants, piles of money that the states can spend as they wish.
The federal governmentj has no business managing educaation, particularly because under Certain Administrations, the department serves certain special interest groups. Also, dismantling the department would be in line with the President's campaign promises.
The Secretary of Education was Terrel Bell, the President was Ronald Reagan, and the year was 1981.
In other words, Trump-McMahon policies are 45 years old. They didn't start with Trump, and they won't end with him. The dismantling of the department--particularly the disempowerment of the OCR-- and the slashing of funding and funding oversight -- that's been the dream of some folks on the right since about fifteen minutes after the department was created.
Note: I came across the story playing with a new EdWeek feature that lets you search for the big stories from the year you started in education. It does not actually go back to the year I entered the classroom, it got close enough to cough up this reminder that some parts of the anti-public education hustle are plenty old.
