Cashing in on Federal Vouchers

The federal voucher program birthed by the Big Beautiful Boondoggle Bill aims to spread a lot of money around, and folks are already getting ready to hoover up a share of the taxpayer-funded largesse. The tricks is to set up a Scholarship Granting Organization.

What's an SGO again?

Tax Credit Scholarships are a way to launder taxpayer dollars before funneling them to private, often religious, schools. To hand the money taxpayer to government to private school would be illegal, so instead, the money goes from taxpayer to SGO (instead of the government) to private school. That shifting of the taxpayer's liability from government to private school is totes legal (except in Kentucky, where the courts are smarter than that). 

So the SGO collects the money and hands out the vouchers, and in between, it collects a handling fee, typically between 5% and 10%. 

SGOs can make some money on the state level, though in many cases they exist just to funnel taxpayer dollars to a particular private school. But the idea of a federal voucher system creates some big possibilities.

There's a wild range of estimates for how much money will be involved in federal vouchers, from $51 billion down to $3 billion. But no matter who turns out to be correct, a 10% will be mean there's a hefty stack of money in play for SGOs on the national level. All the more motivation for voucherphiles to get in on the financial harvest.

American Federation for Children 

As we have noted before, the DeVosian national-level privatization advocacy group is already setting up their own national SGO and teaming up with Odyssey, an outfit that promises "an automated, end-to-end school choice platform. AFC's announced plans that involve serving as an SGO for SGOs-- a national feedline for ambitious state-level SGOs. And look-- nobody yet knows what the actual rules and regulations are going to look like. Will this kind of SGO-to-SGO pipeline be legal? Better question-- will SGOs get to skim off a fee at every level, so that the piece of pie is whittled away as it moves down through the privatization funnel?

But AFC plans give you an idea of how much money is in play-- they are spending $10 million just to publicize and prepare the ground for the launch of federal vouchers. When you can spare a cool ten mill just to launch your new program, you know you're expecting some hefty ROI.

Center for Christian Virtue

State players are also planning to upsize. The Center for Christian Virtue has been active in Ohio since the days of 1983 when it was the more for Citizens for Community Values. Back in 2024 they won an award from the Heritage Foundation that they planned to use "to support its Education Restoration Initiative, addressing Ohio's academically broken and morally corrupt government-run education system."

They've been quite plain about being on a mission to replace public schools with private Christian schools, including helping churches set up such schools. But with the federal voucher program, they have announced their intent to go national by taking its state-level SGO, the Christian Education Network, and sending it out into other states. 

“Families are searching for both excellence and biblical values in education, so this program creates a critical pathway forward,” said Troy McIntosh, Executive Director of CEN. “It gives parents and grandparents a choice they may not have thought possible, and provides Christ-centered schools with new financial resources."

And for just 10% of the take, they will provide that.

MyChurchSGO

Even if you aren't a state or national player, you can still play along! Meet Richard Poljan and MyChurchSGO. In fact, I'll let him introduce himself, because otherwise you might think this is a parody video.

Yup. God's new gold mine.

Poljan has put up several of these videos, and they aren't exactly pulling in the big views. He's a hard man to track down, but he appears to be working in Fowler, Michigan, a small town NW of Lansing (be sure to visit Chester's Chicken while you're there). Richard "Buddy" Poljan appears to have no actual education background; his LinkedIn says he put in a couple of years at Hillsdale, then got a degree at Michigan Technological University before embarking on a career as an industrial engineer, currently with EFI Global, the "fire, environmental, and engineering experts." Looks like he played some college football. And he's served on some GOP local leadership groups.

MyChurchSGO has a website up, though it doesn't seem to be quite finished. Poljan does get the basic pitch here-- you can give $1,700 to the government or to your favorite church school. Also, don't have too many rules or parents will go to some other SGO. Also, to churches he says, "Get free money from the Government and bring in lots more revenue for your Church." Finally, "Get your SGO up and running," Poljan urges, "so that you can help kids make it to heaven."

But it's been six months, and Poljan's operation doesn't seem to be exactly taking off, and it does seem that bush-league start-ups like his will mostly get swamped by the big state and national SGO operations. Still, expect plenty of similar small time pop-ups to try to get a piece of that God's big new gold mine. 

ICYMI: Mothers' Day 2026 Edition (5/10)

A Happy Mothers' Day to those who are able to celebrate. There are many reasons not to want to join in today, and if that's you, then may the day pass with a minimum of hurt. 

Here's your reading list for the week. Remember-- if it speaks to you, share it.

Teachers! Appreciate Them Now. They Soon Could Be Gone!

Wrap up Teacher Appreciation Week with Nancy Bailey's list of the many ways that corporate reformsters have tried to make the lives of teachers miserable.

Is Moms for Liberty paying local chapters to attend monthly Zoom calls?

Moms for Liberty continue to fudge the definition of "grass roots organization." Kate LaGrone at WPTV reports that the Moms need a little help getting people to show up for meetings.

Voucher programs fail rural schools

The Economic Policy Institute explains why taxpayer-funded voucher programs are especially hard on rural school districts.

Congress Is Broken and Unpopular: Here Are 12 Reforms Children and Families Need

Bruce Lesley outlines some reforms that the current lousy version of Congress could pass to make life better for children and families.

The Blueprint for American Censorship

Mrs. Frazzled with some useful history on book banning in the USA, including Anthony Comstock.

Bill Lee's School Funding Formula Leads Tennessee to the Bottom in School Funding

When Tennessee's not busy making sure that voters in Memphis don't matter, they are making sure that they spend as little as possible on schools. Andy Spears explains.

Another death in the AI-in-education family

One more crappy AI educational "aid" appears to have bitten the dust. So long, OpenAI Study Mode. Benjamin Riley has the details.

Education Privatization Propaganda Worsening

Thomas Ultican is bugged by all the billionaires still trying to sell vouchers.

One Big Beautiful Bill’s Child Tax Credit Still Leaves America’s Poorest Children Far Behind

It's been a year and we still haven't tracked all the ways the big dumb bill is sticking it to the non-wealthy. Jan Resseger explores some of them.

Fabricated citations: an audit across 2·5 million biomedical papers

A research paper at The Lancet. And yikes.

Excerpts from Chief Justice John Roberts' High School English Essays

From Mark Paglia at McSweeney's. “Simply wearing a small red letter A is no great burden, and it would infringe upon the free speech of the rest of the town were Hester Prynne not to wear it.”

It was a busy week at Forbes.com

- A guide for Teacher Appreciation Week gifting

- A complaint about the use of "student achievement" when what researchers mean is "test scores"

- A school district in Wisconsin wants to keep the band from playing a piece dedicated to a trans activist.

My mother always liked this song when we were all younger, so this goes out to her today.

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CO: Polis Says Legal Discrimination Is Okee Dokee

What does it take to a nominally Democratic, openly gay governor to vote for taxpayer-funded discrimination? Apparently just some "free" federal money and a legal baloney excuse.

Governor Jared Polis has opted Colorado into the federal school voucher program. He even leaned on the Democratic lawmakers in his state to keep them from requiring voucher recipients to follow the state's anti-discrimination laws. 

Polis attended a voucher party thrown by Invest in Education, a advocacy group led by a bunch of out of state hedge fund guys (so you know education is their top priority), and explained that this was totally legal and okay, using the same rationale that led us to the baloney sandwich that is the tax credit scholarship approach to funding.

See, if Bob Gotbux handed his $1,700 to the government, and the government handed it to a private school that discriminated against some students for being LGBTQ or the wrong religion or having bad haircuts, that would be illegal. But if Bob hands the money to a Scholarship Granting Organization (SGO) and they hand it to the discriminatory school, that's totally okay. 

This is fairly transparent bullshit. 

My spouse tells me I'd better not spend our household money on beer. My brother owes me a hundred bucks, I tell him to just give me fifty bucks and two cases of beer. Will my spouse say to me, "That's okay, because you didn't actually buy beer with the money you were supposed to collect." I don't think so.

The Supreme Court of Kentucky saw through the tax credit scholarship dodge what that state's legislature tried to defend it in court. “The money at issue cannot be characterized as simply private funds,” they wrote, “rather it represents the tax liability that the taxpayer would otherwise owe.” Further “[T]he funds at issue are sums legally owed to the Commonwealth of Kentucky and subject to collection for public use including allocation to the Department of Education for primary and secondary education” and reallocating them to private school tuition violates the law.

Peter Murphy, who is the vice president of policy at Invest in Education, offered his two slices of baloney. “Every non-wealthy child in this country is the potential beneficiary,” Murphy said. “And what this law also does is it puts more control of a child’s education in the hands of their parents, including public school parents.”

That is, of course, a carefully hedged lie. Every parent cannot benefit because every private school that wants to suck up some of this "free federal money" can reject any student they wish to reject. Right now, Colorado is involved in a Supreme Court case about two Catholic preschools that want to be to collect state taxpayer dollars while rejecting LGBTQ families from their service.

But Polis told the dark money crowd that he doesn't think the state should decide which organizations are "worthy" (which is of course a different word than "legal') and went on “When you give $100 to any charity, it can be a church, it can be something that discriminates. It can be pro-gay or anti-gay. It doesn’t matter.” But of course, in his hypothetical, I get to decide whether or not I want to give money to a discriminatory group, which is different from deciding that the state can pass on taxes it was owed to that same group. And if discrimination manages to skirt the law, well, then, that's perfectly okay. 

The federal voucher program is simply federally-funded discrimination, a chance for the government to transfer its tax liability to private schools without holding them to any sort of anti-discrimination standards. It's the government spending what were supposed to be tax dollars on activities that only benefit a selected few. 

Watch for more of this, as pressure is put on other Democratic governors in hopes that they can be tempted with free federal dollars and a bullshit argument. 

Should We Pay More For The Best Teachers?

Matt Yglesias has touched off social media discussion of one of the great zombie ideas of education-- the idea we should pay more for the best teachers. So let me explain, again, why this is not a great idea. 

I will admit up front that I did not read the full post because A) it is behind a paywall and B) Matt Yglesias is kind of a tool. 

Problem #1: "Best"

Modern ed reform has been obsessed with the idea of identifying high-quality teachers and low-quality teachers with hopes of getting more of one and firing all of the others. So folks have been working on the problem for twenty-some years-- and they haven't come up with anything remotely useful. 

There was the travesty that was VAM/VAAS sauce, a system that promised to translate the low-quality data from the Big Standardized Tests into data about which teachers were awesome (or not). The idea was that magical maths would allow us to figure out what a student would have scored in some teacher-neutral parallel universe, and then whatever difference there was between the imaginary parallel universe student score and the actual this world score-- that difference was either to the credit or blame of the teacher. It was always a bizarre idea, and that was even before we got to the question of how to use that score--based on math and reading test results-- to evaluate teachers who didn't teach math or reading (or, in some cases, even that student).

Anyway, that was one of our brightest ideas about how to find the "best" teachers, and it was (and, unfortunately in some states today, is) a terrible idea. 

We can all agree there are good teachers and not-so-great ones. We just can't agree on who they are. Pick out the teacher at your school who you think is most obviously awesome; somewhere out there are students who think that teacher was awful. Pick out a teacher you think is obviously awful; somewhere out there are students who think that teacher was one of the best they ever had. 

Maybe we can agree that there can be broad agreement on the very best and the very worst doing the work. That still leaves the vast middle. When I was in the classroom, I would say I was pretty ok, but I don't imagine I was "best." How do the pretty ok teachers do in world where teachers are paid according to their best-ness, and how would we parse out the various gradations of pretty ok-ness?

Nor should we discuss a teacher's quality as if it's an immutable quality. A teacher's work varies over time, influenced by a variety of factors. Personal stuff. The students in the classroom. The acquired skills over time. The material given to teach. Did I teach every month of every year at the same level of pretty ok-ness? Absolutely not. Really, it's not as accurate to say I was a pretty ok teacher as it is to say I usually did pretty ok work. 

In short, figuring out which teachers are "best" is a huge challenge. It makes far more sense to talk about doing the best work, but even then, we're talking about measuring the almost-immeasurable (particularly since some of the outcomes we're talking about don't become visible for years after the work is done. 

Does this mean we shouldn't talk about how to do the best work? Absolutely not. But trying to tie large stakes to it will not help.

Problem #2: Schools are not businesses

"We should reward the good people and fire the bad ones-- just like in the business world," say fans of this model whose brains have conveniently failed to retain examples like Enron and Donald Trump and every mediocre business guy who kept falling upwards while hardworking high-quality working stiffs lost their jobs. 

But even if we accept the meritocratcic business world fairy tale, there's another important way in which public schools are not businesses.

Public schools do not make money.

Consider how merit pay works in the business world. "We collected an extra pile of money this year," says CEO Gotbux, "So to show our gratitude to those of you helped us make that extra money, we are going to share some of the extra money with you."                                            

But public school districts don't make money. There is no extra profit to share with the folks doing the actual work. 

So merit bonuses can't work. And for the same reason, merit pay is a problem. 

One of the reasons many school boards like the current pay system is that it makes the payroll costs for the coming year very predictable. That's helpful, because the revenues are also pretty predictable; school districts don't expect sudden windfalls of revenue. School districts are dealing with a finite pie, so it's helpful to know ahead of time exactly how many slices they have to cut that pie into.

Try to imagine a school board going to the taxpayers and saying, "Evaluations are done, and we have so many teachers with top-quality ratings this year that we will have to raise taxes to meet our payroll obligations." Yeah, that's not happening. 

What's much easier to imagine is a district saying, "Here's the budget. We can afford five Best Teachers this year." Which actually is a lot like business. And if the Best Teacher ratings are set by factors that the school can't control, like test scores? Then expect the district to say, "Congratulations to all 157 teachers rated Best this year. Your merit pay bump will be $2.98." 

With a finite pie, the end result must be competition among teachers for a slice. That means the very thing a school would hope for will not happen.

Principal: Mrs. Teachwell, you have been very successful teaching students about binomial fricatives, so I'd like you to share your techniques with the rest of the department.

Mrs. Teachwell: Not on your life. My kid is going to need braces next year. 

Maybe the board or the state will kick in extra money to sweeten the Best Teacher pot. But there is one other popular way to get the money for merit bumps-- take it from the base salary of everybody else. 

Look, Robert Pondiscio has a point when he observes that with 4 million teachers, most are going to be regular folks and not superstars, and trying to get 4 million superstars is not the path to better schools. Figure out how to help every teacher to do better and best work (pro tip: a system that punishes them for being less than superstars is not the way). Extra pay for the Best does not further that goal. It just turns schools into teacher Thunderdomes.

Problem #3: The Premise

Merit-related proposals too often assume that teachers already know the secret of how to be Best-- they're just waiting for someone to either threaten or bribe them. This is both insulting and nonsensical. 

And if the premise is that this approach will retain teachers, ask yourself how likely it is that teachers will be enticed by a system that rewards them for random "data" or for factors beyond their control (like which students they get to teach).

Some supporters on the dead bird app follow another old pattern-- they don't so much want to reward Best teachers as they want to punish bad ones. The parity can rankle, and believe me, you can find teachers in any school building in the country who say, either quietly or not-so-quietly some angry version of "I can't believe that person gets paid the same as I do." A teacher who isn't getting the work done is supremely irritating to the teacher who has to clean up after them.

But whenever someone talks about getting rid of all the Bad Teachers, I am reminded of an observation from W. Edwards Deming, to the effect that if there is dead wood in your organization, there are only two possible explanations-- either it was dead when you hired it or you killed it. Either way, you are looking at a management problem.       

I get it.             

There is something hugely enticing about the idea of a pay system that rewards excellent teachers (and doesn't reward less-than-excellent teachers). It is a great concept, but the devil is in the details-- and any such system is all details. And the critical details remain unsolved puzzles.                

For Retiring Teachers

I've been out here in the retiree pasture for a few years now (it's a lovely place upstate, with many frolicking dogs) and as some teachers are staring down the last few weeks of their teaching careers, let me offer them some advice. Here's what's waiting for you.

First, make some noise on your way out.

My regret is that I didn't throw a bigger party. Seriously. Some combination of not wanting to be That Hey Look At Me Guy and survivor's guilt (this hits hard for some folks, because when retiring from teaching is like leaping off a train barreling full speed down the tracks, and you are leaving behind others to continue work that you didn't finish--because teaching is never finished)-- anyway, I should have invited every other teacher in the building and every other person I could think of and made some noise, but I didn't want to be a bother. 

Have a project.

Everyone tells you this. Some of us go at it a bit more aggressively than others, but I don't think a teacher brain can shift easily to simply idling. The teacher brain is generally running 147 different threads all at once, and suddenly running 0 can cause the brain to just lock up. You may think you can handle a life of leisure because you went on vacation during the summer that one time, but be honest-- you were lying on the inflatable turtle in the middle of the pool and one little corner of your brain was still figuring out how to tweak that one unit for September and maybe you could rearrange the seating in your room and did you remember to order those posters yet? 

Volunteer. Start working through your pile of unread books. Travel. Take a cooking class. Find something for your brain to chew on. It took me a while to get past the feeling that there was something I was supposed to be doing, but wasn't. Being a stay-at-home dad for a couple of small children helped with that, but I don't recommend it as a solution for everyone.

Time is different on the outside.

At some point in retirement, you will think, "How did I get all this done and work full-time, too?" The answer is that teacher time is different than retiree time.

Teacher: I have a two-minute break at 10:03, so I can get some copies made, get another fifty grades in the grade book, and go pee.

Retiree: I volunteered to sit in the booth from 10:00 to 10:30, so I guess my whole morning is filled up.

The rhythms of dealing with people

For decades you have been dealing with other humans on a large scale, working to deliberately engage with dozens (elementary) or hundreds (secondary) of students and family members. They become a major factor of how you go through your days, and then, after nine months or so, they leave. 

This is not a natural rhythm for human interactions. I hope your own social and emotional health was anchored outside the classroom, but even so, retirement is a whole new game. If you're an extrovert, you may find yourself craving new sources of human interaction. If you're an introvert, you may find that the part of you that engages with other humans is screaming for a major break. At the beginning of my career, I replaced a guy whose retirement plan was to sit on the porch, read books, drink beer, and talk to nobody. 

Weeks full of Fridays

Other retirees may joke about how every day is Saturday, but teachers know that special Friday afternoon feeling, like you've been dragging a loaded semi with a chain for five days, and you just got to set the chain down. For the first year or two, it felt like Friday afternoon a lot. 

Have your support system

Another one of my retirement secrets was to be married to an exceptionally excellent woman. So I had that going for me, as well as the many connections that come from being active in many small-town activities like theater and band. A church home can be nice, too.

But you may fine that maintaining your web of humans may take more deliberate work on your part. Being at work put you in natural connection with your web of workplace proximity associates, and you aren't going to have that. If you want to stay connected, you will have to reach out. As far as the school itself goes, you will be a ghost in 3-5 years. Your work friends will be busy in the dailiness of the work, and you will not, so maintaining those relationships will take deliberate effort.

Share

You have a wealth of knowledge and experience, both in terms of content knowledge and educational expertise. You know how to organize large groups of cat-like humans. You know how to manage an undersized budget. You know how to help people understand stuff. You know what life in a classroom is actually like. 

There are people and organizations out there that would benefit from what you know. Maybe you can be some sort of activist or communicator about education, or maybe your skills can be put to work in a non-education space. Maybe it is individual humans rather than organizations that can benefit from what you know. 

Whatever the case, you still have plenty to contribute to the world. Teachers are too often reluctant to get involved, to push themselves out into the world. The "just" in "I'm just a teacher" keeps a lot of smart, capable people from making as much noise as they could. And I get it-- when you're dealing with the dailiness of your classroom, it's hard to find the bandwidth for wading into other ponds. But you don't have to deal with the dailiness any more, and you are not "just a retired teacher." You are an experienced education professional with a wealth of experience and knowledge. Somebody can use that.

Finally

People still ask if I miss it, and the truth is that, in many ways, I do. The actual teaching parts were, mostly, great, though there is a tendency as a retiree to remember the best parts and not, say, the class that sat there like bumps on a log despite your best efforts. If you've taught more than six months, you have acquired a list of failures, moments when you just didn't get things to fall the way you wanted them to, and I can report that those haunt you a bit less in retirement.

Mostly I miss the actual teaching (when it goes well). I opposite-of-miss the bureaucracy, the stupid paperwork, the stultifying compliance culture, the bosses who were way more worried about stuff that didn't help me do my job, the time wasted on junk like the Big Standardized Test and BS Test prep, the-- well, it's not a short list. But the work itself? That was golden, and I'll never regret a second of it.

That question (do you miss it) is not always asked in good faith; sometimes it's asked in the same way that some people encourage a newly-married couple to smash the wedding cake into each others' faces. They just want to see someone else be miserable, so while the DYMI question is complicated and nuanced, I don't want to cater to anyone who just wants to hear me smash cake in the profession's face. I can tell them truthfully that it was the best job in the world, and if I had it to do over again, I would, and I'm still a tiny bit jealous of my former colleagues who are still in the classroom doing the work. 

Most Voucher Students Never Attended Public School. So What?

Here is one simple graphic from the folks at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, you can see the point that many folks have made over and over again-- taxpayer-funded school vouchers are going mostly to students who never actually left public school. But this leads to a big question--

So what?

This works fine for voucher advocates-- gives them a whole constituency that will fight hard to keep their free state subsidy. They will also argue that, of course, the vouchers are going to start out by supporting students who are already in private schools. So what?

How do you answer that question? Here's a couple of so what answers.

Vouchers are bait and switch.

Taxpayer-funded voucher programs are advertised as a way to rescue poor students from "failing public schools." Backers argue "Wouldn't you like some tax dollars to help rescue students in need?" which plays a whole lot better than "Wouldn't you like some tax dollars to help subsidize the tuition costs of private school students?" We know the answer to that second question-- the voters repeat that answer every time they are asked to vote for a taxpayer-funded voucher system and say, loudly, "No."

Imagine you gave money to Save The Children because of those pictures of sad poor kids and it turned out your money was buying ice cream for rich kids in the suburbs. That's taxpayer-funded school vouchers.

In fact, vouchers may actually make private schools less accessible. In Iowa, Princeton University researchers found that vouchers spurred a private school tuition increase. 

Vouchers increase state education costs.

"Let the money follow the child" is another standard voucher pitch. But when vouchers go to students already in private schools, that's not what happens. Instead, vouchers that go to students already in private schools adds on to the total cost for the state.

Say that in your state 100 students attend public school and 10 attend private school. The taxpayers are funding education for 100 students. The vouchers go in, and one kid leaves public school while 9 private school students sign up for vouchers. Now the taxpayers are funding education for 109 students. 

The effect is particularly striking in Iowa, where taxpayers now subsidize 99% of private school students. 

If the voters had decided they wanted to do this, that would be a choice. But nobody has pitched taxpayer-funded school vouchers as "Since we are paying for the education of students in public schools, we think taxpayers should also subsidize the tuition of students in public schools as well." 

Nor are vouchers simply giving private school parents their own tax dollars back to spend as they wish. Only the super-rich families contribute enough property tax dollars to fund their own children's vouchers (and not even those families if they have many children). Voucher funds require many taxpayers to chip in, not just the voucher-using families. 

Taxpayer-funded voucher programs end up being "budget busters." They represent an increase in education costs for the state that are neither discussed honestly ahead or time nor properly budgeted for. Every taxpayer-funded voucher that goes to a private or home-schooled student represents an increase in the total state cost for education. That money has to come from somewhere.

There are many reasons to oppose taxpayer-funded school vouchers, and lord knows I get into plenty of them elsewhere, but for purposes of responding to those folks who think it's no big deal that vouchers mostly go to students who were attending private school anyway, the above two points are the answer to "so what."

                                                       

ICYMI: Essay Contest Edition (5/3)

 Once a year, I'm the director of a local writing competition for high school students in the various school districts of the county. The competition is in honor of one of the giants of English teaching in our area; she graduated from here, worked in the original OSS, became a lady CEO, taught English, and left the classroom only because there was such a thing as a mandatory retirement age (you can read about her here). 

The contest has run for thirty-some years, and it is precisely the sort of thing that cheatbots make challenging, though historically our winners write way better than bots do, and I work hard to design a bot-resistant prompt. But it's a fun time for me-- part of my duties include being first reader and culling the hundreds of entries down to a manageable stack for table judges. 

So that has been my week. But I still have a reading list for you. 

The Atlantic Platforms Charter School Propaganda: Anti-Woke Edition

Paul Thomas responds to the Atlantic piece about how awesome charters are and how anti-racism is killing public schools. 

Oligarchs and Christian Nationalists Aim to Plunder Massachusetts Public Schools

Maurice Cunningham peels back the masks on another Massachusetts assault on public education, and reminds us that National Parents Union is none of those three things.

AI gives more praise, less criticism to Black students

Lots of implications to mull over in this finding, written up by Jill Barshay at Hechinger Report.

Most School Vouchers Go To Students Who Never Attended Public Schools

Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has a nifty bar chart that lays out in quick and simple manner where the taxpayer-funded vouchers are actually going.

Epic founders Harris, Chaney bound for criminal trial as 2-year preliminary hearing ends

One of the nation's major charter school scams might actually result in jail time for the scammers who pocketed $22 million of taxpayer dollars in their massive fraud.

Why We Are Suing the Department of Education

It's not just that the Office of Civil Rights in the Education Department has decided only the civil rights of white guys are being threatened-- it's that they're being anti-transparent about what they are and are not doing. ProPublica has sued, and here explains why.

What Will It Take To Get AI Out of Schools?

Don't know how I missed this last week, but this New Yorker piece from Jessica Winter is well worth the read (if you can get to it).

The Big Tech Backlash

Jennifer Berkshire looks at some of the pushback against ed tech, including some of the surprising places it's turning up.

We Created the Lotus Eaters

Matt Brady writes about the students who are comfortable non-starters, and how to get them back into work.

I Write the Songs

On songwriting, music teaching, and mistakes. From Nancy Flanagan.

Broken Record

Audrey Watters finds herself writing about the same stuff, again, again. And yet, it is stuff that needs to be said, again, again.

Seniors and Kids as Profit Centers: Medicare Advantage and School Vouchers Exploit Both

Bruce Lesley explains how Medicare Advantage and school vouchers are manifesting the same philosophy to harvest profits (and provide minimum service).

Ohioans: Please Do Not Sign Petition to Get Referendum to End Property Taxes on the November Ballot

Jan Resseger has an important message for folks in Ohio.

Standardized testing and scripted lessons are failing both teachers and students

Johnathan Kantrowitz is talking about Australia in this post, but some of the description sure sounds familiar (including panic over declining test scores).

The Testing Ritual and the Steakhouse Reality

Testing, staffing, and working lunches-- TC Weber looks at it all with one raised eyebrow and more than a few questions.

Problems with the DOE's AI Guidance

There has been a lot of noise and wrestling about with the New York City schools' attempt to craft AI guidance, and while I don't generally look to NYC for guidance on anything, these five objections from Leonie Haimson are an excellent guide to the sort of questions you should be asking about your local school district's attempt to cope with AI. If you want more, Chalkbeat covers the parent rebellion here.

Kent State President claps back at Vivek. It's about damn time.

A university leader actually calls out a politician's dumb ideas. More of this, please. Stephen Dyer has the details.

At Forbes.com this week, I wrote about some important characteristics of rural schools. 

I don't love the Black Eyed Peas, but I do like an unexpected team-up.