Should Schools Out LGBTQ Students

Donalt Trump has been spewing the baloney sex change operations in schools for years now (here he is repeating the falsehood in 2024), so lying about it a couple of weeks ago (in front of actual young humans, and aided in the lying by Linda McMahon) is par for the course (particularly for a guy who beats par on the course by lying ). Meanwhile, Attorney General Todd Blanche has declared a "pandemic" of gender transitions in schools.

The notion that schools where there aren't enough classrooms or books or staff, but somehow the reading teachers is taking time out of her class schedule to perform sex change operation in a fully functional OR is so stunningly absurd that it defies satire. Of all the things that never happened, secret sex change operations in schools didn't happen the most.

However, there's a real issue behind this absurdity, and whether Dear Leader has distorted it by passing his partial understanding through the funhouse mirrors of his brain or whether he's deliberately distorting the case, his secret school ORs run the risk of distracting people from a real issue being tossed into the courts.

Out in California, brought by a couple of teacher-parents, Mirabelli v. Bonta made it to the Supremes, and another in New Jersey, brought by Moms for Liberty was just filed. Mirabelli is probably what Trump was referring to. 

These cases get complicated, but they revolve around one basic question-- do public schools have an obligation to out LGBTQ students to their parents, or do they have an obligation NOT to do so? 

For the Parental Rights crowd, it's a simple question. They have should have complete control over all aspects of their children's lives at all times. The view of the extreme members of this crowd is that parents have rights and children have none. When they say, "My child is not the property of the government," the unspoken rest of the sentence is "My child is my property" and not, unfortunately, "My child is a living, breathing human being who does not belong to anybody."  

Cases like the New Jersey case invoke the parental right "to direct their children's religious and moral upbringing." 

I wish they would also invoke their parental responsibilities or their children's rights, but I really do understand their point. I would certainly prefer, for instance, that my children's teachers not deliver instruction on how LGBTQ persons are delusional or mentally ill. I am absolutely responsible for the upbringing in all its aspects, and I really don't want the school working against me.

If my children do encounter ideas that run counter to what I want for them, the major tool their mother and I have is an open line of communication. In fact, as they get older, that's pretty much the only real tool I have. 

If your child is using a new name at school and you don't know about it, there are two parties that are not telling you. If your child has come out as LGBTQ and you don't know about it, the only reason is because they have chosen not to tell you.

If a child comes out to a teacher or other school staff, that adult has a responsibility to encourage the child to talk to a parent about it. But they also have a responsibility to listen to a child who says their home will become unsafe if they come out there. LGBTQ children are a disproportionate part of the homeless population, more likely than their straight peers to be thrown out of the house. To insist that a school must out an LGBTQ student no matter what is irresponsible. 

Both schools and parents have a responsibility to look after the health and welfare of the child, and a child's health and welfare is best served ideally by a strong relationship with their parents. It helps if the parents and schools communicate regularly and openly. At the heart of all this should be care and concern for the education, health and welfare of the child-- not absolute authoritarian power of the parent-- or the school-- over the child.

Of course, many policy makers don't care a bit about parental rights. Witness the states, like Texas, where if the parent wants the school to recognize their child's trans identity, the state says "too bad." Sometimes these battles aren't about parental rights at all-- they are about policy makers' desire to erase LGBTQ identities, a stance that puts the health, welfare, and education of the child absolutely last. 

The group for which I have the least patience or sympathy is those teachers who don't want to call students by their chosen name. Grow up, get over yourselves, and call the student whatever the student prefers to be called. Spare me your religious objections; if your religion is defined by the people you are called to reject and deny, the students you think Jesus wants you to tell, "Your identity is not welcome here," you are following a brand of christianism I do not recognize.

The one thing we are not called to do as teachers is to tell students who they are in defiance of who they say they are. 

As a parent, I often think of the words of  Russell Barkley, who argues that we do not engineer children, but serve as shepherds. We don't beat them into the shape we prefer, but guide and support and nudge them along, and if they don't grow up exactly as we ordered them to, that is not a sign that someone has surreptitiously out-engineered us. 

If your child feels unsafe talking to you about highly personal stuff, it will not aid your cause to make sure that they can't trust any adults at school, either. It will just ensure that your child will feel very isolated at a very vulnerable and scary time, which opens them up to the kinds of problematic influences that you were worried about in the first place. 

Parental rights are real and important, but when they are "protected" and extended at the expense of children's rights, that's bad for everyone. Children deserve acceptance and guidance, support and safety, autonomy and guardrails, and providing those things requires a tricky balancing act by all the adults in their lives. It's a balancing act that's best managed by centering on the rights of the child and not hamfisted lawsuits, policy declarations, and press conference bloviating.

FL: State Wants To Run Church Business

The Catholic Church and Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier are in the midst of an argument about who runs Catholic private schools.

Catholic private schools, says Uthmeier, should allow students to enroll without vaccination if they plead religious exemption. Uthmeier expressed his thoughts publicly, coupled with a demand that the Catholic church explain itself within seven days. And have waved threateningly in the direction of Catholic School eligibility for Florida's taxpayer-funded school vouchers. "Nice funding stream we gave you there. Be a shame if something happened to it." 

Michael Sheedy, the executive director of the Florida Conference of Catholic Bishops, responded on August 7. Here's the opening of that letter. See if you think Sheedy is intimidated:

As explained in detail below, the Florida Conference of Catholic Bishops (FCCB) and the Catholic bishops in Florida do not have to justify to your office their position on Catholic teaching and their reasons for the current vaccine policies. They will, however, do so out of respect for you and your office and with the understanding and expectation that your office will respect the Catholic bishops’ constitutional rights and religious freedom. 

While we appreciate the opportunity to present the rationale for school vaccine policies, we wish we could have met and discussed these concerns with your office and perhaps avoided all the public and legal posturing created by your correspondence requesting a response in seven days.   

There's irony all around here. Nobody has pushed harder for policies that funnel public dollars to private schools than has the Catholic Church. But they much prefer the model in which the state hands over the money and then leaves the private school alone. Many states have carefully written voucher laws to require the state to stay hands off, but Florida's HB 1, the 2023 voucher bill, somehow skipped that part. 

So now the Catholic Church finds itself in a completely predictable position; when you break down the wall between church and state, the church may get public money, but they also lose protection from the interference of zealous public officials who are more than happy to tell church folks how they should properly go about the free exercise of their religion (see also: every state that passed a law requiring schools to post the official state version of the Ten Commandments).

Folks on the right have also predicted this and railed against it. Government money means government interference along with a reduced ability to resist. Or, as I always say, when you mix religion and politics, you get politics. 

Or as Sheedy put it, "Government officials may no more determine the content of Catholic teaching than Church officials may determine the content of Florida law." Which is, again, ironic, because the church officials actually worked really hard to determine the content of Florida law when it comes to taxpayer education money. Three years ago, the Florida Conference of Catholic Bishops thought this law was awesome.

On the other hand, if Uthmeier rubbed three of his MAGAbro brain cells together for two seconds, he would realize this is not a fight he wants to win. There isn't anything anywhere in HB 1 on which to hang his demands, so he's left with "Private religious schools that accept vouchers must do what the state tells them to or else," and I'm thinking there a lot of folks on the conservative and pro-voucher side who aren't ready to support that. 

But Uthmeier is a certified real piece of work. He's been a US Department of Commerce senior counsel and senior advisor in the Trump administration, general counsel for Ron DeSantis, and the DeSantis chief of staff until appointed AG. He whipped up a new "Free State of Florida" seal, proposed Alligator Alcatraz, called surrogacy "modern day slavery," and went after a teenage transgender girl in a national women's Irish dance step competition. He chaired the committee that illegally used the Hope Foundation money for political purposes. And he drew a contempt citation from a US District Judge for ignoring her ruling to shut down an illegal Florida immigration law. Uthmeier stated "If being held in contempt is what it costs to... stand firmly behind President Trump's agenda on illegal immigration, so be it." 

Also, part of his argument against vaccines is that they were developed using fetal cell lines. Which is not true.

And yes, as you may already have guessed, this MAGAbro who wants to tell the Catholic bishops what they believe and how to act on it is, himself, a Catholic.

So, yeah. He's that guy. So it's not hard to imagine that his principle here is "I'm allowed to tell the church what to do, but people I disagree with are not." In the Free State of Florida, that may be enough to get by.

"Any insinuation that a government official can dictate to the Catholic Church (or any religion) how to apply her tenets and dogma, violates well-established constitutional religious freedom rights," writes Sheedy. He did not conclude "Now give us our free taxpayer money and shut up." 

This is just another version of the same fight that keeps breaking out right at the very spot where choicers busted a hole in the wall between church and state. There's nobody to root for here. We'll see if Uthmeier backs down or if the whole thing ends up in court. Grab your popcorn and stay tuned.

TX: Alpha School and Voucher Grift-- It's Synergy!

At last we are seeing some of the press that Alpha School actually deserves. Lexi Churchill, in a joint Texas Tribune and ProPublica piece, shines a spotlight on the Texas emperor's wardrobe. You should absolutely read the article, but I want to underline and expand on a couple of points.

First, the switcheroo. As it has in every other state (except, of course, Arizona), Alpha failed to get approval for its attempted charter school launch in Texas. That's Texas, where the state board of education crew is not known for its rigorous standards. This is not a surprise; Alpha School's educational bona fides are still limited to puffed up unproven baloney. As Churchill notes, several journalists have now tried to verify Alpha's claims of magical success with just two hours of screen time a day, and so far, evidence has proven elusive.

But to get into the Texas voucher program as a vendor, a school just needs approval from the state comptroller's office. For that approval, a school need only show that it operates in Texas, that it’s accredited by an approved organization, that it’s been in operation at least two years and that it administers annual standardized tests. Alignment with state education standards? Proven student success? Evidence-based program administered by qualified personnel? None of that is needed.

It's worth remembering that Alpha is by no means the only school playing this game of switching back and forth between charter and voucher status based on whichever category will let them keep the money flowing in with the least possible accountability. If your state has both charter schools and vouchers, I guarantee that there are schools picking whichever designation will keep their owners happiest.

And if you wonder what exactly is the aim of Alpha school and the husband and wife team of MacKenzie and Andrew Price, there's this reminder.

At least two state education boards also took issue with Alpha’s plan to keep Price and her husband on the charter’s oversight board while the school simultaneously paid their companies, which provide services like the two-hour learning platform. The Prices acknowledged the conflict of interest and repeatedly promised to correct it.

When the Price's made their half-baked amateur-hour bid to open an Unbound cyber charter in PA, there were multiple companies connected to the enterprise.

There's Unbound Academy, which is the charter arm of Alpha School itself. Both tout the 2 Hour Learning program, which is set up as separate business. The proposal in the PA Unbound application said “In support of its operations, Unbound Academy will collaborate with 2hr Learning, Inc. to deliver its adaptive learning platform, while Trilogy Enterprises will manage financial services, and Crossover Markets, Inc. will assist with recruiting qualified virtual educators." 

Trilogy Software is owned by Joe Liemandt, the billionaire techbro who backed all of this and is currently the principal of Alpha School; Andrew Price is the CFO. Crossover (an internet employment hub currently advertising a job as Director of Academics fore 2 Hour Learning at $400K) is supported by ESW, Joe Liemandt's personal investment company; their main client is Trilogy. Crossover has a proprietary tool called WorkSmart, which surveils employee work on their computer and was promised for the PA Unbound school. Crossover Markets and 2 Hour Learning share the same Austin address. It appears that Andrew Price was also linked to Crossover, but I find no clear current evidence.

The PA application also noted that the general and administrative service provider would be YYYYY.LLC, a company whose director, president, and principal are Andrew Price.

So Alpha School comes with a whole big web of companies that it "hires" to run the various aspects of the operation, and which in turn funnel all of that money back to the Prices. As Dan Meyer noted regarding that Arizona Unbound charter, "Ultimately, MacKenzie Price, Unbound Academy’s board president, will need to decide whether MacKenzie Price, founder of 2 Hour Learning, Inc, has set a fair price for those curriculum and resource materials. Arizona taxpayers await her decision."

Also worth noting-- Alpha School has ridden a wave of buzz mostly generate by MacKenzie Price's willingness to plug her operation to any media outlet that was willing to be impressed. And yet, according to Churchill

None of the Alpha leaders named in this story, nor the company’s press office, agreed to interviews, nor did they answer most of the newsrooms’ questions, including about their test scores. An Alpha spokesperson provided an emailed response only to questions about previous reporting by other news outlets.

 So, feeling a little shy suddenly.

But hey-- so much synergy. Synergy between Alpha's lazy charter school and Texas's lazy voucher rules. Synergy within the web of money-scrubbing corporations. Who cares about weaving a tangled web if it's a profitable one.

The Worst Argument For Alpha School (So Far)

Well, at least the photo accompanying a Mary Randolph Scientific American story about Alpha School captures how I feel upon coming across one more puff piece about Alpha School.

I feel you, kid.

Alpha School, if you've somehow missed the noise, is a private school chain created by Texas businesswoman Mackenzie Price, her husband, and a real rich guy. It leans on the idea that a child's basic core education can be fully conveyed by a computer program in about two hours a day: Alpha School is directly connected to 2 Hour Learning, because like many private school grifts, the company is one of many companies, wheels within wheels, all handing money to each other, and through each other ultimately to the owners. 

Alpha School is expensive-- as pricey as an ivy league prep school, but the buzz has been phenomenal and ongoing. If Price could do education one quarter as well as she does PR, the school might actually have something to offer.

The Scientific American piece is notable for some of the worst arguments I've seen made for Alpha School, by the guy currently employed as the "senior learning scientist" for Alpha-- Carl Hendrick, who really ought to know better. 

Carl Hendrick is an internationally recognized science of learning and instructional design expert. I'm about to favorably review a book he co-wrote. I have on occasion forwarded some of his substack offerings. People I respect, respect him. 

And yet, the Carl Hendrick in this piece is really out in the weeds.

First, he compares AI in education to Waymo on the road. See, the autonomous car has to learn to accommodate wobbly cyclists and kids running into the street and non-straight roads-- all the things that Waymo, with its limited training for very specific urban areas, still has trouble doing. Sometimes big trouble. But Hendrick predicts that in "five or ten years" AI will be trained on "learning and all of kids' misconceptions and problems."

Thus waving away one of the problems with AI instruction-- the AI can't analyze where the student has gone wrong, what the glitch in their thinking or process might be. Is Hendrick suggesting that AI can programmed with a menu of every possible student misconception and then programmed with a response to it. Because that seems... unlikely. What he's proposing is that the program need not understand why the student is doing what they're doing, just like Waymo doesn't need to know why the bicyclist is wobbling. It's a strictly behavioral approach-- we need the kid to spit out the correct response. 

Randolph slips past some issues. "When used by a teacher, adaptive learning models like Alpha School’s have shown promise in improving student performance and understanding." That sentence is doing so much heavy lifting. Used by a teacher? Models like Alpha School's? Promise? And she cites some objections from some academics. Talking to Kelly Miller, the Harvard professor who has worked in this area. Miller likes adaptive learning, calls it "the future of education." But:

But Miller uses AI and recorded lectures to cover basic material so that her in-person time with students can be spent on more complex work. If there’s no teacher-student relationship—like at Alpha School, where adults supervising students generally aren’t trained educators—“what’s the point?” she says.

Then it's all downhill from there.

Hendrick admits that Alpha School's model isn't perfect, "[b]ut he argues that most kids aren’t getting a good teacher or instruction grounded in learning science in a classroom anyway." So... their human teacher is probably crappy, so why not give them a crappy AI program instead? Hendrick argues that people would be shocked at the varying degrees of quality within schools. In other words, AI "educators" may be bad, but humans are worse-- or at least very inconsistent.

That’s Hendrick’s biggest argument for Alpha School’s model as a solution: “You can’t scale good teaching,” he says. Software, Hendrick argues, can be updated across classrooms at once as new curriculum and instructional research emerges and can give feedback far faster than a teacher grading assignments one by one.

Emphasis mine. Added while picking my jaw off the floor. You can't scale good teaching-- so let's scale mediocre-at-best teaching? And when it comes to feedback for students, which is more important-- being fast or being good? "I got feedback on my essay instantly. It's kind of dumb and useless and even wrong, but at least I got it back quickly."

Randolph nods briefly to the 404 Media report that found all manner of problems with Alpha School. It's not the first negative coverage (here's a Wired piece about unhappy Alpha parents in 2025). 

Randolph also allows one quote that questions the selection bias involved (families that fork over that kind of money for private school tend to be highly motivated). 

She also notes that the model will be tested in some public schools, which may show if the 2 Hour AI model works with a "broader" assortment of students, but we already have some data about that. But as this piece from The Conversation points out, much of the "data" we supposedly have is bunk. And as Dan Meyer showed, 2 Hour Learning has already been tested on general population students-- and it failed hard. 

The irony here is that we are not talking about a revolutionary new technology-- the idea of a teaching machine that can guide students to cough up proper responses is over a century old. Read Audrey Watters Teaching Machines. Alpha School is parked firmly within a forest of red flags, and guys who are learning experts ought to be able to see them all waving. 

TN: Hiding Voucher Failure

Tennessee launched a taxpayer-funded school voucher program in 2019, with a proposal that barely squeaked through the House and narrowly passed the Senate. The idea was, as usual, that it would rescue students from ailing schools, and that voucher-receiving schools would receive autonomy in exchange for accountability. 

Well, forget all that.

This year's result for the state's Big Standardized Test (TCAP) are in and--whopoopsies!-- ESA voucher students failed hard, with their success percentage not even half of what the public schools scored. Just 17% of ESA students met or exceeded proficiency marks in math, and only 24% managed to meet or exceed proficiency for English. (It was 40% and 42% for public school students). In fact, the gap between public and private schools has been widening (as reported by Vivian Jones for the Knoxville News Sentinel).

So of course the legislature moved to find policy levers that could push private schools to do a better job with taxpayer money. Ha! Just kidding. Instead, Tennessee will no longer require voucher students to take the state test. Because what could be a quicker and easier way to eliminate those unfortunate signs of failure? Voucher students will still take the national standard test of their choice (look for that unimpressive-but-unwoke Classical Learning Test to pick up some market share). 

As voucher expert Josh Cowen pointed out to Jones:

“When they stop admin­is­ter­ing the state exam, then the lobby groups and the voucher sup­port­ers can just yell about how great it is for every­one and no one calls them out on it any­more,” Cowen said.

“If these res­ults showed good things, they’d be the first out there in the press con­fer­ence yelling ‘score­board!’ ” Cowen said. “The reason they aren’t test­ing is because they don’t want to see the answer.”

To be clear, the TCAP and other state BS Tests are lousy measures of school success. Those voucher-receiving schools might have some virtues not revealed by TCAP (ditto the public schools of Tennessee).

But this is the game reformsters wanted to play. They promised a future in which parents navigated an open free marketplace rich with information designed to inform the choices of the education "consumers," not a marketplace in which the preferred vendors-- the private ones-- were freed of any measures that might make them look bad. 

I respect folks who are pro-choice on principle, who believe that parents should have a choice whether that choice provides a better result or not. I disagree with them, but I appreciate their principled consistency.

But this kind of thing is just an attempt to give private schools an edge in the marketplace, one more sign that the goal here is not choice for parents, but public tax dollars for private (religious) schools. If Tennessee wants to play the BS Test game, let everyone play it equally. But if legislators just want to play a fixed game so that private (religious) schools can profit from public taxpayer dollars, go ahead and say that part out loud--and let the voters show if they support it. 

Cancelling the TCAP for the private schools that are failing it just reveals that the whole program is a grift. 

ICYMI: Bad Week Edition (8/30)

Just as we were absorbing the loss of Dolly Parton and Tim Curry, the videos started to roll in from Nepal. I confess to watching them over and over as my brain tries to wrap around the sheer scale and horror that swept down upon those people so quickly. If it were rendered as a disaster movie, it would be dismissed as too unbelievable. The people who lost their lives, and the thousands upon thousands who escaped with their lives but lost everything else. The whole thing is horrific.

Meanwhile, school starts in my region this coming week, and there's plenty to read about in the education world. Here's the list.

28 Bills, Ten Commandments and 1 Source: A Christian Right ‘Bill Mill’

This is actually an old article from last year, by Mark Keierleber at The 74 (where their policies are bad but sometimes the journalism is good). At a moment when Ten Commandments laws are facing legal challenge, it's good to remember where they came from in the first place.

Own the Room

Great back to school piece for teachers from Andrew Ordover, reminding us how much teaching is performance-- particularly stand up comedy.

Fewer Teachers, Even Fewer Students: See What’s Happening in 9,500 Districts

I respect Chad Aldeman's ability to crunch numbers, even as I usually disagree what he concludes from them. This article collects a bunch of statistics to create a picture of student population trends compared to teaching staff trends. But the real reason to check this out is an interactive map that shows the trends for every single school district in the country. 

Why Does America Disrespect Our Teachers?

Andy Spears asks the question after looking at teacher pay trends for the last thirty years.

We already returned education to the states once. It was a catastrophic failure.

Jed Bookout at the Frazzled About Education site provides a history lesson in abolishing the Department of Education. It has been done before; it did not end well.

AI Bogus Ed Tech Scheme

Thomas Ultican looks at some of the warnings about AI in the ed tech world and he is not encouraged.

Moral Instruction Will Not Stop Cheating

At Inside Higher Ed, John Warner explains that "The way to stop cheating is to worry less about cheating and more about learning."

Why parents love a school with bogus numbers

That would be Alpha School. Kelsey Piper at The Argument points out that Alpha School's much-touted numbers are so thoroughly massaged as to be useless. Well, except for marketing purposes.

I Heart Mom Populism

Jennifer Berkshire with an important political story. Corporate Dems like Arnie Duncan and DFER insist that Dems have to get behind old school ed reform, but that's not actually winning elections. What is? Support for public education.

Maybe I’m Not A Unicorn

Sue Kingery Woltanski, an oft-elected Democratic school board member in Florida, provides her own example of what Berkshire is talking about. 

Band Kids. They’re the Best.

Retired music teacher Nancy Flanagan should know. So many go on to do great stuff.

Students should only use AI for things they already know how to do well.

Daniel Willingham makes the argument for at least some certain guardrails on AI. If you don't know what you're doing, how will you know what its doing?

When ‘Parental Rights’ Means Letting a Child Die

Bruce Lesley looks at the edges of parental rights law that deny children the right to life-saving health care.

The 50 Percent Problem

Benjamin Riley looks at that Chinese study of the effects of AI use on student learning (spoiler alert: it's not pretty). Some actual evidence to support what you already suspected was true.

Ohio Legislators Should Commit Over ½ Billion in Unspent Revenue to Serving Ohio’s Most Vulnerable Public School Students

Jan Resseger suggests that the Ohio legislature could actually spend some of its extra money on fixing their school funding crisis. Do not hold your breath.

Can AI replace traditional language learning? A new study says not yet

A look at some slightly wonky research about using AI to learn collocations.

A Classroom of Contradictions

Adrian Neibauer's classroom is built on the idea that maybe his favored pedagogical paradigm isn't right for every student.

Did anyone notice that more than 1/3 of Ohio Charter Schools are on the state’s lowest performing schools list????

Stephen Dyer would like to point out that Ohio charter schools are not exactly revolutionizing education.

The Light She Left Behind

TC Weber has some thoughts about Dolly and what she contributed to Tennessee.

Loving Dolly Was Easy. Understanding Her Was Hard.

Plenty of good pieces about Dolly this week, but this New York Times piece by Tressie McMillan Cottom belongs high on the list (gift link).

At Forbes.com, I covered the Economic Policy Institute report on the teacher pay penalty.

 Been listening to this a lot lately. She always brings it for live performances.

Asking SCOTUS To Soak Taxpayers For Private Special Ed

A couple of families in Massachusetts-- and fourteen anti-public ed states-- would like to have it both ways, and having lost their bid in lower courts, they would like the Supreme Court to back their play.

How did we get here?

Massachusetts does require public school systems to provide special education services for students with special needs, which is a heck of a gift to private schools to begin with. But because the state forbids the use of public funds for private religious schools, the rule comes with a requirement that the service be provided at the public school or at a neutral location. 

The plaintiffs are characterizing this requirement creates an undue burden. Students, they claim, lose instructional time, must miss instructional time during the day, and experience stigma for having to leave class (all of which would still be true if the services were provided at the private school). 

But the backers of the case also argue that this burden makes the rule "coercive." In the states' amicus brief, this line appears:

For opponents of school choice, that is the point—to leverage taxpayer dollars to coerce families into public schools by making private education the only setting in which benefits are forfeited,

There is, of course, a solution for this-- the private schools could hire their own special education teachers and provide the services themselves. But that would cost them money, so why not get the taxpayers to foot the bill instead. 

The irony of the states that have signed the letter of support is rich, because in many states, parents must waive their rights to any special education requirements in order to attend a private school. How they complain about rules that make "private education the only setting in which benefits are forfeited," is a mystery, because that is exactly what they allow at home.

A win for the plaintiffs would hit taxpayers not only with the bill for providing the services, but for whatever means are required to transport special ed teachers hither and yon to provide services. The plaintiffs, whose children have disabilities and attend Jewish day schools, find taking their children to get services "burdensome"; they would prefer that taxpayers and the public system bear that burden.

The case, Hellman v. Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, was decided back in March in the First Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a lower court ruling that this rule does not "ban or penalize private schooling or deprive meaningful access to it." Further, it rationally fits with "the legitimate state interest of providing special education services while complying with the Massachusetts Constitution’s prohibition on aiding private schools." The court also rejected Equal Protection and Privileges or Immunities claims.

Lead attorney for the plaintiffs is David Hodges, the "educational choice attorney" at the Institute for Justice. The Institute is yet another libertarian legal shop, founded with Koch brothers money in 1991. They've been in front of the Supremes for several landmark education cases, notably Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue and Carson v. Makin, both of which helped promote the notion that religious folks can't freely exercise their religion unless taxpayers help finance them. 

If SCOTUS agrees to hear this and decides for the plaintiffs (both of which are not the far-fetched possibilities, I wish they were), the result would create some real challenges for a field that already suffers from trouble filling positions. How many extra staff would a district have to hire to cover the "traveling" workload, and how many people would want that job? Such decision would amount to a very expensive unfunded mandate from the court. One wonders what the court would do when a district had to throw up its hands and declare, "We cannot fulfill this requirement because the number of qualified personnel we need are not available to us."