What Really Really Limits School Choice

EdChoice, formerly named for its patron saint, Milton Friedman, in a recent post tackles a real question-- What Really Limits School Choice? They do not, however, come up with real answers.

Martin Lueken and Nathan Sanders tip off from a Michigan study that looked at a study of Michigan's Tuition Incentive Program, a program that was supposed to make college scholarships available to students who grew up in low-income households-- and yet only 14% of eligible students used the scholarship. Lueken and Sanders (who do not link to the actual study) blame "bureaucratic friction, unclear rules, and poor communication," and from there jump to the idea that these same "implementation challenges" also get in the way of K-12 choice programs.

Bureaucracy, they argue, makes it hard for folks to take advantage of choice programs. It's the friction of all the confusing processes, informational missing links, and missed communications. They are not wrong, although they would do well to look at the number of choice schools that deliberately use that kind of bureaucratic friction to keep Certain People from getting into their school. Success Academy is a well-documented example of a school that uses bureaucratic friction to filter out families that they don't want to serve. They sort of get the idea:

Administrative hurdles can quietly limit who benefits from choice. Complicated application forms, documentation requirements, narrow enrollment windows, or poor outreach can all dampen participation—especially among families with less experience navigating state programs.

Yes-- but it's the schools themselves creating most of these hurdles, and they're doing it deliberately. And that's before we even get to the business of voucher school tuition inflation, where the school bumps up tuition costs enough that the school is no more affordable to Certain Families than it ever was.  

The authors point to an "awareness gap" for choice programs, a problem of marketing and PR that keeps parents from knowing that the program even exists. So part of their fix is essentially better marketing. Advocacy groups, think tanks, private schools and churches could do more "outreach" to get the word out. 

States could also follow the lead of Florida by allowing funds to be spent on a "choice navigator" to help you find your way through the education marketplace. They also want more timely payments, clearer lists of allowable expenses, and more certainty about the program's future. 

Most of this bumps up against the real factors that limit school choice, but Leuken and Sanders either don't see it or want to say it. I give them credit for skipping the classic arguments, which claimed that "entrenched interests" and those terrible teacher unions and misguided legislators are creating all the barriers to choice. 

No, when it comes to limits on school choice, the same thing has always been true-- the call is coming from inside the house.

It is charter and private schools the erect bureaucratic barriers, economic barriers, and "we'll reject your child if we feel like it" barriers, and "pro-choice" legislators who pass the laws that allow them to do it. School choice-- the idea of every child having a selection of schools from which they can pick the one that best suits them-- is pushed by a whole lot of people who don't really want to see it happen. Some of these folks are only interested in finding a way to get taxpayer dollars funneled to private Christian schools, and some would prefer a system in which everyone was responsible for their own kid's education and nobody else had to pay to educate Those People's Children. 

In short, what really limits school choice is that it's a policy pushed, promoted, and instituted by people who don't really want school choice.

If we really really wanted school choice, we would require all schools that wanted to accept public dollars to also accept any and all students who applied. We would fund vouchers so that they covered admission at any school of the student's choice, no matter how expensive. We would make every school that accepted taxpayer dollars accountable to those taxpayers; we would have a certification process that provided the same certainty of quality that we get from the USDA stamp on beef, so that families could exercise their choice with confidence.

But because the choice systems we've got prioritize the interests the owners of these education-flavored businesses over the interests of the actual students, we get a "choice" system with a whole assortment of restraints and obstacles not to the businesses, but to the families.

Would better marketing and PR help? Well, it would give the choice schools a bigger pool to choose from, and I'm sure they'd like the chance to have even more students to box out. 

But if EdChoice wants to get rid of the limits on school choice, they should start by talking to their own people. 

Excerpts or Whole Books?

In a post last week, Timothy Shanahan has some worthwhile points to make about literacy, reading, and excerpts versus whole works. But in the end, we come back to the same old problem (spoiler alert: it's testing).

In "Whole Books or Excerpts? Which Does the Most to Promote Reading Ability," Shanahan notes that the excerpts vs. whole books debate keeps busting out. He starts out by questioning the premise of one side's claims of a "purportedly damaging shift" from books to excerpts.

I say “purported” because the claim seems to be that in the past teachers were teaching their kids to read books, and now they aren’t. I’ve been around quite a while, and I don’t remember the past that way.

That's fair. Shanahan says he's been worked on various textbook reading programs for fifty years, so he would correctly remember that most basal literature texts generally relied heavily on short works, a few excerpts, and probably one full play and one full length work. When my department decided to incorporate more complete works, we had to move outside the basal text. Our AP track required students to read 7 or 8 novels, but even in the "general" track, we covered a couple of books a year. I would expect your mileage may vary depending on your local teachers. Shanahan later argues that the lack of complete books has been particularly true for K-5, though a first grader's "complete book" is a far cry from Moby Dick.

But I think Shanahan is missing part of the concern here. In my last decade of teaching under test-and-punish policies, it's not just that I was directed to use more excerpts, but that the excerpts were of particular low quality. Like innumerable teachers across the country, I was handed a stack of workbooks, typically with a few paragraphs on one page with four or five multiple choice questions on the facing page. To make room for all this drill, something had to go (of course, administrations tend to add items to teachers' plates without any direction on how to make it fit). 

We did all this, of course, for test prep. The Big Standardized Test asks students to read a short, context-free excerpt, and answer some multiple choice questions about it. So that's what we practiced. Shanahan says that "it would be the rare program that presents reading instruction as a series of random excerpts," and I would agree if we were only talking about basal texts-- but that's not what much of the "excerpts are killing us" crowd is talking about.

And the Big Standardized Test hangs over Shanahan's whole discussion.

I’d love to say that “Smith and Jones (1998) found that teaching reading with books increased reading levels by 26 points over what resulted for the excerpts group.” Or vice versa.

The problem is that there is no such research.

This is unsurprisingly correct.  But it's also the heart of the problem with his main question. Shanahan is treating "reading ability" and "scores on a reading test" as synonyms. And no reading test I've ever heard of tests for things like "read an entire novel then reflect and develop and understanding of the major themes and how they are set forth and connected over the entire length of the work. There's a level of literacy that is simply impervious to standardized testing because that level of literacy requires depth and time. It's the level of literacy that, for instance, helps you understand that The Great Gatsby parties are meant as a demonstration of using excess to try to drown out the inner wailing of sad, empty lives and not as an example of the kind of cool party that people should want to imitate. It's the level of literacy that is able to grapple with the ambiguity that enriches rather than demanding that every question about a piece of reading must one and only one correct answer. 

I don't know how you test for that level of literacy, especially the level that pays off throughout one's life as a grown human person. But it is precisely that level of literacy and comprehension that is needed to navigate a complicated modern world, and yet we have engineered a system that focuses schools' energy on Not That. Are we paying a price for it as a country and a culture? Aspects of our current national situation might point to "yes," but can I cite actual testing data? I cannot, because there is no test checking for that kind of reading ability. And as long as we keep treating "reading ability" and "score on a Big Standardized Test" as synonyms, we will not have such evidence.

Shanahan argues that reading a full book to students is not helpful, and I agree (he says that lots of whole book fans think Reading To is fine, and I disagree-- I have certainly met those people, but they were a minority among professionals I have known). 

Shanahan speaks in favor of building "reading stamina" but says we don't need to go whole text to do that. And at some points in his post, I'm not really sure what Shanahan is trying to say:

My point isn’t that there is no cultural benefit to be derived from having read The Scarlet Letter, The Great Gatsby, or Beloved in their entirety. Those are wonderful books and the more kids who know them the better. However, I also think it’s wonderful for kids to get to know Steinbeck, Salinger, Morrison, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Hawthorne, Melville, Lee, Knowles, Crane, Golding, Dickens, Homer, Frank, Bradbury, Wiesel, Twain, Atwood, Doerr, Lowry, Kesey, Keyes, Smith, Hinton, Updike, Orwell, and so on. There are so many fine authors and wonderful books, stories, plays, and essays, that a whole book curriculum is certain to be deficient when it comes to familiarizing students with this range of voices.

 So... full novels are swell but have no benefit? Because we can't full novel our way through a full range of writers, why bother? I'm not sure. I'm pretty sure that there are benefits to reading some of these works, even if the variety is limited. Those benefits would include 1) there are a wide range of rewards and understandings that come from full immersion is a large-scale work and 2) there are many different voices out there and you will like some and not others. 

Shanahan lists five concluding, and his last is his most solid:

There is no reason why schools cannot combine both excerpts and whole books in their English Language Arts instruction – fostering both depth and breadth.

Sure. And I would add that it is helpful if these works have some sort of depth or merit to them. Yes, we will argue until our tongues can no longer wag about what works truly have depth and merit, but as long as we're trying to steer by those values, I'm convinced that we will end up some place more rich and rewarding than we get with somebody's super duper test practice workbook sheets, even if our test scores don't go up on the way. 

NH: Considering School Takeovers

My very first school district is in the news yet again, and this time their troubles may usher in some bad legislative choices by the state of New Hampshire. 

I started out life in Claremont, New Hampshire. The first school I ever attended (Maple Avenue School) is still there and still operating (sadly, North Street School and Bluff Elementary are not). I can still vaguely remember the layout of the playground where I ran around with my friend, fellow country kid Becky Dole, and my first crush, Lanissa Sipitakowski. After third grade, my father's employers sent us to Pennsylvania, and I have almost never made it back to Claremont. Strolling through Google maps, it looks like our old house on the River Road might be gone. The Livingston farm right next door became factory buildings years ago. 

But I still notice when Claremont makes it into the news. 

In the 90s, Claremont was the face of two major lawsuits, among the first to bring the state to task for inadequately funding school districts (you can read about it in Andru Volinsky's book, The Last Bake Sale).

Claremont is in the news again, and it's related to funding, again. It appears that all sorts of accounting screw-ups resulted in a district that believed it was financially healthy, but instead is in a real big empty hole. A deficit of millions of dollars. A deficit so problematic that the district had to get a $4 million loan from the Claremont Savings Bank to insure they could open the schools last fall. The superintendent and business manager have both terminated their employment with the district. 

This is a good example of how some huge school district messes can be the result of local issues and not state policy ideas. But this crisis has opened the door to a state policy idea, and it's a particularly bad one.

A last-minute amendment to a bill in the legislature would give New Hampshire the option of a state takeover of troubled school districts.

This is not a new idea. It has been tried before-- that's how we know it's a bad idea.

Ohio has tried state takeover and it has not gone well (Failure Exhibit A is, oddly enough, the first district that ever hired me to teach) because, among other things, bringing hire guns from outside the district to deal with its issues while simultaneously trying to learn what they are-- not a great plan. In fact, Lorain had local-style financial and accounting problems similar to Claremont's, and the guy who was brought in to fix them was a pretty complete disaster. 

Or we could look at Tennessee's Achievement School District, a bold school takeover plan that was supposed to take schools at the very bottom of the ratings and catapult them to the top-ish. It failed. It failed a lot, through several leaders and over the course of several years. 

School takeovers mostly fail, and they mostly for a set of reasons, most of all because they assume that the state can find somebody who knows how to run a struggling school district and is, for some reason, available to hire. 

Many of them also fail because their actual goal is not to fix the district, but to dismantle it and charterize the scraps, sometimes because of a childlike belief in the imaginary awesomeness of charters and sometimes because of a grown-up belief in the real power of collecting piles of taxpayer money.

The New Hampshire bill has its own interesting twists. New Hampshire already has a bill that says the state can revoke a charter school's charter or put the school in probation if the school commits any of several listed Naughty Things. So the argument for the new public school law is that public schools should be under the same sort of watch. 

The stated goal is to get audits done and audit results public. However, the proposed amendment is extremely broad. A school district can be put on probation "if the school fails “generally accepted standards” for fiscal management; if it violates state or federal law; if the school materially violates a state administrative rule or standard; if the school does not file an annual report of its finances; if the school does not follow other state or federal reporting requirements; and if the school “fails to remedy” the causes of its probation." 

Right there in the middle of the list you find that violating a state board administrative rule or standard could trigger probation, which is wide enough to drive a small planet through, Basically, the state board would be free to go after pretty much any district it was in the mood to take over. 

If the school fails probation, they get a state-appointed administrator-- a school district tsar with the combined powers of a superintendent and a school board. The very first power listed by the bill is the power to 

Override any decisions of the school district's board or the school district superintendent, or both, concerning the management and operation of the school district, and initiate and make decisions concerning the management and operation of the school district

This kind of super-CEO is what Ohio tried, and the question becomes where the heck do you find someone with this massive assortment of powers and competencies who is not already in a perfectly good job? It's an impossible job, a job that requires someone to be the best super-superintendent ever under the worst possible conditions. I suspect the assumption is that the school district is in trouble because it's being run by bozos, so any reasonably competent bozo can fix it or any barely functional charter can replace it, which mostly tells me that the bozos involved in this particular show are the ones writing laws.

The other problem with school takeover pans is that they never, ever include a part where some collection of wise people look at the troubled district and try to figure out what the problem is and what resources could be best used to fix it. This is the test-and-punish part of No Child left Behind and Race To The Top writ large-- look for a quick and easy way to determine a school is "failing," then target it not for special assistance, but for dismantling, defunding, and/or privatizing.

We could argue all day about the ethics of the takeover approach, but we can skip all that because it's like arguing whether or not it's a good idea to get spiders out of your house by setting fire to building-- it just doesn't work. Here's hoping New Hampshire doesn't turn itself into one more disproving ground for this failed policy. 

ICYMI: Mom's Birthday Edition (11/9)

My mother will be checking off another year around the sun this week. We held a modest celebration yesterday because she doesn't like a fuss. Fair enough. May you have just the amount of fuss you want from the people you love.

Here's your reading list from the week. Remember that sharing is caring.

Education Helped Power the Blue Wave

You won't find a better education-related summary of the election results than this post from Jennifer Berkshire. 

The Ketchup

Audrey Watters comes bearing an excellent assortment of links this week. More to read!

Rigid Federal Rules May Block Efforts by Dem. States to Redirect New Federal Vouchers for Pro-Public School Uses

The feds still haven't written the rules to go with the federal voucher program, but Jan Resseger explains why the idea that this money could benefit public education is looking pretty shaky.

“Every Child Known: The Slogan That Says Everything and Means Nothing”

Exceptional TC Weber post this weeks connects the dots between meaningless school administration sloganeering and the central place of relationships in education.

Consulting Firm with Deep GOP Ties Helps Launch Effort to Fully Privatize Tennessee Schools

Andy Spears takes a look at a new player in Tennessee that has plans to gut public education--and they appear to have some deep GOP ties.

Florida’s State Board Poised to Ratify Heritage’s “Phoenix Declaration”

Florida is ready to sign on with the Heritage Foundation's Phoenix Declaration, and Sue Kingery Woltanski explains why that is bad news. More culture panic school takeover ahead.

Education Board Reverses Book Ban By Harford County Schools |

In Maryland, the state board of education told a local school board to put a book back on the shelves.

Dear Centennial School Board: We Spoke. Many of You Did Not Listen. And Now We Voted You Out

There is a sequel to the tale of Central Bucks School District in PA. When their far right board lost its majority, their far right superintendent headed for the exit (with a basket of money tucked under his arm). He found a home with another district's far right board, over the vocal objections of taxpayers in the district. Now the board that hired him has been swept out of office. Full story at the Bucks County Beacon with Nancy Pontius reporting.

Mark Zuckerberg Opened an Illegal School at His Palo Alto Compound. His Neighbors Revolted

Zuck's neighbors really don't like him, so when he started running a school out of his home, they were just done and they sicced the law on him. Caroline Haskins in Wired.

The Limits of AI Research for Real Writers

John Warner explaining again that actual writing is not augmented by AI.

Sexbots, students, and schools

Ben Riley suggests that AI is messing with our understanding of what public education is for. He looks at Henry Farrell and the lesson learned from online porn.

Arne Duncan's back in the mix, pushing school vouchers and praising Republicans for their school reform efforts.

I offered my own take on Duncan's op-ed earlier this week. Here's Mike Klonsky's look, including a disturbing possibility-- could Arne be testing waters for a Presidential run by one of the Democrats' griftiest con artists?

In the Trump Presidency, the Rules Are Vague. That Might Be the Point.

Matthew Purdy wrote this essay for the New York Times, and while it's not directly education-related, folks in the ed world will recognize the issue. Make the rules vague and you can just punish whoever you want to punish.

The Lack of Evidence for Ubiquitous Classroom Technology

Larry Cuban and how the desire for evidence based research somehow stops when we talk about ed tech.

How SNAP Funds the Mass Reads Coalition. Or, A Win-Win for the Walton Family

Maurice Cunningham follows the money and figures out that SNAP is tied to advocates for "science of reading."

Jury awards $10 million to teacher who was shot by 6-year-old student

Another sequel to a story covered here. That teacher shot by a sixth grader won a $10 million settlement for the principal's failure to take teacher warnings seriously.

Teachers are Patriots! Who Knew?

Nancy Flanagan points out the obvious-- teachers are not a bunch of crazed America-hating indoctrinators. And there's research to back it up!

This week at Forbes.com, I looked at how the blue wave finished the transformation of Central Bucks School District. Just four years ago, they were the MAGAist GOP board around, a scary harbinger of things to come. Now all nine seats are filled by Democrats. 

Les Paul was a genius and a monster player. This clip is supposed to be from 1951, which would be a year before the first Les Paul guitar was offered commercially. It's also three years after he was in a car accident that shattered his elbow. Rather than accept amputation, Paul had the arm set with a permanent 90 degree angle so he could hold the guitar. 1951 was also the year he and Mary Ford released this hit, one of the first demonstrations of the possibilities of multitrack recording. 

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Arne Duncan Is Now Betsy DeVos

Mind you, on education, Duncan was always the kind of Democrat largely indistinguishable from a Republican, but with his latest print outburst (in the Washington Post, because of course it was), he further reduces the distance between himself and his successor as Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos. 

For this one, he teamed up with Jorge Elorza, head honcho at DFER/Education Reform Now, the hedge fundie group set up to convince Democrats that they should agree with the GOP on education. 

It's yet another example of reformsters popping up to argue that what's really needed in education is a return to all the failed reform policies of fifteen years ago. I don't know what has sparked this nostalgia-- have they forgotten, or do they just think we have forgotten, or do they still just not understand how badly test-and-punish flopped, how useless the Common Core was, and how school choice has had to abandon claims that choice will make education better in this country. 

But here come Duncan and Elorza with variations on the same old baloney.

First up-- chicken littling over NAEP scores. They're dipping! They're low! And they've been dipping ever since 2010s. Whatever shall we do?

Who do Duncan and Elorza think holds the solution? Why, none other than Donald Trump.

Seriously. They are here to pimp for the federal tax credit voucher program, carefully using the language that allows them to pretend that these vouchers aren't vouchers or tax shelters. 

The new federal tax credit scholarship program, passed as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, allows taxpayers to claim a dollar-for-dollar federal tax credit for donations to scholarship-granting organizations, or SGOs. These SGOs can fund a range of services already embraced by blue-state leaders, such as tutoring, transportation, special-education services and learning technology. For both current and incoming governors, it’s a chance to show voters that they’re willing to do what it takes to deliver for students and families, no matter where the ideas originate.

They encourage governors to "unlock these resources" as if these are magic dollars stored in a lockbox somewhere and not dollars that are going to be redirected from the United States treasury to land instead in some private school's bank account. 

Democratic governors are reluctant to get into a program that "could be seen as undermining public schools." But hey-- taking these vouchers "doesn't take a single dollar from state education budgets" says Duncan, sounding exactly like DeVos when she was pushing the same damned thing. And this line of bullshit:

It simply opens the door to new, private donations, at no cost to taxpayers, that can support students in public and nonpublic settings alike.

"At no cost to taxpayers" is absolute baloney. Every dollar is a tax dollar not paid to the government, so the only possible result must be either reduction in services, reduction in subsidies, or increase in the deficit. I guess believing in Free Federal Money is a Democrat thing.

The "support students in public and nonpublic settings" is carefully crafted baloney language as well. Federal voucher fans keep pushing the public school aspect, but then carefully shading it as money spent on tutors or uniforms or transportation and not actual schools. And they are just guessing that any of that will be acceptable because the rules for these federal vouchers aren't written yet.

Duncan and Elorza want to claim that this money will, "in essence," replace the disappearing money from the American Rescue Plan Act. "In essence" is doing Atlas-scale lifting here because, no, it will not. The voucher money will be spent in different ways by different people on different stuff. They are not arguing that this money will help fund public schools-- just that it might fund some stuff that is sort of public education adjacent. 

But how about some "analysis" from Education Reform Now, which claims that the potential scale is significant." They claim that "the federal tax credit scholarship program could generate $3.1 billion in California, nearly $986 million in Illinois and nearly $86 million in Rhode Island each year," drifting ever closer to "flat out lie" territory, because the federal vouchers won't "generate" a damned cent. Pretending these numbers are real, that's $3.1 billion in tax dollars that will go to SGOs in the state instead of the federal government. It's redirected tax revenue, not new money. Will the feds just eat that $3.1 billion shortfall, or cut, say, education funding to California? Next time I get a flat tire, will I generate a new tire from the trunk? I think not.

In classic Duncan, he would like you to know that not following his idea makes you a Bad Person. Saying no to the federal vouchers is a "moral failure." 

Next up: Political advice.

Over the past decade, Democrats have watched our party’s historical advantage on education vanish.

Yeah, Arne, it's more than a decade, and it has happened because you and folks like you have decided that attacking and denigrating the public education system would be a great idea. You and your ilk launched and supported policies based on the assumption that all problems in school were the sole treatable cause of economic and social inequity in this country, and that those problems were the result of really bad teachers, so a program of tests followed by punishment would make things better in schools (and erase poverty, too). 

But now the GOP states are getting higher NAEP scores, so that means... something?

This is Democrats’ chance to regain the educational and moral high ground. To remind the country that Democrats fight to give every child a fair shot and that we’ll do whatever it takes to help kids catch up, especially those left behind for too long.

Yes, Democrats-- you can beat the Republicans by supporting Republican policies. And that "we'll do whatever it takes to help kids catch up" thing? You had a chance to do that, and you totally blew it. Defund, dismantle and privatize public schools was a lousy approach. It's still a lousy approach.

Opting in to the federal tax credit scholarship program isn’t about abandoning Democratic values — it’s about fulfilling them.

When it comes to public education, it's not particularly clear what Democratic values even are these days, and my tolerance for party politics is at an all time low. But I am quite sure that the interests of students, families, teachers, and public education are not served by having the GOP offer a shit sandwich and the Democrats countering with, "We will also offer a shit sandwich, but we will say nice things about it and draw a D on it with mayonnaise." 

We have always heard that Arne Duncan is a nice guy, and I have no reason to believe that's not true. But what would really be nice would be for him to go away and never talk about education ever again. Just go have a nice food truck lunch with Betsy DeVos. 

WI: Pushing For Federal Vouchers

Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers announced way back in September that he would not join in the new federal school voucher program that is part of the GOP's Big Ugly Mess of a Bill, but advocacy groups are being put together to try to sell the vouchers anyway. It's another one of those times to pay attention just in case this is coming to your state soon. 

There is much about the federal voucher program that remains undefined, but we know the basics. It's a tax credit voucher, which means if you've got some money to burn, you can contribute it to funding a school voucher and have that contribution count as paying your taxes. The contribution actually goes to a Scholarship Granting Organization (SGO) in a sleight of move that is supposed to make it look as if taxpayer dollars aren't being diverted to funding private schools, but at least one state supreme court has seen through that baloney. 

Evers correctly noted that the federal voucher would be catastrophic for public schools. 

The usual fans of dismantling public schools and privatizing the remains did not care for the governor's decision. "Why so fast," said folks at the right wing Badger Institute (a great name which really ought to be associated with something cooler than a bunch of wealthy guys who would like to not pay taxes). "There's lots of time left to decide, and this is like free money!"

It is not. Your brother-in-law owes you a hundred bucks. You send your spouse to collect it because you need it to buy groceries this week, and they return with fifty bucks and a couple of cases of beer. "Did you spend our money on beer?" you ask. "No, my brother just gave me this instead of the other fifty dollars. So this is like, you know, free beer!" Are you convinced? Or are you just out fifty bucks that you needed to feed your family?

The Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce really wants that beer, and they have come up with a whole campaign to sell the federal vouchers. If not to Evers (who is not running for a third term and so doesn't have to care about these guys), then maybe the next governor.

Pay It Forward Wisconsin is the campaign, and it tries hard to make these vouchers look swell. There's a certain amount of creativity here-- the actual rules for federal vouchers haven't been written yet, so some of this pitch might best be considered "aspirational" or "loosely interpretive" or even "made up." 

The tax credit allows "you to donate up to $1,700 to the school of your choice." Well, you'll donate it to an SGO, which may or may not be aim that money at a particular school. Some states (like PA) allow any private school to set up its own SGO, and others do not. The law suggests that an SGO has to serve at least two schools; any private schools with multiple campuses could well satisfy that requirement. The federal law suggests that donors can designate the school, but not the student. But that could change when the actual rules are written.

PIFW also suggests that public school students could use the voucher money to fund extras like a tutor or a band trip. Except that, again, the rules haven't been written yet, and no state with vouchers has allowed for this particular use of voucher funds. 

PIFW is accepting "pledges" and notes that "If you don’t have a specific school in mind, Pay It Forward Wisconsin will direct your donation to nearby schools serving students in poverty with a proven track record of improving reading and math proficiency," all of which sure makes it sound like PIFW is positioning itself to be an SGO (SGOs get to keep a slice of the voucher pie, so it can be a profitable business to be in). 

Who's the face of all this? Dale Kooyenga is a GOP politician who is currently serving as MMAC president and the main mouthpiece for PIFW. He's an accountant and private equity guy, as well as an army reserve lieutenant colonel. When he was in the Wisconsin legislature, he helped push a plan to privatize Milwaukee schools. He loves him some private Christian schools, too. 

The idea of redirecting tax dollars to private schools is particular troublesome in Wisconsin, where public schools are stuck under a cap in state funding. 

The pitch captures some of the bizarro world nature of tax credit scholarships. Do you want to support public schools and students? You can take some of your tax dollars and direct them to schools. Or--stay with me here-- you could just pay taxes. PIFW wants to answer the question, "How can I direct my money to help students and schools?" Gee-- if only there were some sort of system for collecting a contribution from every wage earner in the state and then bundling those contributions up and portioning them out to schools. If only there were a way to do that!

But of course what gives the tax credit system value added over regular old taxation is that tax credit vouchers let you make sure that your tax dollars aren't going to support Those Peoples' Children. Let's hope that Wisconsin's next governor shares the current governor's understanding of how bad the federal voucher program would be for education. 

The Coming AI Teaching Assistant Boom (And Cheating)

Matt Barnum (who is, thank God, now at Chalkbeat) just made three predictions about AI in education, and one of them makes my head hurt.

Students will keep cheating? Yeah, that seems likely. AI will not become a super-tutor? No, of course not, particularly given that support for that concept always rests on the old Benjamin Bloom essay about super tutoring that A) involves human and B) is kind of bunk. 

But Barnum also makes this painful prediction: AI will become a ubiquitous teaching assistant.

Lord, but I want this not to be true. I want the woman he uses as an example, a high school English teacher who now uses AI to crank out college recommendation letters-- I want her to be an outlier. I want her to be shamed in her teachers' lounge. I want teachers who use AI to extrude lesson plans to be embarrassed about it and/or to be teaching at a school where nobody ever looks at the lesson plan-- including the teacher whose name is on it. And if a teacher is using their AI "teaching assistant" to grade essays, I want to encourage that teacher to leave the profession immediately.

And yet, in my pained heart, I know those "teachers" are out there. I have no trouble imagining "teachers" I've known who would be delighted about the chance to outsource some of the thinking and effort to some computer program. They're the same ones who used to use Google to find lesson plans. Beyond that, I know how tremendously pressed for time teachers are, so absolutely crunched that the prospect of getting even a half an hour of their day back would be incredibly tempting. 

This is all cheating. 

You know how I know it's cheating? Because all of these scenarios assume that the people on the receiving end of this AI slop will act as if they have received the work of an actual human.

I'm betting nobody is opening their AI recommendation letter with "I am having ChatGPT write this letter of recommendation for Pat McStudent." No, the letter (just like that ChatGPT paper about Hamlet that Pat submitted) is meant to be taken as the work of the human whose name is attached. 

I will predict that AI will kill the letter of recommendation as dead as the follicles on Dear Leader's dome. Admissions officers will shrug and say, "Well, all of these are from some LLM. There's no real point in doing this." And they will look for some other way to find out if a real human who knows the applicant wants to speak up for them. Maybe a phone call. 

It will take students roughly five minutes to figure out if their essays are being scored by a machine instead of their human teacher. What will it do to writing instruction and student growth when students realize that they are writing for an audience of zero humans? I don't know-- but I expect we're going to find out, and I also expect it won't be anything good. If no human is going to bother to read your work, why would you put any human effort into writing it?

Some folks boosting (or contributing to) the coming AI teaching assistant boom talk as if teachers will offload some cognitive labor to the machine, and that will be the end of it. It won't be the end of it. The substitution of AI for human will affect and alter the results. It changes the process, the whole process, from inputs to outputs to reactions to the changed process. The notion that you can just swap out teacher judgment at this one point in the process and nothing else will be altered is naive and foolish. It's like figuring you can swap out mushrooms for burgers at your barbecue, or replace bolts with molded tofu in an automotive assembly line.

To grapple honestly with all this, a teacher would need to stand in front of her class and announce, "I am not going to grade this assignment. I'm going to have ChatGPT do it instead. What do you think?" Or saying, "I can send a letter to the college for you, but I'm going to have ChatGPT write it. Is that okay with you?" And in a nation of three million teachers, there may well be some that are doing so. I hope there are. I hope there are many, soon to be more. Because it's going to take a lot more honesty and soul searching and a whole lot less cheating to get through the advent of AI in education.