More Momwashing For Privatization

The parenting bubble for anti-public ed activism is really expanding. 

Jeanne Allen's Center for Education Reform has just rolled out the Parent Power Index! It assigns arbitrary values measures three vaguely defined qualities-- choice programs, charter schools, and innovation-- and gives each state a letter grade. There's nothing new being quantified here, just the same old anti-public school, anti-union wine in new parentified wineskins. 

In choicer marketing, "freedom" is out and "parent power" is in.

Maybe it's just an attempt to create some synergy for Betsy DeVos's favorite choice evangelist and American Federation for Children "senior fellow" and his new book about the parent revolution.

But to find someone who's really doubling on momwashing anti-public ed activism, we turn to the American Federation for Children, which is launching a whole new initiative-- Moms on a Mission!

AFC is one more dark money group, probably one of the largest school privatization outfits in the country. It was organized and funded by the DeVos family. It has had a variety of names, including American Education Reform Foundation and Advocates for School Choice, Inc, and has suckled up some other DeVos initiatives like "All Children Matter," a group that was fined for election misconduct in Ohio and Wisconsin.

They're tied to ALEC, the conservative corporate bill mill. They've had a variety of projects, including Ed Newsfeed, a program for planting fake news stories on local media. They're still running Black Minds Matter, School Choice Boyz and Federacion Para Los Ninos. 

Their leadership is a veritable privatizer who's who. Betsy DeVos gave up her chairman of the board spot to go work for Trump. These days the chair is William E. Oberndorfer, who co-founded the Alliance for School Choice, one of the root organizations of AFC with John Walton and has his own foundation that is busy pumping up charters and groups like Jeanne Allen's Center for Education reform and Jeb Bush's Foundation for Excellence in Education and EdChoice (formerly the Friedman Foundation).

The board also includes John Kirtley (Florida School Choice Fund, Florida Charter Institute), Kevin Chavous (DFER, New Orleans voucher plan, K12), Rosemarie Nassif (Center for Catholic Education) and Scott Walker. A staff of 49. We could run through the whole crowd, but you get the idea--there's a lot more to AFC than just Betsy DeVos.

Moms on a Mission doesn't have its own tab yet, but AFC announced their launch on May 11 (Mother's Day).  

Across the nation, school choice is opening wide the doors of opportunity for children, thanks to a powerful force: Moms. Parents are the ones who know and love their children best, and moms are often the front line confronting the obstacles that would otherwise hinder opportunities for their little ones.

There's a brief inspirational video. Also, an introduction to some of the moms.

There's Clarice Jackson, an activist from Nebraska who served as Commissioner of African American  Affairs (2021-2024) under Pete Ricketts and Jim Pillen. She has worked with dyslexia organizations and founded Black Literacy Matters in February of 2022. She has a great story about working as a paraprofessional in school and encountering a young girl struggling to read and write, and coming to realize that with an incarcerated mother and "strapped" grandmother, the girl "lacked the help she needed at home." Jackson eventually adopted the girl, and the story is a compelling example of a school dropping the ball. Of course, it's also the story of realizing that someone would have to step in and take over for the actual parents, who could not manage the job because they were overwhelmed by their own circumstances. Not sure how school choice would have helped.

Tera Myers is the Ohio mother of a child with Downs Syndrome. She spoke at the 2020 GOP convention in praise of Donald Trump. Myers is a member of Mansfield Alliance Church and is a "Mentor Mom" at Berean Baptist Church MOPS Program, or Mothers of Preschoolers. She serves as a state and national parent advocate for Education Freedom, the Trump administration's proposed scholarship program, and is a consultant for Washington D.C.-based American Federation for Children. That last part doesn't appear in the Moms on a Mission website.

Holly Terei makes plenty of appearances on Fox News, perhaps because she's the National Director of Teacher Coalition for No Left Turn In Education, where the Georgia mom hopes to see "teachers and parents working together to push against the progressive woke agenda that has infiltrated America’s public schools." NLTE is yet another culture panic group fed by Tucker Carlson; a Florida chapter head single-handedly made his district the country's leader in book challenges.

Becki Uccello is also an activist parent of a child with special needs, which has made her a frequent voice speaking in favor vouchers in Missouri. The former public school teacher used a voucher from the Herzog Tomorrow Foundation to send her daughter with spina bifida to Catholic school (her son did just fine in public school). Herzog is a foundation aimed at trying "catalyze and accelerate the development of quality Christ-centered K-12 education so that families and culture flourish."

So once again, some experienced activists coded as moms, their activist bona fides downplayed or erased. There's a definite emphasis on students with special needs, which is an interesting choice given that so much of the choice school world is not available to those students. At the same time, it makes a certain sense because so many parents of students with special needs are (or at least feel) ill-served by public schools. 

Moms on a Mission is just getting on its feet, so it remains to be seen how it figures in AFC's ongoing work in dismantling public education. But if these moms ("moms just like you!") show up in your neighborhood, they aren't there to give public education a hand. 

Something Else AI "Teachers" Can't Do

"Okay, I think I see where you went wrong..."

"Hmm. Can you explain to me why you took this step here...?"

"That's an interesting interpretation, but I think you might have overlooked this..."

There are so many ways in which generative language algorithms (marketed as AI) can't do the work of a teacher, some larger than other.

Some are pretty basic. The notion that AI can create lesson plans only makes sense if you think a good way to do lesson plans would be to have an assistant google the topic and then create a sort-of-summary of what they found.

But other obstacles are fairly huge. 

Certainly there's a version of teaching that looks like this:

Student: Here's an answer.

Teacher: That's wrong. Try again.

Student: How about this?

Teacher: Still wrong. Try again.

For different sorts of content, there's a version like this.

Teacher: Do A, then B, then C, and you will get X.

Student: Um, I got Q somehow.

Teacher: Do A, then B, then C, and you will get X.

Student: I'm not so sure about the B part. Also, I got V this time.

Teacher: Do A, then B, then C, and you will get X.

The technical term for this kind of teaching is "poor" or even "bad." Also, "teaching via Khan Academy." This also applies to new AI-powered versions like Khanmigo, which tries to help by essentially directing you to a video that specifically shows you B. Or you can throw in "special interests" and the AI will "incorporate" references to your favorite hobby.

Part of the work is to try to get inside the students' head. It is not enough to assess whether the student has produced an answer that is right or wrong or sort-of-right, and it's certainly not enough to repeat some version of "Don't be wrong. Be right," over and over again. The job is to figure out where they may have stumbled, to see where they are in the vast territory of content and skills that we are helping them navigate.

Part of the work is watching students struggle, watching the cues that they have hit a rough spot, collecting data that reveals how they are trying to work their way through the material, sorting and sifting the clues into important and unimportant sets. Part of the work is thinking about how the students are thinking. Part of the work is looking at how certain soft intangibles (e.g. the Habits of Mind) play out as the student wrestles with the material. 

Sure, the algorithm can "learn" cues that indicate certain mistakes in thinking (if you looked at 2 x 3 and got 5, you probably added instead of multiplied), but the more complex the task, the more varied the outcomes, and the more varied and unpredictable the outcome, the less capable AI is of dealing with it (e.g. how does Hamlet's character arc reflect his relationship with death). Does the student show an attempt to really come to grips with the materials, or are they just spitting out something that the AI would recognize as correct?

It all makes a difference. Is the student soooooo close, or just flailing blindly? Is the student really trying, or just coasting? Is the student making operational errors, or operating with flawed fundamentals? Part of the work is to try to assess the student process, but AI can only deal with the result, and the result that the student produces is often the least critical part of the learning process. 

For young humans, the best learning requires relationship with another actual human being. Eventually humans learn to teach themselves, but that comes later. Until that day, small humans need interaction with another human, some being who can do more than simply present the "right" answer over and over again. 

The Freedom Foundation Assault On Unions

The Freedom Foundation wants you, public school teachers, to come to their  second annual Teacher Freedom Summit this summer. July 8-10 in Downtown Denver. 400 teachers for 3 days. Training, hotel, F&B included. And it's free! You just have to apply!

Who are these folks, and what do they want? The blurb on their website is pretty clear:

The Freedom Foundation is more than a think tank. We’re more than an action tank. We’re a battle tank that’s battering the entrenched power of left-wing government union bosses who represent a permanent lobby for bigger government, higher taxes, and radical social agendas.

Their language when approaching teachers and other members of public sector unions is a lot about liberating public employees from political exploitation. Their language in spaces like fundraising letters is a bit more blunt:

The Freedom Foundation has a proven plan for bankrupting and defeating government unions through education, litigation, legislation and community activation ... we won’t be satisfied with anything short of total victory against the government union thugs.

Destroy unions and defund the political left. And they work hard at it, too. They have put an army of foot soldiers out there going door to door in hopes of turning an entire state blue. In one example, they sent activists dressed as Santa Claus to stand outside government buildings, where they told workers they could give themselves a holiday gift by exercising their right not to pay that portion of union dues that goes to political activity.

The foundation was launched in 1991 as the Evergreen Freedom Foundation by Lynn Harsh and Bob Williams. These days Harsh is VP of Strategy for the State Policy Network, the national network of right wing thinky tanks and advocacy groups founded in 1992 (it appears that the foundation may have helped with that launch). Her bio says she started out as a teacher and went on to found two private schools. Williams was a Washington state politician and failed gubernatorial candidate. He went on to work with SPN and ALEC, the conservative corporate legislation mill before passing away in 2022. SPN  started giving out an award in his name in 2017. 

The foundation is not small potatoes operation-- the staff itself is huge, and the foundation operates out of offices in five states (Washington, Oregon, California, Ohio, and Pennsylvania). 

Longtime CEO Tom McCabe is now the Chairman of the Board, and he has been pretty clear in his aims. “Labor bosses are the single greatest threat to freedom and opportunity in America today,” he wrote in one fundraising letter.  The current CEO is Aaron Withe, the guy who headed up the door-to-door campaign the get Oregon union members to quit their unions.

The foundation gets money from a variety of the usual suspects, including the Koch family foundations, Sarah Scaife Foundation, Donors Trust, Ed Uihlein Family Foundation, the Richard and Helen DeVos Foundation, and the State Policy Network. The have gotten small mountains of money from the Bradley Foundation, which also heavily funds the anti-union Center for Union Facts. 

Many of these same folks helped fund the Janus lawsuit that did away with Fair Share, and the Freedom Foundation was one of the groups that immediately started to work to get teachers to leave their unions. Only, of course, because of their deep and altruistic concern for those teachers' freedoms, and not because they were hoping to defund and defang unions as a source of support for Democrats. Their website boasts of how many members and how much money they have taken from the unions.

This is an outfit that can afford to put up 400 teachers in downtown Denver, plus "an amazing lineup of speakers and panels" that will cover topics such as "JANUS rights, running an opt-out campaign, standing up to union bullying, decertifying your school district, and so much more." 

We are equipping public school teachers with the tools they need to counter the tactics used by the NEA and AFT to bring the socialist dogma of their leadership into our children’s classrooms.

What could be more inspirational than a bunch of rich people spending a whole lot of money to convince not-so-rich workers to give up their union support and protection so that the rich people don't have to face political opposition. Lord knows I've had plenty of beefs with the union over the years, but this convoluted plan to keep workers from contributing to the Democratic party is not the way to go. You could always, I don't know, convince workers that your policies and candidates are worth supporting. 

These plans always remind me of that scene in every vampire movie, where some poor guy is holding off the vampire with a crucifix, and the vampire soothingly tells him, "Just put that down. You'll be perfectly safe without it, I promise." Listening to the bloodsucker is always a bad idea.

OK: Getting On The Satan Chaplain Train

The push for school chaplains is moving across the country, pushed by the National School Chaplain Association, a group that pretty clearly hopes school chaplains will be a means of putting a particular brand of Christianity in schools. 

So far the movement's two big wins are in Texas and Florida, where the legislatures actually passed a law allowing anyone who wants to call themselves a chaplain to get into schools that set up the chaplain post. In Texas, the big pushback came from actual professional chaplains, and so far, one charter school has decided to bring in a "chaplain," because a real chaplain has actual training, sometimes specialized, and follows a set of professional ethics and is not, in fact, just some untrained true believer who thinks Jesus wants him to go recruit some children. In fact, several states have said no to the amateur hour first-amendment-busting bill.

Florida also passed a "chaplain" law, and that led to a predictable next step, which was for the Satanic Temple to announce that they would also be offering chaplains, with said announcement followed by Governor Ron DeSantis declaring that he couldn't read the plain English of the law that he would forbid any such thing to happen. 

The law is written to avoid any obvious First Amendment violation; in fact, it doesn't even require the "chaplain" to have a religious affiliation. But never mind-- DeSantis will tell you what is and is not a legitimate religion.

Well, if Texas and Florida are going galumphing off into far right field, you know Oklahoma will be close behind.

So here comes SB 36, passed through the House and now facing the Senate. The bill is a step up from the versions in Texas and Florida and some other states by virtue of some amendments to the bill. It requires the "chaplain" to have some sort of "ecclesiastical endorsement from their faith group" indicating they are an "ordained minister or member in good standing." It even requires them to have a bachelor's degree and some graduate work. The House also added a "no proselytizing" clause. 

None of this really addresses the issue that chaplains are not trained as child mental health professionals. Nor does it make it any less a violation of the First Amendment.

Critics have noted that the bill has one particular religion in mind. But you know some other group is cued up and ready to go. And Oklahoma's Education Dudebro-in-Chief Ryan Walters has come out swinging.

Let me be crystal clear: Satanists are not welcome in Oklahoma schools, but they are welcome to go to hell.

Legislators have also announced their inability to read and their misunderstanding of the Constitution opposition to the Satanic Temple. SB 36 simply wouldn't invite the Satanic Temple to send ministers to school children, said one group. 

Instead, it gives permission for the local school boards to decide whether to implement a chaplain program, leaving the decision to the duly elected school board members who represent their community’s values. Additionally, parents can decide whether or not to let their child participate in the program.

All true, but it skips over the part where the Constitution forbids discriminating against an employer on religious grounds. This is not news. The Good News Club, a program of the Child Evangelism Fellowship way back in 2001 won its case before SCOTUS that it must be allowed to have an after school club like any other group. And that was followed by the Satanic Temple winning cases to have its own after school Satan club in districts, because the First Amendment is clear on not allowing the government to pick and choose which religions are okay.

Dudebro Walters is not a dummy. He most certainly knows all this (he was an AP history teacher). But he's got an audience to play to. So here he is on Fox News, sitting in an office, playing the rightwing hits.

Asked to respond to the Satanic Temple's stated intention to expose "harmful pseudo-scientific practices in mental health care," Walters says 

I am not surprised that people who worship Satan lie. They are liars. What they are trying to do in worshipping Satan is ruin the lives of children, undermine the very Judeo-Christian values of this country and destroy our schools.

The Satanic Temple has always been pretty clear that they do not worship Satan, but are on a mission to push back against those with a theocratic bent. Walters declares 

Satanism is not a religion and we will not allow them in our school. Our bill will not allow Satanists into our schools. It will only allow religions, religions that we have protected in our country since the outset.

Sooo much baloney here. The IRS says that the Satanic Temple is a religion. And if we're going to have state officials going around declaring what is and is not a real religion, there is all sorts of bad trouble ahead. This has been a tough line for us to draw as a country, because "since the outset," we have not protected all religions. The Puritans of Massachusetts used to banish or execute folks of different religions-- and I'm not talking about the Salem witch trials, but folks like Mary Dyer, who was executed in Boston for being a Quaker who wouldn't stay properly banished. Or we could talk about when the Baptists had a fun nickname for the Catholic Church and/or the Pope-- the whore of Babylon.

"Satanists want to destroy families, want to destroy kids' lives," Walters continues. He gets out the chaplain talking point that "we've had chaplains in the military, chaplains in Congress" (trained professionals, but, you know, chaplains) and then he pivots to another point.

Under President Trump, you didn't see the Satanists believing they could actually inject themselves into schools, but under President Biden, he has really cleared the way where they feel very emboldened to try to get in there and influence our kids and they are not going to send our kids to hell.

Well, one of the more recent Satanic Temple victories came courtesy of a Trump-appointed judge. But in fact the first round attempts to launch After School Satan Clubs all came when Trump was President, including the first successful attempt in Tacoma, WA. If Walters were serious about getting his facts straight and not just working on his national profile, he could have discovered this by looking at Wikipedia. 

And that religious tax exempt status that the Satanic Temple got from the IRS? That happened in 2019, under President Trump. TST had previously rejected the idea of pursuing such status, but when President Trump signed the "religious freedom" executive order in 2017, church president Lucien Greaves told members, “As ‘the religious’ are increasingly gaining ground as a privileged class, we must ensure that this privilege is available to all, and that superstition doesn’t gain exclusive rights over non-theistic religions or non-belief."

And if you're still wondering which religions the bill is aimed at, Walters has more

We want the influence of Christian ministers. We understand that Judeo-Christian values were the foundation of this country. In the 1960s the Supreme Court weaponized the federal government against Christians. We have allowed our schools to be state-sponsored centers of atheism. 

This fits with the other Dominionist baloney that Walters has espoused, his stated intent to elevate and center one particular brand of Christianity. The same problem keeps tripping these folks up-- that darn First Amendment. You can't write laws that specify that only one brand of Christianity is to be elevated, so you say "religion" when you really mean "my preferred religion." But you're stuck with the language you have, that "religion," means that all brand of Christianity and Judaism and Islam and Buddhism and the Satanic Temple all get to play.

Folks like Walters only have a couple of choices for a fix. Either you officially codify your brand of faith into law, giving it protection and support. Or you leave the code wide for "religion," but you install an official government agency to declare which religions are "real" and may have the full benefit of the law.

Either of these options should terrify Americans, both those with the Christian faith and those outside of it. Walters knows better, and the fact that he's willing to play these games, presumably because he wants power and attention on a greater stage, marks him as a person not remotely serious enough to have any position of authority. 

P.S. Also in the news this week, an Oklahoma man has been indicted after he traveled to Salem with a pipe bomb to blow up the Satanic Temple.

Failing Charters Go Private

Last month, Amelia Pak-Harvey at Chalkbeat Indiana ran a story about a failing charter school that had been approved for a new lease on life--as a private school.

Ignite Achievement Academy was supposed to improve its "checkered academic record," but instead the State Board of Education gave it a unanimous thumbs up to become a private school. Specifically, a private school that can cash in on Indiana's school voucher program.

This is not a new dodge. Annie Waldman wrote a piece for ProPublica way back in 2017 that found 16 troubled charters converting to private schools that could grab taxpayer-funded vouchers. 

As Waldman pointed out, this was a bit of as shift. There was a time when private schools converted to charter, because charters could collect taxpayer money, and private schools couldn't--yet.

There has always been some tension between charters and vouchers, because they represent two different stances. First, the funding.  Let's say that the funding is an actual stream that leads to an actual pond. Traditionally, that pond was used strictly for thirsty public school systems. The charter approach has been to insist that they be allowed to drink from that pond, too. The voucher approach is to interrupt the stream itself, redirecting it away from the pond and off to a hundred other little locations.

Second, the overall goal. Real charter fans see charters as a sort of supplement or enhancement of the public system, while voucher fans would be just as happy to burn the whole public system down. And of course, a whole lot of charter supporters have been the foot-in-the-door crowd, seeing charters as a way station or halfway house to sort of while away the hours until vouchers could finally stomp freely over the landscape. 

Andy Rotherman (of reformy Bellwether) offered a quick visual analysis that hits the mark. As more and more voucher bills pass, charters will feel the pinch. After all, why run a charter that has to keep some authorizer happy when you can collect taxpayer-funded vouchers that come with no regulation, oversight, or accountability?

It's one more way that magical market forces do not make a good substitute for actual oversight, accountability, and regulation. Ignite is a perfect example. About to be held accountable for your failure? Change your name and move to another sub-sector of the ed biz. It's a trick the private sector already knows, like the drilling company in my neck of the woods that was sued repeatedly for ruining well water, so they declared bankruptcy, escaped the consequences of their failure, and soon formed a new business with the same folks.

Charter and private schools have additional advantages. First, the market for their business is constantly turning over. Second, they only need a small sliver of the total market to be viable. So just keep marketing enough to keep pulling in fresh customers, and it's unlikely that any of your previous failures will catch up with you any time soon.

In the meantime, watch for more and more failed charters, or charters that just want to operate in an accountability-free sector, to jump into the unregulated world of private schooling. 

ICYMI: Feeling Appreciated Edition (5/12)

Was it a good week? Do you feel appreciated now? Good, because it's time for the world to move on to other things. But in the meantime, here's some reading.

A teacher spoke out against offering 'opposing' views on the Holocaust. It derailed her career.

NBC ran an excerpt from Mike Hixenbaugh's new book about the right wing assault on education. Among other features of this story, a peak at how far these folks are willing to go to ruin life for the people they disagree with.

When Conservative Parents Revolt

Some more Hixenbaugh. This time at the Atlantic, looking back to Reagan prequel to curent culture panic.

How going back to the SAT could set back college student diversity

I missed this story when it ran at The Conversation back in April, but it's still worth a look.

Press Reports Ranking American High Schools Mislead the Public

Jan Resseger walks us through the debunking of US News high school rankings, because they are just as dumb as you think they are.

Yes, The Boston Globe Can Report Who Is Funding K-12 Dark Money Interests. Or Not. It’s a Choice.

Maurice Cunningham, dark money expert, points out that certain major media outlets could report on that sort of thing if they really wanted to. 

School districts working with anti-LGBTQ groups can cost your kids’ schools millions

In Pennsylvania, the Independence Law Center will help your district craft anti-LGBTQ, anti-diversity, anti-reading rules, and they'll do it pro bono. Just don't be surprised if it ends up costing you some real money.

Virginia school board votes to restore Confederate names

Sam Cabral reports for BBC News about one district's crusade to honor treasonous losers.

Judge partly sides with plaintiffs suing to stop Arkansas’s ban on ‘critical race theory,’ ‘indoctrination’

Benjamin Hardy reports for Arkansas Times on a setback for the governor's repressive plan. 

Disingenuous Republicans want to force overworked NC public school teachers to post all lesson plans online because indoctrination

Justin Parmenter blogs about the newest plan to make life more miserable for teachers in North Carolina.

Arizona’s ‘universal’ education savings account program has become a handout to the wealthy

A Brooking study discovers some non-shocking news-- Arizona's vouchers are mostly just a taxpayer-funded subsidy for the wealthy.

5 takeaways about segregation 70 years after the Brown decision

Jill Barshay at Hechinger takes a look at current data about segregation in US education. Not entirely encouraging.

The unexpected explanation for why school segregation spiked

Laura Meckler at Washington Post. "Unexpected" is doing a lot of work here, because lots of folks totally expected this-- the secret ingredient in renewed segregation is school choice.

Wealthier and Whiter: Louisiana School District Secession Gets a Major Boost

School district secession continues to be a popular way to re-establish segregation. Beth Hawkins reports for the 74. 

Want to show teachers appreciation? This top school gives them more freedom

A radical notion, reported for the AP by Terry Spencer. In Florida, of all places.

Inside a rural Iowa school district’s fight to save public education

There's a lot to dig through in this story, but eventually you arrive at the root of the problem-- Iowa's decision to give state funding to schools on a per pupil basis. It's a warning for every state following a similar path.

ChatGPT Both Is and Is Not Like a Calculator

John Warner at Inside Higher Education with some smart thoughts about some not-smart thoughts about ChatGPT and its ilk.

Utah fields nearly 4,000 “bogus" reports in first week of trans bathroom ban

Utah set up a hotline so that folks could report any violations of the state's trans bathroom ban. It has gone about as well as you might expect.

The Grinch Who Stole Teacher Appreciation Week

Nancy Flanagan on the business of guilting teachers into a few extra miles.

Stuck on the Merry-Go-Round of Bad Ed. Policy for 40 Years!

Nancy Bailey does a quick inventory of the junk we've been stuck with through forty years of bad corporate reformster baloney.

The Breach of a Face Recognition Firm Reveals a Hidden Danger of Biometrics

From Wired. A data breach in Australia is a reminder that surveillance includes collecting a lot of sensitive data that may or may not be well protected.

The BASIC programming language turns 60 — Dartmouth BASIC started it all in 1964

Ah, my fond memories of programming in BASIC on punch cards back in 1979. Happy birthday to a generation's first computer programming language.

Meanwhile, over at the Bucks County Beacon, a piece about the group that's pushing school chaplains. 

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MO: Put Those Lazy Kids To Work

Add Missouri to the list of states that wants to do away with those silly laws intended to protect the rights of children in the workplace. Because Kids These Days need a good swift kick in the workplace.

Currently Missouri requires schools to sign off on work permits for 14 and 15 year olds to make sure that everything is in line with laws restricting what work children are allowed to do, and when (employers are required to describe the job in detail on the form). But legislators are considering a bill to do away with that and fix it so that all students need is a parent's permission slip. 

This may seem like a less-than-great idea. It allows parents to undermine a child's education in order to make a few bucks. And it removes the already-meager protections that stand between children and unscrupulous employers. Sure, a fourteen year old is totally able to stand up for their rights under the law (which in Missouri, where those rights don't include things like break time, are meager already). But businesses need more meat widgets. 

Maybe you agree with the St. Louis Today headline that says, "Bid to loosen Missouri's child labor law would help businesses--but not kids." But you're mistaken.

And here comes Rep. Cheri Toalson Reisch to explain. 

Reisch has shown her keen grasp of student-related issues before, like that time she went on Facebook to claim that Columbia students were dressing as animals and using litter boxes. Yes, that story. The superintendent said no, and she kept at it. When pressed for actual evidence, she cited the need to protect her confidential sources. So we know she's familiar with bogus claims and lying. 

Reisch had some words to offer in support of this bill in particular and child labor in general, and it's quite a view into the thinking of some folks. After decrying the division and pointing out that this is a good bill that everyone should vote for...

You know, at what point are people going to be self-responsible? Some people seem to think the government is the answer for everything. You know, free food, free health care, free this, free that, free, free, free. But it's not free. These young kids need to be taught self-responsibility, and I can tell you my personal story. I started working at age nine, and I continued to work throughout high school when I was fourteen, fifteen. 

She wanted to get a drivers license, and her parents said they couldn't afford to put her on the insurance. "Much less a car," she adds in a tone suggesting disdain for those spoiled pampered kids who get cars. She worked. Her older brother worked and got a car. And it didn't affect any grades-- she still got As.

My parents always asked me, "Cheri, how do you get A plus?" Well, Mom and Dad, you get 100% on your homework and you do extra credit. And throughout high school when I was working twelve months out of the year, my high school counselor came to me and said, "Cheri, you're bored. You've got enough credits. Graduate early!" I graduated early out of high school, went to work full time--

Working full; time while going to school. It is good for these kids. And you know what these kids of today are? Majority of them are lazy! They don't know what work ethic is! But they know how to play video games all night! They know how to join gangs! They know how to get into trouble! Get a job and be responsible!

No matter what tone of voice you imagine while reading that, I guarantee it doesn't match the contempt for These Kids in Reisch's delivery. The rant was followed by a vote for which the bill won first round approval. 

This is where they are in Missouri-- kids don't need that fancy book learnin' (which you can get around with some extra credit anyway)-- just get 'em to work so they can learn that life is hard and unpleasant and they need to suck it up. Though Reisch is also the rep who was sued because she blocked a constituent on Twitter for saying things she didn't like, so I guess sucking it up is only for certain hard parts of life.

With this kind of hostility toward children in elected officials, it's no wonder that supporting education is not a bigger priority. But that's how it goes with "self-responsibility"- I'm responsible for myself and the rest of you can go pound sand because you're not my problem. And that includes all you lazy, freeloading children.

PA: A Voucher Bill, Again

Voucherphiles in Pennsylvania has tried to push vouchers again and again and again and again and again and again. They've been particularly encouraged by our Democratic Governor Josh Shapiro, who is supportive of vouchers for some reason. Last year they cobbled together a new version of the same old same old in hopes that it would meet his requirements, and instead he left them at the altar.

But Pennsylvania, particularly under a Democrat, would be such a policy win for voucher fans that they are unlikely to give up, and so here we are, once again contemplating this year's version of Lifeline Scholarships, aka more Pennsylvania school vouchers. 

Let's take a peek at SB 795 and see what features are included in this pass. 

Managed by the State Treasury, with an option to hire a third party to administer the program. So this voucher program would not be touched in any way by the education department.

Eligibility? No limits on income for the family of the student. Students are eligible if they are within the attendance boundary of a low-achieving school; that would also mean that students who are already attending a private school could grab one of these vouchers. Also, Pennsylvania defines a "low-achieving school" as one in the bottom 15% of Big Standardized Test scores, which means no matter how well the state does, somebody is always in the bottom 15%.

Funding? Shapiro has explained that he won't support a voucher program that takes money from the public school pile. So this bill proposes that the funding will come from... somewhere. Seriously. Here's all the funding language in the bill (under 1708-E):

(a) Establishment.--The Lifeline Scholarship Fund is established in the State Treasury. All interest and earnings received from investment or deposit of the money in the fund shall be paid into the fund and used for the purposes authorized by this article. Any unexpended money and interest or earnings on the money in the fund may not be transferred or revert to the General Fund but shall remain in the fund. 

(b) Funding.--The fund shall consist of money that is appropriated, given, granted or donated by the Commonwealth or any other government or private agency or person for the purpose established under this article. 

(c) Continuing appropriation.--The money in the fund is appropriated on a continuing basis to the State Treasury for the purpose of administering this article.

So, funding from somewhere. A neat trick, given the GOP is currently set on cutting state revenue by billions via a tax cut.

Costs? Sure better figure out where that funding is coming from, because this will get pricey fast. K-8 vouchers are $5K. Grade 9-12 is $10K. Special ed is $15K. That will be indexed to school spending increases, so it will be going up every year. 

Voucher schools are forbidden to charge extra to voucher parents or provide kickbacks to parents. That does not address the issue of private schools hiking their tuition to take advantage of that free state money, even as they encourage all their families to go get a voucher.

Accountability? A standard feature of voucher law these days is to deliberately avoid accountability. We already that Pennsylvania's current voucher system funds an astonishing amount of religious indoctrination and discrimination. Like most voucher bills, this one includes language that the private school remains "autonomous" and the state may not regulate them in any way. 

The Auditor General may (not "shall") conduct random audits of lifeline scholarship accounts. Nonpublic schools that want to receive voucher dollars need simply indicate so to the state; there are no checks, requirements, screenings, minimum competencies, or academic requirements that they need to meet. Just criminal background checks on employees, and be nonprofit. 

The Lifeline vouchers are at least restricted to tuition, school-related fees, and special ed services fees, and not trampolines and Playstation consoles.

Bottom line? This newest iteration is not the worst voucher program anyone ever proposed. It's just regular old bad. Financial drain from some un-named source in order to have taxpayers fund more discriminatory, unaccountable and unsuccessful schooling. Plus subsidies for families that are already putting their children in private school. Plus whatever more junk will be foisted on the state further down the road, because at this point we well know that the first voucher bill is always just a foot in the door, with the rest of the leg soon to follow.

This is not a good bill. It needs to die, and it would be lovely if Shapiro would help kill it instead of nursing whatever voucher brainworm is chewing away at him. 

Elon Musk Has Some Education Thoughts

Elon Musk has some thoughts about education, and because he's Very Rich, Fortune Magazine decided it should share some of those thoughts, despite Musk's utter lack of qualifications to talk about education. 

Reporter Christiaan Hetzner mostly covers business in Europe, so it's not clear how he stumbled into this particular brief piece, which appears to be lifting a piece of a larger conversation into an article. I'd love a new rule that says every time an outlet gives space to a rich guy's musings about areas in which he has no expertise, the outlet also publishes a piece about the musings of some ordinary human on the topic--maybe even an ordinary human who is an expert in the area.

Hetzner launches right in with both feet.

More than a century ago, Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw wrote, “He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches.” Well, Elon Musk is a doer with a lot of children, and he’s reached the conclusion he doesn’t want his kids to learn from some has-been or never-was simply because they landed a job in a local school thanks to a lack of competition.

It's not clear if Hetzner is editorializing or trying to channel Musk's point of view (I think perhaps the latter), but somebody here is really full of it. I'm not going to argue about Musk's doer qualifications, though his ability to profit off the work of others and his interminable botching of twitter leave me unpersuaded of his genius. But this characterization of teachers is some serious bullshit. And things aren't going to get better.

Over his lifetime, teaching fundamentally remained the same experience: an adult standing in front of a chalkboard instructing kids.

Of course, I don't know how they did things in South Africa when little Elon was a young emerald prince, but the "school has never changed" trope is tired and silly and a clear sign that someone knows little about what is happening in education, which has been highly interactive for decades. 

But sure. There is still an adult in a classroom, much as cars are still four wheels, one in each corner. But perhaps that's because Musk appears bothered that the shifts in tech that are "upending the labor force" haven't yet touched teachers. 

Musk calls for compelling, interactive learning experiences. His example is that, rather than teaching a course about screwdrivers and wrenches, have them take apart an engine and in the process learn all about screwdrivers and wrenches. I'm sure that my former students who learned about operating heavy machinery by operating heavy machinery, or learned about welding by welding, etc, would agree. I'd even extend his argument to say that instead of trying to teach students to read by doing exercises and excerpts, we could have them read whole works, even novels. 

But just in case you're not catching who Musk blames, Hartzen notes that Musk says that the system failed students because "the talents of the teaching staff tasked with imparting this knowledge to their students were sophomoric at best."

Then Musk throws in an entertainment analogy. Teachers are like the "troubadours and mummers of yesteryear who traveled from one backwater to the next, offering their meager services to those desperate for their brand of amateur entertainment." Education today is like "vaudeville before there was radio, TV, and movies." Which compresses a variety of different developments, but okay. 

Then along came Hollywood, and a critical mass of the most talented screenwriters, directors, and actors around joined forces to produce compelling and engaging content that can cost tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars.

So, what? We're supposed to inject hundreds of millions of dollars into education? And does this idea still work if we notice that the "content" cranked out by Hollywood is only "compelling and engaging" to some people. 

Finally, Musk throws in a reference that Hertzen calls "bizarre"-- thespians entertaining the locals in Small Town U.S.A. with a "low-budget rendition" of the caped crusader couldn't compete with Christopher Nolan's Batman. 

Are we sure? Are there not people who wouldn't be interested in either? Are there not people who find live performance far more compelling? I may be biased here, but we just spent two weekends playing to packed houses of folks who could have just stayed home and listened to the album or watched the movie. 

Look, some analogies fail because they aren't a good match for what they're analogizing, and some analogies fail because they are wrong to begin with ("this is just like the way a hummingbird lifts tractors out of tar pits"). Musk manages to fail both ways. But, you know, he's rich, so he gets to have his terrible insight elevated by a major magazine. Add that to the list of things that interfere with meaningful education discourse in this country.

Aunt Peg: An Appreciation

Margaret Feldman was born and raised in my small, the daughter of a musical family. Her father led the Baptist Sunday School Orchestra, and by recruiting members for that group brought a great deal of musical talent to the area. Like many folks in this area, her father had struck it rich in the newly burgeoning oil business. In his case, he developed a method of refining oil into a lubricant for watches and founded the Fulcrum Oil Company. It made him a healthy income, as did the jewelry store his father had started years before.

Margaret was a standout athlete at our local high school. After graduation she went on to Vassar. When she graduated, the second world war was heating up in Europe, and she went to work in DC in the office William Donovan at the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor for the CIA. Through her work, she came to know a wide variety of people from many walks of life and parts of the world (including Moe Berg, the baseball player who was also a spy).

But at the end of the war, her father had passed away, and so she came back home to run Fulcrum, becoming one of the few female CEOs in the country. Along with other women running a company, she was profiled in a Dun and Bradstreet publication in 1959. 

She got her teaching papers and went to work at Franklin High School, the same school she had graduated from years before. She taught English and quickly became department head. She retired in 1970, only because the district at that time had a mandatory retirement age for teachers. Several board members voted not to accept her resignation. 

Aunt Peg (her nickname by this point) stayed involved in the district. She substituted, and even when she was not working, she stopped by. Never married, no children of her own, she watched over those of us following in her footsteps. She dropped copies of the New York Times crossword in some teachers' mailboxes. Her ability to reach out to a vast web of contacts was legendary; she once presented a teacher with a baseball newly signed by a major league player. She held a summer "reading club" for select students from the school, a combination special tutoring and summer school program. When a new teacher arrived in town and made Peg's acquaintance, she lobbied hard for her hiring. That was Merrill, my work sister, about whom I have written before. 

When Peg passed a little more than thirty years ago, many of her former students gathered together, raised funds and created a foundation in her name. That foundation funds an annual essay competition for students in all of the county's high schools. They get a prompt, the essays are submitted, the director of the competition whittles down the stack, and then a group of local high school teachers judge the essays and select a winner. There are scholarship dollars, and a pair of traveling trophies that are engraved with winners' names and which sit at the school of the year's winner. 

For years, Merrill was the director of the competition. Now I do that job. We had the reception for the finalists and winners last night. As we heard each finalist read their essay, I looked around the room and realized that I was the only person there who had met Peg face to face. 

It is hard to estimate the reach of some teachers. I never had Peg in class, other than as a substitute, but I got to know her more as a teacher. Some of the teachers who inspired me were inspired by her, so I guess I was a sort of professional grandchild of hers, and my own students-now-teachers are great-grands and so on. Peg was old school, neither warm nor fuzzy, but fiercely dedicated to literature and writing and what we could learn from them about ourselves. There was never nonsense in her classroom, not even when she was subbing, but there was plenty of humanity, and a demonstration of how wide and deep and rich a life could be, even if it started here in our small town.

When you retire, you become a sort of ghost. You step off that boat careening downstream and you are left behind, out of sight around the bend, so swiftly it can take your breath away. Every year, the competition gives me the chance to remind a few people about who Aunt Peg was, but it's clear that her influence has mostly outlived her name, her memory. 

That, of course, is the gig. Most teachers don't even have a tiny award named after them; they do the work, exert the influence, fire up another set of students, and the effects of their work get passed along, hand to hand, linking an unforeseeable future to an unfathomable past. Happy teacher appreciation week!

VT: An Unqualified Ed Chief, Whether They Want Her Or Not

Vermont had been short an education secretary for about a year when Governor Phil Scott got his heart set on Zoie Saunders, despite Saunders having a less-than-spectacular resume.

Zoie Saunders has barely any background in public education. She attended the Dana Hall School, a private girls’ school in Wellesley, Massachusetts. Her first jobs were in the pediatric health care field, then she went to work in strategy for Charter Schools USA, a Florida for-profit charter chain, in particular profiting from taxpayer-funded real estate business. CSUSASUSA 0.0% was founded by Jonathan Hage, a former Green Beret who previously worked for the Heritage Foundation and Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Florida’s Future.  Here's League Education Chair Patricia Hall talking about how CSUSA rakes in the bucks:

Our shining local examples in Hillsborough County are owned by Charter Schools USA. My first glimpse of Winthrop Charter School in Riverview in November of 2011 was during a scheduled visit with then Rep. Rachel Burgin. When told the two story brick building was a charter school, I was mystified. The site on which it was built was purchased from John Sullivan by Ryan Construction Company, Minneapolis, MN. From research done by the League of Women Voters of Florida all school building purchases ultimately owned and managed by for-profit Charter Schools USA are initiated by Ryan Construction. The Winthrop site was sold to Ryan Co. in March, 2011 for $2,206,700. In September, 2011 the completed 50,000 square foot building was sold to Red Apple Development Company, LLC for $9,300,000 titled as are all schools managed by Charter Schools USA. Red Apple Development is the school development arm of Charter Schools USA. We, tax payers of Hillsborough County, have paid $969,000 and $988,380 for the last two years to Charter Schools USA in lease fees!

After six and a half years with CSUSA, Saunders moved into the job of Chief Education Officer for the city of Fort Lauderdale, a job that involved expanding education opportunities, including nonpublic schools.

Saunders took her first job in public education, chief strategy and innovation officer got Broward County Public Schools, in January 2024; her job there was the lead the district’s work to “close and repurpose schools,” a source of controversy in the community, according to the Sun-Sentinel. But her time as a school-killer for a public system was short, because Vermont was calling.

Once Scott announced his hiring choice (on a Friday), pushback was swift and strong. John Walters at the Vermont Political Observer, a progressive blog that has been all over this, noted that the lack of qualifications for the job was not the bad part:

The bad part is that her experience as a school killer and her years in the charter school industry are in perfect alignment with the governor’s clear education agenda: spread the money around, tighten the screws on public education, watch performance indicators fall, claim that the public schools are failing, spread the money around some more, lather, rinse, repeat. Saunders may not qualify as an educational leader, but her experience is directly relevant to Scott’s policy.

Objections to Saunders in the job were many, including her lack of any apparent vision for job. Add to the list the fact that she'd never run any organization remotely as large or complicated as a state's education department. 

Saunders moved into the office April 15, but the Senate still got to have a say, and what they said was, "Nope." They voted her down 19-9, a thing which pretty much never happens. 

 And Scott went ahead and put her in office anyway.

Roughly fifteen minutes after the Senate rejected her, Scott appointed Saunders the interim Secretary of Education, a thing that does not require any Senate approval and which he presumably doesn't have to move on from any time soon, particularly given she has announced her 100 day plan. Scott did not appear moved to appoint an interim during the year since Dan French resigned the post.

Scott characterized the vote as a "partisan political hit job," even though three Democrats voted with the GOP senators to approve. He characterized attacks on Saunders as "unfair," "hurtful," and "false."

Scott kept spinning in the aftermath, claiming that it was false to say that she only had three months 4experience in public education, even though she clearly only has three months of experience in the public education sector. As John Walters reported, Scott also tried to pin the defeat on "outside groups." Walters pointed out that Scott has previously said he favors "CEO experience more than public school experience," though Saunders doesn't have that, either. 

Ethan Weinstein at vtdigger reported that Saunders was unfazed by her interimness. 

“I’ve never been one for a title,” she said, nodding to her “interim” moniker. “I’m really about being engaged and doing the work.”

In an interview with Vermont Public on April 18, Saunders was not particularly impressive, After she brought up Vermont's funding system, she was asked how she would change it, and her answer was argle bargle about just learning and it wouldn't just be her decision and she's really good at developing shared visions with diverse stakeholder groups. Data driven. Collaborative. Absolutely unwilling to say what she thinks a good answer would be.

In that same interview, she was asked about charters and choice, including vouchers to religious schools. "Do you think there should be any limits on the amount of public funding that goes to private schools in Vermont?" First, she wants to make the "charter schools are public schools" point. Sure. Then a long non-answer-- she thinks the feds say you have to include religious schools and she knows that Vermont has been trying to take care of the discrimination-by-schools piece of that, but on and on saying nothing, certainly nothing about what she thinks is right or should be policy.

She did directly say that she's not interested in bringing charter schools to the state of Vermont. So that's a clear statement. But then she's asked about closing smaller schools, and that triggers more corporate speak about student outcomes and local control and not an actual answer to the question. Asked for her view about Ron DeSantis anti-DEI policies, she does manage to work in diversity and inclusion and support for all students in her answer. 

She comes across as a sort of corporate tool who is either trying to avoid expressing her vision or simply doesn't have one. Is that better or worse than having a Ryan Walters type who has a strong and toxic vision that he's willing to spew regularly?  

 Many folks around the whole approval flap report a lot of vitriol and nastiness around this whole business. On the one hand, that's a shame. On the other hand, when you nominate for the post of education chief people who are clearly unqualified and who are also closely associated with anti-public ed interests, it's going to rile folks up. At this point, we've seen that movie several times, and it always ends badly. Good luck, Vermont.  

ICYMI: May Mart Edition (5/5)

The first weekend in May in my small town is a big festival of growing things, with both parks filled with vendors selling plant and plant-related stuff. My own interactions with plants are limited to A) appreciating them and B) killing them. But this is still a cool thing. And it takes some of the sting off the sadness of the closing of our theater production today. 

But this week it's a large reading list, so enjoy and share and I hope it's pretty where you are.

Remember Betsy? Michigan education leaders blast Trump for ‘abandoning’ public schools

From The 'Gander, Kyle Kaminski interviews some education leaders who point out the obvious--if you care about public education, Trump is probably not your guy. Includes an appearance by Friend of the Institute Mitch Robinson.

Does ‘Grading for Equity’ Result in Lower Standards?

At EdWeek, Risk Hess interviews Joe Feldman, who proceeds to gently explain how a recent Fordham critique of equitable grading was pretty much wrong. 

Press Reports Ranking American High Schools Mislead the Public

Yes, the US News rankings are junk. Jan Resseger explains.

Pennsylvania Taxpayers Are Funding Discriminatory Religious Schools

Catherine Caruso covers a report that I reported on as while back, but she does it in The New Republic, so hooray for more people getting the message about Pennsylvania's crazy discriminatory voucher program.

NC school voucher dollars are funding Christian Nationalist indoctrination

It's not just PA. Justin Parmenter has been running down all of the religious indoctrination and discrimination being funded by taxpayers in North Carolina, and it's a lot.

The Making of Michele Morrow

Speaking of North Carolina, they've got a woman running for state superintendent who is Ryan Walters-level right wing. Carli Brosseau at The Assembly has produced the best deep dive into Michele Morrow seen so far.

Iowa legislator opening his own private school, to be funded by vouchers he voted for

Yes, really, Help pass a law to help people get rich, then go cash in. Also, put your wife on the board. You'd think it would all be illegal, but no... Ty Rushing covers story for Iowa Starting Line.

Reynolds’ voucher program is about destroying public education

A former Iowa superintendent doesn't think much of Governor Reynolds' plans for public schools in Iowa.

Ohio’s *School Vouchers for All*: Expanded, Expensive, but Not Audited

The indispensable Mercedes Schneider details some of the shenanigans surrounding Ohio's voucher program (a program that is currently being dragged into court).

What Is That New Car Smell?

Florida is the petri dish in which a thousand school choice bacteria bloom. For instance, would you like some of the tax you pay for your new car to go to fund home schoolers? Sue Kingery Woltanski will guide you through this bizarro voucher grift.

A San Diego charter school may shut down its high school by the end of this school year

The San Diego Union-Tribune reminds us that charter schools are routinely unstable. Turns out amateurs have trouble making them work.

A controversial group looks to join school chaplain program under proposed OK legislation

Yet another state decides that allowing faux chaplains into schools might be another way to get Christianity in there, and so another states gets to say Howdy to the Satanic Temple. Welcome to the club, Oklahoma.

Do Schools Really Need To Give Parents Live Updates on Students' Performance?

Lenore Skenazy at Reason, of all places, points out that maybe the ever-available grade portals are doing at least as much harm as good.

Ultra-conservative lawmakers target Louisiana libraries as culture war rages on

Piper Hutchinson at Louisiana Illuminator runs down the many ways that some lawmakers are trying to stomp down libraries.

The PA mother who’s standing up against book bans—and the Dems standing with her

Ashley Adams at The Keystone  looks at one mom fighting for reading rights in Chester County.

NEPC Review: The Reality of Switchers (EdChoice, March 2024)

EdChoice created a "report" claiming to show that vouchers are a money-saver for taxpayers. Voucher scholar Josh Cowen explains why the report is pure bunk and hackery.

A new lost generation: Disengaged, aimless, and adrift

Robert Pondiscio at the Fordham Institute blog attempts to put school absences in a larger context. 

School Wars

Since it was Star Wars Day yesterday, let's go back to that time that Mr. Finkle managed to spoof Star Wars and school testing all at once.

At Forbes.com this week I looked at vouchers and their transparency problem.

Come join me on substack. More subscriptions means a greater reach, and it's free!

Should We Voucherize Title I?

Spoiler alert: no, we should not.

However, not everyone agrees, as witnessed by this "policy brief" (aka "blog post with footnotes and letterhead") from Ray Domanico for the Manhattan Institute, the same right-tilted thinky tank that employs Christopher Rufo, chief promoter of critical race theory panic.

Domanico opens with some history. Title I was born of the civil rights movement post Brown v. Board. And if you're wondering why folks on the corporate right aren't fans, it could be that Title I dramatically increased the federal government's share of education funding. In 1957, the feds kicked in 1.3% of K12 district revenue: in 1977, that was 8.1%. In 2021, the percentage temporarily goosed with Covid funs was all the way to 10%. That translates to billions and billions of dollars.

Next up-- a literature review of anything that helps prove Domanico's assertion that Title I has failed in its goal of improving "academic outcomes for the disadvantaged." This assortment of papers from the Manhattan Institute and other right-tilted advocacy groups finds that Title I wasn't working, and that it was even involving things like Whole Language!

But achievement gaps--aka the scores on the Big Standardized Test as distinguished between the poor and the not poor--were not reduced. Therefore, fail. Because education has no purpose except to improve student scores on the BS Test. In fact, as Domanico correctly points out, Title I became another justification for more emphasis on the BS Tests.

Domanico is also not keen on how the Duncan-Obama administration used threats to Title I funding as leverage to push their policies, and I do not disagree, just as I do not disagree of his story that shows imposing Common Core was a big mistake, and if I could find anything from the Manhattan Institute at the time objecting to Common Core I would gladly link to it, but all I can find are pieces like this one, in which the Institute scolds conservatives for opposing Common Core when it's clearly such a worthwhile thing. In other words, Domanico is both correct and about a decade late.

He winds around to arguing that Title I is a mess because its original intention is lost in current ed policy debates and federal overreach is super-unpopular. Also, it didn't fix the test score gap. 

His proposed solution? "Modernize" Title I funding.

Using federal powers to address social inequity and education for all is a policy that "emerged in a political environment that has expired." Federal involvement in educational equity is so last century. 

Now, what you could do, Domanico suggests, is turn the Title I money into vouchers, specifically education savings accounts, where you just hand the money to families and wash your hands of any obligation to try to get them a decent education let them spend the money as they think best. The state's could also fund math and reading tutors, or "distance learning for advanced coursework for lower-income students in rural areas." Because that distance learning thing has been super-popular the last few years.

Of this idea:

The best thing that could happen to Title I is for it to be turned into a national scholarship or tax credit program for lower-income families to use for tuition in the school of their choice.

This was Betsy DeVos's Education Freedom plan, though she at least proposed a national tax credit voucher program without gutting Title I at the same time. But Domanico not only wants vouchers and to end federal funding of Title I, but he wants to be clear that, given recent SCOTUS decisions, private religious schools should get some of those sweet taxpayer dollars. In fact, he likes the idea so much that he sort of botches the wording--

Given recent Supreme Court rulings—clarifying that a state need not offer school choice but if it does, it cannot exclude religious schools—Title I funds should flow directly to religious schools chosen by the families of eligible students, ending the practice of funding local school districts to provide services to eligible religious-school students.

 Flow directly to religious schools? I thought the money flowed directly to the families, thereby avoiding charges that we were using taxpayer funds in violation of the First Amendment. Huh.

In conclusion, he really wants vouchers. Also, the feds should stop using Title I funds as policy leverage.

It's an argument that has been repeatedly made, though this is a rare chance to see it all laid out in one blogpost policy brief. It has the usual feature of so many reformster arguments-- let explain the problem to you in great detail, and then propose my solution while skipping the part where I provide an argument for how my solution actually solves anything. 

It also shows how some folks on the right cannot see what is plain to some other folks on the right. If a big problem with Title I is that federal funds come with federal strings and levers attached, then why would those same strings and levers not stay attached when Title I funds are used as vouchers?

As a sort of tag, Domanico suggests that if the feds won't shape up, maybe a state would like to just reject Title I funding. Because that clearly won't negatively affect any of the high-poverty schools that depend on those dollars. Because maybe Title I, which has all the lumbering clumsiness of any federal program, still provides a bit of a lifeline to underfunded schools and the students in them and would be better off expanded rather than gutted. 

PA: Serpents and School Boards and the ILC, Again

Here's one more story of how Pennsylvania's leading right-wing law firm wiggles its serpentine way into local districts. 

Central York School District in Pennsylvania was one of the early poster children for reactionary culture panic board take overs, and they leaped right into book banning--and then leaped back out because a Large Fuss was raised. And then continued to wrangle over book banning, particularly banning that seemed aimed at erasing LGBTQ and non-white voices. 

This was a place that made its banning choices by looking at a list of 300 works recommended by a diversity committee and saying, "Nope" to all of them, including works like Brad Meltzer's I Am Rosa Parks (a children's book). 

In the midst of all this noise were board members Vicki Guth and Veronica Gemma, who back in August of 2020 faced calls for their resignation over comments questioning any need for teaching ab out tolerance and racism. 

Gemma was the president of the board at that time, and when she didn't resign, voters took the old-fashioned route and voted her out of office, hard. Gemma did not quietly; as a lame duck, she tried to mount an investigation into the book ban controversy, taking a slant that would be used later by Ron DeSantis, arguing that some people just meddled with the list to make the board look bad. "It was a collaborative effort to destroy our reputation for political reasons," Gemma said. Because, you know, the banning of diversity texts wouldn't have looked bad on its own.

Gemma found herself a job that seems to fit. She now works as a district office manager for York County state Rep. Joe D'Orsie (R-Mount Wolf). D'Orsie introduced legislation exempting school employees from honoring the pronouns of LGBTQ+ students, similar to a policy drafted by the ILC and passed by the Red Lion Area School Board last year.

But that's not her only new gig. She's also Director of Education for the PA Economic Growth PAC. The PAC is headed by John Davis, who owns a mall in York, along with Kristen Rohrbaugh, a "seasoned brand specialist" and Don Yoder, all of whom contributed a small pile of money to the group. The group stands for "championing freedom, preserving capitalism, demanding transparency, and empowering the people," though as with many right wing groups, those stances come with asterisks.

For instance, that one about transparency.

Here's Gemma talking to Epoch Times about her gig, to combat critical race theory and DEI.

PAEGPAC did a lot of mailing work for campaigns (with Rohrbaugh's company apparently doing the design work), though they did chip in $500 to the 1776 Project PAC, a million-dollar PAC that targeted school board elections.

But now The York Dispatch has unearthed emails that show the PAC has been doing more than just sending out mailings.

Meredith Willse, writing for the dispatch, shows how Gemma put together some secret meetings to play matchmaker between York school boards and the right-wing law firm, Independence Law Center, the firm that specializes in crafting anti-LGBTQ, anti-DEI, anti-book policies for districts all across the state. 

In a March 4 email, Gemma invited members from 12 school districts across York County, warning them specifically not to bring more than four members because any more would make the meeting subject to Pennsylvania's sunshine laws. Turns out the PAC's interest in transparency has some exceptions.

Ther secret meeting was on March 15 at an East York warehouse, located in the rear of a strip mall, with catering by Round the Clock Diner. You will be unsurprised that nobody answered Willse's request for a comment.

The email referred to the ILC, a firm that many York County districts have been hiring this spring. And the email makes clear that this is a regular get together: 

We finally nailed down a date that works for most. Keep in mind we will have these meetings every quarter so if you miss this one, we can see you at the next.

In a separate editorial, the York Dispatch Editorial Board does a good job of connecting the dots. They look back to a 2005 meeting with ILC's chief counsel Randall Wenger, who had worked with another firm as counsel in the case that ultimately threw out Dover School Board's attempt to inject creationism into science classes. His take was that the board members had been to clear and transparent about their intent to inject religion into school. 

He told attendees: “I think we need to do a better job at being clever as serpents.”

So now ILC and their allies show their commitment to acting like serpents, because lying and sneaking are super-consistent with Christian values. 

Secret meetings seem to be a special technique of, which has also set up secret meetings with board members in my corner of the state. 

At this point, it's best to assume that if your board is making noise about anti-LGBTQ, anti-book policies, ILC is in your neighborhood, slithering and you just need to start turning over rocks to find them. 

It reminds me of a saying that friend used to keep on his fridge. It's about using any means to an end, to the effect that since we rarely fully achieve our ends, we are much more defined by the means we use. If you get really good at being a serpent, don't be surprised at the end of the day when you find you can't shed your skin.