Taxation Without Representation

America's favorite voucher evangelist and some of his friends stopped by my twitter feed yesterday to share some thoughts about my latest piece for The Progressive and he shared this bon mot

It's true. The public school system also uses tax dollars collected from childless taxpayers. But there's a difference-- a critical one.

It's not a point of hypocrisy. Some folks are going to say that the voucher-loving taxation-is-theft crowd are being hypocrites to say that they don't like paying school taxes except when it benefits them, but I'd argue that their point is more "If we're going to do this thing I hate, let's do it in a les objectionable way" or maybe "Watch me hoist these libs by their own petard." And that's as American as apple pie. 

It is certainly more accurate to point out that vouchers don't just give certain taxpayers their money back. And it is certainly problematic that a voucher system uses money not just from childless taxpayers, but from parents whose own children are not allowed to participate in the voucher system (too poor, too not-religious-enough, too LGBTQ, too low achieving etc etc etc).

But the big critical difference is that in the public system, childless taxpayers get to participate.

They get to elect board members who then decide how those tax dollars should be best used. They get a voice. Their voice may not always dominate, and sometimes the voices that do dominate are, well, not so awesome.

But today is a good day to remember that democratic governance (or a republic, either*) is not defined as "system of government in which I always get what I want." All democracy promises us is a voice. And that's one of the things that a voucher system denies. Private schools do not answer to the public, are not owned or operated by taxpayer-elected boards, and are not required to show the public jack squat about what they do with taxpayer dollars. To really hammer the point home, most voucher laws now come with hands off language, expressly forbidding the people's elected representatives from interfering in private school operation in any way.

One of the things that got us riled up as colonies was taxation without representation--taking our money without allowing us a voice. That denial of a voice to childless taxpayers is an undemocratic feature, and a distinct contrast with the public system which, though imperfect, provides avenues for taxpayers to be heard, to get some representation with their taxation

Undemocratic processes have been critical for school vouchers; no voucher proposal has ever survived a public vote, which is one reason that voucher evangelists have to evangelize to legislators and not the general public. 

It has been a long, slow process to give more Americans a voice since we were founded all those years ago. School vouchers seem like a step back for many reasons, but calling for more taxation without representation is definitely a backwards move.

Happy Fourth of July! Enjoy the day!

*Reminder for all those trying to make a distinction out there that democracy and republic are just the terms derived from Roman and Greek for "of the people."

PA: Bill Proposes $8000 Payoff To Ditch Public School

A new bill in the Pennsylvania Senate is a sort of super-voucher stripped of any pretense, because it simply pays parents to pull their child out of public school.

SB 1280 is short and sweet. Every parent who has a child not in public gets an $8000 payoff from the state.

The payoff comes in the form of a personal tax credit of $8000 per child. That's not an "up to $8000," either:

The tax credit under this section shall be applied against the taxpayer's tax liability. If the tax credit exceeds the taxpayer's tax liability, the department shall issue a refund under the procedures specified in section 346 of the Tax Reform Code of 1971.

In other words, if you  only owe $2,000 in taxes, you get a $6K check from the state. 

Governor Josh Shapiro has signaled that he does not support the speedwalked  bill, which was introduced last week (June 26) and will be considered by the finance committee this morning (Wed, July 3). 

There's no income requirement for eligibility, and unlike other vouchers, there's no requirement for how the money must be spent. It's just $8000 payoff to pull out of public school. It applies equally to private school or home schooling-- just so long as you get your kid out of public education.

Maddie Hanna and Gillian McGoldrick are all over the story for the Philadelphia Inquirer (and Steven Goldrick sent up the alert on Twitter), where they get this on the nose quote:

“We’ve just gotten a signal of what the end of the road is: the destruction of public schools,” said Dan Urevick-Ackelsberg, senior attorney at the Public Interest Law Center. He called the expedited bill the “Episcopal Academy Assistance Act,” highlighting the Newtown Square private school where high school tuition tops $43,000 as one of the expensive schools that could benefit from such a proposal.

True enough. There is no pretense here of helping students from poor families get to better education. There's not even a pretense that this is taxpayer dollars directed at education. It is the baldest version of vouchers yet-- "We will pay you to abandon public education. We don't care what you do about educating your kid. Just get out of public education."

How expensive would this be? There are roughly 275,000 students in private school. Maybe 126,000 home schooled students. So that would blow a $3.2 billion hole in the state budget in a combination of taxes not collected and cash paid out. And that's just if nobody else jumped on the deal.

It's unlikely that the bill would get past the Democratic controlled House, though one never knows, and it's unlikely to get past Shapiro, who previously scrapped a proposed voucher bill.

This is based on the Oklahoma model (sponsor Senator Judy Ward pointed to Oklahoma as an example in the committee meeting Wednesday morning). 

Oklahoma's version was dressed up in lots of pretty language about families and educational choices. The Pennsylvania version is notable for how direct it is. Vouchers have usually pretended to be about "The state wants you to abandon public schools. We'll wash our hands of responsibility for providing a decent education for your child, and in return we'll cut you a check to help defray the costs, a little." 

This drops that whole game. "We'll cut you a check to just walk away from public education," is next level stuff. I want to call it a voucher, but it doesn't even pretend to be that. Just a payoff and an attempt to gut public education while washing the state's hands of even the most rudimentary attempt to help families provide an education. Here's your check, thanks for getting out, and good luck to you.

Mind you, this is Pennsylvania, where we're already looking at a multibillion dollar fix for a school funding system that has been ruled unconstitutional by the courts. Maybe Ward figures if we can just pay everyone to leave the public system, we won't have to fund it. I'm not sure that's anyone else's idea of a solution. 

Update-- But I just realized something important. The bill says you claim the tax credit by filling out the app0ropriate line on your tax form, but Pennsylvanian's who make under $33K do not have to file income tax with the state. So much for benefiting the poor.

AI and Disengaging Reality

I'm fully aware that I'm going to sound like an old fart here, but I think much of what AI is promising to deliver is not just an advance in technology, but a lurch in the wrong direction and fundamentally bad in ways that all other technology up until this point was not.

For virtually all of human history, technology has helped us extend our reach, sometimes in incredibly powerful ways. Reading and writing allowed us to listen to the insights and ideas of people separated by time and space. The printed word increased that miracle by a thousand-fold. 

Centuries of advance in various media have extended our human reach. Just think of the ocean.

When my students would complain about the verbosity of authors from an earlier time, I would point out the limitations of the age. Back then, I'd say, the only way to see the ocean was to physically travel to the ocean and look at it with your own eyeballs. Maybe you could see a painting of it, though you could only see the painting if you were physically standing in front of it. So an author who wanted to evoke the ocean would have to do a lot of work to create that picture in the minds of readers who really didn't have much on which to draw. 

Then there came photographs. Then print, so that you could see copies of photographs and paintings. Then movies. Then photographs and movies in color. Then television. The color television, on which to watch the movies of the ocean, or maybe even live broadcasts from the ocean itself. Then the internet and the capability to share depictions or even live feeds of the ocean on a device you carry in your pocket, any time you wish.

The march of media technology has brought the ocean closer and closer to every human being.

Ditto for areas of human knowledge. Go back far enough and you're in an era in which the only way to learn some piece of information is by talking to a person who already knows it. Then writing made it possible for many people to get that piece of information, even if the person who originally possessed that information is currently deceased. The printing meant an incalculably large number of persons could reach out and grab that information, and digitized technology increased the number exponentially. 

Even the internet, for all the demonization and pearl-clutching about Kids These Days tied to their screens, has made it easier to connect with other human beings. Left-handed basket-weaving afficionados can now find each other and share ideas. My daughter and her family are on the other side of the country, and while they can only travel back here a couple of times a year, my grandchildren are growing up knowing my face and voice. 

The long march of media technology is toward increasing engagement, making it easier and easier to find and grasp and grapple with ideas and people and the world.

Media tech has steadily built bridges between individual human beings and the larger world around them. But AI promises something else.

AI builds a wall around the world, then sits on top of the wall and promises to tell us what it sees, more or less, kind of, with maybe some extra made up stuff thrown in.

This is not always a bad thing. If I want to know how many sheep are in my yard, I could go out and count them myself, or I could ask software to count them then report the number back to me. Useful.

But other wall building work is more troubling. I deeply love that for any question that occurs to me, I can google a variety of sources, look through them, learn about the answers to the question. Or I could skip actually engaging with the sources and just let the terrible AI from Google (or Microsoft or whoever) give me a quick summary of whatever it has scraped off the interwebs, more or less, with right, wrong and fictional all dumped into one big stew together.

Or like the ad that promises I can use AI to write up the notes from the meeting. I don't really need to pay attention. In fact, I don't even need to check in at all. Just let the AI monitor the meeting and then get back to me with the notes it compiles. No need for me to engage on my own. 

Or the many AI applications that boil down to "let AI deal with these persons so you don't have to" (or don't have to pay money to hire a human to do it). Los Angeles public schools paid $6 million to have a chatbot talk to students who needed academic and mental health help, building a wall around those students instead of bridge between them and another helpful human. The company just tanked.

In the classroom, I can skip reaching out to engage with the research and materials about the topic I want to teach. Just have AI look at the stuff and tell you what it found, mostly, kind of. 

Or the ultimate AI disengagement-- an AI writes the assigned essay for a class, and then an AI assesses the essay that the other AI manufactured, and no actual living humans engage with anything at all. 

AI threatens to foster a misunderstanding of what research and critical thinking are for. These mutated descendants of Clippy are predicated on the notion that the point is to look for a single answer which one then pours into one's noggin. Research should involve searching, collecting, evaluating, processing, and fitting together the bits of information, a process by which the researcher both fine tunes the results and sharpens and deepens their own understanding. Students have forever attempted to short-circuit that process ("Can't I just find the right answer and hand it in without all this mucking about?"). AI makes that short-circuiting simpler.

Tech and media have made it progressively easier to engage with the world; AI is a big bold step toward disengaging. AI tells humans, "Don't get up. I'll go look for you, and you just sit there and I'll bring you something." AI is not just a plagiarism engine, but a disengagement engine. A tool that moves its users away from the world instead of toward it, and there is nothing desirable about that.

Yes, maybe I am just a cranky old fart. (Okay, not "maybe") and perhaps there are ways that AI can be used to build bridges instead of walls. But my gut-level aversion to AI (and I have indeed played with it) is about this retrograde drift, this movement away from the world, the promise to build walls instead of bridges, the whole "You just stay on the couch and I will pretend to engage with reality for you" of it. I will yell at my own clouds myself, thank you.