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Wednesday, July 31, 2024

OH: Religion Skip Days

You've probably heard of Senior Skip Days, the odious tradition of 12th graders taking a day off just for being seniors, just cause they felt like it (yeah, I was never a fan).

Well, Ohio will now go one better.  They have just passed HB 214, creating Religious Expression Days. (This is actually not the first time this bill has been brought up.)

Under the new law, each public school must adopt a policy that “reasonably accommodates the sincerely held religious beliefs and practices of students; to require each public school to adopt a policy regarding certain expectations related to the performance of staff member professional duties.” 

The policy must allow students to skip up to three days of school for "reasons of faith or religious or spiritual belief system or participate in organized activities conducted under the auspices of a religious denomination, church, or other religious or spiritual organization." 

And if you are imagining that this policy is ripe for abuse, the policy says that the school must approve the absences "without inquiry into the sincerity of a student’s religious or spiritual belief system." Also, students will still be eligible to participate in sports on the days they missed school for their religious thing. Teachers will provide make-up work or an alternative test if needed. The school is allowed to require a parent's signature to okay the students' religious time off. 

All right. It's marginally better than having the school rule on which religions are "legit." And I can see the value of such accommodations for all the religious holidays that aren't Christian and therefor already baked into the school calendar. But that doesn't seem to be where this is coming from. As reported at Mahoning Matters:
“Ohio’s recent political climate has raised concerns that Ohio’s K-12 public school teachers, staff and students may face negative consequences for expressing certain political perspectives or failing to conform to specific ideological viewpoints,” bill sponsor Rep. Adam Holmes, R-Nashport, told the House Primary and Secondary Education Committee during testimony. “More directly, concern is growing that employment, funding, promotion, certifications, and classroom evaluations in Ohio’s public schools are increasingly tied to demonstrated support for specific ideologies and political opinions.”

Given that Adam Holmes has previously backed Ohio's parental rights bill and a bill to exempt homeschoolers from oversight and accountability, I don't think he's worrying about how conservative christianists are imposing their world view on others.

But I also fully expect the Satanic Temple to start sponsoring Three Days Of Rational Activity time off for students. And that's even before the students themselves start getting creative. "I need a day off to go worship at my beloved First Church of Because I Feel Like It." I reckon one unexpected consequence of this law will be a huge rise in the number of Ohio students and parents who develop a habit of putting the word "religion:" in air quotes. Maybe this is supposed to increase respect for religion, but I don't think that's how it's going to play out.

The law also includes some section about not allowing schools to inquire into staff beliefs when hiring. It does not, however, extend to staff the privilege of taking three religious holidays per year. Nor does it explain how this dovetails with the rising alarm over school absenteeism.

School districts have 90 days to get that policy whipped up. Presumably they will not be able to demand an extension for religious reasons.





Monday, July 29, 2024

Godspeed, Coach Stewart

In the gallery of high school teachers who taught me about the different ways to be a teacher, there will always be a spot for Joe Stewart.

Joe Stewart's claim to fame in our small town was as a hard-driving successful football coach in a town in which football was the only real sport. I played in the marching band, and it was partway through my junior year that I ever saw the football team lose. Pennsylvania's high school sports system had not yet figured out just how much money they could grab with post-season play, but it was clear that Coach Stewart's team would be one to beat on the larger level.

There is that persistent stereotype of the high school coach who only became a teacher so he could coach and whose classroom work showed little effort, who barely shows up during the day to lead his students on a desultory journey to easy As. 

That was not Joe Stewart.

He taught chemistry, and in the classroom his students never dared to be inattentive, unprepared, or off the mark. In retrospect, I'm not sure exactly why. His temper was a thing of legend--but only on the field, where his explosions were epic. I can still remember a football game at which we were suddenly surprised by a cloud of arms and legs flying, like a Warner Brothers cartoon battle, down the sidelines. Coach Stewart was in there somewhere.

But that was not the classroom. He almost never raised his voice, was never cruel or unkind, and yet... He absolutely demanded your full attention, all the time. Wisecracking students used to turning to deliver a split-second bon mot to fellow students found that they couldn't find even that little pause in the class to do their thing (at least, that's what I heard.) In Joe Stewart's c las, you paid completely attention from bell to bell, and you had better be prepared enough to deal with any questions lobbed your way. As one friend said to me as we marveled over the class, "You just have to pay attention so hard. It's exhausting." Years later I ran into Coach Stewart and was shocked to discover that he was not a particularly tall man at all; in his classroom, he always seemed like a giant.

Coach Stewart and his family moved into my neighborhood, two houses up the street. His oldest son was one of my best friends in those years, and we accompanied each other through a variety of nerdtastic adventures. None of his three boys were the kind of hard core athletic types that some might have imagined for Coach Stewart's kids. The two younger sons were cut from a somewhat different cloth, but they were smart and decent and the home was filled with warmth and love. Joe's wife was an extraordinary woman in her own right. And at the time I liked to think that as he watched his own boys grow up, Joe gained some new insight into why his teenaged students were They Way They Were.

There were stories about underprepared and slacking students being called up to his desk, during class, and breaking into tears before he said a word. But here's what I witnessed in my own class. Debbie, who would be our valedictorian and go on to double major in biochemical engineering space economics or some other improbably challenging field, set out one lab period to boil water over a Bunsen burner. But she did it in a styrofoam cup, and as the styrofoam slowly melted around the boiling water, Debbie started making noises of alarm, as Coach Stewart slowly worked his way around the room. This, we expected, would be an epic evisceration of a student. Instead he looked, chuckled a bit, and moved on.

I never imagined that I could run a classroom with that type of intensity, nor was it a style I had any desire to emulate. But there was something in Joe Stewart's work that stuck with me, typified by an illustration he delivered one day. 

I don't remember if it was prompted by a student complaint about the expectations in the class, or just something he decided to talk about. But he stood in front of us and explained about why his expectations were so high. "I know that if I ask for this--" and here he held up his hand to indicate a line somewhere above his head "--that I will get this." And here he held the hand around shoulder level. "And that's what I want to get. But if I ask for this" (hand still at the shoulder) "then I will get this" and here his hand dropped to his waist. It was as clear an explanation of expectations as I would ever get from a teacher training course, and perhaps more realistic. 

Every once in a while that old saw crops up about whether it's better for a teacher to be feared or loved, and I reckon that some FHS grads would say that Joe Stewart was feared, but I don't think that's right. I think his expectations were high, his demands were rigorous, and he treated students as if they were grownups who had no excuses, least of all the excuse of youth, for not producing the work he demanded of them. What you feared was not Joe Stewart, but the loss of his respect. 

He was a good man with a great coaching career and a great teaching career. He passed away last week at the age of 92. His memory, I am quite sure, is a blessing to many.

Sunday, July 28, 2024

ICYMI: Surprise, Surprise Edition (7/28)

Hard to believe that just a week ago, we still thought the Joe Biden was running for another term. Sometimes life just comes at you quickly. And some times the actual news will fit in a couple of sentences, but because we want to wrestle with it more, we listen to a whole lot of blather about the actual news. Enough of that. Let's get on with it. Here are some things to read.

A Florida school district banned ‘Ban This Book.’ Author says that’s ‘erasure of the highest order’ and wants it reinstated

CNN continues coverage of this very meta story, with Moms for Liberty snarling in the wings.

Florida 7-year-old compelled to testify in book ban lawsuit

Escambia school district has decided that a seven year old is too young to read a book about a penguin with two dads, but old enough to be forced to testify for 90 minutes.

Deer Creek, Yukon latest to refuse Ryan Walters' order to add Bible to curriculum

Walters decrees "Thou shalt teach the Bible." A growing list of school districts says, "No."

We can teach Black kids to read and love who they are. Here’s how.

Sharif El-Mekki writes about an initiative for the Philadelphia Inquirer. 

It’s Time to End Federal Funding for Reckless For-Profit Charter Schools

Carol Burris profiles a new bill that would straighten out some of the charter school funding shenanigans on the federal level.

COVID-19 devastated teacher morale − and it hasn’t recovered

Lesley Lavery and Steve Freiss look back at the punch in the face that was covid and our reaction to it. Nothing here you don't know, but I bet you'd put it out of your mind as much as you could.


Emily Hays for IPM news with a story about teaching hard things and why making kids uncomfortable might be a good thing. 

Critical Issues and Minutiae of Public Education

Nancy Flanagan on the tiny parts of education and when parents get obsessed with them.

How the Culture Wars Are Undermining Public Education

Jacobin runs an interview with Jennifer Berkshire, with plenty of pithy insights about the culture panic being directed at public education.

What's Ryan Walters really want, because all he's doing now is getting ignored?

A very cool thing is happening in Oklahoma. A whole lot of school districts are telling Ryan Walters to take his mandatory Bible teaching and stick it where hymns are not heard. Clay Horning writes about it for Oklahoma Columnist.


On top of that, there's now an opt-out form for parents who want to exercise those parental rights that Walters is so concerned about.


Sue Kingery Woltanski reminds us that Florida's crappy school evaluation system moves the goalposts regularly.


A set of presentation slides, both hilarious and insightful and also slightly rage-making.

Over at Bucks County Beacon, I point out that while folks are justifiably worked up over Project 2025, we should also pay attention to Agenda 47, in which Trump's plans for the future come out of his own mouth.


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Tuesday, July 23, 2024

Say No To VP Shapiro

Josh Shapiro has been a swell governor of Pennsylvania, certainly far superior to some of the far right wingnuts that we've had running in this state. But word is out today that he's on the Very Short List for the Kamala Harris VP, and all I can say is, I sure hope they don't pick him.

Shapiro has a good ear for many things, and as governor has gotten stuff done in a state where we often find a Democratic governor and a GOP-dominated legislature looked in paralytic embrace. He fixed a bridge--quickly.  Even the right-tilted Washington Examiner said he "met the moment" after the attempted assassination of Donald Trump. 

But when it comes to school vouchers, he is not a public school supporters dream.

He hasn't been shy about it. He ran on a platform that included explicit support for school vouchers, explicit in favoring the super-vouchers that Pennsylvania's GOP has been pushing for years.

Josh favors adding choices for parents and educational opportunity for students and funding lifeline scholarships like those approved in other states and introduced in Pennsylvania.

His education transition team included several choicers, including Amy Sichel, the superintendent who drew flak for selling naming rights for a high school to Donald Trump buddy Stephen Schwarzman, and Joel Greenberg, co-founding partner of Susquehanna International Group with Jeff Yass, Pennsylvania's most well-heeled deep pocketed activist for school vouchers.

The state Democratic Party was on the verge of telling him to back off the vouchers, but then they decided that just wasn't as important as other stuff

School privatizers worked out a bill that they thought would provide Shapiro sufficient political cover, meeting his requirement that it wouldn't take money from public schools (spoiler alert: it totally would), then were Very Upset when Shapiro decided not to sign off on that voucherpalooza. 

However, Shapiro immediately signaled that his voucher love was still strong and that he still wants to find a way to make it happen. In the meantime, he threw choice a bone by giving supporters a chance to "improve" the state charter board. And his crew went ahead and approved a new cyber-charter when there was every reason in the world to say no.

Look, it's not as if he's been sneaky or underhanded about his voucher love, but it's also not as if he's shown openness to consider evidence that his affection might be misplaced. Meanwhile, other governors like Governors Roy Cooper (North Carolina), Andy Beshear (Kentucky), Gretchen Whitmer (Michigan), and Tim Walz (Minnesota) have stood up for public education in their states (yes, they're not all available, but they are proof that such defenders exist).

The state Dems were willing to throw public education under the bus, and I don't expect much better from the national party. But it would be nice. It would be nice to have the nation's top spots occupied by solid supporters of public education who oppose privatization, who did not calculate that education is one place where they can just go ahead and adopt a slightly watered down version of right-wing policy, who did not embrace the kind of neo-liberal baloney that we've suffered under in previous administrations. 

The push to privatize education has never pushed harder, and public education has never been more in need of a champion at the highest level. Josh Shapiro is not that champion.

Sunday, July 21, 2024

Where's My Bubble?

We just took a quick day trip with the board of directors to an amusement park, one that has become a favorite of mine after roughly 17,000 excursions there as a class trip chaperone. One small incident reminded me of one reason we are having a moment about vouchers and choice in this country.

To understand the story, let me tell you a few things about regular life for the board of directors. The twins are now 7 and get very little screen exposure. In the summer, they get one "show" each on a daily basis (less during school). They don't have devices of their own, and they don't get to share ours. They do have screen time at school. But they are used to watching shows from tv or disc. Also, they are very accustomed to hearing some version of "no." 

So. We booked a hotel room for the night before. When we're doing longer traveling, we usually have a laptop with us, which, time permitting, let's them have a daily show. But this time we didn't. All we had was the cable for the hotel tv.

They were absolutely baffled. Why could we not just watch their shows? Why wouldn't we pull up Netflix? Why was this program in the middle and what did we mean, we couldn't just go back to the beginning and start over?  

None of this was angry or entitled, but about 1 part bemusement and 2 parts frustration with the grownups who were not smart enough to make things work the way they are obviously supposed to.

We have raised and are raising generations of citizens who are used to living in a bubble, a bubble in which they control most of what goes on, how it goes on, when it goes on. 

I have used before my tales of being a band bus chaperone and the effects of technology on shared space. Ages ago, the inside of a band bus was a shared space, as exemplified by the music. Ages ago, you got whatever the driver picked up (or could pick up) on the radio. Then debates over what tape to play. The use of boom boxes to break the space into smaller spaces. And finally, we arrive at the age of walkmans and ipods, in which what was once shared space is not shared at all.

Most of our popular culture in the 20th century was shared space. If you skip Super-Bowls and political debates, all of the most viewed episodes on tv are from at least thirty years ago; an entire generation has grown up with no idea of what Must-See TV is. 

I'm not waving my old man fist at technoclouds. Things change. But I do think that sometimes we overestimate the power of deep policy decisions and the long slow game for school choice and the privatization of education and underestimate the degree to which a generation has been affected by growing up in their own individual bubbles. 

Of course, the thing about bubbles is that they're fueled by available choices, and has always been true, the number of choices you have available is directly proportional to the amount of money you have to spend on them. Bubbles favor the haves way more than the have-nots; in fact, bubbles are often about the haves keeping the have-nots out.

Nor do I think society benefits from a shortage of shared spaces. But shared spaces are at odds with the commercial, mercenary consumer mindset, a mindset that encourages us to scrimp and save and hoard the resources we need to make ourselves the best damned bubble ever. Gimme my fully furnished neo-liberal bubble, baby.

Robert Putnam in The Upswing suggests that maybe we will figure out the value of shared spaces and bounce back. And maybe we will be moved by the loneliness of tiny gods; certainly the signs are that we are feeling it. Lots of folks like to point at social media and smartphones as culprits, and I have long resisted that notion because I have witnessed what a huge connective power that social media exerts, how it allows people to stay in contact with a myriad of human beings. But it does so as part of the process of building that bubble, and I think that bubble, that lack of time spent in shared spaces, is the more likely culprit in the steadily worsening mental health of younger generations (as well as, suggests Hannah Arendt, the growing attraction to totalitarianism). 

Public schools have been one of the great shared spaces in this country, shared not only because every child goes there, but because every taxpayer participates and contributes.

Preserving them as a shared space is crucial to our collective health. Some public school defenders link public schools to democracy, both as contributor and benefactor, but I think the issue is deeper than that, more fundamental our health as human beings. We need shared space to be fully, healthily human, even if we have to share that space with people with whom we disagree. Maybe even especially if we have to share the space with those people.

How to do this when so much of the tide is sweeping away shared spaces? How to make the argument to folks whose position is a simple, dispassionate "Why should I have this particular feature in my world when I don't want to and I don't have to?" 

There is a big bundle of questions to solve here, and I don't take them as simple theoreticals, because my sons and my grandchildren are the people who are growing up needing the answers, who are having their shared spaces devoured out from under them, and I worry about them reaching the point when their bubble is not a preference, but a necessity. 

ICYMI: Fun Field Trip Week Edition (7/21)

The Chief Marital Officer of the Institute took a couple of days this week to adventure with me. We even took the Board of Directors on one trip (details to come). Our anniversary was this week, so we were involved in some mild adventures preparatory to vacation, which is coming up soon. 

But there are still things to read, so here's your list for the week.

Ohio Charter Schools Still Struggle

Stephen Dyer provides an update on Ohio's attempt to improve their dismal charter school performance. Spoiler alert: it's not going well.

Ohio Seems to Be Throwing Away Public Education, Arguably America’s Most Important Institution

Jan Resseger connects several dots while looking at the current threats to public education in Ohio.


Josephine Lee reports for the Texas Observer on some financial shenanigans by the turnaround king. 

The Impact of Diverting Public Money to Private School Vouchers in Kentucky

Kentucky Center for Economic Policy takes a look at the impact that vouchers would have on Kentucky. A warning for many states.

No cellphones in classroom? Pa.’s new state budget has funding for that

One more state tries to take a side in the cell phone debates.


ProPublica looks into yet another Christianist group trying to work its will on education.


Columnist Rod Miller writes about a Wyoming decision slapping down an education department official for spending public money on politics. (Take notes, Oklahoma)

How do you really know if data-driven policies and outcomes are accurate?

John Thompson makes a guest appearance in The Oklahoman, asking about that data-driven stuff.

The Potential for Race Discrimination in Voucher Programs in a Post-Carson World

Yes, it's an academic paper, but it's by Preston Green, Bruce Baker, and Suzanne Eckes, and it looks at some important questions about the aftermath of SCOTUS chipping away at the church-state wall. What happens when free exercise beats civil rights?

The Rich Are Pushing Right-Wing Tax Education in Schools

There's a whole new education program headed to a school near you, and it's all about teaching the youngs to see that taxes are bad and rich folks shouldn't pay them. 

School Vouchers Were Supposed to Save Taxpayer Money. Instead They Blew a Massive Hole in Arizona’s Budget.

ProPublica again, by Eli Hager. Yes, universal school vouchers aren't saving money for anyone except the wealthy folks using them.

2024-25 Florida Voucher Funding Approaches $4 Billion

Speaking of blowing holes in budget, Sue Kingery Woltanski reports from Florida on their massive private school subsidies.

How the Culture Wars Are Undermining Public Education

At Jacobin, an interview with Jennifer Berkshire, whose new book you should definitely read.

Project 2025: Politicking for Jesus.

The indispensable Mercedes Schneider gives her take on Project 2025.

I am a Patriot

Nancy Flanagan on patriotism and the teaching thereof.

Republican candidate for NC Superintendent says Black men commit more than 50% of all crime in the United States

Running for the title Worst Education Chief In The US" is Michele Morrow in North Carolina, and Justin Parmenter has been patiently cataloging her awfulness. Here's just a sample.

A battle of wits between humans and chatbots

Benjamin Riley plays connections with chatbots. Some interesting outcomes ensue.

I've been busy outside of the mother blog ship. 


At Forbes.com this week--



* The latest news in the ongoing attempt by the Nebraska legislature to avoid letting voters have a say about school vouchers

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Tuesday, July 16, 2024

KY: Vouchers Would Be Bad News, Says Study

I'm not sure anyone would have expected Kentucky to emerge as one of the big voucher battlegrounds, but voucher fans have had a real uphill trek.

Kentucky voucherphiles created a bill, passed the bill in 2021, and then watched as the state supreme court ruled that the law was hugely unconstitutional. The problem was that Kentucky's constitution is unusually clear:
No sum shall be raised or collected for education other than in common schools until the question of taxation is submitted to the legal voters, and the majority of the votes cast at said election shall be in favor of such taxation

Voucher thought they had circumvented the problem by using tax credit scholarships, and the attorney general led the defense of the vouchers with the old "the money is never actually in the government's hands" argument. The court was unimpressed. “The money at issue cannot be characterized as simply private funds,” they wrote, “rather it represents the tax liability that the taxpayer would otherwise owe.”

Deputy Chief Justice Lisabeth T. Hughes wrote “Simply stated, it puts the Commonwealth in the business of raising sum(s) . . . for education other than in common schools.”

So the next move for voucher fans was clear-- amend the state constitution so that taxpayer dollars can be handed over to private schools. That's Amendment 2. It's pretty simple:
The General Assembly may provide financial support for the education of students outside the system of common schools.

Pick yes or no.

Now a new report from the Kentucky Center for Economic Policy lays out just how expensive a "yes" would be.

"The Impact of Diverting Public Money to Private School Vouchers in Kentucky" is deep and thorough and with more than enough charts and graphs to warm the wonky heart. But its findings are clear and cause for alarm.

Even a modest program would cost the state $199 million (the equivalent, the study points out, of employing 1.645 public school personnel). This is before the inevitable ballooning of the program. Arizona, on the forefront of universal vouchers is also on the forefront of having their budget slammed by a voucher program. ProPublica has just released a report showing that vouchers are about to force "hundreds of millions in budget cuts to critical state programs and projects."

The report points out that in other voucher states, 65%-90% of the taxpayer-funded vouchers go to families that already have their children in private schools, and that in Kentucky, that group has an average household income 54% higher than public school families. Even if you think the wealthy have a right to be subsidized by the taxpayers (including the less wealthy ones), that group represents an expansion in the number of students using taxpayer dollars, a dramatic expansion of education costs.

The cost of all this will hit rural and poor areas hardest, because they are the ones most dependent on state support, which will be reduced by the voucher program. At the same time, since few rural areas have private schools available, the voucher dollars will represent money leaving the community entirely.

Meanwhile, in populous counties, vouchers will increase the total cost of education in the area. Public schools will retain stranded costs (heating costs don't shrink just because you have fewer students) and parallel school systems will duplicate administrative costs. There's a reason that school districts trying to cut costs close buildings rather than opening new ones. 

The report nails the bottom line pretty effectively.

If Amendment 2 passes, it will upend Kentucky’s longstanding constitutional commitment to public education and result in legislation that diminishes public schools across the commonwealth. The amendment will widen the growing divides that are already weakening Kentucky communities and hinder education’s role in fostering the healthy democracy necessary for every Kentuckian to thrive.

Let's hope the voters of Kentucky heed the warning.  




Sunday, July 14, 2024

ICYMI: Horrific Violence Edition (7/14)

If we should have learned anything else in the past couple of decades, it's that leaping in quickly with comments and reactions before the smoke has cleared is a mistake, so I try to keep my mouth shut, but I will say this-- I have no love or respect for Trump, but this was terribly, deeply wrong.

The shooting hits hard here-- Butler is in my neck of the woods, a quick 40-mile jaunt up the road. We go there for some Red Lobster now and then. It's a small city, very much the kind of place that you would not expect something like this to happen.

Meanwhile, the story I was going to lead with took place in the next county over from Butler. A teenaged trans girl was found horribly murdered; a suspect is in custody. I would not have caught the story except for a message posted by Bishop Sean Rowe (currently newly elected top bishop of Episcopal church, formerly the priest at my own local Episcopal church). It's a terrible, brutal story.

I'm not a fan of critically acclaimed shows about horrible people doing horrible things' The world doesn't really need any more of that; certainly not in real life. I am grateful that in the education biz, we mostly don't have to spend a lot of time arguing about who does or does not deserve to be murdered. Mostly.

It's Sunday and my regular promise is a reading list and not a homily, so here you go. 

Florida Department of Education includes Jane Austen novel in ‘American Pride’ recs

What happens when you just search for key words in your library listing? Maybe this.

A Failure for ‘Divisive Concepts’ Legislation Is a Victory for Education

Jacob Goodwin takes a look at an important victory in New Hampshire. For The Progressive.

A school district in Pa. says students made fake TikTok accounts to target teachers

The new technological frontier in student trolling of teachers, scaled up. If you couldn't get past the NYT paywall when this story broke, here's the NPR coverage.

The Real Targets of Project 2025’s War on Porn

Melissa Gira Grant takes a look at the anti-porn portions of Project 2025 and how it fits with the culture panic of the past couple of years.

The College Board’s FAFSA Takeover

Liam Knox for Inside Higher Ed looks at the latest fallout from the FAFSA fiasco. No way this could end badly.

PROOF POINTS: Asian American students lose more points in an AI essay grading study — but researchers don’t know why

Jill Barshay at Hechinger looks at a study I've written about before--the one where humans and AI both scored the same essays. It's mostly bunk, but this little data point that has shaken out is just so weird...

The blasphemous GOP push for religion in public schools

In the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, paster Kate Murphy has a reaction to recent attempts to shove Christianity into the classroom, including the point that needs to be made much more often:
If the governor of Florida can, by the power not vested in him, unilaterally declare that the church of Satan isn’t a religion, then he can also wake up one morning and decide that Islam isn’t a religion, or Hinduism, or Catholicism or any faith that allows women to preach or doesn’t handle snakes.
Project 2025: Ending Public Education for Students with Disabilities

Nancy Bailey looks at how Project 2025 would affect special ed services, and it's not good. 

The indispensable Mercedes Schneider looks at how PragerU, the fake education video outfit, has managed to get a handful of states to help it out with market share.

Stunning New Report on Who Is Funding the Culture Wars to Undermine Support for Public Schooling

Jan Resseger guides us through a new report that provides new details about who exactly is funding the ongoing attempts to discredit public education.

At Forbes.com this week I took a not very sexy look at a new bill that proposes to clamp down on charter school profiteering.


Friday, July 12, 2024

Cato's Failed Argument Against Public School

Colleen Hroncinch of Cato Institute's Center for Education Freedom tried this week to plug one of the pro-public education arguments that the Libertarian think tank runs up against when pushing choice. 

Do public schools serve everyone, she asks. She does not make a convincing case for her answer.
For starters, it defies logic to think one provider of any service could “serve everyone”—or at least, serve everyone well.

The fallacy here is that public education comes from "one provider." It does not. There are thousands of public school districts in the United States, each different from the others, each owned and operated by a different group of taxpayers. 

Hroncinch's real point is that children have different abilities, skills, preferences and styles, and have parents who also have a variety of values, goals and priorities. 

No wonder that even in the top-ranked district in any state, many parents choose other options for their children. It’s unlikely they would pay twice for education—once in school taxes and again in tuition—if their assigned school was serving their children well.

Two problems here. One is that of course some parents choose private schools even when public school is serving them well for reasons as simple as status and additional features that are beyond the financial reach of public schools. Have you ever seen the library at Philips Exeter? The theater building? There are plenty of colleges that would be happy to have such facilities. 

The other problem is the repetition of a Cato favorite line--the "pay twice for education" line, But nobody in this country, with the possible exception of the very very rich, pays once for public education. The implication here is if you just give me back my tax dollars, I can go spend them on the private education of my choice. But the math doesn't hold up, and of course it doesn't, because if it did we wouldn't have school taxes in the first place. My tax dollars do not pay for my children's public education--no, not even if you count up all the tax dollars I'll pay over my lifetime. My children's public education is paid for by my taxes plus the taxes of my neighbors.

Nobody who is sending their child to a private school is paying for their education twice.

Hroncinch's other point here is that the public system doesn't serve all students well, and a mountain of ink has been spilled examining to what extent this is true and why and what can be done about it. But what the public system has that a voucher does not is a legal obligation to at least try. The challenge for any education system is to educate students who, for a vast panoply of reasons, are hard (and expensive) to teach. As Robert Pondiscio put it in his book about Success Academy, “A significant tension between public schools and charter schools is the question of who bears the cost and responsibility for the hardest-to-teach students.” Public schools do not always solve the issue well, but voucher schools solve the issue by simply washing their hands of those students and sending them on their way to find solutions on their own. Public schools do not have that option; that's what their defenders mean by saying that public schools take everyone.

Hroncinch cites Baltimore's test scores as proof that they are not serving all students well. The irony here is that if they were all private voucher schools, they could bring those numbers up by simply refusing to serve low-scoring students at all. Not sure that would be an improvement.

Hroncinch spends a chunk of her piece citing examples of parents who got in trouble for finding ways to get their kids into a public school outside of the district in which they lived. The aggressive prosecution of this kind of stuff is inexcusable, but it's not proof that the public system does not serve everyone. Every one of those parents had a place reserved for their child in a public school; they just didn't want it. But again-- if they were trying to get away from the school set up to serve their child and they wanted to go to a private school, that school wouldn't have to pursue them through legal means. It could just reject them.

Hroncinch does address this part of the argument, sort of.

What about the argument on the flip side that private schools don’t serve everyone? It’s absolutely true. No individual private school can serve everyone—just as no public school can. But in the private sector, no provider claims to do that.

This is a false comparison. It's true no individual school of any sort can serve all students, because any individual school has finite space. But a public school system does promise to serve all students, and a voucher system makes no such promise. 

Hroncinch lists a whole list of various "private education providers," arguing that surely somewhere in all that families can find what they're looking for, that parents can "customize their children's learning experience." But that doesn't really address the issue.

No school, public or private, can serve everyone—just as no restaurant, grocery store, doctor, or car dealership can.

That's a pretty good analogy. Because these sectors of the economy don't serve everyone. Some people get to eat at upscale restaurants and some get to eat at McDonalds and some don't get to eat out at all. Some people get to shop at a big beautiful grocery store, some shop at a lousy little one, and some live in food deserts. Some people get top of the line health care, some get bare minimum care, and some die because they can't afford health care at all. Some people drive a new Lexus, some drive a used Kia, some ride public transit if they can, and some walk. 

None of these sectors serve everyone. None of these sectors are a model for how the public school system would ideally work.

Now we arrive at Hrincinch's final sentence.

The best way to “serve everyone” is to enable each individual student to have options.

Well, yes. But. A voucher system doesn't really get the job done. The major obstacles to education choice remain discriminatory policies of private schools and the cost. While vouchers pretend to address cost, they're too meager; either taxpayers have to foot the (very high) bill of paying the cost of students attending the school of their choice, or individual families have to do it themselves, which really isn't any better than telling poor families they can exercise choice by buying a more expensive house in a wealthier community.

That's before we even get to the taxpayers' stake in oversight and transparency of a voucher system, in not paying to send students to sub-prime pop-up schools that produce under-educated members of society. 

Voucher policies change the fundamental nature of the education system, turning K-12 into a younger version of our post-secondary system, where some folks go to great schools, some go to mediocre ones, some go to terrible ones, and some don't go at all. Some can afford it, some borrow huge amounts of money, and some don't go at all. 

Most of all, the voucher system eliminates any promise by society that we'll get your child a decent education. Certainly it's fair to argue that we have not always done a good job of fulfilling that promise, but deciding to just stop making the promise, to tell parents "You're on your own now, good luck"- that's a huge shift in how we do education as a nation, a shift that guarantees a tiered education system that reinforces socio-economic class even more than the public system we've got. 

It's the Friedman dream, the dream of a country in which education is a private commodity and not a public good, a personal issue and not a shared responsibility. It has been a persistent dream for some folks for years. I don't think very much of this dream, but the very least we can do as a society is have an honest discussion about it.

Thursday, July 11, 2024

The Free Market Won't Save Public Education

It's been an article of faith since Milton Friedman first started fantasizing about getting government out of education and replacing it with a voucher system.

Competition will spur excellence. Free market schools will save students from failing schools in poor districts. Free markets will stave off inequity. 

Folks keep saying it. And yet there isn't a shred of evidence that it's true.

Name a single free-market sector of the economy that serves all citizens with excellence. Automobiles? Restaurants? Technological tools? 

None of them, because what the free market excels at is picking winners and losers. The free market says these folks over here can have a Lexus and these folks over here can have a used Kia and these folks over here can take the bus (if there is one) and these folks over here can just walk. 

What the free market excels at is sorting people into their particular tier, their particular socio-economic class. If you want to move up a level, then show some hustle and grab those bootstraps to prove that you deserve to move up the ladder. Otherwise, we'll just assume you're right where you belong.

There's no version of our free-ish market that is about lifting every single citizen up to a decent level, no function of the free market that says, "Let's get every single person in this country behind the wheel of a Ford." The free market doesn't like the poor. 

Economist Douglas Harris laid out a solid explanation of why education is a lousy fit for the free market, and there's one more problem-- the free market and the public education system don't want the same thing. The free market wants to sort people out, put them at the top, bottom, middle-- and then provide them with what they deserve. The US public school system, however imperfectly, promises to provide every student with a quality education, without ever asking if one child deserves something different from another. 

For some free market fans, inequity is not a bug but a feature; it's a way to sort people into their proper place. Equity for them means "equal chance to prove that they belong in a particular tier." The social safety net is disruptive and wrong because it "rewards" people with stuff they haven't proven they deserve. 

Some free market fans believe that the free market will provide equity and even things out. Hell, Friedman appears to have believed that the free market would fix segregation and not, say, give rise to segregation academies. But the notion that free market mechanisms will bring greater equity than we now have in education is silly. Your ability to vote with your feet will always be directly related to your wealth.

But more to the point, we know that the free market will not correct the inequities of the education system because it is the free market that cemented them there in the first place. The primary mechanism for creating public school inequity is the policy of linking school funding to the housing--one more free market where winners and losers are sorted out. The free market was instrumental in giving us educational inequity; how can we possibly imagine that the free market would help get rid of it?

Well, that's not really a free market, free market fans will complain; it's a market that has been hampered and hamstrung by various government policies. But that's all markets. To start with, money is just made up stuff, and it takes government policies to maintain the illusion. Nor is there some pristine natural economic playing field that exists naturally; all economic playing fields are created, maintained, and regulated by governments. "That's not a true free market" just means "that playing field is not tilted the way I want it to be." 

There are playing fields more severely tilted than others, markets more free-ish than others. I'm actually a fan of our free-ish market system. And some free-ish markets are excellent at handling some sorts of commodities, companies and customers. But education is not a commodity, and no free-ish market is going to help us create a more equitable system fir universal education of young humans in this country. 

Tuesday, July 9, 2024

OK: Ryan Walters and Project 2025

Ryan Walters, the education dudebro-in-chief of Oklahoma, has made a national name for himself with a flurry of christianist nationalist policies (most recently requiring every classroom to include the Bible), which has helped distract from, the trouble he has getting along with legislators and doing his actual job. His rise has been swift and well-funded and bad news for Oklahoma education; as a modestly-paid state employee he was actually making the big bucks thanks to Every Kid Counts Oklahoma, yet another of those Koch & Walton privatization groups.

While Walter talks a big game of cultural warfare, he's not actually very good at his job, to the point that even like-minded conservatives have walked away from him. But Walters has the super-power of being super well connected. From his adoption by Governor Kevin Stitt. through his patrons at EKCO to his national profile courtesy folks like Fox News.

It's those connections we want to note. Now that everyone is finally catching on to the anti-liberty mess that is Project 2025, we should note that Walters is very tight with the Project 2025 crowd.

We can start with the PR firm that Walters has hired to boost his national profile. 

The firm is Virginia-based Vought Strategies, They seem like a great fit. Their website includes a testimonial from Jim DeMint calling the firm's founder, Mary Vought, "one of the best conservative communicators and public relations specialists in the nation." Mary Vought has been at it for a decade; previously she did coms work in the US Senate and House of Representatives, working for folks like Ron Johnson and Mike Pence; she's also a senior fellow for the far right Independent Women's Forum, and the executive director of the Senate Conservatives Fund, an outfit that endorses the likes of Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, and Rick Scott. And she cranks out pieces like this one for the Daily Caller in which she writes "as a parent" (not a conservative PR operative) that she doesn't want her daughter reading naughty books. Or slamming NIH for Fox News. Or noting a Wall Street Journal profile of Walters, saying "we proudly stand beside our clients as they fight to protect our children and parental rights."

Mary Vought is also the vice president for strategic communications at the Heritage Foundation.

The Heritage Foundation was founded in 1973 to push conservative business-friendly policies, and has developed into one of the most influential activist right-wing think tanks in DC. They are politically agile; they developed and promoted a health care proposal, then opposed it when it was adapted by the Obama administration as the Affordable Care Act. Their reaction to a Trump candidacy was to call him a “clown”, then once he was in office, they became a major voice in staffing; CNN said that “no other Washington institution has that kind of footprint in the transition.”

They have worked to push critical race theory bans, praised Florida’s dismantling of public education, and repeatedly argued for education funding to be voucherized. They even once tried to argue that school vouchers would increase the birth rate.

And, of course, they took point on the development of Project 2025.

A partner group for Project 2025 is the Center for Renewing America ("For God. For Country. For Community.") This group was created by Russ Vought, a Project 2025 project leader and Mary's husband. He previously served as Donald Trump's OMB director. He's one of the people accused of interfering with the Biden administration's transition; he is also among those who defied a Congressional subpoena during the Trump-Ukraine scandal. He's considered a likely candidate for Trump's next chief of staff. He has said we are in "post-Constitutional" times and wants to staff federal agencies with true believers who will bring the culture war to DC. He is a self-described Christian Nationalist, and argued way back in 2021 that Christian nationalism was "benign and useful."

Walters is also linked to Kevin Roberts, president of Heritage. He appeared on Kevin Roberts podcast in an episode teased with "The entrenched woke elites within our education system aim to dismantle the innocence of our children, erode parental rights, and undermine community authority over schools. Oklahoma State Superintendent Ryan Walters has boldly confronted them—and he's winning." Walters opened up by listing his struggles against the terrible media and the awful teachers' unions (he does not mention that much of his opposition has come from other GOP politicians) and he offers this:
The Heritage Foundation has been an incredible partner to help us develop what the plans are for the state, for our schools, for our education system

And praises them for sitting down with him and walking through the plan.  

Project 2025 is soaked with christianism and high level of culture panic. If you wonder what it looks like in action, looking at Ryan Walters in Oklahoma gives you just a small peak, because Walters tied toi the project and the ideology behind it. 

And this news just dropped-- Walters has tapped Kevin Roberts to lead the committee rewrite Oklahoma's social studies curriculum. The committee will also include fake historian Dennis Prager.

In a document obtained by the Washington Examiner, Oklahoma Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters announced a “complete overhaul” to the curriculum with the goal to “inspire in students a love of country and a proper understanding of the American founding,” as well as completely eliminate diversity, equity, and inclusion ideology from schools.

“Teacher’s unions have been rewriting history, teaching students to hate America. But not under my watch,” Walters told the Washington Examiner. “Our goal is to give Oklahoma students an education that focuses on history, not indoctrination. The executive committee that we’ve assembled are experts in American exceptionalism, our Founding Fathers, and historical documents like the Bible. These things are essential to understanding our history.”

Sunday, July 7, 2024

Premiumization and Education



Six Flags and Cedar Fairs (the parent company of my beloved Cedar Point Amusement Park) have merged, with the more successful Cedar Fair owning 51% of the resulting amusement park behemoth. Like many park fans, I have followed this news with some trepidation-- Cedar Point is a tight, well-run operation with a park carefully laid out to deal with their geographic limitations (unless they dump a mountain of fill into Lake Erie, they aren't expanding any time soon), and Six Flags parks are like someone dumped some attractions in a sack, shook it up, and dumped it out.

Six Flags is the gazillionth business to suffer from a lack of focus on the main thing. One regular has noticed their strategic misstep:

Six Flags, he noticed, focused on adding thrill rides and overlooked smaller rides for kids and families and other park activities, such as evening entertainment and shows. Staffing at the park and customer service also became inconsistent.

“Six Flags can feel a bit disjointed,” he said. “Finances were more important than the guest experience.”

The coverage notes a technique that Six Flags used to boost its sagging fortunes.

Six Flags hiked ticket prices in 2022, raising the average price of admission to $35.99 from $28.73. The move caused a 26% drop in annual attendance

It was part of Six Flags’ “premiumization” plan to bring in fewer people to parks but get them to spend more. CEO Selim Bassoul complained in 2022 that Six Flags had turned into “cheap day care centers” for teenagers and said the company wanted to “migrate…a little bit from what I call the Kmart, Walmart to maybe the Target customer.”

In other words, here is Example #28,911,237 of how the Free Market is not geared toward making sure every customer is served. The Free Market picks winners and losers, not just among businesses, but among customers. Some customers are just too poor and annoying, say some businesses, and we choose not to serve them.

Premiumization is already a feature of the private school world, where pricing structures help signal that some schools are for the elite. A study now confirms that in one state, vouchers led to private school tuition hikes as schools took the opportunity to "migrate" to a higher tier in the education biz. 

Voucher fans picture a country in which privates schools throw their doors open wide, ready to accept poor young refugees of failing school systems. But the history of free(-ish) markets shows no such behavior. What the free market does is set tiers of service and quality, including the bottommost tier which may get nothing at all, with many businesses working to climb the profitable ladder of premiumization. 

It's no way to run an education system for an entire country. 

Let Teachers Take Back The Classroom

During my 39 years in the classroom, my classroom management methods were pretty simple. 

Only a handful of explicit rules. We're here so I can help each of you become better at reading, writing, listening and speaking; anything that gets in the way of that is not okay. This classroom is meant to be a place where nobody needs to fear disrespect or mistreatment. Treat all students with respect all the time. That pretty well covered it.

I also subscribed to the theory that keeping focus on what we were doing, not what we were supposed to not be doing, is useful, and that keeping the class moving right along (Joe McCormick, my student teaching co-op liked the term "punchy quick") and knowing what the heck you're doing go a long way toward keeping the classroom managed. 

For 39 years, that worked well for about 97.6% of the time, even as the tides of various cohorts shifted over the years. 

But based on surveys and countless pieces of anecdotal data (aka stories teachers tell me), I have to admit that something seems to have fundamentally changed. There is more disorder, disruption, and outright violence in classrooms. There are new frontiers in attacks on teachers being found every day, like the mass defamatory social media accounts set up by Malvern PA middle schoolers. There are a variety of theories about why this is happening.

Pandemic hangover. Thanks to the pandemic disruptions of in-the-building schooling, a whole lot of students just kind of lost the knack, the skill, even the inclination, for Doing School.

Squishy liberal ideas. In the face of charges that discipline was being inequitably doled out against students of color, schools stopped doing any doling at all. Others tried implementing ideas like restorative justice, which just led to all sorts of chaos.

Parents these days. Gentle parenting and other modern parenting trends are creating unmanageable children. 

Bad top-down policies. States impose rules about how certain populations may or may not be treated in school and schools suffer the consequences. 

Cultural ick. A decade or two of arguing that schools are terrible and teachers are evil grooming indoctrinators eventually trickles down to children. A culture in which our very highest officials regularly bully and belittle and break rules with neither shame nor consequence trickles down to students, too.

Young teachers are wimps. I know a lot of young teachers. I don't buy this one.

Something in the water. Cosmic rays. Who the heck knows. Not a popular explanation, but I've heard it more than once.

Further complicating the discussion is that some folks have attached particular explanations to particular politics, and it's not a political problem.

We have, on the one hand, people who sincerely want to address issues of equity and sensitivity and are doing a lousy job of it. Restorative justice and trauma-informed practices and all the versions of positive behavior reinforcement are not terrible ideas, but they take a lot of time and training (and therefor money)--and none of them mandate that students never suffer consequences for bad choices. 

See, several things can be true at the same time. Is misbehavior often the student's way of communicating underlying issues that they need help in addressing? Yes. Should students experience consequences for their misbehavior? Yes. Should students be handled with respect and care for the baggage they bring with them? Should teachers be mindfully aware of equity issues in how they treat their students? Yes, and yes. Should the classroom be an environment where the teacher is safe to teach and students, including the ones that are not causing trouble, are able to learn? Yes. Does every individual child deserve support, empathy, and consideration? Yes. Can a single child who goes off the rails regularly make life miserable for a teacher and all the other students in the room? Yes.

All those things can be true at once, and therefor proposed solutions have to treat all those things as true rather than, as some folks tend to do, declaring that only certain sides of the problem need to be addressed. That means that those who want to blame it all on liberal squishiness are only looking at part of the issue, and those who don't want to talk about any classroom management problem spike because saying it exists might feed the conservative trolls--they have to ease up as well.

Most of the solution for issues of classroom management is located exactly in the administrative offices of your district and building. 

I've seen all manner of problem principal. Send your problem student to the office. In one case, the principal would have the student pull up a seat while the principal talked about how he'd done way worse stuff when he was a teen and ten minutes later send the student to class. In another case, the principal would browbeat and bully the student, pushing them into a corner until they either broke down or blew up and earned a suspension that never should have happened. Or there's the hands off principal--the one who, if she's in the office at all, will ask you if you have made five contacts with the home and sat down with parents three times. In all cases, what teachers learn is that they shouldn't bother asking for help from the office.

Every building has its actual written behavior policy and its operational rules--the rules that the office really follows. Like the school where the dress code is only enforced for certain young women. Or the school where bullying is dealt with directly unless the victim is a LGBTQ kid. Or the school with different rules for white kids and students of color.

Teachers and students both learn what the unwritten policy really is and conduct themselves accordingly. 

Do teachers have responsibility for managing their classrooms? Absolutely. But the tools they have are directly related to the tools that the administration lets them have. The most basic thing you learn as a teacher is whether or not administration has your back, and nothing else will have a larger effect on your classroom management style and effectiveness. 

Are there teachers who use ineffective policies in their classroom? Are there teachers whose lackadaisical or biased or, yes, even racist policies cause them and their students plenty of trouble? Are there teachers who send students out of the room every ten minutes for sneezing disrespectfully?  Absolutely. Whose job is it to straighten those teachers out (or show them the door)? Administration's.

Behavioral issues require a vision of both trees and forest. Often the issue is immediate--right now I cannot help 20 students in this class better understand a simple algebraic formula because Pat won't stop throwing books at the windows. That needs to be dealt with Right Now because every minute that I'm kept from providing instruction is a minute I can't get back. But in the big picture, I need a plan for the long term, something more useful and thoughtful than simply playing daily whack-a-mole with Pat's outbursts. For success, I need to deal with both the forest and the trees, and it helps if I have someone to work with me on that,

A building administrator's job is simple--create the conditions under which each teacher can do her very best work. That includes helping her with the tools to manage her classroom. It is possible to be fair and just and sensible and equitable and still have classrooms where teachers are able to take hold of their classrooms and do the job they entered the profession to do. But that only happens when your school either A) gets really lucky or B) makes a deliberate, thoughtful attempt to create such a culture.

It will not happen if either the Repressive Military Camp or the Land Of Do As You Please Camp dominates. It will not happen if I get caught up in either forests or trees. The push for discipline and for empathetic flexibility will always be in tension, and there is no tension in education that a couple of pundits can't blow up into a full-sized battle. As with most educational tensions, we have to keep adjusting year after year, and if the surveys and anecdotal evidence is accurate, something is out of whack right now. 

This is another of those posts that could rattle on forever, because the issue is not necessarily complicated (see my classroom rules above), but it is complex (see all the other factors I have skipped over). Once again in education, if someone is touting a simple silver bullet to address the issue, they're probably selling something, and it's nothing you want to buy.

The one plus is that this is an issue that offers broad agreement from a wide variety of people. Nobody wants schools that are unfair and unjust, and nobody wants classrooms where there's so much chaos that education can't occur. We may disagree on what exactly that looks like or how we get there, but at least we're looking at the same horizon.

ICYMI: Picnic Leftovers Edition (7/7)

Weather and other stuff stifled the annual Fourth picnic this year. The plus side is that now I don't have to make food for a week. Making lemonade here.

In the meantime, here's the weekly list. Remember-- you can amplify the voices that you believe should be heard. 

What these states get wrong about the Bible and the Ten Commandments

Amanda Tyler's opinion piece for CNN is one of the better takes on the continued efforts to jam the Bible into the classroom.

Red states’ religious mandates for schools ignore basic history

Historian Kevin Kruse has some lessons for the Christianity-in-our-classrooms crowd.


The least surprising development in this ongoing saga.

What You See Is Not What You Get: Science of Reading Reforms As a Guise for Standardization, Centralization, and Privatization

Some scholarly work from Elena Aydarova. You may want to skip past the scholarly part to the findings, which are pretty hefty all by themselves.

Hot Fun in the Summertime

It's test score time in Tennessee, and TC Weber has some thoughts about the "increasingly irrelevant" results.

Child Tax Credit Reform Languishes as Children Remain Invisible in U.S. Politics

Jan Resseger reminds us that at one point we made a real dent in child poverty. Now, we're just never-minding our way past it.

Conservatives Go to War — Against Each Other — Over School Vouchers

Alec MacGillis reports for ProPublica on the phenomenon of conservative supporters of local public schools.

A.I. ‘Friend’ for Public School Students Falls Flat

From New York Times. LA schools thought they could hire someone to replace support staff with a chatbot. Not so much.


Thomas Ultican takes a look back at Karen Fraid's reform-to-English dictionary, and it turns out that after more than a decade, it holds up depressingly well.

The Right-Wing Network Manufacturing the War Against Higher Education

Colleen Scerpella writing for the Center for Media and Democracy looks at some of the folks behind the recent alarms over higher education.

This week at Forbes.com, I reminded you (again) that you ought to pick up a copy of The Education Wars. 


Join me on substack for free and complete updates on what I'm putting out into the world. 




Friday, July 5, 2024

Will Public Funding For Religious Schools Ease Culture Wars?

Mike Petrilli, head honcho at the Fordham Institute, has a theory. Maybe, he suggests, spending public tax dollars on private religious schools might actually ease some of the continuing cultures out there
Indeed, there’s good reason to believe that, as more parents gain access to school choice, including the option of sending their children to religious private schools, we will see today’s education culture wars recede.

I don't think so. Here's why not. 

First, silos don't solve anything. Letting people of differing values retreat to their own separate silo has not ever solved the issue or reduced the conflict. The history of segregation in the US is as good an example as any; it did nothing at all for reducing racial issues and tension in this country. 

We've even tried this out in education before with the post-Brown segregation academies, where some parents were free to pursue their value of "get my kid an education where he doesn't have to be around Black kids." That didn't serve some Americans well, nor did it ease the tension caused by different values regarding race. 

What separate silos do is make it easier to target certain folks. All the Others are over there in that group, so we can easily rail away at them. The second part of the segregation academy movement was for white folks to say, "Now that this school system over here is mostly Those Blach Kids, let's stop funding them." Which they could safely say because their own kids were safely somewhere else in a different silo.

We've already seen that much of the culture panic is animated by folks who are not merely concerned about what values and books and humans persons that their own children are exposed to, but what varieties of human experience everyone's kids are exposed to. Hence the need to make sure that nobody's child can read "And Tango Makes Three." Hense the establishment of a school that centers LGBTQ students immediately becomes a target

Since we're talking about religious private schools, there's another problem. You will have noticed that within the Christian church alone, there are a gabillion sects. Thise exist thanks to centuries of doctrinal differences. In short, many churches are not only bad at welcoming pluralism outside their walls, but inside as well. Once our silo is established, then it's time to make sure that everyone inside is pure and in compliance.

And for some fairly vocal culture warriors, choice is not on the table. They will consider the culture wars over when their side has won and all the other sides have been silenced and/or obliterated. These are the allies the choice movement chose, and at some point it's going to bite choice in the butt.

None of these factors will ease the culture wars. In fact, not only will they not ease them, but they will lead to a side effect that nobody wants.

Battles amongst the various silos will escalate. Those will be exacerbated because despite reformster magical thinking, you can't run 15 parallel school systems for the same money that barely ran one ("Our business is running into financial trouble, so the solution is to open a bunch more branch locations" said no corporate operation ever). The religious schools will argue about which other religious schools should be allowed to exist, and they'll all be pissed off that the Satanic Temple is also setting up schools. Politicians will argue that Certain Schools are not run by Real Religions and therefor shouldn't be allowed to operate at taxpayer expense (spoiler alert: already happened). Others will argue that taxpayers shouldn't fund LGBTQ schools (spoiler alert: already happened). And even Petrilli notes that he's rather have some safeguards against schools that are strikingly low quality, though I don't expect any such school to say cheerily, "Yeah, that's us!"

So ultimately, the state will have to either sort it out or fork over a pile of money or defund education of all sorts. One end result is the State Department of Religious Okee Dokeeness, where state bureaucrats decide which religious schools can be certified 100% fresh and which cannot. 

Benefits to society? None. People don't learn tolerance of LGBTQ persons or conservative wingnut persons or persons of different races or religions if they spend their school years in a bubble where they never actually meet any of those humans. 

It is tempting to think that the culture wars will ease when we try to give people the impression that they have won, but the loudest culture war voices have shown us who they are again and again, and who they are are people who don't just want a quiet corner of their own, but to claim dominion over the whole education mountain. 

I love our Puritan forebears. Hell, I'm related to our Puritan forebears. For all their virtues, it's inaccurate (as I told my students) to say the Puritans came to establish a country where anyone could worship the way they wished; they came here to establish a country where everyone would worship the way the Puritans wanted them to. It was the ultimate attempt to solve a culture war by silo, and while in many ways it was better than their brethren's attempt back home to win a culture by killing the king and taking over the country, it ultimately didn't end the conflict. 

In short (okay, too late), public funding won't ease culture wars. It will likely intensify them, and most probably shift the battlefield to state and federal government, where the question of which values get to have their own schools and how much they get paid to run them will be endlessly relitigated. Maybe forever, or maybe until some wise sage discovers that the best way to preserve pluralism and religious freedom is a public school system that is inclusive about students and neutral about religion.