Supporting Teachers

How do we help teachers be better?

Robert Pondiscio is fond of pointing out that A) you go into battle with the army you have, not the one you wish you had and B) with around 4 million teachers in the country, many are likely to be just regular human beings and not super-teachers.

He's not wrong. On the national, state, local, and building level, the teacher corps includes some very excellent teachers, some pretty good ones, some average ones, and a small but non-zero number of not very good ones. (My argument remains that it's not a simple bell curve because the majority of people who would be bad at it either never try or give up fairly quickly.)

Policy and reformy folks have tried to deal with this distribution in a number of unproductive manners.

Firing our way to excellence.

A favorite with the technocrat crowd. this was the plan whereby test scores soaked in VAM sauce was going to create hard data that could be used to make hiring and firing decisions (or, in some cases, merit pay decisions). But sure-- if we just fire all the terrible teachers, we'd be left with nothing but the good ones. 

There are numerous problems with this, starting with the lack of a valid or reliable way to evaluate teachers. The Big Standardized Test is its own kind of sham, but Value-Added Measures can only dream of someday working their way up to junk science status. 

Sardine Superteacher

The flip side of firing to excellence. This idea was to find the super-duper teachers and plunk them in classrooms with a couple hundred students. (There was a time when they also liked the idea of hooking the super-teachers up to computers, but COVID took some of the bloom off the distance learning rose.)

Rendering

Another idea was to take the Highly Effective Teachers and move them to the low-achieving schools. This idea lost traction on the slippery idea that teachers had to be convinced, somehow, to take the different job. More money? Sort of. Send a team to grab them, drop a hood over their head, and throw them in a van? Probably illegal. 

All of these have the same problem

It's not just that it's really difficult to quantify how good a particular teacher is. It's that teacher effectiveness is dependent on context and environment. A teacher who's effective with 20 students is not necessarily equally effective with 200. A teacher might be very effective with one type of student and not with another. And despite being the best work at being "professional," sometimes teachers bring their own lives into the classroom. Plus, what are we asking them to teach? I found that I was actually better with multiple preps in a day than just teaching the same thing, but some of my colleagues struggled with that kind of grind. And there's just the influence of time and experience; I taught for 39 years, and I was not the same teacher every one of those years.

On top of that, teaching involves a teacher and a student, and that connection is also variable. Pick any teacher in your local school, one that you are certain is terrible, and I guarantee you that we can find students who will praise that teacher to high heaven. Likewise, pick someone known widely as a wonderful teachers; we can find students who will tell you how awful they are. 

I'm not going to argue that judging teacher quality is impossible. I am going to say that it is heavily influenced by context and environment and factors that shift regularly, making it hugely difficult to quantify teacher quality in such a way that the measures can safely and accurately be used to make major decisions about teaching careers. 

And even if you could...

What are you going to do? Fire a bunch of teachers and replace them with...? How much more practical is it to take the folks you have and help them be the best they can be. Will there be a non-zero number of non-salvageable teachers who have to be shown the door? Certainly. But can you direct (or re-direct) staff to be better? I think that's not only possible, but necessary.

So how?

We've seen bad ideas about this, as well. 

Carrots and sticks and sticks and sticks

There's a whole family of reformy ideas that starts from the premise that teachers know how to get the high-achieving results that policy makers want, but those teachers have been keeping the secrets of Teaching Well locked in their filing cabinets, waiting to be either bribed or threatened into finally unleashing all the awesome.

It's a premise that is both insulting and myopic. The vast majority of teachers are doing the best they can with the tools they have. But some reformsters (looking at you, Arne Duncan) treat teachers like the main obstacle to educating children instead of the people who are actually in classrooms trying to get the work done. 

Teachers and their students face a variety of obstacles, but reformsters got into the nasty habit of dismissing these explanations of real hurdles by calling them "excuses" rather than, say, "challenges that maybe we could try helping teachers meet." 

De-professionalizing the Profession

For some reformsters, the dream has been the teacher-proof classroom. Set out a curriculum so specific and pre-programed that whoever your teacher is, you just hand them the program, tell them to implement it With Fidelity, and voila!-- an educational program that a trained monkey could implement effectively. Maybe it's scripted. Maybe it's just a day by day, minute by minute guide. Maybe it's a computer program, or a series of videos. 

Some reformsters see this as an opportunity to cut personnel costs. Turn teaching into a job that anybody can do, as long as they follow instructions, means that the labor pool is huge and the meat widgets hired for the classroom can be easily (and inexpensively) replaced. These are the folks who are so excited about AI "teachers" that they barely bother to pretend that such a move would foster better teaching. 

De-professionalizing teaching is the fast food model of education. But the promise of standardization in a McDonalds is not that you can always get excellent food there, but just the promise that you probably won't get terrible food. People who want excellent food go somewhere else, where the chefs are chefs and not assembly-line food prep meat widgets.

Maybe forcing your less-gifted teachers into a program to implement With Fidelity will improve schools on the bottom end (though I'm not convinced that someone with limited teaching ability can really implement one of these scripted programs effectively). But by stripping teachers of autonomy, you will inevitably hamstring your best teachers. You can argue that their superior teaching skills will allow them to find ways to put their personal spin on the mandatory teacher-proof program, but I'd say you're just arguing that they can still be great to extent that they work around, ignore, and otherwise find ways to escape the mandatory program. 

Removing teacher authority may or may not help your mediocre teachers, will hamstring your better teachers, and will make the profession less attractive to people who would be a real asset.

Testocracy

We are already reaping the problems created by a new generation of teachers who have never known anything in school except test-centered prep work. Too many have learned that you check the standards, google for "exercises" aimed at those standards, hand them out, drill them down, and that's supposed to be teaching (Daniel Koretz writes about this in The Testing Charade). 

Okay, have you got anything other than complaints?

The job of a school administrator (of any manager) is to create the conditions under which staff can do their best work. Most folks who work in schools already know that teachers are overworked, overstressed, and overburdened with a whole bunch of responsibilities. Many attempts to improve teaching and/or sell new education-flavored products are built around the idea that we could take X off teachers' plates. 

The crazy thing about this is that these attempts are all marked by one feature--the people behind them have decided on teachers' behalf what it is that teachers need. Let me suggest a crazy new approach--

Ask the teachers. 

I've talked about this before (see "The Seven Most Powerful Words in Education") but not enough since. Just ask staff, "What can I do to help you?" 

Now, sometimes this will be tricky, because teachers, as different individual human beings, will want/need different things. And sometimes they will want things admins can't give them. But administrators have to be better. One former colleague of mine pissed off our administration by asking, after being given yet another new responsibility, "What do you want me to stop doing so I have time to do this?" It's a legitimate question, and one that every teacher in that room was thinking, but asking it was Forbidden Not A Team Player naughtiness.

Ask your staff what they need. Don't just jump to "I have decided that what you want is a program to manage grades" or "I have decided that you want PD about apps I'm sure you want to use." Ask.

Provide high quality materials and resources.

But do not mandate how they must be used. Involve staff in the collection or creation of these materials, and revisit the collection annually. There will be eternal debates about which materials are high quality, just like there are eternal debates about what belongs in the canon. These debates are eternal because the answer keeps changing because of the times, the context, the available materials. But the fact that these debates can't be settled conclusively is not a reason to abandon the work of getting the very best materials available to your staff. 

Provide structure and scope and sequence, but don't set it in cement.

Your newer teachers should be able to find a useful answer to "What should I be working on next" and your experienced teacher should be comfortable adjusting the scope and sequence to fit the class, and all staff should feel safe adding their own special educational touches.

Flexibility is a local thing

Note that every mandate that comes down from the state or federal government tends to reduce flexibility, particularly since so many of them are wrongheaded variations on "If we make all teachers do X, all students will learn Y," a statement which is always wrong, no matter what you plug in. Policy makers need to ask one simple question-- does the proposed policy provide support or a straightjacket?

Teacher training and peer support

Too many undergraduate teaching programs waste too much time. For secondary teachers, there should be far more emphasis on the content of the subject area they plan to teach. For all teachers, there should be far more support through the student teaching experience, and hefty support should also be present through the first couple of years in the classroom. 

Some folks like the mode school model, with professionals working their way up as interns etc etc. Schools don't have to look exactly like that, but supports need to be in place. In most schools, whether a teacher has good support in their first few years depends on random factors like which other teachers have lunch the same shift. That early mentoring needs to be deliberate, intentional, and carefully considered. 

Peer support should continue. It should be easy for teachers who work in the same department or who work with the same cohort of students to collaborate and consult. If policy makers want to encourage this, there is one thing they can offer--money. Schools don't build more deliberate mentoring programs because such programs depend on time during the work day which equals money (sometimes there's also a lingering attitude that teachers are only really working when they have students in front of them).

Nothing else-- not PD, not merit pay, not threats, not scripted instruction-- will work to turn a new teacher into a good teacher better than regular support and mentoring by capable colleagues. 

Hold teachers accountable

The myth that teachers are all about defending low-achieving teachers is bunk. Second only to parents, nobody is more bothered by a low-quality teacher than the teacher who has to teach those kids the following year. What teachers fear is not accountability, but random irrational bad-faith harassment and mistreatment trying to pass itself off as accountability. 

So when a teacher wanders into the weeds, go help them get back. Yes, maybe they won't be helped, but you need to try first because firing just means starting over from scratch (if you can even find somebody). Give them extra-intense mentoring, coaching, daily assistance--whatever you think will get them back on track. But don't just leave them out in the field flailing. 

The non-answer answer

There is no one single simple answer to finding and developing good teachers, but we have more than enough experience to know that "Hire some people and hope for the best" is not the winning approach. Provide and surround them with access to top quality materials. Provide them with personal support. Treat them like grownups. Provide a supporting structure that holds them up without choking them off. 

If you want a metaphor, here's one I'm sure I've used before. 

Let's call teaching the classroom version of playing jazz. To pay jazz, you need a couple of things. For one, you need a solid rhythm section; a solid rhythm section makes everyone else sound better, plus it gives you a foundation on which to play. On that foundation, you have plenty of freedom, but you exercise that freedom within a framework--a best, chord changes, maybe even the basic tune of the song. Ignore the beat and the chords at your peril; you can't just do whatever the hell you want. Find good people to play with, and you will play better. And when you are really good, you can actually bend and defy the framework of beat and chords--but you have to really know what you're doing. It's part inspiration and gut, but it also requires technical skill and control and a good piece of equipment on which to play. Also, some songs are way better to play on than others (depending on who's on the stand tonight), so have a big book to select from. And especially also, you have to pay attention to your audience and where your own playing is in that moment, and adjust accordingly.

I have no idea how many jazz trombone players there are in the US, but if there were 4 million, only a small number would be a Jack Teagarden or a George Brunis or a Gunhild Carling. But given the right tools and the right support, the rest could do a good job. That's teaching. 

ICYMI: Here Comes The Arctic Air (1/19)

 Here at the Institute we are hunkering down and preparing for a blast of arctic air over the next two days. The Board of Directors gets tomorrow off in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr., which is the only thing happening tomorrow that I expect to pay attention to. 

A reminder that you can always help amplify stuff by posting it throughout your various social media channels. As someone who's able to track activity through at least one of my outlets, I can tell you that one just never knows where a particular post or article will catch fire. Your share could make a big difference in how widely something is read. Help folks out and share their stuff.

I am also happy to get recommendations. I read a lot, but I don't read everything, and I don't always get everything I've read into this weekly digest. So suggestions are always welcome. I had originally dreamt that maybe the comments section of these posts would fill up with "You should also read--" comments, and that hasn't happened, but the dream still lives.

In the meantime, here's this week's list.

‘Their Kind of Indoctrination’

In the New York Review of Books, Diane Ravitch on the kinds of attacks public schools can expect under the new Trump regime.

3 myths about rural education that are holding students back

Awkward structure aside (the three items are truths that debunk the myths), this is a welcome look at a more accurate picture of rural education.

‘Bless his heart,’ says Pulaski superintendent after ‘school choice evangelist’ sues KY district

Corey DeAngelis is butthurt that a Kentucky superintendent blocked him from attacking the district for supporting the anti-voucher measure that Kentucky passed. The superintendent is not impressed.

On a Mission From God: Inside the Movement to Redirect Billions of Taxpayer Dollars to Private Religious Schools

Alec MacGillis looks at the story of how Ohio set out to get public money into Catholic private schools. Choice was just a tool. This is well-researched and detailed and a bit alarming.

Ohio’s Journey from Public Education to School Privatization

Jan Resseger, a retired Ohio educator, reacts to MacGillis's article.

Jeff Bezos Wants to Go to the Moon. Then, Public Education

Dominik Dresel at EdSurge and a convincingly scary look at Bezos and his long term plans for privatizing education.

The Uber Rich Are Funding “National School Choice Week” to Attack Public Schools

We'll all be hearing about School Choice Week soon, At Truthout, Alyssa Bowen, Ansev Demirhan, and Lisa Graves explain who's really behind it, and what they're after.

Volusia School Board member vows to stay despite Moms for Liberty chapter chair's threat

In Volusia County, Florida, the Moms for Liberty chair is opposing a former ally for being way too racist and insulting and mean. 

Defunding Public Schools is Really Unpopular

Jennifer Berkshire, blogging at The Education Wars, takes a trip to New Hampshire to watch democracy once again put the smackdown on an attempt to undermine public schools.

A new governor sets her agenda.

Also in New Hampshire, Andru Volinsky looks at the agenda of the state's new governor.

The Far Right’s Plan to Force Teachers to Lie About Race

Jesse Hagopian in The Nation outlining the threat of the Trump administration toward teaching a more authentic United States history.

I'm Not Sure Schools Can Teach Creativity

Can schools teach creativity as a sort of disembodied transferable skill? I don't think so, and neither does Chad Aldeman.

Measuring Artificial IQ

ChatGPT did a Thing, even a cool thing. But what does that mean, exactly? Benjamin Riley considers the question.

Top scholar says evidence for special education inclusion is ‘fundamentally flawed’

Is there any more reliable pendulum in education than the swing back and forth between putting students with special needs in regular classrooms vs. giving them a specialized separate room of their own? Jill Barshay at Hechinger reports on new research that will keep the debate going.

Are Today’s Students Really Less Independent Than Previous Generations?

At EdWeek, Arianna Prothero is really reporting about SEL program effectiveness in schools, which is also a topic worth discussing.

The MAGA Think Tank Behind Linda McMahon’s Education Agenda

Linda McMahon has been running a think tank that has served as a holding tank for Trump administration members waiting for their second chance. What that think tank has been saying may tell us what to expect from McMahon as Ed Secretary. Christopher Lewis and Jacob Plaza report for The Nation.

TIMSS Scores Down-- Don't Panic

Thomas Ultican digs into the latest in internation standardized math test scores. How bad are they, and do we really need to care?

Heroes, Hypocrisy, and Hubris

There's more on the ground detail here from TC Weber about Tennessee's new voucher push, but mainly there's a story about a teacher who has been put through hell and deserves to have his "not guilty" verdict published high and low.

Why Senate Cabinet Hearings are a Lesson for Schools

Nancy Flanagan and the problem of character and power.

Banned Book: Normal People

Steve Nuzum has been closely following the South Carolina committee charged with book banning for the entire state. Here he takes a close look at one particular book they chose to ban, searching for some hint of what their actual criteria might be.

AI Is Like Tinkerbell: It Only Works If We Believe in It

At Futurism, Jathan Sadowski suggests we think "of AI futurism as a sophisticated form of check kiting — cashing a check today and hoping the money will be in the account later." Predictions as marketing.

Know how to read cursive? The National Archives wants you

Really. If you are a master of this arcane art, the National Archives have tons of manuscripts they need to have translated into legible English. And you do it from home.

At Forbes.com this week, I looked at a new survey that shows, once again, people would rather fund public schools than vouchers. 

And an unusual week at the Bucks County Beacon, with two pieces-- a look at NPE's report on the massive failures of charter schools, and a piece about the attempt to launch an all-AI, no teacher cyber charter in Pennsylvania. 

You can also subscribe to my free newsletter and get all of my stuff in your email inbox. 

OH: Public Education Under Attack (Again)

The reporters at the Ohio Capital Journal have been all over this story. I'm here to give you the broad outlines of this latest adventure in trying to eclipse Florida and Arizona as the nation's leader in hostility to public education. 

The background: Ohio is yet another state that was ordered by the courts to fix its public education funding system (three decades ago). They've been trying to fix it with the Cupp-Patterson plan which shifts the burden from real estate taxes to the state government. 

As every state that has been through this (or has avoided going through this) knows, getting from inadequate funding to fully funding public education can cost a lot. In Ohio's case, that's about $2 billion over six years.

This makes some members of the Ohio GOP sad, especially House Speaker Matt Huffman, and the word "unsustainable" was thrown around. Huffman says that if they're spending that kind of money, why aren't public schools more accountable for how it is spent. Huffman told reporters that he thinks the final push of Cupp-Patterson just isn't going to happen, because of all that money.

As Morgan Trau reported for the Ohio Capital-Journal:

“That’s often how a lot of projects go — early on it doesn’t cost very [much] money — but some other governor or General Assembly will have to figure out how to pay for it,” [Huffman] continued. “As it turns out, I am the other General Assembly years in the future, or possibly am, and I don’t think the spending is sustainable.”

Just because some previous elected officials made a government commitment, that doesn't mean other elected officials have to honor it. Let's just cut those school funds.

The kicker here is that Huffman is also a huge supporter of Ohio's voucher program EdChoice, a program that has sucked up $1 billion taxpayer dollars and which involves no accountability.

So if the funding of public education is "unsustainable," how can the public funding of unaccountable private schools be sustainable?

Susan Tebben reported for the Capital-Journal:

” If the speaker thinks there isn’t enough education funding to go around, Ohio law is very clear,” Melissa Cropper, president of the Ohio Federation of Teachers, told the Capital Journal. “The legislature must fund public schools and make cuts to the costly and ineffective universal private school vouchers that were put in place by Speaker Huffman (as an Ohio senator) and other legislators,” said Melissa Cropper, president of the Ohio Federation of Teachers.

Those who support the funding model pointed to the $1 billion that went to scholarship funds including the EdChoice private school voucher program in 2023, which the legislature approved to give Ohio students near-universal eligibility to move to private schools of their choosing if they live in public school districts considered under-performing.

“If the speaker wants to talk about sustainability, you have to start with those numbers,” [Ohio Education Association President Scott] DiMauro said.

 Apparently plenty of legislators' phones have been ringing, because the Capital-Journal has heard from some of them. Reports Trau last Saturday:

Following our reporting on a proposal by Republican leadership in Ohio to cut public school spending, which resulted in the lawmakers facing backlash, half a dozen GOP legislators personally reached out, vowing to protect K-12 education.

Those six, and at least 15 others we have spoken to in recent weeks, say that one of their main priorities is supporting public schools.

Ohio has recently taken their vouchers universal, meaning that taxpayers now help pay off the tuition of wealthy families who were attending private schools already. Ohio is also a levy state where any tax increases by local schools have to go to a public vote, which means everyone gets to feel public school financial struggles immediately and acutely. 

As we learned this week from reporting by Alec MacGillis at ProPublica and the New Yorker, Ohio's school choice program have their roots in a desire to get taxpayer dollars to fund Catholic schools. The level of sneakiness and political gamesmanship that went into those maneuvers is kind of astonishing. It almost makes one appreciate Huffman's straightforward statement of his intention to throw public education under the bus while supporting the forced taxpayer support of unaccountable private schools. Here's hoping the actual taxpayers in Ohio don't let him get away with it. 

FL: Affirmative Action Revived for Some

You may recall Governor Ron DeSantis has a project to take over Florida's New College and turn it into a conservative bastion. Manny Diaz, Florida's unqualified education commissioner said their hope is "that New College of Florida will become Florida's classical college, more along the lines of a Hillsdale of the South.”

You may also recall the DeSantis is a staunch opponent of affirmative action, proudly telling the Moms for Liberty crowd that he goes even further than simply not doing AA. 

It's a standard MAGA talking point-- decisions should be merit only! They take considerable pleasure in quoting Martin Luther King Jr on being judged by content of character rather than color of skin.

But now it turns out that maybe a little affirmative action is okay-- as long as you're affirming the right thing.

New College hasn't just dismantled the gender studies department. That's old news. Steven Walker reported for the Sarasota Herald-Tribune about the new wave of students at New College, and, well, academic excellence does not seem to be their defining feature.

Overall, the average ACT and SAT scores for the incoming fall class at New College were lower than the previous year. The same group's overall GPA was also lower than in fall of 2022, according to data obtained by the Herald-Tribune and confirmed by the college.

Much of the drop in average scores can be attributed to incoming student-athletes who, despite scoring worse on average, have earned a disproportionate number of the school's $10,000-per-year merit-based scholarships.

 New College is recruiting heavily for athletes because Richard Corcoran, interim president and former head education privatizer for Florida, announced back last March that the school was going to build an athletics department. From scratch. Walker reports that of the 328 incoming students, 115 are student athletes. They scored 47% of the merit scholarships. Note: New College doesn't have athletic facilities, nor have they been accepted into the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics.

They are also mostly men. Michelle Goldberg, writing for the New York Times, gets an explanatory quote from MAGA culture panic leader and New College trustee Chris Rufo:

In the past, about two-thirds of New College’s students were women. “This is a wildly out-of-balance student population, and it caused all sorts of cultural problems,” said Rufo. Having so many more women than men, he said, turned New College into “what many have called a social justice ghetto.” The new leadership, he said, is “rebalancing the ratio of students” in the hopes of ultimately achieving gender parity.

Well, heck. Even Reason, the very Libertarian magazine/website knows what that is. Emma Camp hit it under the headline "New College of Florida Embraces Affirmative Action for Men." They picked up the above quote, as well as noting that Rufo afformed that the whole point of expanding athletics was to draw more males. Rufo has written and ranted before about the "problem" of "the great feminization of the American university."

There are all sorts of issues here, but I'll let the Libertarian right call the college out on this:

But even if one accepts the premise that female-led institutions are more left-wing than male-led ones, New College's response—to engineer a more conservative institution by reducing female participation in it—is inherently in conflict with the strong defense of meritocracy and opposition to affirmative action espoused by Rufo and his allies.

Young women are outpacing their male counterparts in the academic sphere; girls now comprise roughly 60 percent of college students. While young men's failure to academically compete with their female classmates is worth our concern, the solution is not to lower the bar for men to obtain collegiate gender parity (something many selective colleges have been quietly doing for years). Nor is the solution to an illiberal left-wing campus culture to engineer a more male—and supposedly more conservative—student body.

Is the problem simply that MAGA doesn't like women very much? Sure seems like it some days. But for the moment let's just note that they are perfectly okay with affirmative action for dudes, which sure seems to support the theory that they were never against affirmative action--just the people they felt it was affirming, and the whole meritocracy argument was bad faith baloney.

But hey-- they are on the way to more closely resembling Hillsdale, with its student population of 865 men and 813 women. 

AI Can't Imagine Future Humanity

It's a minor throwaway article, but it is a fine example of how people who aren't paying close attention both accept and perpetuate huge misconceptions about what AI is or can do.

The headline from a story that originally ran on Tom's Guide, but was picked up by MSN (which is itself a bad sign) is "I used AI to imagine humanity in 50,000 years — here’s how it went."  The piece is by Ryan Morrison, the AI Editor for this tech-centered website. The first three paragraphs tell us how far into weeds we are headed.

I’ve always been a daydreamer, leaving my mind to ponder the possibilities of what could be to come. With the help of artificial intelligence tools, I can turn those ponderings into something I can actually see and even interact with.

Recently I found myself talking about space travel with ChatGPT, asking it about timelines and the impact terraforming a smaller world like Mars might have on human physiology. This later led to me having ChatGPT outline how it perceived humanity over 5,000, 10,000 and 50,000 years of evolution.

I also had it come up with ways humans might change if left isolated on different terraformed planets such as Mars, with its lower gravity or even the moons of the gas giants. I then used Freepik’s impressive Mystic 2.5 image model to bring them to life.

Morrison goes on to talk about how he offered ChatGPT different parameters and asked some other pointed questions. It all seems built around the notion that when he asks ChatGPT these questions, ChatGPT goes and looks at all the scientific research surrounding Mats and human physiology and gravity and whatnot and works up a series of theories based on a rational consideration of all the pertinent science. "Well, what if human civilization splits with no contact for a few millennia?" he asks, and ChatGPT strokes its chin and says, "Well, let me consult some sources and run some numbers." 

The article is laced with references to his "conversation" with ChatGPT. The program went on to "outline" how it "perceived" human change. He asked it to "imagine" humans in 50,000 years. 

Of course, ChatGPT doesn't do any of that. The stochastic parrot strings together an assortment of probable words in a probably string given the prompt, and given whatever training it has on sources that string together words near words similar to the prompt words. 

People like to think of "artificial intelligence" as the equivalent of some really smart, extraordinarily well read professorial type, or perhaps any of the artificial personalities we know from popular fiction. People who have AI products to sell like that picture of AI very much-- but Artificial Generalized Intelligence like that is not here yet, and may never get here. GPT-5 also not here. 

In the meantime, people who really ought to know better keep pretending that Large Language Models like ChatGPT are really something far more advanced (and useful) than they really are. But here's Morrison, saying his website bio has been written for him by ChatGPT, a "silicon-based life form."

This is the kind of stuff that trickles down to the general public and teachers and administrators and leads them to put all sorts of faith in "AI" that it does not deserve and cannot live up to. If we're going to have conversations about AI's proper place in the classroom, they will have to be based on reality and not marketing puffery and the imagination of over-excited commentators.

 

ICYMI: Fire and Ice Edition (1/12)

Whether you are being hit with a blizzard or a fire, I hope you are staying safe this weekend, and that you are coming through with minimal damage, and that you get the help and support that you need. For the rest of us, here's one researched list of places to which you can contribute to help folks in LA.

Here's some reading from the week.

Schoolhouse Crock

From The Baffler, Jennifer Berkshire's very excellent review of Adam Laats's very excellent book about one of the first great education con artists. 

Burning Down the Schools

Anne Lutz Fernandez and the impact of climate change on schools.

Writing Process: Scholarly/Academic Writing Edition

Paul Thomas shares practices and ideas surrounding the teaching of writing. He's an expert. 

Ryan Walters is blaming teachers for New Year’s attack. Has he forgotten Oklahoma history?

Ryan Walters, the education dudebro-in-chief of Oklahoma, continues to make it hard to believe that he was once a respected history teacher. But I guess if you have a Trumpian desire for press attention, you just have to keep saying stupid things loudly.

The Danger of Miseducation

Jess Piper connects Dylann Roof, January 6, and the problems that come with the rewriting of history.

Undoing EdTech's Death Grip on Education

At Restore Childhood, Denise Champney does some outstanding work breaking down just how deep and bad the edtech hold on education has become. 

Technology is supposed to decrease teacher burnout – but we found it can sometimes make it worse

"Use this app! It will save you time!" Here's some actual research to back up why every new piece of tech fills teachers with existential dread.

Everything Everywhere All at Once

Audrey Watters connects some techno-dots, starting the Power School data breach, in which somebody got their hands on a bunch of student data that the company was probably sell anyway.

The Ugly Truth About Vouchers

Paul Bowers at the ACLU explains why South Carolina's love for vouchers is just a bad, bad idea.

Fact-checking Elon Musk's claims that NJ teachers 'don't need to know how to read'

You may have heard President Musk's complaint that Jersey teachers will no longer need to be able to read. This piece from Lori Comstock explains why he's full of it, with all the details so you can explain it to your MAGA uncle.

Hundreds of Charter Schools Will Fail, Close, and Abandon Thousands of Families in 2025

Shawgi Tell looks at the research and lets us know what we can expect from charter schools this year.

AI Wants to Help Me Write– But With Disclaimers

The indispensable Mercedes Schneider tried taking an AI writer out for a spin, and while some results are predictable, take a look at the caveats that the AI company puts on its own product!

EnronAI

Back when he was a baby lawyer, Benjamin Riley worked for Enron. Yes, that Enron. He was on the inside for the early stages that led to that famous collapse (in a department trying to keep it from happening) and for him, much of the AI industry has a familiar smell.

Committee Moves to Ban More Books

In South Carolina, one committee can ban books from every school in the state. How efficient! Steve Nuzum reports on their most recent targets.

Newton Falls implementing Armed Staff Program

This is in Ohio, where a district is starting to arm its staff "to act as a deterrent and a force multiplier." Yeah, I'm sure that will work out.

Honor President Carter: Save and Improve the U.S. Department of Education!

Nancy Bailey says if you want to honor Carter, help protect and improve part of his legacy.

Mississippi Association of Educators Opposes Private ‘School Choice’ Efforts

Erica Jones, head of the MAE, will say it again-- don't strip funding from public schools to give it to private schools.

Trump’s Immigration Proposals Would Traumatize Children and Schools and Jeopardize Children’s Civil Rights

Jan Resseger dives into the question of what Trump's professed intent to throw out all the immigrants (that don't work for his friends) might do to their children. 

Is 2025 the Year to Eliminate Florida’s High School Exit Exams?

Florida is usually in the forefront of bad trends. Could they actually join the crowd on a good one? Sue Kingery Woltanski looks into it. 

Scandalling Up in Ohio

David Pepper profiles J. D. Vance's likely replacement, whose previous achievements include enabling one of Ohio's biggest privatized education scandals.

At Forbes this week, I explained why this is the heart of the school year, and looked at a scary bad new bill in Indiana for dissolving public school districts.

In the meantime, you can subscribe to my free substack and get all of my stuff in your email inbox. 

Rewriting the Success Sequence?

You've probably heard about the "success sequence," the idea that if young people do the right stuff in the right order-- finish school, get a job, get married, have a kid-- they are less likely to end up poor. 

Conservatives had pushed this concept for a while, including some fairly overblown sales jobs, like the Brookings article "Follow these three rules and you will join the middle class!." The data for the success sequence are pretty spotty, and one has to wonder if maybe its fans have things backwards; maybe being middle or upper class increases the likelihood that you'll follow the sequence.

Nevertheless, conservatives believed in the success sequence enough that Rick Hess at the American Enterprise Institute wondered if maybe schools shouldn't be teaching students to follow it, the better to improve their future prospects. I disagreed at the time, But now it seems that many folks on the right want to... revisit the terms of the success sequence.

The argument has been bubbling up for a while in MAGA-land. Jay Greene and Lindsey Burke at the Heritage Society argued the country needs more babies, and the problem is that too many women are going to college and postponing baby-making. Joy Pullman at The Federalist argues that to get healthier Americans, we should get women to quit their jobs (so they can stay home and cook healthy stuff for their children). In Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis wants to install Scott Yenor as a board member at the University of West Florida. This is a guy who has labeled “independent women” as “medicated, meddlesome and quarrelsome” and decried colleges and universities as "the citadels of our gynecocracy”

“If we want a great nation, we should be preparing young women to become mothers,” Yenor said, "not finding every reason for young women to delay motherhood until they are established in a career or sufficiently independent.”

So you see, the problem is that women are actually trying to follow the success sequence by getting an education, then a job, before they get married and baby up.

Turns out that the success sequence is a Bad Thing when practiced by certain people, specifically certain people who ought to busy birthing, rearing, and feeding babies. 

One good way to make this possible would be to make it possible for a working man to support his family with his wages, but somehow none of these "a woman's work is to make babies and sammiches" folks is advocating for, say, a hike in minimum wage. Just advocating for women to be regressively focused on making babies and sammiches. 

But there's something else to note here. These are the same folks who want to privatize education, to make it every person's responsibility to get the education that best fits their station in life, without any support from the government. And when you put together "Get the education that fits what your kid needs" and "You don't need any education except maybe learning some cooking, Missy," you get a system that aims only to educate young men. You ladies just need how to cook a nice meal while you bat your eyes and try to land yourself a successful man who can get you properly impregnated.

I think it's pretty clear that for one part of the ed reform crowd, reforming education means making sure that women get less of it. It's not unlike the focus in some states on making sure that teenagers are "free" to ditch school and get out into the work force, unobstructed by any of those darn child labor laws. 

The underlying assumption is that for some people to take their proper place in society, education is unnecessary, even counter-productive. Success, it turns out, is only a worthy aspiration for Certain People.

This Is What State Takeover Of The Church Looks Like

You will recall that Louisiana has declared that every school room must display the Ten Commandments. That law took effect over the winter break. 

Which version of the Ten Commandments, you may ask. And indeed you should. Depending on your faith, you may be familiar with one of three versions. The Bible itself gives about three and a half versions of the decalogue.

So "post the Ten Commandments" is not a simple and direct order. Some clarification is needed.

And here comes the Attorney General of Louisiana to provide that clarification. 

Not just guidance, but four versions of the poster that schools should put up (images below).  

One uses the decalogue as a centerpiece under the heading "The House of Representatives and the Lawgivers and includes two equally-weighted images--one of Moses and one of Speaker Mike Johnson. Another equates The Lawgivers with the Supreme Court. Another argues for "Religion's Role in American Public Education" and the last one offers the Ten Commandments amongst four cases instrumental in eroding the wall between church and state.

And all include the state-approved version of the Ten Commandments.

This is what it looks like when the state takes command of religion. This is what it looks like when the state tells people of faith how best to understand central pieces of their faith ("Yeah, Moses was pretty much like the Speaker of the House in the United States in the 2020s"). This is what it looks like when the state shoulders pastors aside and says, "Hey, let me go ahead and explain that for you."

Yes, this is also what it looks like when the state violates the First Amendment in order to elevate one favored religious tradition over all others (including many nominally of the same religion, because this is an example of the weird far right Old Testament focused Christianity-without-Christ that stalks far right sanctuaries these days, but that's a discussion for another time). This is what state-inflicted religion looks like.

(For what it's worth, this is also what bad state-sponsored graphic design looks like.)

Absolutely nobody should be in favor of this. It's a violation of the First Amendment for the state to impose and promote a particular religion on students. It's also a violation for the state to take command of the church and force the state's version of a religion as the One True Form. That's why a federal judge has already said the law is unConstitutional. 

A suit challenging the law is already under way. May the court strike this abomination down hard. 

In the meantime, take comfort in knowing that these "posters" are required to be at least 11" x 14"-- the size of a sheet of a legal pad-- which will make the cluttered print tiny and easily ignored by students. 

ECCA Is Not The Center

I wish folks were paying more attention to the Educational Choice for Children Act, a federal school voucher program and tax shelter program. I've written about it (here, here and here), pointing out that it provides virtually no oversight or accountability (but plenty of tax dodging opportunities). But mostly it's being ignored.

Granted, there are plenty of possible futures to be alarmed by. But this bill, probably aimed to slip through the reconciliation process, would quickly force tax-payer funded school vouchers on every state in the union, whether they want them or not.

And when people do write about ECCA, they say really dumb things.

Take Juan Rangel. Rangel rose to fame and fortune running the UNO charter school chain in Chicagoland, and had a good couple of years before the truth about nepotism, fraud, and shameless self-dealing emerged. The SEC got him for fraud. He got sued by his former second-in-command. And yet, somehow, he is now the CEO of the Urban Center and on LinkedIn calling himself an "Experienced leader with a demonstrated 34+ year history of working in the non-profit industry." 

And the Chicago Tribune was willing to give him some space to make his case for ECCA, making the singularly odd argument that "embracing school choice will move Democrats back to the center."

Nope.

Rangel makes the usual arguments-- school choice gives families freedom, and the "usual criticism" comes from teachers unions. 

He cites the usual choicer-run polls that show the public just loves the idea of school choice. He does not mention the three states that soundly defeated voucher measures in the last election. 

What a tragedy, he opines, the Illinois Democrats allowed that states voucher program ride off into the sunset. That was the naughty teachers' union's fault. The decision, he says, "not only ignored public sentiment but also harmed the very communities Democrats claim to champion." Which is baloney-- the voucher program was a model of outsourcing discrimination to religious schools that rejected students for all manner of offense. Like most voucher programs, it was not there to serve poor communities, but to serve private schools who rejected anyone who didn't fit their preferred beliefs or who couldn't afford the school, even with the vouchers. 

Rangel's main beef is that Democrats are more interested in an alliance with teacher unions than they are in going along with conservative interest in school choice. Because school choice is bipartisan, but Dems are being partisan to oppose it. Which I guess is something that might make sense in Chicago. But if opposing choice is what a partisan Democrat would do, how can choice be bipartisan? 

But Rangel is one of the Reformster Democrats, folks like Rahm Emanuel and Michelle Rhee who are nominally Democrats but really love the conservative school privatization policies so much that they have little love left for public schools and none at all for the teachers who work in them. How this tribe can keep arguing that a bill that is exactly what Betsy DeVos always wanted and which will now be championed by Trump and comes with the stamp of approval of far right thinky tanks--how exactly is ECCA centrist?

But I guess this is going to be a feature of the next four years-- nominal Democrats talking about "compromise" and "reaching across the aisle" when what they actually mean is "give in to what those folks want." This seems like a bad plan, but then, we haven't had Democrat leadership standing solidly on the side of public schools in hardly ever, so if they want to listen to Rangel, whose credentials in education leadership are just super-impressive, it wouldn't be a huge change of pace. But, boy, would it be nice to have at least one political party that didn't think supporting public schools was a radical position.

ME: Demanding Religious Discrimination Funding

Once again, it's the argument that taxpayers must be forced to fund discrimination.

Maine ended up in this debate because they already had a voucher program, created so that communities that couldn't afford to operate a school could send students to schools elsewhere, including private schools. But on the heels of Trinity and Espinoza, some folks decided to see if they could get the courts to take their new version of the First Amendment one step further.

Could they successfully argue that it's religious discrimination and an interference with the right of Free Exercise if the state didn't force taxpayers to help fund the private religious school? Hence the Carson v. Makin case.

SCOTUS said, "Sure!"

Noah Feldman, a Harvard law professor, had called this one after Trinity, writing:

It’s the first time the court has used the free exercise clause of the Constitution to require a direct transfer of taxpayers’ money to a church. In other words, the free exercise clause has trumped the establishment clause, which was created precisely to stop government money going to religious purposes. 

In her Carson dissent, Justice Sotomayor also nailed it:

After assuming away an Establishment Clause violation, the Court revolutionized Free Exercise doctrine by equating a State’s decision not to fund a religious organization with presumptively unconstitutional discrimination on the basis of religious status.

Not an exaggeration. Chief Justice Roberts offered that rationale for the decision:

In particular, we have repeatedly held that a State violates the Free Exercise Clause when it excludes religious observers from otherwise available public benefits.

But that, it turns out, is not enough.

Maine had put in place an amendment to its anti-discrimination law, saying that taxpayer dollars couldn't go to a school that was violating those anti-discrimination laws.

The schools in the original lawsuit said that under those conditions, they would not accept voucher money (in other words, you cannot pay them enough to accept LGBTQ persons or "un-saved" individuals in their schools). Don't take away their ability to discriminate.

Not that they admit to discrimination. The spokesperson for the American Association of Christian Schools gave the AP this swell quote back in 2022:

We don’t look at it as discrimination at all. We have a set of principles and beliefs that we believe are conducive to prosperity, to the good life, so to speak, and we partner with parents who share that vision.

This is not surprising rhetoric. There's a whole industry out there about helping Christian schools make sure they are only serving "mission-appropriate" families. It's not that they are discriminating against anyone; they're just refusing to serve people who aren't aligned with their values. 

The next step was, of course, a lawsuit. Bangor Christian Schools sued the state of Maine in 2023, asking first for an injunction against the Maine Human Rights Act (MHRA) restriction that bars them from receiving state money as long as they continue to discriminate. Their assertion is that the “poison pill” of human rights law in Maine violates their religious liberty, that they cannot exercise that liberty unless they can both receive state funds and continue to discriminate against students and prospective faculty that don’t meet their religious requirements.

They didn't get their injunction. So now the case, along with a similar case from St. Dominic's Academy in Auburn, has worked its way up to the U/S. Court of Appeals of the First Circuit, where arguments were heard on Tuesday. First Liberty Institute, one more Texas-based right wing legal firm, is arguing for the church. These folks were also part of the case of the paying coach, a no-LGBTQ bakery, and the original Carson case.

First Liberty is arguing a chilling effect, they argue. “The First Amendment actually does protect religious organizations from the very activity that the state of Maine is trying to impose upon them,” said lawyer Jeremy Dys. The "very activity" that the state is imposing is to stop discriminating against some staff or students. 

As the lawyer for St. Domonic's explained: “Non-discrimination law is important for everybody. But as important as it is, it can’t be used to deprive religious believers of their rights.” The "rights" we're discussing are their right to discriminate against people to whom they object. 

So this case still turns on the argument that people and institutions cannot freely exercise their religion unless they can freely discriminate and freely collect taxpayer money to do it. Therefor, taxpayers must help fund discriminatory, religious schools. And in keeping with soi many of these cases, the schools have not actually been required to do anything yet, because they have not yet applied to be included in the voucher program. In other words, their lack of taxpayer-funded voucher income does not seem to be keeping them from operating and exercising their religious beliefs.

You might be tempted to point out that there are parallels between the discrimination of either side, but there is one more distinction-- while the state's "discrimination" is "against" institutions and organizations, the school's discrimination is against individual human beings. 

It's a version of Christianity that I find puzzling. Did I miss the part of the Bible where Jesus said, ":et all the children come to me, except for those couple over there. The one looks kinda gay, and the other one doesn't seem to be sufficiently impressed by Me. Just keep them away." 

At some point we'll have a decision from the First Circuit, and it doesn't take a crystal ball to see that the decision will then be appealed all the way up to the Supreme Court where the writing is probably already on the wall for more taxpayer funded religious discrimination. I'm going to go ahead and pray that I turn out to be wrong.

ID: Pushing Vouchers Again

Idaho is a GOP stronghold, but it has so far resisted the idea of school vouchers. Governor Brad Little has announced that he would like to change that.

Idaho has charter schools, and their public school system has implemented the most obvious solution for the old "education shouldn't depend on your zip code" complaint by allowing students to attend any public school in the state (though transportation is no small barrier in Idaho). 

The barrier against taxpayer-funded school vouchers has been Republicans. When the Education Savings Account bill failed in 2023, it hit a wall of GOP legislators who actually remembered some traditional GOP principles. As the Idaho Stateman reported:

“It’s actually against my conservative, Republican perspective to hand this money out with no accountability that these precious tax dollars are being used wisely,” said Sen. Dave Lent, R-Idaho Falls.

Senator C. Scott Grow complained, "I have absolutely no clue what the dollar amount is on this.”

Citing the explosive growth of programs like those in Florida and Arizona, folks pointed out that the program could get pretty expensive, pretty fast-- and no oversight of how that was spent was included in the bill.

That failure undoubtedly shaped the program that Little proposed in his state of the state address.

Little declared, "Just like we do with every taxpayer dollar that is spent in government, we will ensure there is oversight in school choice." Any school choice measure must be "fair, responsible, transparent, and accountable." Also, he declared that "it must not take funds from public schools." He set the cap for the program at $50 million.

Little's speech came hours after just such a bill was announceed by Representative Wendy Horman at a pro-voucher event sponsored by the Mountain States Policy Center, yet another right wing thinky tank advocacy group tied to the State Policy Network and ALEC. Hornan has pushed for vouchers before, parroting the "civil rights issue of our time" talking point. 

Horman told that crowd that she intended a voucher law with no income limits; every family, no matter how wealthy, can have taxpayers subsidize their private school. According to the Idaho Statesman, Gorman said she's proposing tax credits of $5,000 for families whose children were not in public school. The proposal appears to be an education savings account style voucher, allowing families to spend their tax credit on any number of education-adjacent expenses. 

The tax credit is a familiar dodge that allows politicians to say, "No funds will be taken from public schools." Because the money never gets into the government's hands. But the credits still blow a hole in the government budget. The Kentucky Supreme Court struck down just such an arrangement; “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.” 

It remains to be seen if this can fly. Huge areas of Idaho have no private schools at all, and resistance to taxpayer-funded vouchers is still strong. In a debate with Horman last month, Rod Gramer, former president of Idaho Business for Education, it’s an “existential threat” to public education and “the most expensive government handout in the history of the United States.”

The End of the Public Cyber-Square

It's time to let go of the idea that the internet will provide some sort of public square.

The latest wake-up call came from Mark Zuckerberg, who announced that Meta's already barely-existent and largely ineffective moderation system would be scaled back to even less (best coverage of the day-- The Guardian researching the watch he was wearing). There are still some standards in place, sort of, but mostly Zuck has signaled that he wants to be part of the anti-fact MAGA world. 

Mostly folks are missing that this flap is another sign of how far Facebook has strayed from its original promise. My Facebook days go all the way back to the era when you could only get an account as a student or parent of certain universities, so I can tell tales of the days when Facebook allowed you to stay in contact with friends and family. It was ingenious. You told Facebook whose posts you wanted to see, and Facebook showed them to you. 

It was an internet public square of sorts, a place you could go and be assured you'd see people you knew and wanted to stay connected to. You could find old friends and, in the case of teachers, former students. 

But that didn't last. Instead of simply showing you what you asked to see, Facebook started shoving other stuff at you, showing you what someone else wanted to see. The public square started to grow a thousand billboards and snake oil salesmen. Enshittification set in as Facebook tested its limits. How many people will leave if we tweak this feature? How much will people pay us to have their content shoved in front of everyone's eyeballs? How much violation of privacy will people tolerate as we mine their profiles in order to make our advertising sales better targeted? 

And so now we have the Facebook that we only sort of use, a stream of spam and ads that can't be trusted because nobody vets them, interspersed every ten posts or so by the stuff we actually want to see. If you use Facebook much at all, your reaction to the Meta announcement is a bit meh, because chances are you've had a post taken down for no discernable reason even as you scroll past blatant lies. 

Twitter, the other contender for a public square designation, has become President Musk's private playground. I love Bluesky, but it's not going to be the new Twitter, and it's the best in a long line of sad, failed attempts to create a new internet public square (Google Plus, anyone?). And let's not even start on social media accounts of people who are not actually people; AI is going to make us nostalgic for old-fashioned sock puppets; at least those fake people were real people.

It's hard to say how close we came to an internet public square. There were always limitations, the FOMO was always greater than what you were actually missing, and if twelve people sign up for an online community, the thirteenth person is going to be some kind of troll. But the dream is hard to release.

There may be real benefits. Social media often gives us the feeling that by engaging in an on line debate about an issue, we were really Doing Something. If the collapse of the public cyber-square gets more folks to log off and Do Something in their own communities, that's probably a net win. 

Also, once the dream dies, we can make use of the tools we have. This is part of wearing your big boy and big girl pants in the grown up world-- most of the tools and services available to do your work involve dealing with sub-optimal people and companies. You have to make your choices and decide which compromises you can live with. Does the benefit you get outweigh the problematic nature of the tool you're using? Corporations will give us what they want to give us; it has always been up to us to sift through that for the things we can use.

I can scroll past the baloney on Facebook to keep in touch with people who matter to me. This blog is published on blogspot (owned by Google) and also on Substack, both of which are in some ways problematic. But it lets me do part of my work and be part of a network that, sitting here in a small town, I would never have otherwise connected with. On the other hand, I won't use AI images to spruce up the blog because the environmental, ethical, and reality-eroding costs are not worth making the blog marginally more pretty. Everyone has to do their own cost-benefit calculations, which is its own little pang, because those calculations will hasten the break-up of the public space as people peel off to their separate new places.

It sucks that enshittification has been accelerated by a second Trump administration. It can feel like community is breaking down just as we need it, that our ability to build a consensus reality based on, you know, reality, is being broken down at the exact same moment that people who want to attack it are coming to power. It sucks, but there it is. Sometimes you wake up in Interesting Times and there's nothing really for it except to suck it up and do the work.

Teachers are especially well-prepared to deal with these sorts of times. It's pretty standard operating procedure for classroom teachers to find ways to do their jobs despite a lack of support from the people who are supposed to support them. For most of my career, I called teaching a guerilla job, a job in which you have to work around your administration and, increasingly, around the state and federal bureaucrats and politicians who seem to devote far more energy to making your job harder than helping you do it.

Many states have been hostile territory for public education for years; now, the whole country will become more hostile. But there was never a golden age when national politics were noted for boosting and supporting public education. 

So find your support network. I notice that many folks are patching one together out of several platforms, and that makes sense-- social media diversification protects you from the sudden collapse of any one platform (hasta la vista, Cafe Utne). But in the meantime, it's probably time to let go of the dream of some social media platform where everyone gets together, asshats are muted, and all the communicating you want to do can be done freely and safely at one URL. No corporation was ever going to be a reliable arbiter of the truth, and now they've at least said out loud that they don't intend to try. Let's get on with it. 

The Free Market In A Small Town

I live in a small town in a small town region. A little over 6,000 in the city, somewhere around 50,000 in the county. We're in northwest Pennsylvania, about halfway between Pittsburgh and Erie, so not the kind of brutal isolation that a small town in Nebraska or Montana experiences.

We were fairly wealthy once upon a time 150 or so years ago, we were the heart of the oil industry, and our cities are still marked by some of the buildings that our local wealthy folk erected. But that was another time. We are not some sad and hollowed out disaster of a town. We have a functioning arts community, plenty of outdoor recreation, and some community festivals that light up the region. People move here because we are in many ways the picture of that idealized small town life that is part of how we Americans view ourselves.

We are, in short, probably better off than the average small town.

But there are too few of us, with too little money, to make us a very attractive market, and when you aren't a very attractive market, the invisible hand of the free marketplace just kind of waves at you on its way to some place a little more lucrative.

Much of what has happened here is a familiar story. A mall went up many decades back and kneecapped the downtown stores. Then Walmart came and kneecapped the mall. I would love to avoid giving the Waltons any of my money, but for many goods there are no alternatives here. Other than, of course, Amazon. 

If I want to "ethically source" some items, it becomes a chore. I don't know if you've shopped much at Walmart, but what I find remarkable is how little selection they actually offer. I needed a toaster-oven. They had only a couple of choices, all too similar to the one I bought from them the last time and which turned out to be largely useless. We have lots of nice little shops in the area that can sell some nice stuff, but not toasters, so I hopped on line to hunt down an acceptable toaster which I would have to select based on pictures and descriptions because I cannot see it or heft it. This is exponentially less annoying than trying to shop for shoes for my non-standard feet. After days of research, I find the item, and I even order it from someone other than the House of Bezos, though I can't be certain I didn't just give money to some different awful person. And I'm also aware that shopping for a more-ethical option is a privilege that not all my neighbors can afford.

The free market does not like places without a lot of money. You can shoot me messages about the latest thing proper lefties are supposed to boycott, but chances are there isn't such a place within fifty miles (Starbucks? Fat chance). 

We at least still have a hospital (through a bizarre fluke involving a lawsuit and a story too long to tell here). My niece lives a few towns over in a larger city that as of the new year has no hospital at all. We still have a large unit in the county, a wing of Pennsylvania's leading health care behemoth, but it is inadequately staffed with a group of folks who are trying their damnedest to compensate for their employer's neglect and disinterest.

For folks who are sure that the free market can do a better job than the United States Postal Service--well, UPS and FedEx have closed their customer facing offices here, so if you want to send something with them, you'll have to prepare and tag the package yourself before leaving it on a table at some pick-up spot (that you'll have to find by searching on line). As always, private carrier deliveries will only happen in town-- if you live out in the boonies, the delivery companies will hand your package to USPS to complete the delivery.

We have some nice local restaurants and for chains, just the basics of fast food. We have a small airport, but no commercial flights any more. We have may shops in town, many of which are "hobby shops" run by people who are more attached to the idea of running a business than making a living at it. 

When I think about the free market true believers and their approach to education, I wonder if they really understand how little the free market could accomplish here. Our local Catholic school system has shrunk to nothing but a single K-6 school. There is a private Christian school that controls costs by replacing teachers with computers. 

There are just over 5,500 students in the whole county. Cyber charters regularly bleed off a couple hundred of those (though that is often temporary). Like most small town areas, folks here consider the schools a big part of the community identity. And almost all of those schools are Title I schools, meaning that families aren't sitting on big piles of money they can spend for a quality private school (if such a school were available locally). 

I don't hate the free market, and it has done some mighty nice things for this community. But the free market likes marketplaces flush with cash and customers, and most small town and rural areas aren't. This is Dollar General territory, a store whose whole business model is "If we give folks with few alternatives the very bare minimum of service and product quality, maybe we can turn a profit."

That is not the business model we need for education. We already know that it's not working for health care--spotty-if-at-all, minimally capable service. Turning education into a free market, you're-on-your-own consumer good will not serve us well. If the goal is going to be providing the best possible education for every child in the country, the free market is uniquely unable to pursue that goal. 

Come visit us here. It's a beautiful place to live and work and even be a tourist. I'll give you a tour and show you the sights. But don't ask us to depend on the free market to get us top quality education for our children.