Free Market Myths and School Choice

Why the reformster love affair with the free market?

Every version of school choice we've been pitched over the past few decades is wedded to some form of free market dynamics. And yet it doesn't have to be.

Educational choice can take place within the public school framework. School districts in my area all offer a choice between a traditional school path or a career-technology school, and that's in districts that are relatively small. A school district could offer different educational paths under one roof, which, as I've argued before, would be less expensive for taxpayers and more flexible for students, who would face far fewer switching costs if they changed their minds (as teens do). The taxpayers would retain ownership of the facilities and could exercise accountability through their elected school board.

School choice within the public system certainly comes with some challenges (New Hampshire is wrestling with some of them while contemplating open enrollment). But there's no particular reason to assume that school choice must be wedded to a free market system. In fact, Doug Harris, Professor and Department Chair of Economics at Tulane, who has done plenty of reformster-friendly work, has laid out why the free market is a poor match for education. 

And yet, reformsters stay deeply attached to the free market, to the point that some appear to be more committed to the "convert education to free market commodity" part than the "give families educational choices" part. Schools are called "government schools" with contempt because such a system is, to some folks, a self-evident afront to free marketry. Calling public education a "monopoly" misuses the term to push the assumption that education is already in a free market framework. 

So what drives this attachment to the idea of unleashing free market forces in education? What are the myths behind this tunnel vision?

The free market is a magical moral good.

There are folks who just believe that a free market is in and of itself good, that even if it doesn't produce better or more equitable results, the country is still better off with a free market system. As myths go, it's a pretty one. Honestly, these believers might have more intellectual integrity than followers of any of the rest of these myths.

Competition makes things better.

For some folks, it is a fundamental truth that competition increases excellence. If public schools just had some private competition, the reasoning goes, they would be motivated to new heights of excellence.

But this assumes that some schools know how to be more awesome-- they just don't bother unless sufficiently threatened. Which is both wrong and insulting. 

Nor does competition always foster excellence. History is littered with companies that won the free market competition by means other than excellence, from VHS players to a whole lot of cable channels. The free market does not foster superior products; it fosters superior marketing. Yes, excellence can be a marketing tool, but there are many other ways to compete for market share.

Free market competition is excellent at sorting both customers and businesses into tiers-- rich and poor, winners and losers. The market is good at carving itself into different sectors of more or less privilege. That's not what we want for education; the national goal is not supposed to be getting some folks an educational Lexus and others an educational 1996 Kia. 

Plus, after years of free market education, we have plenty of data to tell us that it is not making education more excellent, at all.

Money is the only motivator that matters.

Equally cynical is the assumption among marketeers that the only thing that really matters in getting people to work in the education space is then chance to make money. That's why we need to attract people to leadership roles who have a track record of making money, and then we have to free them of the rules and regulations that would frustrate their drive to make money. 

Choice schools need to be run like unhampered visionary CEOs, because only the model of a profitable business makes sense for-- well, anything at all. Education. Health care. You name it. You have to model it on a business.

Foot-based accountability.

Free marketeers believe in voting with your feet. If a school is terrible, customers will desert it and it will suffer a deserved death, to be replaced by some newer, better school. But voting with your feet is not going to exert any serious market pressure.

A charter or private school only needs a small sliver of the market to stay in business. Witness charters like Success Academy that actively chase away families that don't fit their mold, not so much customers voting with feet as it is schools voting with their boot. 

But free marketeers believe that the education market should be unregulated, and that operators should be free to do as they please, and foot-based accountability was all that was needed. This goes all the way back to Milton Friedman, who was sure that nobody needed to make laws about racial discrimination because the market would iron all that out. That turned out not to be true, at all, and it holds true for schools that teach everything from flat earth theory to creationism.

Individuals take responsibility, but not for Those People.

For many fans of the invisible hand, free markets means individual responsibility. If you need a commodity from the market, getting it is your problem. So is making sure it's not junk. 

Here's the other accountability piece. It's not just that accountability is to the customer, but that there is no accountability to society at large. If a school is teaching racism or flat earth theory or The Flintstones were a documentary, that's the family's problem, as if releasing a bunch of mis-educated adults into society doesn't cause problems for everyone else.

For these marketeers, choice isn't really the issue at all. What is the issue is that the government is taking their tax dollars to help educate Those Peoples' Children, and that's gotta be some kind of socialism. If Those People want to send their kids to a decent school, then let Those People pay for it themselves. 

And if that means some people send their kids to a lousy school, well, that's fine. These marketeers don't think the market's tendency to pick winners and losers (they might say it "reveals" or "certifies" winners and losers) is a feature. not a bug, for putting people in their proper place. Public education is just one more commie social safety net that is working against the laws of nature. 

The kind of choice that should exist is an individual one, and the choices you have will depend on what you can afford. Which is, ironically, pretty much what we have already with real estate based school district funding.

What about culture warriors?

These folks muddy the waters because they are not interested in school choice at all. They would like to send taxpayer dollars to private Christian schools, and they would like to inject Christian Nationalism into whatever public schools they aren't able to dismantle. The rhetoric of school choice was just conveniently sitting there, and it provides some cover for their actual aims, but watch these folks oppose LGBTQ charters and Islamic voucher schools. They've teamed up with the marketeers, but like the previous alliance between Free Marketeers and those seeking educational equity solutions, this alliance between two groups that don't really have the same aims is probably eventually doomed.

Could there be myth-free school choice?

Absolutely. There's a whole other argument to had about the mythical nature of a free market, that all markets are created and maintained by government and unavoidably rigged in one direction or another. The mechanics of school choice do not require a free market system. It does not require schools to be run like a business. 

School choice doesn't have to be constructed on a framework of market dynamics. In fact, school choice could be done much better without those things-- provided we accept the notion that the goal is to get the best possible education to every student, regardless of zip code. We could do it, if the goal were actual educational choice and not the conversion of a public societal good into one more commodities market. And that remains a fundamental problem with the modern "school choice" movement. 

 

NE: Vouchers Sink Budget

As we noted last week, some Nebraska fans of taxpayer-funded vouchers tried--again--to get enact vouchers, this time through the sneaky technique of putting them in the budget. Instead of getting their vouchers, they raised a controversy that sank the entire budget.

State Sen. Rob Clements of Elmwood, Appropriations Committee chair, removed the $3.5 million of voucher money, meant to bridge the gap between the end of the state's voucher program that was repealed by voters, and the beginning of the federal voucher system that Governor Pillen opted into (the voters get no say on that one). And lots of people were upset, as reported by the Nebraska Examiner.

Arguments for the voucher money were baloney. Sen. Christy Armendariz of Omaha argued that the vouchers were needed to protect poor kids who might be "kicked out" of public school. State Sen. Brad von Gillern of the Elkhorn area expressed frustration toward opponents, calling it hypocritical to oppose the measure when many of the same senators argue the state isn’t doing enough to help the poor.

“Shame on you,” von Gillern said. “If you make a pitch for poor people for any other reason, and you can’t support this, you’re a hypocrite.”

Except that vouchers are used mostly by wealthy, already-in-private-school students, and it's the private schools that get to pick their students, not vice versa. It is telling that the voucher crowd did not have anecdotes of poor children who had been kicked out of public school and had been rescued by vouchers. The program ran all this year, so those stories, if real, should have been easy enough to locate. 

Sen. Myron Dorn of Adams, the only Republican on Appropriations to oppose the $3.5 million in vouchers, criticized focus on this one issue, and also criticized the whole sneaky business of trying to slip this policy into the budget when there is no bill or law behind it. 

Said Tim Royers, president of Nebraska State Education Association--

This standoff is exactly why you don’t try and pass policy through the budget, especially when that policy is to extend an incredibly unpopular program that was repealed by voters in the most recent election. … We hope enough can come together and negotiate a path forward that keeps vouchers out of the budget.

So Nebraska voucherphiles managed to sink the state budget over a program that voters had already voted down. That's a bold stance to take and one can hope that Nebraska voters will deliver the reward they so richly deserve. It's yet another reminder, in a backhand way, that no matter how hard voucherphiles insist to the contrary, supporting taxpayer-funded school vouchers is not actually a winning political issue.

TX: A New Center Tracks Vouchers

Our Schools Our Democracy was set up in 2024 "to protect the fundamental rights of all Texans to a free, quality public education" at a time when those rights were under a concerted attack. Now they have come up with a new organization and some excellent tools for dealing with the Texas march toward privatization.

The Texas Center for Voucher Transparency is a timely organization for Texans, as Governor Greg Abbott and his fellow voucher lovers continue to push for privatization of public education. Over the years, Abbott has had trouble getting past democracy, especially those pesky rural representatives and their tendency to represent their constituent's wishes instead of Abbott's beloved plans. Even with outside help, it has been a tough haul.

And it has been crystal clear that what the voucherphiles of Texas want is not so much actual school choice as much as it is a way to funnel taxpayer dollars to private Christian schools. Everything that research predicted-- schools that pick their students, wasted taxpayer dollars, vouchers that mostly fund families who were already in private schools-- it's all happening in Texas.

So the time is right for a center that tracks all the voucher shenanigans. A place that collects the research and tales of voucher irresponsibility. It's a billion-dollar taxpayer0funded program-- surely somebody ought to be keeping an eye on it. The TXCVT goal:

To uphold the public trust and ensure that Texans have timely, credible information about how the voucher program operates, who it benefits, and how it affects public schools and communities.

One exceptionally cool tool is the School Locator Map. The map shows the location of every school in the state-- public, charter, and private. It shows their ranking on Texas evaluation system, and you can also break it down by county or by elected representative. There's a wealth of information here, though you can see very quickly one truth about school choice in Texas-- it's really only available for families in the urban areas. The vast majority of counties in Texas have no "choice" options-- and yet, their residents get to contribute their tax dollars to help fund vouchers in the cities. 

It's a great batch of resources. If you are in Texas, you should be aware of them, and if you are in any other state, you should be jealous of them-- jealous enough to either find the resources available in your state or to get something started.

ICYMI: Maple Syrup Edition (3/22)

A little field trip yesterday to a maple syrup producing farm, where they are boiling the last catch of the season. If you are used to the picture of a bucket hanging under a tap on a tree, I can tell you that more modern operations involve a tap hooked to a hose that runs through a network of other hoses to a main collection tank that uses some suction to collect the sap. Lot of technical steps after that, too, mostly involving some impressive machinery. However, I feel confident that AI will not take over the maple industry any time soon.

In the meantime, here's this week's reading list. In case you're new here, let me mention that A) this list generally doesn't include any pieces that I referenced or wrote about during the week and B) your mission is to take any pieces that you think are particularly valuable and amplify them through your own channels.

Public schools bombarded by families scrambling for special education assessments tied to Texas voucher money

Texas has a voucher system that incentivizes specials needs (if your child has them, you get extra taxpayer dollars). So now a bunch of parents want their public school to certify that their child has special needs so that those parents can pull that child out of public school.

The "Education Freedom" Myth Gets Its Wild West Makeover

Josh Cowen hates to say he told them so, but when it comes to Texas and their taxpayer-funded vouchers, he told them so. Includes lots of useful links to research.

Punishing Children: Why the Attack on Plyler v. Doe Is an Attack on America’s Core Values

You may not know much about Plyler, but you're going to hear about it plenty. Bruce Lesley explains why it's a big deal.

Highest performing Ohio Charter Schools still have 30% Ds and Fs on State Report Card. Public School Districts have 30% As.

Stephen Dyer breaks down some numbers, and they provide one more piece of proof of the mediocrity of Ohio charter schools.

Moms for Liberty’s “Toxic” Tiffany Justice Is Out at Heritage

Maurice Cunningham caught an interesting piece of news this week-- Moms for Liberty co-founder Tiffany Justice lasted less than a year in her cushy Heritage Foundation gig.

When Literacy Reform Meets the Classroom

Cooper Sved at the Albert Shanker Institute blog writes about the miserable crap that happens when someone wants to teach but they have to wrestle with tightly standardized curriculum in a box instead.

Massachusetts: Highest Court Says Charter School Must Comply With State Public-Records Law

Shawgi Tell checks in on another court case in which charter schools try to avoid the whole public-or-private question. 

A viral case against screens in schools is winning converts. Does the evidence hold up?

I am so glad that Matt Barnum is back at Chalkbeat. In this piece, he looks at the growing argument that points at screens as the culprits behind the great test score dip.

America’s math and reading scores tanked after schools ditched textbooks for screens—and AI could worsen the brain rot

Meanwhile, Sasha Rogelberg is helping push that same theory at Fortune.

KY bill pushing religion over school education is immoral

Kentucky is considering one of those bills that mandates letting students out of school to go attend a "moral instruction" class. Linda Allewalt argues this is, in fact, immoral.

Arizona ESA LEGO Spending

Jen Jennings has been digging through the Arizona taxpayer-funded voucher spending and fining some real whoppers. These graphics look at just the spending on LEGOs alone.

Conservative parents and teachers unions become unlikely allies fighting tech in schools

I told you a couple of weeks ago that M4L was sounding not-crazy on ed tech. Some state unions are deciding the same thing.

Our Experience with i-Ready

Not good. The experience was not good. But if you are wondering why people complain about i-Ready, this will give you plenty of specifics. If you already know, this will let you know you're not alone. This is painful.

Failing Up: From Nashville to Chicago

TC Weber provides a ground-level example of yet another one of these guys who never, ever suffer for their failure. Watch out, Chicago-- he's headed your way.

April 1st: Supreme Court Will Hear Oral Arguments on Trump’s Exec. Order to Deny Birthright Citizenship

Jan Resseger remains the queen of explaining what the heck is going on and what people have to say about it.

Grade Retention: The Debate Had Its Day, Now End It!

Nancy Bailey provides some final words on the eternal debate about holding students back a grade.

The False Promise of Education "Miracles" and Misunderstanding Standardized Test Scores

Paul Thomas looks at the history of education miracles, and what it can tell us about any current reading miracles, like the one in Mississippi.

AI Is Coming For Your Job (and Mine Too)

Jennifer Berkshire checks to see if her job is in danger, and if the dream of retraining and education can protect anybody.

AI ‘Slop’ Is Flooding Children’s Media. Parents Should Be Very Alarmed.

Emily Tate Sullivan at The 74 has an important story about the tidal wave of AI slop aimed at children who are using Youtube or other video platforms. If you are the parent of such a child, you need to read this.

Heather Cox Richardson talks to Josh Cowen

It's an interview on Youtube with America's leading daily historian talking to one of the biggest experts on the problems of school vouchers. Well worth 40 minutes of your time.

Measles Is Back on the Faculty Meeting Agenda

Matt Brady goes down the measles rabbit hole and bring backs information about the disease and advice about how to deal with it in school.

Massachusetts Fiscal Alliance: Kochtopus Flunkey

Maurice Cunningham, the dark money expert, finds the Koch machine spreading its tentacles again in Massachusetts.

This High School Student Invented a Filter That Eliminates 96 Percent of Microplastics From Drinking Water

Just a reminder that high school students can accomplish pretty extraordinary things.

Meanwhile, at Forbes.com, I looked at a measure of teacher morale across the country, and a court case that used some interesting ju jitsu to keep prayer out of the classroom in Louisiana.

I like music that finds new ways to re-create itself, and I love musicians who are having fun doing their thing, so I love this version of a song that is not exactly a classic.

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NE: Trying To Get Vouchers Past Voters

Nebraska's voucher fans are bound and determined, like legislators in many states, to get around the voters so they can get vouchers installed.

In May of 2023, Nebraska’s Governor Jim Pillen signed into law LB 753, creating tax credit vouchers for subsidizing private schools.

The concept has been floated in Nebraska before, notably turning up more than once in 2022’s session. In 2023, it finally progressed through the legislature. But NSEA political action director Brian Nikkelson told the Nebraska Examiner that the public did not support the vouchers, and if the bill was passed, there would be a petition drive to force the bill to go on the ballot for voters to decide.

And so there was. It was a heck of a battle, with the pro-voucher forces have attracting a mountain of money, some of it from outside the state. Paul Hammel at the Nebraska Examiner reported that big money contributors include C.L. Werner, an Omaha-based trucking company executive ($100,000), Tom Peed and his son Shawn of a Lincoln publishing company ($75,000 each), and former Nebraska governor U.S. Senator Pete Ricketts ($25,000). Governor Pillen himself has contributed $100,000 to the campaign to save vouchers from a vote.

At the same time, Hammel reported, the American Federation for Children, the school choice advocacy group founded by Betsy DeVos, has contributed $103,000 in in-kind services and $583,000 in cash to the campaign.

It didn't matter. Support Our Schools needed 60,000 signatures to force a referendum. They ended up with about twice that number (that's roughly 10% of all eligible voters in the state). So this November, the voters of Nebraska were supposed to have their say. So you'd expect that voucher fans, who keep telling us how much everyone loves vouchers, would just sit back, secure in the knowledge that their program would win the referendum handily.

Well, no.

Instead, legislators cooked up LB 1402. This bill proposed to repeal the Opportunity Scholarships that were created under LB 753, and then to replace them with a new version of Opportunity Scholarships. This version would have been an education savings account (ESA) style super-voucher that hands over taxpayer money to send a student to a private or parochial school. It was more sketchy than last year's bill because it appropriates state funds (rather than tax-credited contributions) to pay for the vouchers.

But mostly what it did it render the petition drive moot, because it repealed the version of vouchers that the public was going to vote on. "Ha," they apparently thought. "That'll stop those damned voters."

In 67 days, the coalition of opponents gathered the necessary signatures—again. That repeal passed in November 2024, with 45 out of 49 legislative districts voting to repeal, and Nebraska's voucher law was toast. The voters had sent a clear and unequivocal message. 

Surely the state's leaders would say, "Well, the voters have spoken, so that's that."

Fat chance.

Voucherphiles were back with a new proposal in January 2025. “I’m not dissuaded by the fact that it was defeated at the ballot box,” said freshman State Sen. Tony Sorrentino of Omaha. 

To nobody's surprise, Governor Jim Pillen was first to jump on the as-yet-rule-free federal school voucher proposal. Okay, it was a small surprise, because Nebraska is not known for grabbing federal dollars, but hey-- this is Free Federal Money for private schools. In fact, U.S. Rep. Adrian Smith, R-Neb., helped Congress usher the tax credits provision onto President Donald Trump’s desk, even though his home district was among those shooting down vouchers in 2024. 

Pillen's new idea is to sell vouchers for the "gap" year, the year between the time when Nebraska's vouchers are required to end and the time when the federal vouchers are supposed to kick in. The proposal is being sent through the state's Labor Department rather than the Department of Education because that would skirt the requirement for any sort of hearing or debate, probably because voucherphiles have a pretty good idea of how that would go. 

Nebraska is one of those states where rural Republicans have opposed all attempts at vouchers, and they aren't sounding any friendlier about this one. Zach Wendling at Nebraska Examiner talked to State Sen. Tom Brandt of Plymouth, a Republican who opposed Linehan’s previous proposals; he said he is opposed to using any public money for private school choice. He’s still waiting to see how the federal tax credit program includes public schools (because, remember, there are no actual rules yet attached to the federal voucher program). 

“The referendum simply eliminated that. Period, end of story,” he continued on the state policy. “There’s no other interpretation you can draw from that.”

The gap funding would cost about $5 million for around 2,500 students. Of course, with no rules in place, it's possible that not all of Nebraska's current voucher students would qualify for federal vouchers. Nor can we predict what slice of the federal money pie Nebraska would be entitled to. If it comes to that, we could expect voucherphiles to argue that more gap funding is needed to cover new gaps, or maybe to expand above and beyond the federal offerings. 

Nebraska voucher fans are making a lot of "think of the children" noises, but families have plenty of time to look for new arrangements (i.e. finding the student a new school or going back to paying the full tuition with their own money). 

This is the same story we've seen over and over again. Vouchers never win when voters have a chance to be heard. Every single taxpayer-funded voucher program in this country has been created without giving the taxpayers a say or ignoring the say they had already said. Taxpayer-funded vouchers are all the result of legislators backed by deep-pocketed voucher fans deciding they are going to inflict these on the taxpayers. Nebraska's taxpayers just happen to have a few more tools to fight back with, but Nebraska's voucherphiles just keep looking for a way to avoid that whole pesky democracy thing. 

PA: An AI Safety Bill

In Pennsylvania, a bipartisan group is pushing SB 1090, a bill "providing for disclosures and safeguards relating to the use of artificial intelligence." 

It's short and sweet and doesn't go far enough, but it's something. The meat of it is in these next few bits:

Disclosure of nonhuman status.--If a reasonable person interacting with an AI companion would be misled to believe the person is interacting with a human, an operator shall issue a clear and conspicuous notification indicating that the AI companion is artificially generated and not human.

"Reasonable person" is doing a hell of a lot of work here. 

The bill would also require AI "operators" to "maintain and implement a protocol" to prevent its bots from producing suicidal ideation, suicide, or self-harm content to users, or content that directly encourages the user to commit acts of violence. That protocol should include suicide hotline or crisis text line if the user expresses thoughts about self-harm.

Even better, the bill would require that if "the operator knows or should have known" that the user is a minor, they must provide notification that the user is not interacting with a human being. They must also provide a "clear and conspicuous notification" at least once every three hours that the user should take a break and, again, that they are talking to a non-human bot. The AI should also be prevented from producing sexually explicit images or giving the minor instructions on sexually explicit conduct. 

Bots also have to come with a cyber-label saying "this might not be suitable for minors."

The Attorney General gets to enforce this. The state can fine an operator up to $10,000 for each violation (on top of any other remedies provided by law). $10K is, of course, couch cushion money for most tech companies, but this whole law is a hell of a lot better than one more chorus "Everyone better get their kids on AI before they are left behind in the awesome world of tomorrow that AI is going to launch any day now." Dragging them into court is the only thing that might get our tech overlords' attention, so it's encouraging to see legislatures showing a willingness to make that happen. 

The Mystery of Eighth Grade Test Results

Jill Barshay at Hechinger took a look at the Mississippi "Miracle," specifically the question of why the miraculous 4th grade test results have not been matched by the 8th grade. She shared many theories about what might help, a conversation that Mike Petrilli continued in his substack. But I think, as always, the discussion of this topic skips an important point. I'm going to skip my usual Big Standardized Test rant and save the Mississippi thing for another day. Let's just talk about the 8th grade test scores and what they tell us about 13-year-olds and testing.

The 8th grade test dip is not news to anyone who has been paying attention. One of the great unstudied effects of the BS Test era is just how many districts reorganized their elementary. middle, or high schools in order to put their 8th graders under the same roof as another test group and hopefully blunt the effects of their lousy grades on the specific school. (If your middle school is just grades 6-8, then your 8th grade scores are the school scores, but if, say, your high school is grades 7-12, then the 8th grade scores get lumped in with 11th grade scores).

But any discussion of 8th grade scores needs to consider the Giving A Shit factor.

8th grade is the year when everything breaks loose for students. Their bodies betray them, becoming ungainly and hard to manage. They have whole new sets of feelings, whole new drama-fraught social lives to manage. They have to work out how to deal with their parents, who have somehow become way more dumb and obnoxious than they used to be. School gets hard because learning gets hard, harder than in elementary school when it just sort of happened, and it begins to dawn on students that adults are not always reliable or trustworthy.

Testing has, of course, given rise to a new set of springtime traditions. The pre-test pep rally. The pre-test hype video. The pre-test earnest talk. The elementary students may still get some inspiration from these, but now you've got eighth graders who have been through this year after year, test after test, practice test after practice test. 

The entire foundation of test-based accountability is the assumption that students will sit down to take the test and actually care and actually try. Elementary kids? They are game to throw themselves at whatever you give them to do. 11th graders? They have learned that there is some senseless baloney you have to work through in the adult world. But 8th graders? Nobody has fewer shits to give about your adult nonsense than an 8th grader.

Every time this discussion comes up, I just imagine some bureaucrat in a suit standing in front of a bunch of 8th graders telling them, "I know every one of you is going to do their very best, because while this test has no stakes at all for you, how else will researchers and policy makers and academics  be able to have data-based discussions about the educational effects of instructional techniques and curricular policies?"

Don't get me wrong. 8th graders can be awesome, the energy and heart of elementary students combined with the knowledge and sense of high schoolers. 8th graders will absolutely give their blood and guts and hearts to an endeavor when they can see an authentic, real reason, a reason they can see and feel in their bones. 

Where in the battery of the Big Standardized Test do you think they'll find that? 

All the discussions of other factors-- the screens, the social media, the knowledge-based learning, the high-quality instructional materials, test designs, the leveling of reading materials-- that's all worth having. But I wish everyone worked up about testing would--well, you know what I wish when it comes to testing, but at least I would like them to ask themselves one question:

You want students to give their best, most intense and serious effort when it comes time to take the test.

Why should they want to do that?

The More Reforms Change

So here's the story.

The Secretary of Education sends the President a memo (91 pages!) arguing that the Department of Education should be dismantled as part of plan to get education sent back to the states. In its zeal to promote national security and reduce inequality, argues the secretary, the federal government has adopted "an overly intrusive federal role.”

The details of the proposal include moving department functions to other departments, such as sending Pell Grants  and loan programs to Treasury and the Office for Civil Rights to the Justice Department. Indian Education programs could go to Interior. The secreary explained that the move of the OCR would be with the aim of “making local and state resolution of complaints the first recourse.” Let Alabama and Georgia decide whether they are violating anyone's civil rights by promoting inequality in education.

The "large scale funding" of the department needs to be reversed because it is "one of the factors responsible for the present imbalance of the federal budget." Cutting around 27% of the federal budget should provide “encouragement to the states to shoulder a greater share of the responsibility for delivering educational services.” 

And what funding remains should be provided to the states in no-string block grants, piles of money that the states can spend as they wish.

The federal governmentj has no business managing educaation, particularly because under Certain Administrations, the department serves certain special interest groups. Also, dismantling the department would be in line with the President's campaign promises.

The Secretary of Education was Terrel Bell, the President was Ronald Reagan, and the year was 1981.

In other words, Trump-McMahon policies are 45 years old. They didn't start with Trump, and they won't end with him. The dismantling of the department--particularly the disempowerment of the OCR-- and the slashing of funding and funding oversight -- that's been the dream of some folks on the right since about fifteen minutes after the department was created. 

Note: I came across the story playing with a new EdWeek feature that lets you search for the big stories from the year you started in education. It does not actually go back to the year I entered the classroom, it got close enough to cough up this reminder that some parts of the anti-public education hustle are plenty old.

ICYMI: Out Of The Office Edition (3/15)

I am away from the Curmudgucation Institute home base this weekend, off to a whirlwind trip to the Seattle branch office, so the reading list may not be as rigorous as usual. And the time difference may factor in as well. 

How Did This Happen???

Jennifer Berkshire observes that as backlash against ed tech grows, some folks seem to have conveniently forgotten who pushed some of this stuff in the first place.

Nebraska braces for latest private school funding, vouchers fight, now eyeing $3.5M

Let's throw more money at private schools, declares Nebraska's governor. Zach Wendling reports for Nebraska Examiner.

One-third of Arizona school districts at financial risk amid ESA growth

In the race to privatize public schools into oblivion, Arizona is a leader. A new report shows how many school districts are in trouble in the voucher state. Steven Sarabia has the story for Arizona's Family.

Taxpayer-funded school vouchers used for Disneyland trips

Speaking of Arizona's taxpayer-funded vouchers, Craig Harris at 12News has been doing outstanding work as the news unit digs into what, exactly, those Arizona taxpayer-funded vouchers are being spent on (spoiler alert: not education).

Demand for student teacher stipends outstrips supply as Shapiro proposes boosting program

Pennsylvania started giving student teachers a stipend, and that program is going pretty well. Yes, there's an old farty part of me that says Kids These Days should just suck it up like we did Back in My Day. But as a Pennsylvanian who wishes we were way better at attracting and retaining teachers, I have to admit this makes sense.

Teaching Writing is Personal.

The indispensable Mercedes Schneider writes about teaching writing.

Are public schools part of the government, civil society, or both?\

This week, in the Posts Worth Reading By People I Generally Disagree With, Mike Petrilli says folks should stop calling public schools "government schools." 

MAGA Promotes “Same Old” Dangerous School Vouchers with a New “Culture War” Frame\

As always, Jan Resseger does a fine job of bringing together some excellent commentary on the continuing trouble of privatizing school.

Hate Definitely Has a Home Here

Nancy Flanagan wonders where we are as a nation, and how teachers are supposed to deal with it.

The Alarm Bell Experiment (n=1)

Matt Brady tries consuming a teen style online video diet, and he learns a few things in the process.

The AI Education Grift

Thomas Ultican has some doubts about the intentions of the AI-in-education crowd.

When Correlation Repeats Across 50 States

Jared Cooney Horvath is an author and scholar who did some research looking at the connection between those drooping NAEP scores and a state's digital adoption, and the results are... not good.

Logged In, Tuned Out

Meredith Coffey walks us through the last fifteen years of ed tech in this piece for the often=ignorable Education Next. But this piece has some solid sections (at last, someone who agrees with me that "digital natives" are not all that tech savvy). 

‘I wish I could push ChatGPT off a cliff’: professors scramble to save critical thinking in an age of AI

Alice Speri at The Guardian collects a few pointed reactions to the rise of AI and the attempts to resist.

Against Maxxing

John Warner looks at the bizarre world of maxxing and shares some thoughts (including education maxxing). "We are just fine as we are, my fellow humans."

Gullible, Cynical America

Adam Serwer at the Atlantic writes about how many of us have become both disbelievers and suckers all at the same time.

Class Action Alleges That Grammarly Misappropriated the Names of Journalists and Authors Through its “Expert Review” That Lets Users Get Feedback on Writing From Experts

The grifters at Grammarly have unloaded a new scam, and this time they're getting taken to court over it. May they lose, big time. More details here. 

Some music is best played on the back porch, maybe even with a dog. 

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Zuck's Ed Tech Baby Goes With A Whimper

A new chapter in the long story of Summit Learning.

Summit Schools were an early entry (2003) into the world of charters, with founder Diane Tavenner trying to do personalized learning the low tech way. Tavenner was reportedly a former teacher, asst. principal and a graduate of the Broad Faux Academy of Superintendenty Stuff: she served as the board chair for the California Charter Schools Association, a board that includes Joe Williams, head of DFER as a member). 

Mark Zuckerberg, fresh off a disastrous attempt to finance an overhaul of New Jersey schools,  ran across the Bay area school in 2014 and decided that he would give it not just an infusion of cash, but an infusion of technology. Including engineering support to "make this better." Summit became one of Zuckerberg's pet projects, and it was also beloved by that other well-connected super-rich education amateur, Bill Gates, who has some of his Top People promoting hell out of it.

Summit handed off its "education. in a box" program to all sorts of schools (about 400 at its peak) and it was yet another experimennt in large scale education-via-screen. 

Many folks did not love it. . Take a look at some of the comments in this piece "The Inherent Racism of Summit 'Public' (Charter) School." And many schools have backed away from the Mass Customized Learning Program (a term that deserves a place on the oxymoron shelf right next to Jumbo Shrimp and Peacekeeper Missiles).

Indiana, Pennsylvania schools tried to quietly implement Summit programming, and parents began to squawk almost immediately. After just one month

parents began telling the school board that their kids were not adjusting to the new learning style, that they found questionable and objectionable material in the recommended online resources in their classes, and that their children were spending too much time in front of computer screens

NY Magazine just profiled Cheshire, Connecticut, another town that fought back when the mass customized learning program came to town (or rather, the town came to them, since the Summit model involves logging on to the Summit website). The Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative had paid for the 130 Chromebooks needed, but once again, reality got in the way of CZI dreams.

Students rarely met with teachers, but instead had lots of screen time with a computer program that was reportedly easy to trick (just skip the lessons and go straight to the tests). The program still has glitches, including questions that cannot be answered correctly (maybe some nerdy programmer decided Summit needed its own Kobayashi Maru?) And there's the problem of the open-sourced playlists themselves:

Nothing about the platform said Silicon Valley more than the open-source approach to the “playlists.” Teachers were encouraged to customize them, to add and subtract — and Cheshire’s teachers were working on this, Superintendent Jeff Solan said in an email — but the base material was often just a bunch of links, to sites ranging from Kids Encyclopedia to SparkNotes to the BBC. I interviewed several educators who were involved in developing the platform in 2014, and when I mentioned this to one, he agreed they were “shoddy.” “We knew it,” he said. They were in such a hurry, he said, “we were just throwing things in there, that, at least from a Google search, looked reputable.”

Yikes. It's almost as if the actual education piece is secondary to some other part of the operation. I wonder what that could be...

And there was the question of data. Summit is clear about the 18 partners it shares its data with, and subjects itself to its own strong privacy agreements in addition to the legal protections around student data already in place, but parents and other locals were nonetheless concerned. “The Chromebooks were free. Nothing’s free. There’s always a reason,” said Mary Burnham, a retired educator who was part of the campaign against Summit. “If somebody’s giving you something free, chances are, they want something back, or they’re already getting something from it. As best I can tell, with Summit, it’s data.

Like the equally tech-heavy and success-light Altschool, Summit seemed to be one part market research and one part experiment on human lab rats, with the goal of finding proof of concept for computer-managed education. But mostly Altschool lost truckloads of money, and it eventually faded away into various other products and companies (Altitude Learning was one piece, apparently part of Guidepost Learning, another edu-prenuer undertaking that has since gone bankrupt). 

Traction was not happening for Summit, either. Chalkbeat found that 1 in 4 schools dropped the program by the 2018-19 school year.

In 2018, Summit spun the digital program off into a non-profit entity whose initial four-person board included Diane Tavenner, Summit founder; Priscilla Chan; and Peggy Alford, the CFO for CZI.It seemed suspiciously like a subsidiary of the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative. The program was designed to follow what has now become the familiar model-- students getting their education from a compter-manab=ged algorithm while (low-cost) "coaches" provided some human oversight in the room. Maybe not so much oversight as "accountability sinks," because somebody has to be responsible when things go south. But Summit even went so far as to create its own special farm for training "facilitators."

The National Education Policy Center took a look at Summit's learning system, and found that it was a lot more hat than cowboy (and it was also extraordinarily reluctant to submit to any examination of their work or results). 

So in 2023, CZI (not really pretending it hadn't swallowed Summit whole) spun Summit off again, this time an outfit called Gradient, which the CZI blog said "we can help these important research-based resources more consistently reach students and educators, by focusing on coherence for educators." "Consistency" and "coherence" come up a lot in the history of Summit, because Zuck and his friends repeatedly concluded that the reason the computer-managed curriculum in a box wasn't working better and winning hearts and minds was that teachers were not implementing it faithfully enough. Damned mat widgets.

Gradient was yet another company whose promised whiz-bangery invokes the the "whole student" and a "unified learning platform," and while it can be hard to see through the smokey argle bargle, it sure looks like Trascend also wants to make computer-managed software-delivered education a thing. With a "dedicated coach." 

Gradient was going to have things chugging along by the 2024-2025 school year, but in Februarty 2026, Gradient announced its "next chapter,"

Expanding the scale and impact of this work is more important than ever. After much deliberation with our board, we are pleased to share that the future of the Gradient Learning program will move to a new home at Transcend, a nonprofit dedicated to supporting schools and systems to create extraordinary experiences and outcomes for all students. Transcend brings the expertise to take our program to the next level, as well as the ability to amplify a community of education innovators working for lasting change.

Transcend is about "model sharing" and "community innovation." They want to "reimagine educator roles" and their Leaps toward Extraordinary Learning for All is just the same old "school hasn't changed in a century" and educatyion should be relevant and a lot of nice words about what education should be like that nobody should disagree with, given that they offer nothing in the way of specific techniques that teachers should use. They jpin. a whole long line of edu-prenuers who offer pretty ideals about what education should be like without addressing any of the nuts and bolt specifics, which is where teachers live and do their work. Agency! High expectations! Rigor! Not one size fiots all! I have no evidence, but it is entirely possible that Transcend is actually headquarterd on a farm upstate, where tired old reform mcliches can run and play and are definitely not euthanized.

There is a certain symmetry to this story, however. I didn't follow up on the various team members of Transcend, so who knows-- maybe none of them were in Teach for America. The board is largely investment and business types. The CEO is Aylon Samouha, whose previous jobs include  Chief Schools Officer at Rocketship Education and several years as a Senior Vice President at Teach For America, and I feel compelled to note, lists jazz guitar as one of his pursuits, so God bless him for that.

But the kicker. The board has two lifetime members. One is Stacey Childress, former CEO of New Schools Venture Fund, and the other is Diane Tavenner, currently listed as CEO and Co-founder of her latest ventures, Futre.me.

These are the stories I think of every time some reformbro tries to argue that in the private sector, when you fail there are consequences-- not like in public education. Maybe. But it sure seems that in the private sector, the invisible hand doesn't cut failure loose so much as it just shuffles it around, to kick back and forth from one doomed enterprise to another. Will the ghost of Summit ever be laid to final rest? It may take decades to find out. 

Netflix Chief Ready To Help DFER Fix Education

Democrats for Education Reform (DFER) is delighted to announce that Reed Hastings, co-founder of Netflix, has joined their board, "bringing a disruptor's lens to education." That seems about right.

First, a reminder of who DFER really are. One of the key founders of DFER is Whitney Tilson, a big time hedge fund manager (you can read more about him here). Long ago, Leonie Haimson had a great quote from the film version of Tilson's magnum opus about ed reform, "A Right Denied," and it's a dream of mine that every time somebody searches for DFER on line, this quote comes up.

The real problem, politically, was not the Republican party, it was the Democratic party. So it dawned on us, over the course of six months or a year, that it had to be an inside job. The main obstacle to education reform was moving the Democratic party, and it had to be Democrats who did it, it had to be an inside job. So that was the thesis behind the organization. And the name – and the name was critical – we get a lot of flack for the name. You know, “Why are you Democrats for education reform? That’s very exclusionary. I mean, certainly there are Republicans in favor of education reform.” And we said, “We agree.” In fact, our natural allies, in many cases, are Republicans on this crusade, but the problem is not Republicans. We don’t need to convert the Republican party to our point of view…

DFER's mission has always been to convince Democrats that they should be backing ed reform ideas from the right. It's standard to find them trying hard to convince Democrats that it would be a winning strategy, like the recent NYT piece by their chief Jorge Elorza in which he tries to sell taxpayer-funded school vouchers.

Hastings, meanwhile, is a long time fan of school choice programs. Hastings has been plenty active in the charter sector, managing to help push through the California law that not only did away with charter caps, but made it possible to run a chain of charters with just one (unelected) board. Unelected is how he likes them-- in 2014 he told the California School Boards Association in fairly clear terms that elected school boards were a scourge and should be done away with.

Hastings likes to note that way back in the day, he was a teacher. That was with the Peace Corps in Swaziland over 40 years ago. But he's been a busy edu-preneur for decades, and he certainly knows all the classic bits.

There's the whole "unchanged classroom" shtick. Hastings sees schools as being like the entertainment biz thirty years ago-- "a model built for a different era" and has often claimed that "the traditional classroom model—one teacher, 20-to-50 students, sage-on-a-stage—is ripe for reinvention." He declares "the schools of the future won't look like the schools of the past," which is his one accurate observation, though he could easily note that the schools of the present don't look like the schools of the past. Lord, they were ushering the sage off the stage back when I was in teacher school. 

Paired with that is the claim that "Netflix replaced a one-size-fits-all broadcast model with something more personal and responsive," which is just a silly claim. In 1997, when Netflix launched, cable tv was achieving great new heights of variety. Hell, Fox News launched in 1996. Back then, boys and girls, cable provided actual variety before free market forces pushed cable channels to become barely distinguishable imitations of each other (you know, back when MTV played music and A&E stood for Arts and Entertainment, and there were two comedy channels). The broadcast model was already well and fully disrupted, and the only thing that Netflix disrupted was the practice of having to go to the store to rent DVDs. 

So guess what Hastings thinks is the key to this new shift in education? Here's a hint-- as of last year, Hastings is on the board of Anthropic, the big AI company.

"AI is a once-in-a-thousand-year shift, and what happens in K-12 is at the center of it,” Hastings continued. “The schools that figure out how to combine individualized software with teachers focused on social-emotional development are going to unlock something we’ve never seen before."

Individualized computer instruction is definitely a thing we've seen before, though what we've seen is the many ways that it crashes and burns and fails to deliver its many promises. There is no reason to believe that the newest iteration of the giant plagiarism machines is likely to change that, no reason to believe that education delivered through a screen is somehow superior to education involving other humans, both as teachers and as co-students. Hastings believes AI can help make education more personal, which highlights how oxymoronic it is to propose personalization that is delivered by non-persons. 

"He sees AI enabling a shift where teachers become more like coaches and build deep relationships with students."

Why does he see that? How does he see that happening? Could it be that replacing teachers with "coaches" solves that nasty labor problem with schools and helps make them more profitable? And yes, his description sounds very much like Alpha School, a ridiculous school model that is somehow beloved these days with its assertion that students can get a full education with two hours per day on computer. It's technoamnesia all over again, as folks just seem to forget that we have seen this model tried and failed. AI will make it better by... being more expensive, in every sense of the word?

Oh well. DFER and Hastings are just as dangerous to public education separately as they are together. May they have many lovely meetings together

The Great Screen Debate

Well, maybe not even a debate. More like a holding action.

Because the Chief Marital Officer (CMO) teaches elementary school and I spent decades teaching high school, we were clear from Day One that the Board of Directors would grow up with minimal screen exposure. They have always gotten a little bit of tv time (about 45 minutes a day, now that they're older) and always with a grownup watching along. A weekly family movie. No personal devices. Lots of reading, lots of books, lots of play (including being left to suffer the kind of boredom that births improvisational self-entertainment). 

Then it was time for school. And like the parents in Jackie Mader's Hechinger piece about ed tech pushback, we had to deal with new heavy exposure of the boys to screens. 

It was probably less of a shock to us because of our professional background. My high school went one-to-one with mini-laptops back in 2010, plunging us immediately into the many problems that come with such an ed tech initiative.

Ed tech is like every other kind of tech-- some of it is magnificently useful, some of it is a waste of time and money, some of it is crap, and some of it is dangerous crap. And being selective really matters. My high school used a program to gamify math for struggling students, and it was awful, particularly in the way that it would only accept a correct answer if it was typed in exactly the way the program wanted it (imagine a program that tells a student that 2x5=10 is correct, but 5x2=10 is incorrect). The Board of Directors have gotten much of their math instruction via a computer program (Reflex Math), and as much as it pains me, they seem to have actually learned well from it, buoyed up by the way the program lets them move on to the next thing the instant they are ready to go. 

I was a yearbook advisor who lived through the transition from paper layouts and photos to all-computerized desktop publishing and digital photography, and you could not have paid me a zillion dollars to step backwards. 

Too many districts have been unwilling or unable to ask the most basic questions when adopting ed tech ("Is this program junk?") and so students spend a lot of time in front of screens that are wasting time and providing zero educational benefit. That and the possibility of screen "addiction," with students hooked on the same sort of rushes that bring grown-ups back on line too often. 

And screens in school inevitably have a "leakage" problem. Students with a few extra minutes of screen time use it to surf Youtube or whatever else the school's filters won't stop. Cheap districts that use lower-level subscriptions expose students to resources that "leak" ads onto student eyeballs. The Board of Directors had never seen a video advertisement until they went to school, which seems... backwards somehow. 

Meanwhile, the ed tech is an ad. When it turned out that Google's education products are about "creating a pipeline of future users," no educators were surprised.

The last twenty-or-so years of ed tech were sold with the same sort of pitches that are now employed for new AI baloney. Don't let your students be left behind! This is the inevitable face of tomorrow and you want your students to be prepared! This tech will provide miraculous leaps in learning (just don't ask us for proof). 

Richard Culatta, CEO of ISTE+ASCD (motto: "Let us jam ed tech directly into your veins!") is in Mader's piece with the usual baloney

When kids hate learning because it’s boring, it will have far more damaging consequences than if they are playing a game that is helping them find learning more interesting

Sigh. No. First, you know who doesn't find something interesting just because it's pixels on a screen? People who have grown up in a world stuffed full of pixels on screens. Second, when you spend years around teenagers with phones, one thing you notice quickly is that a fascinating new app generally has a half-life of about four weeks. Culatta also trots out this old chestnut

We do have to be really careful that we don’t actually end up harming kids by taking away tools that are really helpful for them for their future

Nope. No student is going to lose ground in reading or math or history or art or music because she didn't have access to EduBlart3000 on her screen. 

And I myself once bought the idea that students could benefit from exposure to tech tools so that they were better able to use those tools in the future. I have changed my mind. First, the tools schools teach them to use now will be long gone in the future and second, we are well into the stage in which tech tools can be learned quickly. 

Lawmakers across the country are scaring the crap out of tech companies by contemplating restrictions on screens in schools. That new wave yielded this hilarious quote to NBC from Kieth Kruger, CEO of the Consortium for School Networking, an ed tech trade organization. 

I think some well-intentioned policymakers trying to do something are rushing so quickly that they haven’t thought through the implications.

Ironic, given that the ed tech industry's motto has always been "Buy our stuff RIGHT NOW and don't pause to think through the implications."

Well, the implications of years of screens in classrooms are starting to catch up with us. Check out Jared Cooney Horvath's set of graphs showing that the much-lamented dip in test scores seems to line up with digital adoption. Endless teacher anecdotes of students having trouble focusing, paying attention, just plain sticking with something for more than five minutes. Increasing numbers of studies suggesting that screens have hurt learning-- and (horrors) news that ed tech companies aren't making mountains of money! 

And yet, as Jennifer Berkshire points out, absolute amnesia about how we got here. Folks who cheerfully burbled about the promise of ed tech are now shocked-- shocked!!-- that screens have been allowed to dominate classrooms. Not a surprise-- as Audrey Watters has repeatedly pointed out over the years, the story of ed tech is the story of enthusiastic promises, joyous press coverage, and expensive failure, all wrapped in a blanket of sweet, sweet forgetfulness.

The amnesia would be funny if we weren't already being dragged into the next wave of ed tech, the one powered by "Artificial Intelligence," a marketing term designed to put a pretty, inevitable face on a morally bankrupt industry. "Come take a kick at this hot new ed tech idea! It's inevitable! It's awesome! This time it really will change everything!" 

We're still getting back up from the last faked kickoff. Here's hoping we think twice before we fall for this again. 

Three Problems of Big Standardized Testing

Of all the various Great Ideas launched at education in the past couple of decades, none have done more damage than the Big Standardized Test, a practice that has been in place now for a generation. So on top of the other harms done by test-driven accountability, the cherry on top is that a whole crop of newbie teachers has emerged thinking that test-centric schooling is natural and normal and how the U.S. education system has always worked. Meanwhile, we are just about to enter the season in which school staffs start creating cutesy videos and holding noisy pep rallies in an attempt to convince these tests are Important and students should Do Their Best. Yuck. 

The BS Tests have been a source of toxic waste in schools for years and years, and they have created this toxic effect in three distinct ways.

High stakes for a narrow measure

A single test is used as a broad measure of educational achievement. It claims to measures reading and math and nothing else, and yet it is repeatedly used as a measure of educational quality, students achievement, and teacher/school effectiveness. States have used BS Test results to label schools as "failing" which can have consequences ranging from a loss of funding to charterization to plain old reputational damage. 

Attaching high stakes to the test has led to a twisting and warping of curriculum, with course content and even courses themselves judged by just one metric-- is it on the Test? Science, history, the arts, even recess cut from schools so that extra work can be put into getting studennts to raise those scores, because the BS Test turns schools upside down. The school doesn't exist to serve students by giving them an education; students exist to serve the school by generating test scores. The upside down school effect is particularly notable in manuy charter schools, where the scores are an important marketing tool and so students who don't help make good numbers have to be "counseled out."

Meanwhile, test scores make an easy reference point for journalists, especially when combined with such prestidigidatation as "days/months/years of learning" which is just a fun mask to slap on the increase or decrease in test scores. Or soaking test scores in VAM sauce to make them seem as if they Really Mean Something. Or the transformation of scores into a kind of stock market, rising and falling as if they are waves of data flowing through a single medium, rather than representing the scores of different students.

But, hey. If the scores represent real measures of reading and math skills, isn't all of this justfied? Isn't it?

Lousy tests

Have the Big Standardized Tests been checked for validity and reliability? Do they measure what they purport to measure? Will they produce consistent results (iow, if the same student takes the test multiple times, will he get pretty much the same score every time)? 

The most likely answer is "Nobody knows for sure, but probably not." 

Multiple choice questions are about the weakest measure of knowledge and skill we have. But written answers create an assessment challenge that is almost insurmountable at that scale (and certainly insurmountable by any bots currently available). Also, a test needs to be created for a particular purpose, while the BS Tests are sold as being useful for multiple purposes. "We will sell you," say testing companies, "a piece of string that can be used to measure the circumference of a cloud and the amount of water in a swimming pool."

If we start with the number of skills that the BS Test claims to measure and multiply it by the number of items that it would probably take to measure those skills, we arrive at a test much larger than the actual tests. 

All of this gives us ample reason to suspect that the BS Tests are less-than-awesome assessment tools, suspicions that might be quelled by extensive test testing to show validity and reliability. Except that there doesn't seem to be any such test testing out there. Meanwhile, folks keep arguing that if teachers just teach the standards, the test results will take care of themselves, despite the fact that test results vary wildly from year to year for the same teacher.

But, hey. It generates some data, and even that sketchy data should be useful for something. Shouldn't it?

Tortured data

When a classroom teacher uses an assessment to evaluate learning and instruction, she can dig down to a granular level. Go question by question, checking student responses against the test items to see exactly where students are going wrong (or right). 

But the BS Tests are black boxes. Policy makers have accepted the notion that a test manufacturer's proprietary material is more important than useful data for schools, so teachers are forbidden to so much as look at the questions on the test, and the results that come back to schools (in too many cases, still after too many months) are rough summaries. For years, my results for student on the BS Test were broken down into "reading fiction" and "reading nonfiction," and that was it. 

Imagine you are a parent whose child brought home a C on a major reading test, and the teacher wouldn't let you see the test and wouldn't tell you what areas your child needed help with and what areas were your child's strength. In response to the question, "What can we do to help him," the teacher replied, "Just, you know, work on his reading." That is where teachers are with BS Test results. 

This tiny sliver of data is one of the reasons that schools take to carpet-bombing students with a host of broad, unfocused "interventions." It's also why we've seen the booming cottage industry of pre-test testing, with schools giving multiple tests throughout the year in an attempt to identify students who can be dragged to a higher score and to identify the areas in which interventions for these students might help. The actual BS Test doesn't give us the information we need, so maybe a few rounds of NWEA MAP testing will tell us what the BS Test won't (spoiler alert: it won't, in part because it's hard to predict how students will do on a test that isn't very reliable or valid).

So very little useful data gets back to teachers and schools. It is almost as if policy makers are only interested in generating pass-fail labels for schools and not in providing data that would actually help improve performance.

Solutions?

Policy makers could fix any one of these three factors. They could reduce the stakes attached to the BS Test, or combine test results with other measures of education. They could simply require the tests to be better, and they could certainly require test manufacturers to provide more useful data in a more timely fashion. In fact, in some states, policy makers have taken some baby steps. But it's not nearly enough.

Underneath all of this, there are philosophical questions to be answered, like how does one distinguish between good schools and bad, can you measure the difference, and if you can, is there any benefit to trying to slap "good" and "bad" labels on schools or teachers. But I don't recommend holding your breath while waiting for policy makers to have serious philosophical conversations about education in this country.

But in the meantime, high-stakes large-scale standardized testing continues to be one of the single most destructive factors in U.S. education. If you handed me a magic wand, it is the very first thing I would disappear. Barring that, it would be great if we could just do better.

ICYMI: The River Is Rising Edition (3/8)

The Institute's grounds back up against the river, and the waters are rising. It has been a combination of rising heat hitting a lot of snow, and a steady rain. The river never rises all at once, but slowly and steadily, as combined forces drive it slowly and steadily over its bank. It's a natural process; as it rises, the waters will sweep away the garbage, detritus, and goose poop that have accumulated on the banks. We root for the river to rise far enough to sweep the area clean.

Meanwhile, a varied assortment of education reading this week. Have at it. 

Don't Talk to Me About the Factory Model of Education

Dylan Kane takes on everyone's favorite counter-factual education talking point. 

Experts liken potential Supreme Court reversal of school funding rulings to overturning Roe v. Wade

Hyperbole? Maybe-- but the New Hampshire Supreme Court is taking a whack at the landmark Claremont decisions, another of those court decisions that tell a state it can't keep half-assing public education funding. But the NH GOP would really like to just half-ass public education funding, so here we are. Jeremy Margolis reports for the Concord Monitor.

A Backdoor School Voucher Scheme That Sidesteps Civil Rights and Undermines Public Oversight

At The Century Foundation, Kayla Patrick and Loredana Valtierra have produced an excellent explainer of the federal voucher program. Great for forwarding to that person who keeps insisting that the state ought to grab some of that free money.

State Law: Ohio's "Dropout Recovery" Charter Schools don't actually need to have any "dropouts". What they do need, though, is less accountability.

Stephen Dyer explains another charter school scam ripping off Ohio taxpayers. Saving dropouts? Not so much.

Nearly half of Ohio’s teachers say they may quit teaching; morale lags national average: Report

Speaking of Ohio, the new Ed Weeks survey suggests that Ohio excels in making teachers regret their career choices.

Zooming Out

Steve Nuzum explains what really drives all those book bans (spoiler alert: it is not deep concern for children).

The plot to replace teachers with tech

John Allen Wooden provides an absolutely blistering takedown of i-Ready.

Louisiana's 10 Commandments Law Marks a Critical Step Toward Christian Nationalism

Lorena O'Neil at Rolling Stone looks at 10 commandments laws in the context of rising Christian nationalism and its designs on schools.

Why Your School District Is Losing Its Leaders

Drew Perkins explains how the culture wars are driving leaders out of school districts.

The Cycle of Disinvestment in Public Schools: How Public School Criticism Drives Policy and Disinvestment

The National Education Policy Center presents some research from Huriya Jabbar and Daniel Espinoza supporting what you already knew-- the constant attacks on public schools lead to policies that hurt those schools.

ProPublica Sues Education Department for Withholding Records About Discrimination in Schools

Good luck to them.

America’s teachers are working two jobs and barely getting by

CNN reports on a new survey that shows many teachers are having trouble getting by. In other news, sun expected to rise in East tomorrow. But Matt Egan does report some details and data.

Trump aims to shrink the Education Department — while Washington tightens its grip on schools

Matt Barnum captures the duality of this administration. On the one hand, they want to kill federal education oversight; on the other hand, they would like to micromanage local school policies that they don't like.

At least $7.2 million in taxpayer funds has been spent on LEGO sets through Arizona's school voucher program

Craig Harris ay 12News continues to dig deep and find out just how badly Arizona's taxpayer-funded voucher program is ripping off the taxpayers.

Florida Once Rewarded Academic Success. Now It Prorates It.

Sue Kingery Woltanski reports the latest Florida shenanigans, this time involving quietly cutting funds for a program that actually worked.

Ben Albritton’s priorities — rural spending and school voucher fixes — seem dead

Meanwhile, attempts to fix a system that can't even keep track of students will apparently stall once again.

The Backlash Against School Vouchers Is Showing Up at the Polls

Jennifer Berkshire continues to be a voice crying the wilderness that vouchers are a losing issue for elections, and maybe somebody ought to mention that in coverage.

"AI" is Yesterday's News

If you ever have a chance to hear Audrey Watters speak, do not pass it up. Here's a talk she gave to the Massachusetts Teachers Association, and it highlights, with humor and unexpected connections, the hollowness of the AI education promise.

About that School Trump Referred to in the State of the Union Address…

Nancy Bailey takes a look at Alpha School, a massive techno-scam that somehow keeps drawing glowing press.

A Simple Idea That Could Change Things for Kids: Child Impact Statements

Bruce Lesley has a great idea. Government will never adopt it--but they should.

Heritage Foundation Strategizes and State Legislatures Propose Laws to Deny Free Public Schools to Undocumented Children

Jan Resseger looks at the latest initiative from those big-hearted clowns at Heritage. One more court decision to overturn.

Test Scores Tell You Who Your Child Beat, Not What Your Child Knows

Akil Bello reacts to a recent Jill Barshay article chicken littling parental favoring of grades over Big Standardized Test results. It's a great critique of the grades vs. test scores debate.

No one wants to read your AI slop

Cory Doctorow on the habit of tagging in AI to rebut arguments. Worth it for this quote--"There simply is no substitute for learning about a subject and coming to understand it well enough to advance the subject, whether by contributing your own additions or by critiquing its flaws."

Former UM president Seth Bodnar officially launches campaign as independent vs. Daines

Montana's Senate race is turning out to be a complicated mess, but allow me to endorse this guy. He's a former student of mine and you won't find a better human being on the planet.

At the Bucks County Beacon, I reviewed a new plan-shaped report aimed at sort of fixing the problems of recruiting and retaining teachers. 

This is from the memorial concert for George Harrison. Lots of layers here, but the performance itself is quite a reading of the song.

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