The Conversation We Aren't Having

Since the days when Milton Friedman first cast his gaze on public education, education debates have been heavily influenced by a conversation we mostly haven't had.

Yes, there have been pushes to break the teachers unions. Yes, there has been lots of maneuvering to break the public system so that the parts can be sold off and the gazillion dollar edu-piggy bank can hoovered up by profiteers. Yes, there has been plenty of noise about accountability, plus, heaven knows, no end of debate about choice. And these days there's a whole other bunch of noise about parental rights. 

The thing is, as much as we talk about these topics, we're really talking-- indirectly-- about something else entirely. 

We're talking about rewriting the foundational principles of our public education system. We're talking about shifting the responsibility for children's education. 

Look at how we talk about school choice. There are many ways to provide educational choices, but choicers only really discuss one-- choice based on the idea of education as a commodity supplied in a free(ish) marketplace. 

In this conception, the community has no responsibility to educate your child. That's your problem, to be solved as the best you can with whatever resources you have at your disposal. The old promise-- that as a society we would get the best possible education to every single child, regardless of zip code-- would be null and void, and families would be left to rise or fall based on what they and they alone can bring to the table.

That major shift in How Education Works is masked a bit with the promise of vouchers-- a little money that families could use to pad their limited resources (though the advent of universal vouchers guarantees that the gap between the wealthy and the not-so-wealthy will remain exactly the same). The major shift is also sold with decades of insistence that the traditional public system is broken, even dangerous.    

It's not that we have ever done a perfect job of fulfilling the promise of a decent education for every child. It's not even as if we started making the promise for strictly noble, egalitarian reasons ("Let's get those delinquents off the street"). But way too much of the education reform debate has not really been about fulfilling the promise, but about changing the promise.

This goes double for the MAGA crowd, for whom any sort of societal responsibility is anathema. Society is composed of layers, their premise goes, and no government should interfere with those layers naturally sorting themselves into winners and losers, based on what they deserve (because some people are, in fact, more deserving of power and privilege than others). There should be no SNAP or social safety net, because the poors should be left to their well-deserved fates. DEI should not be used to lift non-white folks out of their proper position of subordination to white folks. The government should not be supporting health care or pushing vaccinations, because those who aren't strong enough to deal with illness and disease should be left to their well-deserved fate. And the education system should not be some sort of socialist scheme for lifting all children.

This is the conversation we aren't having--

Do we want to try to for a collectively funded, owned, and operated system that tries to deliver an excellent education for every child, or do we want a system in which each individual parent must navigate a largely unregulated market in which they get whatever quality of education they can personally afford?

We really need to have that conversation, because it lurks and nibbles at the edges of every other conversation we have about education. We really need to have that conversation out loud, because we keep trying to have it without having it, and it makes much of the education debate more tiring than it needs to be. 

Three Guiding Principles of Alpha School

I've been following Alpha School ever since the days they were trying to launch a cyber school in Pennsylvania. The picture that emerged (here's the piece) was of some folks with tech expertise, finance skills, PR savvy, and absolutely no clue about education. I expected this snake oil operation to burn out quickly.

I was wrong. My collection of Alpha School PR links just keeps growing, people keep taking them seriously, and, most important to their business model, rich folks keep forking over huge piles of money.

God bless Todd Feathers over at Wired, who seems to have noticed that the emperor's wardrobe is a bit lacking. "Alpha School’s Ritzy New York City Campus Costs $65,000 a Year—but Isn’t Actually a School" looks at Alpha's decision to open a school in Manhattan, and then, when the state department of education denied its application to become an independent school, just pivoted to becoming a sort of homeschool hub-thing.

The basic Alpha School pitch is simple. Two hours of screen time are enough to teach students all the core content they need. The rest of the day can be "projects" and "activities" and just generally stuff to keep your child from having to come home by noon while allegedly learning grit and entrepreneurship. There are no actual teachers involved anywhere in the process (though as Feathers notes, MacKenzie Price, the face of the school, has said that they use the words "guides, coaches, teachers" interchangeably.

Feather's article reminds me of three guiding principles that Alpha follows.

1) The ultimate Big Standardized Test result

When high-stakes testing accountability swept the education system, some schools adapted by cutting recess and reducing time in non-tested subjects like science and history and the arts. But what if you were willing to go whole hog and simply cut everything in your education program except test prep for the Big Standardized Test. I give Alpha School credit for just one thing-- dropping all pretense that they were delivering some sort of well-rounded education, and then offering as an academic brag their results on test scores.

2) The Trumpian approach to rules

Feather uncovered memos that show a clear priority-- get schools open quickly, even if you have to cut corners to do it. Trump's whole life has been organized around a particular approach to rules-- if people can't punish you for breaking them, then they aren't rules. And as many corporate bigwigs know, a fine is not so much a "penalty" as a "fee paid to break a rule." Student safety? How much do we have to pay to be exempt from certain requirements. One Alpha School is still operating in areas where they don't have occupancy permits from the fire department. Said one memo, "Opening date > safety > operability > cost efficiency > permanence." 

Another memo explained the need to move at "Alpha speed." 

The only reliable way to achieve Alpha’s opening timelines is subtraction: fewer approvals, fewer handoffs, fewer phases, fewer assumptions, fewer permanent decisions. If a step survives only because ‘that’s how it’s done,’ it is not neutral, it is actively sabotaging the opening date.

3) Selectivity as a marketing tool

Feather provides a picture of how marketing documents framed the approach:

To sway families in places like Miami, New York, and San Francisco, Alpha would need to “invert the power dynamic,” the document says. “We deliberately limit enrollment opportunities, create waiting lists even when capacity exists, and establish application windows that close regardless of capacity—triggering the scarcity psychology that accelerates decisions and enhances perceived value.” It goes on: “We must compress the entire decision process into 48 hours through a carefully orchestrated immersion experience that provides all necessary information, emotional connection, and social proof within a concentrated timeframe, culminating in a binary decision point with genuine scarcity pressure.”

Internal documents note the need to attract the "right" families. I have seen reports that Alpha also screens students for their ability to stay engaged with a screen for at least twenty minutes.

And, of course, the hefty price tag, ranging from $40K in Texas to $65K in Manhattan immediately filters out plenty of prospective customers, while fostering an image of an elite, exclusive operation. Phillips Exeter Academy tuition is $71,797 for students who also get room and board; $56,077 to be a day student at the exclusive prep school. For a school that offers two hours a day on screens with a few more hours being "coached" to price itself in the same league is astonishingly ballsy.

But then, astonishingly ballsy is very much the Alpha School brand. Some days, MacKenzie Price reminds me of Elizabeth Holmes-- repeatedly and charismatically claiming that things that are almost too impossible to believe are true. 

Price also brands Alpha as a school for rebels, badmouthing public education and arguing that she (and her husband and their gazillionaire partner) have cracked the code to making education swift and simple and easy and awesome, and it sure seems unlikely but, oh, wouldn't it be great if it were true, and after all, she's got a big following on social media and outlets keep running her claims and the schools keep spreading and parents keep forking over their money, so surely what's she's selling is real and true (even if Alpha has still avoided any sort of independent examination). 

I suppose it's possible that, somehow, Price is On To Something. But as hard as I squinty, I can't quite make out the emperor's wardrobe or screensaver or whatever. I appreciate writers like Feathers who help me believe I'm not crazy. 

Chesterton's Fence

There are plenty of laws that come up in discussions of modern education reform. In particular, we talk about Campbell's Law and Goodheart's Law, both of which focus on the idea that once you focus on mastering a measurement, that measurement becomes useless (e.g. once you organize your school around getting better test scores, those tests scores cease to provide any real useful data). 

But there's another fine model, known as Chesterton's Fence. It comes from author G. K. Chesterton, and the idea is simple--

Don't tear down a fence until you know why someone put it up.

Just because you don't understand why a particular process, procedure, or tradition is in place, that doesn't mean you can remove it without ill effect. Not until you understand what the original purpose was, and what removal or change would do to that original purpose.

Education has been plagued with reformsters who want to see changes, and they want to see them Right Now. They rarely want to try to understand how aspects of the system were put in place, even if there is history to show that systems are in place in response to failed versions of that same reform in the past (check out works by Adam Laats and Audrey Watters to see historical reform failures laid out in familiar relief). 

Individual schools also suffer from new administrators who make decisions based on the understanding that "kept things running as they always have" isn't nearly as sexy on a resume as "change agent." They will be quick to pick out fences they can tear down and may not even stick around long enough to build anything in their place. 

Chesterton's Fence does not suggest that no fence should ever be taken down; it may very well turn out that removing the fence is a great idea. But when you are contemplating the removal of a fence, it is wise to know what problem the fence was solving, what the current status of that problem is, and what might happen if the fence is removed. Some unanticipated results occur precisely because nobody took the time to try anticipating them. Nobody took the time to ask why the fence is there or what might happen when the fence is blown up. 

ICYMI: Canadian Smokehouse Edition (7/19)

We didn't get it as bad as places like Detroit, but we've been at a good, solid 200+ for a couple of days, and if that number doesn't mean anything to you, congratulations on being Not Downwind of the Canadian forest fires. What a fun summer. My town band canceled a concert for air quality issues, which is the first time that has happened in 170 years. 

It's been a busy time, but I still have a list for you. Remember to share.

Barns, Go-Karts, and Strip Malls: the Wild West of Private Schools that Collect Taxpayer Dollars

This Private School Had Students Scrub Floors and Attack a Fellow Classmate. The State Still Funds It.

How To Research Private Schools Like an Investigative Reporter

If you read just one piece on the list this week, let it be these. ProPublica took a look at the world of taxpayer-funded vouchers and the schools that profit from them. It's thorough, alarming, and hugely informative. Outstanding work from the team.

"Venmo government," administered by ClassWallet

Want to know more about ClassWallet, one of the companies cashing in on voucher administration? Steve Nuzum has the story.

Linda McMahon & How the Pledge of Allegiance Represents a Worse America

Jed Bookout at Frazzled explains how the administration's patriotism push is bad news for the country and education. 

She's So Sure

Audrey Watters with another explanation of what AI does not and can not do. 

Tennessee, Exemplar for Meritocratic Rot

James Horn breaks down some numbers to show that Tennessee is using testing to reinforce inequity in the name of merit.

Teachers save time with AI. Their students may pay the price

I have my doubts about the time saving, but Jill Barshay at Hechinger gets the rest right. 

Counter-Narratives: Mississippi Reading Reform

Paul Thomas explains some different, better ways to understand the narrative of the Mississippi reading miracle.

Found Him in the Front Hallway

At EduHonesty, a look through old discipline referral forms provides some insights into the sort of issues that disrupt a classroom.

Dismantling the Department of Education: Ten Bills That Ask Zero Questions About What Happens to Kids

Bruce Lesley takes a look at those ten bills being used to dismantle the Department of Education, and what they don't say about the students.

Dangers Are Embedded in Federal Waiver Proposal Being Advanced by Ohio Department of Education and the Workforce

Jan Resseger looks at a proposed waiver that would allow Ohio to turn federal money into block grants, part of a troubling trend.

Dear Alpha School: I Hope You’re Right

I'm still baffled by the continued fawning coverage of Alpha School, but this week Robert Pondiscio provided a useful critique from the reformy side of the aisle.

Let's try something a little more soothing this week. Huntertones are proof that you can still start a band in college and keep it going into your alleged adulthood. 

If you sign up, you can get all my stuff in your inbox without any effort. And it's free, now and forever.

Communication Communication Communication

We've been having a couple of weeks of medical adventures here with my 92-year-old mother, and it has reminded me of some of the things we get wrong in public education.

Here is Northwestern PA, most medical care comes one way or another through the folks of Unimaginable Piles of Money Collected. There are advantages to dealing with such an institutional behemoth, most notably a digitized medical record that is up-to-date and available to the patient and the family. It is routine for my sister to see and share test results before the doctor can make it around to the room to talk to us about them, and this is invaluable in terms of coming up with useful questions to ask. 

Hospitals deal with people who are extremely vulnerable, and that makes communication important. Our hospital quality check folks who sometimes amble into the room to ask questions about how well your health care professionals are communicating with you (best question asked-- "Do you know what you are waiting for?")

But this time we went through some real communications whiplash. We knew what they were doing, what they expected, what the goals were-- and then one morning we were moving--rapidly--in a whole other direction. Not because of any new change in the patient's condition; just in how the hospital was responding to it. No real communication about the what or why, catching both us and the facility on the other end of these choices flatfooted. It was an odd moment-- for about 24 hours, while nothing really changed for Mom, it still felt like we were handling an emergency situation.

It sucks enormously to be in a vulnerable medical situation and have nothing communicated to you beyond "We know what we're doing, so just sit there and trust us." It's frustrating and alarming, and if you have a family member who's good at interrogating the functionaries involved, you may make some progress.

The education world should take all of this to heart.

While it may not be a life and death situation, it feels hugely vulnerable to hand your child over to the care of others-- especially if you don't know those others personally. And it surely doesn't help if the school's answer to "What are you going to do with my child" is a hand wave and vague, "You know, school stuff." 

Many districts have an administration-level policy that opposes communication. Not that they phrase it quite that way, but the basic principle is "If we tell people about this, I will get phone calls, so let's just not tell them." This trick never works. Years ago my district contemplated closing an elementary school and decided to deal with the anticipated fallout by keeping the whole business quiet as long as possible. All they got for their trouble was members of the public who were angry about the proposed closure AND the lack of communication.

And it doesn't count as communicating if what you are really trying to do is use a carefully crafted line of baloney to "manage" the public. That is the opposite of communication, and its shiftiness is not hidden if you wrap it in shiny AI slop.

After roughly 100 very lonely parent open house evenings, I absolutely get that attempting communication from the school side can feel like shouting into the void. And we have made progresses-- the pressure to keep that digital gradebook up to date may be annoying some days, but from the parent side, it is a huge blessing. Digital gradebooks, e-mail, even those damned learning platforms-- it is easier than ever for parents to hunt down the information they want.

But none of that means that school districts, school buildings, and classroom teachers cannot do better at communicating to parents. Asking parents to add yet another app to their phones doesn't count. Information passed through channels that are already available and easy does count. For districts and buildings, this may mean spending some money. It is astonishing to me how many school websites do NOT have current information, but I know why it happens--because website maintenance has been assigned to someone who is expected to do updating work in spare minutes between the demands of their actual real job. I know how much time it takes to keep a website current; many school administrators have not a clue.

It is easy, living the dailiness inside the bubble, to imagine that the whole world is awash in the information of what's going on, what people are doing, what is the Usual Stuff of the school. When I passed out of that bubble at retirement, even I was surprised at how little information makes it outside of that bubble. (I wrote to my old district's leadership and board about the issue. "Do you want to do the job," they snarked back. No, because one, I'm retired and two, it needs to be done by someone inside the bubble.)

If you are a district administrator, a building administrator, or a classroom teacher, and you are not reaching outside the bubble at least once a week, you aren't doing enough. Talking to your students doesn't count-- they are inside the bubble with you. For the love of God, do not have an AI agent do it, because the resulting bloated bland and boring product is just noise. You have to let people know what you are doing.

Yes, I know-- lord, I know-- that you don't have time for this. But I am telling you that you can't afford not to take the time. It is how you build trust and support and partnership in your community. It is how you reduce the total amount of unnecessary fear and uncertainty and anxiety in your community (and really, these days, we all need less of that). Will you sometimes get pushback? But the correct response to pushback is to A) examine your premises and practices, B) make your case, and C) listen to the cause of the pushback and decide if it might be worth considering.

If we were better at this in education, reformsters over the last forty years would have heard a lot more, "I don't know what you're going on about. I know what my school does and your claim that they are a disasterific mess are just wrong!"

It's a big ask. It's one more damned thing. But right now I'm living through the difference between navigating with clear complete communication and being left to fumble through opaque and spotty communication, and the difference just feels really huge and the world, including the education portions of it, would be a much better place with less of the latter and more of the former. Inside the bubble, it may not feel like a big deal, but outside the bubble, it's huge. 

NY: District Will Install Teacherbot For the Fall. Yikes.

It is, of course, a rural district, a district located on the Seneca Nation reservation in Western NY.  The Salamanca City Central School District enrolls roughly 1400 students K-12, roughly a third of whom are Native American. 

And they're getting a "humanoid robot" teacher. 

There are so many red flags flying around this story. Take this description from Melissa Manno at New York Focus who talked to Andrew Siguel, CEO of Toronto-based Realbotix (more about them in a bit):

The female robot, named Sally, will have a “lifelike appearance” with silicone skin and long brown hair, Kiguel said in an interview with New York Focus. It will be stationary in a seated position but have a wide range of upper-body movements and facial expressions.

The "female" robot? Robots do not have gender, as far as I know. Students will use a unique id code to announce themselves to the bot, so the bot can id with whom it is speaking. Place your bets now on how many nanoseconds until students decide there is fun to be had by switching id codes. 

The robot will be tied into the school's tech curriculum, which was developed by Steve Sozniak "to prepare students for high-demand tech jobs," and I sure hope they aren't referring to all those coding jobs that are now being handed over to AI.

But hey-- nothing like waving jobs and technology at rural, marginalized districts (the district has roughly 79% low-income students) in an attempt to get them to sign up to be some tech bro's guinea pig.

And it won't just help students, who might, for instance, "upload photos of homework for feedback, ask the avatar to generate lessons on topics that interest them, or receive real-time translations in over 100 languages." You know. Cheat. But teachers benefit, too-

If a teacher loses their place during a lesson or needs a prompt on what comes next, Kiguel said, they can ask the robot for guidance because it has been loaded with the district’s curriculum.

Good lord in heaven. How the hell does a teacher "lose their place" in a lesson, unless it's in a district that is so tightly scripted that teachers are required to memorize the script? Maybe she turned two pages at once? And what the heck does it do to student respect for the teacher if they get to watch the teacher be redirected and corrected by a bot??  

Teacherbot will cost $57,590, but it will not come with some of the advanced features of Realbotix's other products, and if you're thinking "What features" or "How do this company think it's ready to make a roboteacher, anyway," well, hold onto your hat.

Realbotix is already in the humanoid robot business. Specifically, the humanoid sex robot business. 

Realbotix used to be Tokens.com, a crypto company (which let you rent real estate in Zuckerberg's Metaverse) that bought Simulcra, the company behind RealDoll, in 2024, into That was merged with RealBotix with the intent to expand above and beyond the sex robot biz into AI and other robots. That move was funded in part by investor Arthur Hayes, a crypto-bro with legal problems of his own (to add to the confusion, Bed Bath and Beyond just bought the Tokens.com domain). Realbotix also wants you to know that they make companion robots, intended to fight the loneliness epidemic (but not, apparently, with sex). 

The "how did this even happen" part is its own little story. Manna reports that Salamanca's superintendent Mark Beehler says that the "partnership with Realbotix began after a former colleague met an investor at a dinner and discussed the possibility of bringing the company’s robots into the education sector." 

The company provided a demo of the teacherbot "counseling" a child who has been bullied, with basically, "I'm sorry that happened to you. You should go tell a trusted adult." 

And you may be wondering about the wisdom of getting teaching support from AI and its tendency to just make shit up. Realbotix thinks it has that whole "hallucination" thing under control. 

To avoid AI-generated inaccuracies, Beehler said Realbotix trained the robot and avatar to say, “I don’t know,” instead of generating fabricated or misleading responses known as “AI hallucinations.”

That seems both unlikely and inadequate.

Look, I would not be particularly concerned if my child's teacher was a former sex worker, but I would sure as hell be concerned if it weren't even human. And I would be doubly concerned if that non-human was given a bunch of synthetic humanoid features designed to trick my children into thinking of it as a person rather than a plagiarism-fueled next-token-predicting machine. 

It would also be super if all these Frankenstein wannabe's stopped unleashing their ideas on poor, rural families who lack the clout to push back. Behhler says he'll assess the success of this nightmare fuel through "qualitative feedback" from teachers and students. And Ryan Schaaf of Notre Dame told Manna he's optimistic, but that it will require "thoughtful implementation" (yikes) and lots of teacher monitoring and guiding student interaction with the bot (in other words, another new tech making more work). Here's hoping this doesn't waste a whole year of student's learning.                                   

Chatbots Can't Read Your Essay (Part 1,299,437)

This is one more example of how a chatbot will NOT read your writing and provide useful insights into what you have created. I referenced this piece of mini-research before, but it deserves its own post (partly so I can find it easily when I want to reference it again).

Adam Kucharski is, according to his bio, a mathematician/epidemiologist. He wrote Proof: The Art and Science of Certainty, and his work has appeared in Wired, Guardian, and New Scientist, among others. 

Back in May, he published an account of a simple experiment. It started with a simple question-- how good is Copilot at finding insights in a data file. 

To test it out, I asked Copilot to look at differences in how people in US and UK expressed emotions in an Excel dataset that contained thousands of survey responses.

Copilot found all sorts of deep insights. The responses differ "mainly in tone, intensity, and wording style," the bot typed. And it went on to provide deeper analysis. "US responses were typically more direct and emotionally amplified, while UK responses were more restrained." or how about "UK responses use more poetic, metaphor-rich phrasing; US responses favor plain, action-oriented wording." And even "UK wording reflects understatement and nuance; US wording emphasizes clarity and emphasis."

Wow, that is some deep and nuanced analysis. 

Except that the dataset wasn't real-- and it wasn't different. Kucharski explains his technique:

First, I’d created 2000 free-text responses and labelled them ‘UK’. Then I copied and pasted the exact same 2000 responses but labelled these ‘US’. Finally, I combined them to create a dataset of 4000 total responses, and jumbled them up.

So Copiloty looked at two identical data sets--not made by a human in any country-- and found all these nuanced differences between them. It's almost as if the chatbot is just making shit up.

So he tried it again:

This time, I got an LLM to simulate 200 statements about career aspirations. Then I duplicated the dataset five times, labelling each one ‘US’, ‘UK’, ‘France’, ‘Germany’, ‘Italy’.

Again, the bot found a variety of differences and nuanced distinctions between the five different countries. It even generated a chart that shows the likelihood of people in a particular country pursuing particular careers-- In France, they are twice as likely as the UK to pursue a career in the arts. US citizens are most likely to pursue a career in business, and way more likely to pursue one in medicine. 

Again-- all this analysis is based on identical datasets generated by a bot that is not a citizen of any country. 

Kucharski's post gets into some specifics and offers links to his datasets. Plus some updated follow-ups by other folks who took a stab at the same experiment. And it addresses a bit the question of "Well, if you used a different process..." You know who doesn't have knowledge of the best ways to trick the bot into doing the thing for real? The kind of folks who think the computer is smart and will help them with their writing.

Any time someone tries to tell you that a chatbot can be a useful tool for analyzing your writing, you should be thinking of this (and many other) actual demonstrations of how badly bots do at this task. 

One of the most useful checks I've seen came from anonymous writer online who suggested that the best way to think of a prompt is that you're not asking "Do an X for me" but instead "What would an example of X look like?" The bot is not going to do an actual analysis-- it's just going to extrude an example of what an analysis would look like based one whatever stolen analyses it was trained on. 

It is not reading your work. It is not analyzing your work. It is most definitely not your writing partner or editor.

ICYMI: Under Water Edition (7/12)

It has been a week. Maybe we'll talk about it some other time. But I still have a reading list for you.

I Asked My Students About AI Again

Marcus Luther talked to his students about AI. Maybe that tidal wave isn't coming.

The Real Cost of Fifty Years of Policy:

Greg Wyman puts the last several decades of education reform in context.

What Schools Can’t Do

David Larabee reprints a speech from 2009, and it is taking perhaps a broader view than classroom practice, but boy dose some of this really hit. Like:

we pass off on schools social problems that we are unwilling to accomplish through the political process, where the capability for success actually resides. Instead of addressing these problems directly through political action, we foist them off on schools and then blame them for continually falling short of the desired goal.

And also:

Reformers are loath to give up their aims in the service of making the reform acceptable to teachers, so they tend to plow ahead in search of ways to get around the obstacles. If they can’t make change in cooperation with teachers, then they will have to so in spite of them. They see a crying need to fix a problem through school reform, and they have developed a theory for how to do this, which looks just great on paper. Standing in the state capital or the university, they are far from the practical realities of the classroom, and they tend to be impatient with demands that they should respect the complexity of the settings in which they are trying to intervene.

There's plenty more where that came from.

AI: The Trust-Breaker

Matt Brady examines the effects of AI use on the trust necessary for schools to work.

Where's the Science?: Not in Think Tank Reports or Reading Legislation

Nobody has critiqued the Science of Reading movement more relentlessly that Paul Thomas. Here's his reaction to a new "report" from the National Council pn Teacher Quality.

‘Wasteful and extravagant’: Here’s what Utah auditors found digging into the first year of school voucher spending

Utah's new Arizona-style voucher program seems riddled with Arizona-style abuse and fraud. Reported by Carmen Nesbitt for the Salt Lake Tribune.

The GOP-created university civics centers aren't popular. They want to require attendance.

Ohio set up university centers to combat liberal bias, but students weren't interested, so now the GOP, champions of the free market, will just force everyone to attend. Morgan Trau reports for News 5 Cleveland.

Let AI Burn

If you like your anti-AI arguments brutal and uncompromising, Ed Zitron is your guy.

Looping. It’s Not New. It’s Not a Panacea.

Nancy Flanagan on the recycling of old education ideas.

Arizona students with disabilities fuel rapid growth in billion-dollar ESA voucher program

What do you suppose would happen if you set up your taxpayer-funded vouchers system to incentivize a diagnosis of special needs? Craig Harris reports for 12 News.

Families hoard ESA funds as Arizona public schools face low funding, records show

Arizona's taxpayer-funded vouchers are also piling up big money stockpiles for some parents. Craig Harris again.

Teachers in Michigan school district can pick from 32 phrases or face legal review over classroom posters

How stupid can the attempts to police teacher posters get? Pretty stupid. Lily Altavena at Chalkbeat.

Big Changes to Federal Grants Are Coming: What They Could Mean for Schools

Much of the boring routine funding from the feds is about to be disrupted. Marl Lieberman at EdWeek reports.

“One Big Beautiful Bill” Has Already Begun Damaging Children’s Well-Being: It Will Only Get Worse

Jan Resseger looks at the worst side-effects of that thing.

AI Data Centers: Greed Rather Than Need.

The indispensable Mercedes Schneider looks at the threats coming from data centers.

Teens Arrested for Breaking Into High School With a Homemade Plasma Cannon

Are you worried that Kids These Days just aren't as ambitious or creative as they used to be? This is a story for you. Luis Prida at Vice covers a North Carolina story.

This week at Forbes.com, I took a look at how Arizona is one step closer to imposing actual accountability on its taxpayer-funded voucher program. 

A video artifact-- a medley from the cast of the then-current musical Hair, on Ed Sullivan. Asks your parents (or grandparents) what's going on here. 

The Federal Religion Commission on Education

The federal Religious Liberty Commission just coughed up its 224-page report, and I'm not about to shovel through the whole thing here, but it does devote a whole chapter to education, and that's worth a look for what it tells us about the MAGA view of education.

Much of the report is taken up with some anecdotes from students who allege various versions of being picked on in/by schools for their faith. One fifth grade student was "forced" to read a book about transgenderism to his kindergarten buddy, and this qualified for testimony because somehow being anti-trans is a Christian belief. One student was denied the right to wear a covid mask with "Jesus Loves Me." One student was denied the right to thank Jesus in his graduation speech. One girl's attempt to sing a Christian song in the school talent show. One girl wanted to pray with friends in a corner of the cafeteria and was denied. And one more student was subject to antisemitic bullying.

The stories are dramatically embellished (when the graduating student went ahead and thanked Jesus anyway, everyone clapped, teachers embraced him, and the principal cried). Sure. And we'll never know just how quiet the cafeteria prayer really was. But while the trans book story is complicated, the other stories, if accurate, are stories of students whose rights were, in fact, violated by their school. 

They are anecdotes. The commission might have included others, like the story of the kindergartners who wore hijabs to graduation and were held up for abuse by the President of the United States. There are undoubtedly other anecdotes that bend the other way; take my own former superintendent who routinely opened elementary graduation ceremonies with a Jesus prayer, or my former student whose fourth grade teacher who pressured her to convert from Judaism to Christianity. 

The commission deals with the anecdotal nature by offering a blanket observation that the "story is not an isolated event." 

That's fine-- providing a compelling narrative is how folks do the commission testimony thing. But what's more notable is the principles outlined to provide context for the narratives.

The commission offers the now-familiar tale of how institutions have been captured by the Bad Guys. For a century, they assert, teacher training institutions "have increasingly framed education not as the transmission of intrinsic moral truths, but as a vehicle for ideology-driven social transformation." 

Well, now. "Social transformation" has arguably always been the point, as in transforming society by trying to make everyone numerate, literate, and knowledgeable. "Ideology-driven" only makes sense as analysis if you remember, as implied by this construction, that "ideology" only refers only to ideology followed by Those Guys, while our ideology is actually "truth." Either way, it's a stretch. Virtually every teacher I've ever known or worked with mostly had a classroom ideology of Can We Please Learn This Content. Though I'll bet you can find a few ideologues of every flavor in classrooms here and there about the country (there are over 4 million teachers, guaranteeing at least one of everything you can imagine). 

But what really strikes me is the commission's idea of what schools are supposed to do--

The transmission of intrinsic moral truths.

That's a phrase doing a lot of heavy lifting, but dovetails with the notion that the world is all absolute truths, probably already figured out by some dead Greek and Roman guys. Once grasped, the truths allow for no negotiation, discussion, and certainly no revision (see also the argument that we don't need to respect all religions because everything that's not Christian is just wrong). 

They go after John Dewey (though I'll bet you that there aren't 25 teachers working in 2026 who could name two things Dewey believed) and accuse him of this kind of stuff:

He proposed that schools create an “embryonic community life,” where children would be taught primarily not how to think or explore truth, but to develop habits useful to the state, such as cooperation, shared purpose, and democratic citizenship.

Dewey gets charged with re-characterizing schools as "a vehicle for ideologically driven social progress." Again, I think his offense here is not going after "social progress" so much as letting the incorrect ideology have a say. 

Their example is sex ed. After the sexual revolution of the sixties (the decade when everything went to shit for these folks) schools started teaching sex ed and exposing young kids to discussions of sex (bad, because otherwise young humans would not have ever heard about sex). Also, they taught birth control instead of abstinence, which is bad, because schools should prioritize politically correct over actually works.

The commission argues that "ideological current has too often left little room for students who hold traditional religious convictions, such as the belief that God created man and woman, that moral truth is real, or that America—though imperfect—is not fundamentally evil." Maybe not so much "left little room" as "didn't allow these beliefs to occupy a central place over all others." And I'm not sure how beliefs about America qualify as traditional religious convictions (even if, as they apparently mean, only certain religious traditions count here). But humans have a historic tendency to confuse their own personal beliefs with the Will Of God.

The report positions all this debate of the First Amendment as a battle over culture:

It is part of a larger cultural struggle over whether schools will form children in the moral inheritance of Western civilization or in a newer creed that often treats historic religious belief as something backward, suspect, and even harmful.

"Form children." Yikes. (I refer you to Russell Barkley's contention that we are shepherds, not engineers.) And historic religious belief has, at times, been backward and harmful, and remembering that ought to inform any discussion of the First Amendment and what the founders had in mind.

But from there we're on to the argument that some sort of hostile secular religion displaced "the 2,000-year canon of Western moral and religious tradition" (the writers are careful not to explicitly argue for Christianity by name, but they might as well have). 

This is a bogus argument and always has been. Public schools have no official position on vegetarianism. Their only mandate is to offer an assortment of healthy choices and the freedom to pack a lunch from home. Likewise, the First Amendment mandates that religion not be on the menu of what schools offer, leaving students free to practice as they wish. There is no such thing as "secular religion," rather, "secular" is what is left when you remove all the religious parts. 

We can find three issues in the commission's complaint.

One is that some schools, over-zealous (or afraid) about church-state separation take steps to squelch student religious expression when they should not. School officials should not lead a religious prayer at graduation, but if student speakers want to thank Jesus, they should. Admittedly, the line is sometimes tough to spot-- if a student, as part of a school project, chooses to paint a religious image, that's probably okay, but if the painting is on the wall of the school, the issue is fuzzier. 

Second is the part they try to avoid saying out loud, which is the belief that White Christianity should be the dominant culture in America, and that should start in school. 

Third is the notion, repeatedly taken into court, that one cannot fully exercise one's religion unless one is free to inflict it on others. That includes financing that exercise with public tax dollars and discriminating against certain Others. This goes hand in hand with having a dominant position. 

Some folks will absolutely regret it if they ever win these debates. For one, they will find themselves swamped with people who want to claim a religious free-money-and-no-rules card. For another, the inevitable result will be government commandeering and regulation of religion-- you know, like setting up a federal commission to oversee religion in this country. The First Amendment is just as much about protecting the church as it is protecting the state.

The commission offers all sorts of recommendations. Some involve providing more guidance about First Amendments, which isn't a bad idea depending on whether or not the training is related to the actual language. "Know Your Rights" posters for school. Sure; posters really work in school. Set up a portal so that people can report naughtiness on line. Sic the DOJ on those naughty schools. Get behind courtroom support for the transparently unConstitutional laws requiring Ten Commandments displays. Also, school choice. They don't bother to explain why they want it; they just want it.

Nothing here you wouldn't expect from a commission headed up by Dan Patrick and including Ben Carson, Dr. Phil, Franklin Graham, Cardinal Tim Dolan, Paula White, and Todd Blanche. Can't wait to see what they come up with next.

A New Bot-enhanced Assessment Approach

I have spent plenty of time over the years tracking the fortunes of a high-capacity clown car of computer software that promises to grade those student essays. Labeling the variously inadequate programs AI just adds a new level of marketability to this unholy monstrosity, a piece of Schrodinger's software that is simultaneously totally as great as humans and also just about to be perfected within the next two years (going on twenty years).

I just came across a new model that promises speed, efficiency, validity and reliability.  Welcome to No More Marking.  Or maybe don't welcome it.

The company serves all the English-speaking world after spawning in the UK, headed up by Daisy Christdoulou. And her Clever Idea is called "Comparative Judgement."

The idea is deceptively and seductively simple. It's hard, goes the argument, to make absolute judgments. If someone walks into your room, can you judge whether they are tall or not? But comparative judgements are easier for human brains-- if two persons walk into your room, you can tell pretty quickly which one is taller.

So what if, instead of reading a student essay and trying to decide whether it was a 94 or 88 or 91 or whatever, you looked at two essays and decided which one was better. Wouldn't that be quick and simple? And if you had multiple teachers working through the same essays in the same way, wouldn't you have tons of data?

This sounds not bad until the first five seconds you spend thinking about it. Oh, but then...

If I used this technique on student height, I could probably generate a pretty good arrangement of students from tallest to shortest. But I still wouldn't know squat about how tall they actually were. Any kind of non-generalized collection of students (a kindergarten class, a group of pro basketball players) would give me particularly unhelpful results. And if the students are very similar in height, suddenly the judgment isn't so easy, and the results are nearly meaningless.

Part of their solution is a "powerful statistical model" involving some fancy maths that generate raw scores that are turned into other scores. Is the result valid? Well, the site tells us "Human Comparative Judgement is the gold standard of human decision-making. It is supported by an extensive research literature." So, you know, there you go. The other part of the solution appears to be a large sample size.

This is also another one of those tech labor transfer systems, because before any of this can start, someone has to feed all of the essays into the computer program. That can include scanning handwritten copies. You'll have to be sitting at a screen to use this. And of course results don't come back until at least one other human scorer runs through the essays, but while you're waiting, perhaps you can go ahead and be a second reader for someone else's essay stack. Are we saving time yet?

The company insists you are. 30 essays would take you two hours the traditional way with a rubric, but with human comparative judgement, you can cut that to an hour. Why are you so much faster reading every essay without a rubric? I don't know.

Don't worry, because we can save time another way, and you knew this was coming. What if some--or even all-- of the "readers" were AI programs? The company suggests going 90/10-- 90% AI and 10% human. 100/0 is of course an option.

Sigh. Okay, the premise of the whole CJ biz is that it's easier and faster for a human to judge which essay is better than it is to evaluate an essay. But that's human beings. It's not clear if the AI in the loop is doing comparative judgements or just offering the usual crappy robograding assessments; the language hints that it's the former, but it's not really clear. If it's the latter, that's bad news because bots are bad at assessing writing, but trying to figure out which of two essays is "better" seems like a whole other level of judgment that AI is not equipped to perform.

If you want to give students the impression that their teacher actually read the work she assigned to them, then you voice-deliver some comments and the AI will spruce that up and attach it. 

For the American market, the company offers three national writing assessments. You can throw in a multiple-choice grammar test. The company says they are also teamed up with The Writing Revolution, which isn't encouraging.

The company insists that they are valid and reliable and, hey, the program lets you see where the humans and the AIO disagreed. Christodoulou has a substack, but after digging through the company website I was too grumpy to dig any more. Okay, I looked at one post that made the argument that if an AI comes up with results similar to a human, it must be valid. I've heard this a zillion times, and to me it is an indictment of the degree to which human teachers have been herded into mechanical rubric-centered assessment. All you're telling me is that robots are pretty good at imitating humans who have been trained to imitate robots. 

Christodoulou asks some good questions (will knowing they're writing for an AI affect how students write), and she clearly knows that some buzzy items like Bloom's 2 sigma study is bunk. Christodoulou also acknowledges elsewhere that students really care about what their teachers think, and the simple "final product" of a grade is not enough. They've been at this model for a decade or so, so I'm going to assume good intentions. But the site doesn't offer any insights into what standards or training the AI is programmed with, nor the question of how the company deals with the inevitable AI bias and lying about what it has "read." 

CJ is an interesting approach, or at least more interesting than the typical "AI so smart grade your essays quick just like human teacher" pitch. But I remain unconvinced. 

Video: Arizona's Model Voucher Program (How Not To Do It)

More Perfect Union is an advocacy journalism non-profit that has scooped up awards for some of its video pieces about major issues-- and they have now taken a swipe at taxpayer-funded school vouchers.

The piece-- We Investigated The Biggest Government Fraud In America. You're Paying For It-- focuses on Arizona's taxpayer-funded voucher program. The video looks at how this barely-regulated program manages to waste a ton of money on things that shouldn't be purchased with taxpayer education dollars (and guess how much you can spend with your voucher and be automatically approved). 

Josh Cowen, who makes an appearance in the video, notes that Arizona's program is the "gold standard for what not to do and how to do what not to do," and yet it is considered by many voucher fans as the gold standard. 

Watching the video will take barely 17 minutes out of your day. The video is also an excellent primer for folks who are just now trying to figure out what the fuss is about. 

ICYMI: Another Tech Sunday Edition (7/5)

Now that we've cleaned up after the Fourth, it's time for yet another tech Sunday with community theater. This time I'm pit conducting for a production of Disney's The Little Mermaid. Like many of the staged versions of Disney films, it has way more music and a tweaked story that corrects some of the ick from the original film, which was in fact awesome but still, the whole "give up your life for some cute guy you saw once" was kind of off, along with the helpless damsel ending. Anyway, community theater is always fun, so this should be a delightful week, kicking off today with orchestra practice.

Hope things are cooling down. My old high school was supposed to be marching in the Philadelphia parade for the Fourth, and it was canceled for heat. Fortunately-ish, my friend and former colleague the band director got the word a bit before he was supposed to be loading students on the bus. May we all enjoy better weather soon. 

Here's some reading.

Beware the Reading Proficiency Numbers Game: Florida Edition

Paul Thomas encourages us to look a little more closely at some of the goals of the SoR crowd.

Massachusetts Should Reject Trump's K-12 Privateering Scheme

After DFER chief Jorge Alorza published a piece encouraging Massachusetts to sign up for federal vouchers, Maurice Cunningham and I teamed up to write a rebuttal. 

 

What School and District Leaders Need to Know Before They Invest in AI

I spotted this a bit late, but Stephen Aguilar published a piece at The 74 that provides a good checklist of things for districts to think about before unleashing AI.

AI Can’t Fix the Student-Motivation Problem

Bots aren't great teachers! Surprise! Jenny Anderson and Mike Goldstein of the Center for Teen Flourishing lay out the details.

How Good Teachers Get Broken

Matt Brady offers some explanation, with details you may recognize from your district. Note: he also explains how to do better.

Financial Nonsense

Audrey Watters talks about leaving the free stage of AI, and what it will mean to districts and companies.

Keeping SCORE

After some thoughts about the Fourth, TC Weber takes a closer look at SCORE, the very influential reformster group with an awful lot of say in Tennessee education

Children Are Increasing in the South: Their Champions Aren't

If you thought there was a terrible national fertility crisis, surprise-- not in the South. But Bruce Lesley points out that means we're getting the most children in the part of the country least prepared to help them.

This week at Forbes.com, I looked at new report from the Shanker Institute that underlines what teachers already know-- they need more time to implement your latest genius improvement program.

If you need a little chaser from your holiday music and explosions, the Muppets have you covered.

Can We Have a Nonpolitical Patriotic Moment?

We have done all the usual Independence Day things in my community. We had a parade, and last night the town band I play in delivered our usual pre-Fourth concert in the park featuring mostly marches, a salute to veterans of all service branches, Stars and Striped Forever, and the Carmen Dragon America the Beautiful.  

Attendance was down for most events. I have no idea why, though a crowded local calendar and punishing heat are undoubtedly factors. There's been noise about the lack of enthusiasm about the 250th, and as someone who well remembers the Bicentennial, I agree that the excitement level is far lower. However, as a student of history, I can also tell you that the 150th in 1926 was no great shakes, either. 

Who knows. 1976 was a moment in which the nation was bruised and recovering, looking for a reason to celebrate that after a lot of testing of our institutions and character, maybe we could focus on what was great about the nation. Right now we're in the middle of the newest test, and celebration may seem premature. Maybe it's because much of the national celebration has been hijacked for a MAGA rally. Maybe corporations are now so multi-national that throwing business weight behind a celebration doesn't make sense to them. Who knows.

Look, our country is a complex mess, and it always has been. The Founders were a fractious that agreed on very little. The actual war effort was a slog because some states refused to help pay and many, many men refused to join the fight (some by not signing up and some by running away as soon as bullets started flying). The Constitution was a second attempt, and it's partly because some states stayed home and had a hissy fit that the thing even got across the finish line. We are a democratic nation that has always included citizens that don't believe in democracy, just as we have always housed--right through today-- a bunch of folks who vigorously reject the Declaration's assertion that all men are created equal. We set up a collection of ideals around which to center a country, and we have spent 250 years arguing about how or if to try to live up to them.

But the ideals part matters, because that's a different animal than centering a single human leader. When you have Dear Leader in charge, people are measured not by competence or merit, but by loyalty. We are currently living through the demonstration of what you get with government built on loyal dopes. 

We are also living with the illusion that everything is politics. It's not too complicated-- when Dear Leader has an opinion about everything, then every opposing opinion is painted as politics. And really, there's a whole class of politics-oriented folks who also think that everything is politics.

It is true that for some folks, politics has shaped the context that they move through. But that doesn't mean they have to live their every waking moment maneuvering with politics and power. If we had remembered that, we could have had a nice party for the 250th. Instead, so much is polluted with politics and the related impulse that we will not be able to leave a good life until Political Goal X is achieved. 

But the saturation of politics also matters because our current moment in politics is mostly negative. The easy way to get people to donate is to point at something and holler that it's a threat. You can hear the desperate grasp for another Big Scary Thing in Trump's address yesterday trying to get us all excited about scary communists. Meanwhile, my inbox is filled with people who really need my money to combat the threat of MAGA. 

Some days you would think we lived in the scariest damned country in the world, and while I think that's problematic for many reasons, I do worry that we are passing it on to another generation, raising them to think they are growing up in some sort of combat zone (which is not only not helpful for them but is insulting to people who live in actual combat zones). 

There is much to love about this country, much to appreciate, and certainly, for most of us, a great deal to be thankful for. Are we the greatest country on Earth? It's a very American thing to want to be able to rate ourselves Number One, but it's a distraction. Can we be great, allow our people to be great, and accomplish great things? We can, and we do, and often it is far removed from politics. And we should be grateful for that.

The saddest lesson of this administration is its demonstration that you can grasp for power and money, that you can get your hands on some of the most powerful levers on the planet, and have it do nothing to sooth the gnawing in your soul. You can radically change your circumstances to acquire more power and wealth than most people can imagine, and you will still be your same old miserable self, empty and chased by inevitable mortality. Miles of words have been written about what Trump lacks, but one obvious item is an authentic love of country, and a less obvious one is a sense of gratitude. 

There are many things in my life because I was born in this particular time and place, and I have t9o be grateful for that. If we don't impart some sense of gratitude in our children, we are missing the boat. This is part of the point of school clubs and sports, the not-always-admirable pitches for school spirit-- learning to be part of something bigger than yourself, and being grateful for what that something gives you in the range of possibilities and achievements. You did not make yourself, and you should be grateful for that (and that gratitude should move you to pass it on). 

I hear the bitching about not feeling Fourthy because That Man is the President. Well, the President is not the country. The country is far bigger than any set of elected representatives or bureaucratic bozos. It is a collection of humans, and that means it's a big messy thing, forever balancing love for our best angels and a desire to clean up our worst impulses. That balance is never perfect, but we should reject any views that A) call for unreasoning unquestioning love that insists everything is perfect or B) call for a total rejection of everything the country is and does as evil and wrong. Both of those views are incorrect (and people who take one of the views will always insist that anyone who disagrees with them at all must be part of the other group), and they are usually political in nature.

Should we teach students to be patriotic? Certainly, and that should include the idea that being patriotic means be willing to question and challenge when we think the country is wrong. There's an important idea there-- that you can love and honor and respect something or someone even as you recognize and challenge its bad choices. Certainly it will be a useful concept for life and connecting with employers, friends, and partners. If your own child came home claiming that their partner was the most perfect human who should never be questioned, you'd be alarmed. If your child came home with a partner that they constantly denigrated and put down, you would also have concerns. Patriotism is complicated-- like every other relationship in life.

Tonight some family and friends will come over. We'll eat some food, and then a few of us will play some traditional jazz for the rest of us (and for neighbors) and then the city will set some fireworks off over the river that runs past my back yard. It will probably be too hot, and it might rain, and my food may or may not be awesome, and the playing will involve some bad notes but I will be grateful for all of it.

SCOTUS Okays Restrictions on Teen Girl Athletes

The Supreme Court has upheld the Idaho and West Virginia bans on trans girls in school sports.

This means trouble for all teen girls playing sports, and we haven't seen the end of the legal attacks.

The ruliong establishes that states may institute such bans. But they did not answer the question, "Do states have to ban trans girls from athletics in order to protect Title IX." We can fully expect that there are already people working to put that question in front of the court.

In the meantime, this ruling will do plenty of damage on its own. 

For trans girls (and it's always trans girls, because the culture panic crowd never gets excited about trans boys-- do they think that becoming a male is admirable but giving up male-hood in order to become a girl is terribly wrong) this means that no matter what they've been through to make gtheir decisions, no matter how widely accepted they are by their peers, the school must deny their identity and bar them from activities that give them joy and connection in their lives. A bunch of grownups have gotten together to look a teeneger in the face and call her names and deny her life. That is messed up.

But anti-trans laws have impact far beyond the tiny number of actual teen girls affected. Let me offer an example or two.

Here's a story from Utah about one of the results of the state's girls track and field competition:

After one competitor “outclassed” the rest of the field in a girls’ state-level competition last year, the parents of the competitors who placed second and third lodged a complaint with the Utah High School Activities Association calling into question the winner’s gender.

Congratulations unnamed female athlete! For your dominance in your sport, you win the chance for the state and your school district to dig through your records to prove that you have always been a girl. 

That's what a trans ban gets you-- any female athlete who is too strong, too dominant, too good, or just too butch, is now subject to a challenge from any disgruntled parent whose daughter lost (second, third, toed for fifth, whatever). 

Ohio almost had an odious bill when the House advanced the Ohio version of a Save Women's Sports Act that allowed losers to burden winners not just with the burden to prove their adequate femaleness, but to do it by way of testosterone levels, dna testing or "participant’s internal and external reproductive anatomy." Congratulations on your win, Bethany. Now, the state needs you to submit to a little physical exam.

That goodness Governor DeWine saw through to the real issue here:

The welfare of those young people needs to be absolutely most important to this issue, whether that young person is transgender or not.

Other states are not so lucky.  Oklahoma and South carolina did get a Save Women's Sports Act passed into law. That one gives any female athlete who thinks she's been boxed out or beaten and deprived of benefits to sue the school, and she's got up to two years to sue. Oklahoma's law doesn't offer any guidance about how the school is supposed to defend itself in court and what demands for "proof" they can place on their athletes. 

And that's before we evenb get to states with laws saying that students must dress in ways the People In Charge deem appropriate for their "gender at birth."

Or take the Ted Cruz anti-trans ad from 2024. The ad shows images of female athletes at a track meet, while a caption says his opponent U.S. Rep Colin Allred has "voted to allow boys in girls sports." How messed up is this ad? Let's count the ways.

1) The track meet is taking place in Oregon.

2) Despite the implication of the caption, the girls are not trans.

3) Nobody with Cruz's campaign asked for permission to use the girls' images.

Anti-trans laws don't just declare open season on trans teens--which would be bad enough--but also declare an open season on all teenage girls. 

We'll see if subsequent decisions make this situation even worse. As of right now, it's bad enough.

 

Ten Federal Voucher Myths

Jorge Elozar, head of Democrats for Education Reform (a group started by hedge fund managers to convince Democrats to support education privatization), has been lobbying hard for the federal voucher program, with most of their talking points gathered into a single post here offering ten reasons that the Dems should not repeal the federal vouchers; the list corresponds to the reasons DFER thinks Democratic governors should sign on.

Let's look at the list.

1. It helps public school students.

Note that this is different from the claim that it helps public schools, which is slightly more honest than Elorza's suggestion elsewhere that public schools might benefit from this. 

But as usual, the list of expenditures includes things that public school students should and do provide, like transportation, special education services, and career training. This only makes sense if the public schools somehow manage to off-load some services to federal funding, which would be bad news for local control and for students who need those services. But it would be good news for those policy leaders looking for ways to dismantle public education and sell off the parts.

2. It Can Bring Significant New Resources Into Public Education

Again, the hint public school systems will benefit from these programs. But come on- if the feds really wanted to inject funding into public schools, it would be far easier to just offer tax credits for supporting a public school. A complicated set up with "scholarship granting organizations" is only useful if you are trying to launder public money so that you can legally give it to a religious organization.

"Scholarship organizations can support services that school districts often struggle to provide at scale, creating new educational opportunities without requiring states to raise taxes or cut other programs." Again, if this were an actual goal, the feds could devise much better ways to do it. Instead they are busy closing down the Department of Education and promising to send education back to the states, by which they mean sending back responsibility for funding any programs the feds don't like.

3. It Helps Close the Out-of-School Enrichment Gap

So federal vouchers will get poor kids SAT coaches and violin lessons? Maybe. But I'm waiting to see regulations that actually limit voucher use to non-wealthy students. Otherwise, I expect that these vouchers will follow the common pattern of mostly supporting families that are not wealth-impaired.

4. It Advances Democratic Priorities Like High-Impact Tutoring

Maybe that is a Democratic priority? It shouldn't be. Two-sigma tutoring is a fabrication, a snare and a delusion that has been thoroughly debunked. 

But even if it weren't an exercise in unicorn farming, please note the usual privatizer shift here, turning beneficial tutoring from something the system provides for everyone into a commodity that you are free to shop for on your own. This is right in line with the choice movement-- "Your child's education should be your responsibility, not society's. But here's a little voucher check to take some of the sting off when we wash our hands of you."

5. It Expands Opportunity for Students With Disabilities

Again, why are we touting a system based on the idea that families of these students should have to go find necessary services on their own. If only there were a program, like a federal program-- a sort of  Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, and if only that program were fully funded. I bet that would be a far better solution than handing parents a check and saying, "Good luck! Buh-bye!"

6. The Fiscal Impact Is Small Relative to the Federal Budget

Compared to the massive trillion dollar holes blown in the budget by this administration, the amount that this will add to the deficit isn't so bad. So...yay?

DFER skips the other financial impact, like the estimate from American Federation for Children, a severely pro-privatization group, estimates that $300 per child will have to be spent marketing the tax shelter part of this program to convince people to contribute. 

7. It Represents an Investment in America’s Future

Does it? DFER argues that we should welcome throwing more money at education. "The ROI from helping a child learn to read, master algebra, recover from pandemic learning loss, or access specialized support far exceeds the program’s cost," Elorza writes, without asking why the importance of these programs might call for an actual federal investment instead of a tax shelter that is designed to help public tax dollars flow to private schools. Did you forget that was the purpose of the federal voucher program? Elorza is glad you did.

8. It Is Popular With Voters

You know a good way to find out what voters want? Let them vote on it. Except they're not going to do that because school vouchers have never once been voted into place by voters. Voters, given the choice, have rejected vouchers every time. Which is why they are rarely given the choice. Every voucher program in this country was birthed by legislative shenanigans.

You want to show me how popular your program is? Don't show me the results of carefully crafted polling questions. Let people vote.

9. Democrats Need a New Direction on K-12 Education

This one is just whacky. "Ten years ago," says Elorza, " Democrats were the undisputed party of education." I will not dispute for a second that the Democrats lost their claim to be an education party, though I would say that it happened a lot sooner than ten years ago. Ten years ago would be when the GOP started pushing the exact same policy that DFER is arguing for today. 

How did they lose their education mojo? By listening to people like DFER and pushing policies like test and punish, privatization, and generally offering right wing policies with a blue towel draped over their shoulder. But DFER was founded explicitly to perform the "inside job" of getting Dems to fall in line with the privatization movement, and they have been consistent ever since, repeatedly trying out versions of "If you were a true and smart Democrat you would totally want to back school choice." And also "Public schools suck because of the evil teachers union." 

Do the Democrats need a new direction in education? They surely do, but following the privatization policies of Betsy DeVos is neither new nor win Dems education plaudits.

10. Democrats Should Be the Party of Opportunity

To be clear, Elorza is arguing that the federal vouchers expand educational opportunity. The questions he skips are: what kind of opportunity, for whom, and at what cost? Watch this bit of misdirection:

Families are asking for more options, more support, more tutoring, more enrichment, and more help for their children. The FSTC provides all of those things.

This skips over the most important question, which is what would be the best way for the feds to provide those things? Because this isn't it, and to pretend that this program, carefully designed as a tax shelter than funds private schools, is somehow a big boon for public schools and public school families is baloney. 

The DFER argument is like saying, "Yes, an AK-47 assault rifle will let you mow down a bunch of fleshy, vulnerable human beings, but let's not be hasty. You could do useful things with it, too, like cut down shrubbery or open a door you accidentally locked. Really, I don't understand why you don't fully embrace the AK-47 bush trimmer."

Elorza also throws in a bonus myth-- governors should opt in "to keep resources in the state." In that construction, "keep" is doing some heavy lifting, since we are talking about redirecting funds that were already bound for the bottomless money pit that is DC. 

DFER is presenting a backwards-engineered argument. They start with the policy they want to pursue; now they've searched for an argument, landing on "This will solve Problem X" rather than start with Problem X and asking what a good solution for that would be. DFER wants to dismantle and privatize education, and federal vouchers are set up to further that cause of converting a shared societal responsibility into an individual shopping problem.

None of this, unfortunately, means that more states won't sign up for some free federal money. The bare minimum we can hope for is some actual guardrails and restrictions on how the money would be used. Maybe even an actual out loud conversation about the steady erosion of the country's promise of public education. But I don't expect any of that from DFER.