The Local Control Song

Okay, I got around to this a few days late, but I suppose this isn't really an April Fools item. The folks at the National Education Policy Center have recorded a satirical song for our current moment, setting current United States Education Department policy to music. And they've done it without AI. 

Listen, and share with a friend

Behind Fad-Prone Education

Robert Pondiscio posted a question-- "Why Is Education So Damn Fad-Prone?"-- that everyone who has taught for more than two years has often asked. The fad-addiction of education is exactly why every announcement of The Next Miracle Cure is met by a bunch of teachers shaking their heads, rolling their eyes, and closing their doors. 

"But this time is different!" proclaim the progenitors of every new big idea, just before they start bitching about how "the education establishment" or "the blob" or "special interests" are too resistant to their brilliant transformational idea. Lordy, Arne Duncan is still out there trying to explain how his reformy ideas were awesome and totally should have worked but the establishment just didn't try hard enmough. Spoiler alert: This Time is never different. And Pondiscio notes that it is actually teachers who keep education somewhat fad-resistant:

Why is education so damn fad-prone?

The easy answer is also the most insulting—that educators are uniquely susceptible to trends, quick to abandon what works, and too eager to embrace whatever comes next. But that answer is wrong. Classroom teachers are typically the least enthusiastic participants in these cycles, having learned through experience how quickly today’s “transformational” idea becomes tomorrow’s abandoned initiative.

He points to four structural reasons that contribute to recurring fad chasing, and they aren't a bad start to explaining the phenomenon.

Weak feedback loops. 

Pondiscio argues that "in most sectors, failure reveals itself quickly," and while I think there's room for debate there, I agree with him that in education the feedback signal is "low and noisy." There are so many variables-- student turnover and many factors outside the classroom mean that changes in outcomes are hard to attribute to any single factor. We should note that this limitation has not kept many reformsters from arguing that measuring outputs would allow us to identify teachers and methods that are effective. I would add to his list the lack of any good measure of outcomes (the Big Standardized Test is not such a measure). 

But mostly the feedback loop remains weak because it usually carefully and deliberately cuts actual classroom teachers out of the loop. Nobody is better positioned to see exactly how the hot new idea works on the ground than the people who are right there, and yet the teacher view is subject to benign neglect and at worst (as in the days of Common Core) treated as if teachers are the problem of education and not the expert ground troops. 

Publishers and other instructional materials manufacturers feed this dynamic because their target audience is usually not actual teachers, but administrators. Many instructional materials are bad because they were made to be sold, not to be used. And that means NEW! is better.

And when it comes to evidence-based choices, consider this rather grim finding from a recent meta-study which found that the rate at which education research precisely reproduces results of previous studies is-- zero.

In the absence of clear feedback loops, education is plagued with policy by assertion-- folks who just declare that Policy X or Instructional Strategy Z are excellent because it just feels true. And education has been plagued by decades of people insisting that American schools are failing, based on their insistence that it is so. Even when data is available, the loop can be disrupted by bias and political gamesmanship; just this week, Secretary Linda McMahon was one more Ed Secretary to misrepresent what "proficient" means on the NAEP.

Leadership legitimacy requires visible change.

Administrative churn is a blight. I have written before about resume bombs; a new administrator doesn't build a resume by keeping things running smoothly. No, if they want to call themselves "forward thinking change agents," they have to change something. Blow stuff up, start a new program, get that next job, then leave the district to pick up the pieces. "Implemented new widget education program" looks great on a resume, whether it actually works or not. 

Low barriers to new ideas.

"In fields like medicine or engineering, new approaches must pass through layers of validation before they reach widespread adoption. Education has far fewer guardrails." Ain't it the truth. In education, anybody with a few gazillion dollars in business success can decide that he's going to push a set of standards in an attempt to standardize the entire US education system to his preferences, and that won't even be the only time he tries to transform the system.  

And he's not the only one. So many Hot New Ideas have been pushed by folks whose education expertise is based on nothing except they went to school when they were young. Education is largely free of anyone to say, "You'll need to provide some evidence before we even let you in the door." If someone in education does try to resist, just cue more complaints about the establishment and the monopoly and putting adult concerns ahead of children's. It's not just that there are few barriers to faddish new ideas-- it's that many folks believe they have a right not to be met with any barriers to their ideas. 

Add forty-some years of politicizing of education, so that now political avenues are considered a legitimate way to pursue new instructional approaches. The reading wars have been going on for a long time, but No Child Left Behind sold the idea, now being pursued by Science of Reading fans, of using government to settle instructional debates. We're at a place where to be an education advocate or mover and shaker, it's more important to be good at politics than to be good at education.

Moral urgency.

The magical phrase "for the children" allows folks to wave away all objections to their cool new idea, along with its cousin "don't put adult concerns ahead of children's needs." Morla urgency is always part of education discussions, and rightly so. But it is suspicious that moral urgency is always used to ramp up speed rather than caution; it's always "the children can't wait another second" and not "we owe it to the children to make sure we get this right." Common Core had to be rammed through quickly because we couldn't wait a second to rescue children. These days, folks like to wave around the "terrible NAEP scores" as proof that schools had better buy the newest AI-powered edu-whizbang.

All four of these are real features of the education system. They render it vulnerable to fad-of-the-week ideas both on the macro and micro level, and these vulnerabilities have been exploited by everyone from corporate salespersons to well-meaning amateurs to reformsters of all stripes to privatizers who simply want to dismantle the whole thing. 

Pondiscio argues for slowing down and not throwing out functioning ideas to make room for this week's fad. "In short," he concludes, "we need to make competence visible."

That's a great thought. I'm just not sure how it happens. The folks who are looking to the edufad to bring them money and/or power are more invested in bolstering their own preferred fad than taking a look at whether it is successful or not. A whole wing of the reformster/privatizer world has worked hard to make incompetence visible, whether it exists or not (do not forget Chris Rufo telling his Hillsdale College audience, "To get universal school choice, you really need to operate from a place of universal public school distrust.") This is another way in which a free market approach to education is counter-productive. The free market does not foster superior quality; the free market fosters superior marketing. And marketing loves on asymmetric information in which the seller knows more about the product than the buyer.  

We could, I think, damp down the faddishness of education. There is nothing that tamps down faddishness like a level-headed district administration that eschews fads in favor of long-term investment in unexciting things that work, leavened with investment of time and attention in new things that are taken on thoughtfully and given time to prove themselves (or not). How we grow more of those high quality administrators has puzzled me for forty-some years. But more of these people would in turn affect what companies thought they could get away with selling. 

And if everyone-- edu-corporations, legislators, bureaucrats, thinky tank folks-- listened more to teachers, the whole loop, the whole education process process would work so much better. I'm not pretending that getting teachers into the loop would be easy. Out of a group of four million, you are going to find A) a non-zero number of oddball perspectives and B) a distinct lack of unanimity. On top of that, the teachers who could probably provide the most useful perspective may well be too busy to talk to you. But the current practice of locking teachers out of education discussions (unless they have been pre-screened to make sure they have agreeable opinions) is not helping education in this country avoid the latest in education hula hoops.

How Do We Get News to Students

We are two weeks into a new reality in my county-- the local newspaper now exists only as a website, which means a whole lot of folks now have a choice between going online to search out the news from one of two local digital outlets or just patching together whatever from wherever. Or just believe whatever the algorithm sends you on social media. 

So Nancy Flanagan's latest post hit hard ("I read the news today--Oh boy"). 

What do educators do when the students whose intellectual growth they are entrusted with believe things that are false and dangerous—because the influence of the internet has led them there? When the most important content and character-building discussions in school are suspect—or banned? Or when, God help us, the President’s “Special Advisor” suggests that we shouldn’t be teaching undocumented students at all?

What is our moral obligation to the kids we teach, when it comes to truth—and how they form their own opinions and civic engagement?

Truth. That is a tough one, because there is always a divide between those who believe in truth and those who believe in Truth. It shapes how a teacher works in the classroom.

I was in college when I finally realized that English teachers could be roughly divided into two groups. In one group, you have the teachers who believe that a certain work of literature has One True Meaning, and so their job is to impart and transmit that One True Meaning to students (then test them on whether they can repeat it back to you correctly). In the other group, we find teachers who believe that a certain work of literature has a range of possible interpretations, and so their job is to help students learn how to sift and support their way through all of those and present well-supported conclusions of their own.

I am solidly in that second group. It may be the musician in me. There's more than one way to play "Honeysuckle Rose," and there's more than one way to play Hamlet, and there's more than one way to understand The Awakening. This doesn't mean you can just pull any old version out of your butt without any visible support from the work. But I think of these "truths" as a kind of strange attractor, where the variety of answers cluster around particular points, not entirely random, but not locked into a single coordinate, either.

We have plenty of first group people in the education world. The whole classical education movement rests on the assumption that there is One Truth, that a bunch of dead white guys found it, and all we have to do is just keep reteaching it to the youngs. It can become confusing when One Truth folks talk about their love of critical thinking, but what they mean is not "thinking that wrestles with and evaluates a variety of facts and ideas to draw its own conclusions" but rather "thinking that leads to the One True Conclusion."

So education includes this tension between Truth and truth. It's particularly visible in history, where some folks insist it is "divisive" to try to talk about a variety of viewpoints and interpretations, where some folks want to assert that there is just one Truth. There isn't. History is not a string of facts. History is a conversation, an ongoing discussion about what happened, why it happened, what it means, how we understand it. 

News is, of course, just history that's happening right now, and we have a whole network of influencers and news-flavored baloney merchants trying to package it as One Truth immediately as it happens. And that bleeds into the classroom in a variety of ways.

None of this is entirely new. Hearst and Pulitzer and many smaller fish all made a bundle peddling manufactured baloney in newspapers. Even my own small town once upon a time had multiple newspapers--one for each political party's version of events. Students have always brought their own parents' beliefs to school with them. 

But the social media and the algorithm-fueled outrage machine has exacerbated the problem a hundredfold. We're starting to catch up. Meta and YouTube just lost a big social media addiction trial. Instagram and YouTube were found liable for damage to children. Backlash against screens in school is building. But we still have a long way to go. 

When it comes to knowledge of the world around them and what's happening in it, most students are an information vacuum just waiting to be filled, and there is too much garbage too readily available. Much of that garbage is designed to inflame rather than inform, which means that the consumers--particularly the young ones--are emotionally invested in those particular Truths

Schools can continue with "media literacy" and units about evaluating source material, but the actual content of the "news" has to be addressed as well, because it's very hard to make critical judgments when you don't know much about the topic. Civics and current events should be addressed, and students should be challenged regularly to cite their sources and back up their contentions. Teachers have to bite their tongues when the impulse is to simply refute or even ridicule the worst of the ideas students bring into classes. There is nothing more endlessly useless than an argument between two people who believe there is only One Truth and the only thing to debate is which Truth it is. One of the foundations of authoritarianism is "There is One Truth and I-- and only I-- will tell you what it is!"

So a two-pronged approach. One prong: a pipeline of various sources to get actual news and current history into classrooms, including the kind of civics education that everyone keeps calling for. The other prong: deliberately fostering atmosphere and practices for questioning everything. Would it be enough to counteract the outrage machine? I don't know, but it's better than just hoping.

UT: Taking Education Back To 1952

Utah is looking at HB 312 which seeks to "modify" school curriculum and standards. Having already interjected a version of the Ten Commandments into classrooms, legislators are seeing if they can't push some more religion in there, along with a hefty dose of right-wing politics and actual Mormonism. Coverage of bill has focused on the Christian nationalism aspect, but there are few other things going on in the bill that promise to lead Utah boldly into the past.

The bill ups the requirements for US history instruction, and it has some definite ideas about what that instruction should look like. It promises the development of some "open educational resources" that are both open and at the same time, the state is supposed to own all IP rights for the resources, including copyright.

The bill calls for materials that sell the idea "America good, communism bad." America's founding principles (individual liberty, limited government, natural rights) are set right beside supporting and preserving the family, the awesomeness of the Constitution, economic prosperity through free market capitalism, and the contributions that America has made to "human progress and flourishing." This is to be deliberately contrasted with the evils of communism and other autocratic government (while noting we have a republic that rejected the pure democracy of Greece). 

The course should note that communists tried to spread their ideology in the 20th century and tried to infiltrate institutions. It should list a whole bunch of communist atrocities including the Cultural Revolution in China, Khmer Rouge genocide, Cuba's commie naughtiness, and the systematic persecution of religious groups. That last one is a particularly bold choice for Utah, the state where the US Army was sent ion 1857 to take the Mormons down a peg or two.

Meanwhile, the course should teach the benefits of "constitutional republicanism." This is a quick capsule of the right-wing fable version of US history. Unlike many attempts to push this story into schools, this bill does not include any language requiring that teachers admit that yeah, there were some problems with slavery and racism in this country, but that's all in the past. 

The Christian nationalism part comes with the list of selected documents intended for inclusion:

the Bible, including the Hebrew Scriptures and New Testament, as literary and historical texts that have influenced American constitutional history, civic thought, and cultural development; 

This has been the standard smokescreen ever since the 1963 SCOTUS ruling that suggested that suggested teaching about the Bible was okay as long as it was purely objective consideration of historical and literary merit. It's an easy game to play. When my high school experimented with 9 weeks mini-courses, one was "The Bible as History and Literature." It was taught by a devout Baptist (famously, at the end of every class, his announcement for what was coming next started with "If we're here tomorrow..." by which he meant "If the Rapture doesn't come tonight...") and he taught the class like a literature class, but the only acceptable way to understand and interpret the text was the one reflected in his own religious beliefs. So, yeah, I've seen this game. Just think of any English teacher you had who taught that there was only one correct way to read the text, and imagine if that text were a sacred scripture.

Teaching the Bible as an important historical influence on the American Revolution is almost always proposed by people who believe that the historical influence was the attempt to found a Christian nation and not, say, the efforts of people who had deep personal knowledge of how badly things go when government and religion are closely linked and who were therefor determined to found a nation that was definitely NOT based on some religion. 

So, yes-- this bill is another attempt to forcibly sneak a particular brand of Christianity into classrooms.

Since we're talking Utah, there is one other interesting item in the bill--

when teaching Utah history, an LEA may include study of religious beliefs and texts that influenced the state's early founders and the state's history.

In Utah, that means The Book of Mormon (and I don't mean the Broadway musical). In fact, Utah provides a pretty rich contrast between a country not founded on a religion and a state absolutely founded as a colony for a definitely-not-mainstream religion where the church was the government.

Bill House sponsor Tiara Auxier is a parents' rights, make Utah great again conservative, former school board member and legislative newbie. It's not clear what her church affiliation is. Lead Senate sponsor is Todd Weiler. 

There's a story that some folks on the right like to tell. Once upon a time, a bunch of white Christian men got together and, with their Bibles open beside them, they copied out a Constitution that enshrined freedom, the nuclear family, and the free market, just the way God wanted them. Occasionally some bad individuals did bad things like enslaving Black folks, but we settled at that around 1964. In the 20th century, communists, for no reason other than they're just selfish and evil, snuck a bunch of their people into elite institutions (like schools and colleges) and started trying to indoctrinate children to join them in ruining the US just like they ruined the rest of the world. But we can take those institutions back and make them tell young people the one true story of our history (and everything else). 

Folks who believe this story also believe that if we could indoctrinate teach children this story-- and only this story-- then we'd get things back on track. 

I am a little curious how things would work if Utah passes this bill and conservative christianists discover that the Book of Mormon gets to enter the classroom on equal footing with the Bible. When you keep sliding that Overton Window around, you can never know what might slip through. It might even become a portal to an imaginary past.

Follow Casey Fiesler For AI Info

 I'm not a huge video guy, particularly when it comes to the short for stuff. But I stumbled across the work of Casey Fiesler, and I want to recommend it to you as a good explainer for large language model AI.

Casey Fiesler is the William R. Payden Endowed Professor in the Department of Information Science (and Computer Science, by courtesy) at the University of Colorado Boulder. She has  PhD in Human-centered Computing from Georgis Tech and a JD from Vanderbilt Law School. She can be found on pretty much every social media platform (often as Professor Casey). She focuses on ethics and law when it comes to AI, and she rocks a mean pair of Clippy earrings.

What I've embedded below is (hopefully) her series of short videos about how AI works (and why we should care). It's comprehensible for a layperson, short, clear, and informative. Each one is about 2-3 minutes long. It's also a reminder that, as she points out, AI is magic and can therefor be explained. 

Fiesler handles the material without trying to push one direction or another, but just laying out what is actually going on under the hood

Fiesler also has a series on AI and ethics, and, believe it or not, also has some videos of her doing stand up comedy about the issues. 

Fiesler has a light touch and a grounded view of what AI can, can't, and shouldn't do. If she's not already there, she's a useful addition to your stable of AI experts with a realistically dubious eye on LLMs (you should already be following Benjamin Riley and Audrey Watters). I mean, Emily Bender, Hank Green, Heather Cox Richardson, and Ben Williamson follow her on Bluesky. Look her up, and if you would rather watch videos than read stuff (or know someone like that), check her out.

ICYMI: Swearing Not Procrastinate More Edition (3/29)

I swear I am going to get my taxes done today, ignoring the semi-decent weather outside and every other thing that attracts my attention. In the meantime, I'm going to throw this week's reading list at you. Remember, sharing is always helpful.

Education is the Enemy

Jess Piper looks at more anti-education policy in Missouri, where a policy penalizing colleges for giving students low-earning degrees would end up penalizing any school that trains teachers.

Penn has an AI problem

The student newspaper at University of Pennsylvania says the school's leaders are making an AI-addled mess.

Telling Your Story and Our Story

Greg Wyman looks at the importance of telling your story-- particularly when you are a public school facing charter and private school competition.

Belleville parents outraged after students invited to do community service at ice detention facility

A New Jersey school's 11th graders get a surprise invitation from an unwelcome facility.

What ICE Detention Does to a Child

Andrea Gonzalez-Ramirez looks at the impact of the regime's detention camps on the children. This is a rough story to read, but a necessary one.

Rediscovering Knowledge as the Key to Reading

This piece if by Daniel Willingham and E.D. Hirsch at Education Next, so you will probably disagree with some of what's here, but there are also a few points worth thinking about. Content knowledge does indeed provide a foundation for reading comprehension.

How Can You Tell If a Curriculum Truly Builds Knowledge?

I'm not always a Wexler fan, but this post offers some useful ideas about telling whether a not a curriculum is really building knowledge or is just farting around with a topic.

Proposal to relax voucher program’s testing mandate advances in Tennessee House

Voucher programs repeatedly run into hard truth that voucher students do poorly on the BS Test. That could be a call for them to do a better job teaching students, but the Tennessee GOP would prefer to go in a different direction. Melissa Brown at Chalkbeat.

How Will Trump’s Supporters React To Seeing School Vouchers Program Increase Chinese Influence?

Jeff Bryant takes a closer look at some of the groups looking to cash in on the federal voucher program, and why the right wingers who support the vouchers might have some problems with the profiteers lining up to benefit from it. Forward this to your favorite GOP state lawmaker who thinks free federal voucher money would be great.

What It Takes to Flip a Seat

Jennifer Berkshire reports on yet another Democrat who won in part by standing up for public education.

A Federal Court Blocks RFK Jr.'s Anti-Vaccine Agenda – But the Threat to Children Is Not Over

Bruce Lesley looks at a successful court challenge to one of the bananapants policies that RFK Jr. imposed on us. That may keep your students slightly safer, but the fight is not over yet.

Claremont in the Crosshairs

New Hampshire has a court decision on the books that, as in other states, says it has to fix its shabby damned school funding system. Now some folks are trying to make that decision go away. Andru Volinsky, lawyer from the original decision, explains what's going on now.

Cutting State Funding while Intensifying Test-and-Punish Won’t Improve Public Schools

Hard to believe we are still trying to make this point after decades, but Jan Resseger is here to do the work.

Stephen Miller Pushes States to Pass Laws Denying Public Education for Undocumented Students

Jan Resseger is doing double duty this week by looking at reactions to Stephen Miller's call for Texas to bar undocumented immigrants from education.

Grade Retention is Bad Education Policy

Thomas Ultican takes a look at just some of the evidence that third grade retention policies do more harm than good (and the good is not for students, but for the district).

A Bill to Prohibit Changes to SC Monuments

I can't imagine what it's like to try teaching history in one of these confederate states that require folks to not just avoid badmouthing confederate figures, but also to actually revere these traitors. But here comes South Carolina with a "hands off our rebel statuary" bill. Steve Nuzum has the story.

You Do Not, In Fact, Have to Hand It to Them

Audrey Watters is here to remind you that, among other things, tech billionaires make predictions that are marketing baloney and also very wrong.

OpenAI's slop machine Sora is dead. We're all better off without it

True that. Sora was a blight, and now it's gone. Cross your fingers that nothing worse springs up to replace it.

The Hypocrisy at the Heart of the AI Industry

Alex Reisner at The Atlantic (this should be a gift article). The tag line says it-- "Tech companies believe in intellectual property, but not yours."

AI is not superhuman

Benjamin Riley continues to be one of my favorite AI growlers. Here he looks for a good metaphor for AI.

This week at Forbes.com I looked at a study that suggests that computer tutors work better when they aren't lying about how human they are. 

Reg Kehoe and his Marimba Queens worked for a couple of decades starting in the thirties; they played their last gig in 1962. They were out of Lancaster, PA and made a yearly appearance at Hersheypark. That hardworking bass player was out of Hershey. The woman next to the maraca player was Reg's wife. 

You can sign up to my newsletter for free. 

Plyler for Dummies

You're going to see the Supreme Court case Plyler v. Doe coming up a bunch these days, and if you are not up on your SCOTUS cases, let me provide you with the basic info about what the case was, why its decision matters, and why some folks are looking to get it overturned. This is about immigrants and education and, as is often the case these, a whole lot more.

Why did the case happen in the first place?

Texas. In 1975, they passed a law prohibiting "the use of state funds for the education of children who had not been legally admitted to the U.S." In 1977, Tyler Independent School District adopted a policy requiring students who were not "legally admitted" to pay tuition ("legally admitted" included having documents saying they were legally present or in the process of getting such documents).

A group of students who couldn't produce such documents sued the district. The district court ruled the policy (and therefor the state law on which it rested) was unconstitutional. The federal appeals court agreed, and the district pursued appeals all the way to the Supremes, who handed down a decision in June of 1982.

What did SCOTUS say?

SCOTUS was 5-4 against the policy.

The majority opinion, written by Justice William J. Brenan. found that the law was aimed squarely at children and discriminated against them for a characteristic that they could not control. The ruling also asserted that there is a state and national interest in educating these children, regardless of immigration status, because denying them an education would lead to "the creation and perpetuation of a subclass of illiterates within our boundaries, surely adding to the problems and costs of unemployment, welfare, and crime."

The majority argument also rested heavily on the Fourteenth Amendment, which should ring a bell because that is also the amendment that establishes birthright citizenship, which Donald Trump would very much like to get rid of. The arguments in Plyler rested on the Equal Protection Clause. Justice Lewis Powell (a Nixon appointee) argued in his concurring opinion that the children were being kept from schools because their parents broke the law. "A legislative classification that threatens the creation of an underclass of future citizens and residents cannot be reconciled with one of the fundamental purposes of the Fourteenth Amendment."

Even the dissent, written by Chief Justice Warren Berger, actually agreed with the majority that it would be a bad idea to "tolerate creation of a segment of society made up of illiterate persons." But they asserted that this was an issue to be settled by lawmakers and not the court.

One notable argument raised by Texas officials was that the phrase "within the jurisdiction" in the Equal Protection Clause did not cover illegal aliens. Both the majority opinion and the dissent disagreed, arguing that illegal aliens are, in fact, persons, and they are here. 

Why do we care?

Many pieces of this case have re-emerged in recent years, in part because conservatives have a bone to pick with the Fourteenth Amendment. The Equal Protection Clause was, for instance, instrumental in Obergefell v. Hodges, the decision that established same-gender marriage as Constitutional.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott has been itching to revive that 1975 anti-child law since SCOTUS struck down Roe, arguing that the Dobbs decision draft opinion from Justice Samuel Alito (the one that was leaked) was based on the idea that abortion rights are not specifically protected by the Constitution and neither does it mention education rights for undocumented immigrants.

And if SCOTUS can be convinced to take another look at that "within the jurisdiction" language, so that the court no longer recognizes being a person and being here as enough, we could be looking the wholesale creation of all sorts of second-class tiers in America, people who are not protected by the Equal Protection Clause. 

The Trump administration has been pushing back against Plyler for a while, But in just the last week, hateful homunculus Steven Miller has pushed Texas to kick those undocumented immigrant kids out of school. Earlier this month the House held a whole hearing on "the adverse effects of Plyler v. Doe." The underlying argument is part bullshit, part chilling prediction of where these guys are headed, the argument being basically "Why spend money on anyone who is not One Of Us," an argument that is sociopathic baloney, but also alarming in how easily it can extended to anybody We Don't Like. Witness also this tweet from the official White House twitter account:

Get that? Not the worst of the worst. Not illegal or undocumented immigration. The promise made and kept is to chase all immigrants away. And if scaring them away from schools with ICE, or chasing them out of schools entirely-- well, if that gets a few more of those immigrants out of the country, then the administration thinks that's just fine.

The GOP in Tennessee has obligingly advanced a bill that would allow schools to deny, or charge tuition for, education to any children without legal immigration status. They did amend the bill so that children thrown out of school for immigrant status will not be in trouble under the state truancy laws. What big hearts! The bill exists to allow legal challenges to carry it all the way to the Supremes so they can, if so inclined, undo Plyler. 

Just imagine if SCOTUS also undoes the Fourteenth Amendment's birthright citizen language. America gets a large, uneducated generation of young humans who can either be deported or put to work as good old fashioned hard laborers (thank all the states that have rolled back child labor laws).

There's an extra layer of irony here. As we learn from Adam Laats in his book Mr. Lancaster's System, one of the forces behind the invention of the U.S. public school system was a concern about the number of illiterate and unschooled youths who were out on the street causing trouble and worrying their elders. 

So pay attention to what happens to Plyler next under the regime. It could spell trouble not just for undocumented immigrants, but for all of us. If leaders agree that only Certain People are entitled to an education, we'd better pay attention to who qualifies as Certain People, and who does not. 

PA: Book Banners Are Never Satisfied

The Independence Law Center, a far right christianist law firm, has helped craft and push anti-LGBTQ, anti-diversity, anti-reading policies in Pennsylvania districts for a few years. They've had enough success that one might think that in some districts they could just sit back and say, "Well, our work here is done." 

But for people who want to squelch Naughty Ideas, the work is never done. The new wave of ILC policies is a reminder that for these folks, no amount of book banning is ever enough.

The Independence Law Center

The ILC is the law arm of the Pennsylvania Family Institute. PFI was founded in 1989 as a “key strategic voice for the family, and for the Judeo-Christian principles needed for a free and prosperous society.” Their stated mission is to “strengthen families by restoring to public life the traditional, foundational principles and values essential for the well-being of society.” As with many christianist political groups, they’ve learned to couch their goals in more secular language, but their true nature often peeks through.

Our goal is for Pennsylvania to be a place where God is honored, religious freedom flourishes, families thrive, and life is cherished.

Of course, they only have one particular God in mind.

The founder, president, and CEO of PFI is Michael Geer. Geer started out as a journalist, including almost a decade as senior news producer at WPXI in Pittsburgh. Geer is a regular voice in conservative meetings, church gatherings, and media coverage. He’s opposed to legalization of marijuana, women’s health care options, non-traditional marriage, and freedom to read for students.

In 2006, PFI set up the Independence law Center to do pro bono work “that litigates and advocates on behalf of the sanctity of life, marriage and family and religious liberty.” Wenger has been the chief counsel since the center’s inception. He’s a ninth-generation Lancaster County Mennonite who decided early on that he wanted to be a religious liberty lawyer.

Samek, who joined in 2015, is senior counsel. Samek has been a school board member (Franklin Regional), spent eight years as an attorney with Eckert Seamans in Pittsburgh, and before that was a staff sergeant in the USAF reserve. His law degree is from Pitt; his undergraduate work was done at Liberty University.

The center has handled some high profile cases in the past; Wenger has been to the Supreme Court twice. A decade ago he took Conestoga Wood Specialties Corp v. Burwell to SCOTUS, where it was paired with the more famous Hobby Lobby case that decided that employers’ free exercise of religion allowed them to refuse to provide insurance to cover types of health care with which they disagreed (in this case, birth control).

ILC has been consistent in representing pro-Christian, anti-LGBTQ, anti-abortion points of view. So it should be no surprise that in recent years they have been plenty busy with work in school districts.

ILC and school districts

ILC has worked in a number of school districts around the Commonwealth.

In 2012, Wenger worked with ADF to provide cover for a school board in Mercer County that wanted to “solemnize” its meetings with a prayer. That year they were also involved in a dispute between the Harrisburg school district and Child Evangelism Fellowship over release time allowing the group to “feed lunch to participating elementary students (off site) and also feed them truth from God’s word.”

In 2017, ILC teamed up again with ASDF for a lawsuit against the Boyerstown Area School District, alleging that the district was promoting sexual harassment of students by allowing trans students to use the locker rooms for their identified gender. Though they aimed for the Supreme Court, SCOTUS chose not to hear the appeal of the Third Circuit ruling in favor of the district. ILC also involved itself in a similar case involving a trans student in Virginia.

In 2019, ILC took the Mechanicsburg district to court because it was prohibiting students in Christians In Action from handing out Bibles during lunch (the district’s policy banned handing out all non-school literature).

In 2020, they warned 50 Pennsylvania districts that they were illegally targeting students’ religious speech.

Many of these cases are highlighted on ILC’s page of “case news.” They are less forthcoming about their other growth business—quietly writing discriminatory policy for right-wing school board members.

The Central Bucks school board famously became the poster for right-wing culture panic takeover, launching a batch of anti-LGBTQ, anti-reading policies, while steadfastly refusing to tell non-right-wing members of the board exactly who was “helping” write those policies.

But some metadata showed that at least some of those policies had passed across Jeremy Samek’s desk, and when former board Vice President Leigh Vlasblom moved on to a job with the right-wing Leadership Institute, Vlasblom bragged that during her board tenure she had “worked extensively with PA Family Institute, Independence Law Firm, Keeping Kids in School PAC, Hope 4 PA, and Bucks Families for Leadership.”

When pressed, Central Bucks board President Dana Hunter finally admitted working with ILC’s Samek, arguing that since he was working pro bono, she had no obligation to inform other board members – or district parents and taxpayers. Offering pro bono "help" writing repressive policies has been an ILC standard plan.

Other districts have worked closely with ILC to draft policies to ban books and trans athletes. When Hempfield’s school board worked on book restrictions and trans athlete restrictions in 2022 and 2023, their board not only used ILC advice for crafting the policies, but met with Wenger in executive session.

Central York School District drew considerable attention for what was, in 2021, the highest number of books banned in the country. FOIA requests pulled emails that showed that to manage the fallout and try to hold onto the policy, the district turned to ILC. The emails between Superintendent Peter Aiken and Samek were heavily redacted, but the tone was certainly chatty (“Let’s grab lunch again soon man,” writes Samek to Aiken at one point).

In the Red Lion District, ILC helped craft anti-trans policies about which bathrooms trans students may use, which sports teams they may join, and which pronouns they may use.

In one case, ILC returned to the scene of earlier work. Dover Area School Board hired the firm, for free. Dover previously made news 20 years ago when the board required that the science department teach Intelligent Design, yet another attempt to mask religious values in secular language. The district was challenged in court and lost. One of the attorneys who filed briefs on behalf of the district was Wenger, who at the time was working as a lawyer for the Foundation for Thoughts and Ethics, the Christian “think tank” that produced the intelligent design text that Dover used.

The list goes on and on. In Warwick, the board hired ILC prompting the superintendent to resign. Penn Manor School District hired ILC to whip up some anti-trans policies just months after a trans student committed suicide in the community. 

The ILC has been so busy that a map maintained by Pennsylvanians for Welcoming and Inclusive Schools helps track the ILC presence in Pennsylvania districts. 

But if you think all this successful cracking down would cause ILC to lay back and relax, well, not so much.

Another leap forward in book banning

ILC created an even broader version of a book ban, starting off in places like Bermudian Springs School District and Pequea Valley, where, according to Meredith Willse at York Daily Record, schools passed a restriction against books or any other material that "offends good taste or propriety."  Now a similar policy has been adopted by the Southern York County School District board.

Southern York already has a swell track record; last summer, it adopted an ILC-penned anti-LGBTQ policy. The district has previous banned books like Flamer. The district also reinstated a Native American mascot and canceled a noted Black chemist from some guest teaching spots in the school's science program because the chemist had previous made some statements about feeling excluded in the past due to her race. The district is about 90% white.

The new library policy, adopted unanimously by the board, further states that if a work includes vulgar language that offends good taste or propriety, that cancels out any intended serious literary, artistic, political, or value for the audience. In other words, the board will not allow the "artistic merit" defense for books with Naughty Language.

This goes beyond book ban laws that have prohibited depictions of sexual conduct or even divisive content rules. This rule says the board can yank anything that they find in any way improper or offends their particular taste. This rule doesn't much move the goalposts as it replaces them with a wispy cloud in a stiff breeze.

It's one more reminder that you can never, ever appease the culture warrior crowd, that they will never ever say, "Well, I think that's it. We are happy now that this line is drawn, and we will let you get back to business." They will never be happy until everything they disapprove of has been banished, and they will never, ever run out of things of which to disapprove. 

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.