More Momwashing For Privatization

The parenting bubble for anti-public ed activism is really expanding. 

Jeanne Allen's Center for Education Reform has just rolled out the Parent Power Index! It assigns arbitrary values measures three vaguely defined qualities-- choice programs, charter schools, and innovation-- and gives each state a letter grade. There's nothing new being quantified here, just the same old anti-public school, anti-union wine in new parentified wineskins. 

In choicer marketing, "freedom" is out and "parent power" is in.

Maybe it's just an attempt to create some synergy for Betsy DeVos's favorite choice evangelist and American Federation for Children "senior fellow" and his new book about the parent revolution.

But to find someone who's really doubling on momwashing anti-public ed activism, we turn to the American Federation for Children, which is launching a whole new initiative-- Moms on a Mission!

AFC is one more dark money group, probably one of the largest school privatization outfits in the country. It was organized and funded by the DeVos family. It has had a variety of names, including American Education Reform Foundation and Advocates for School Choice, Inc, and has suckled up some other DeVos initiatives like "All Children Matter," a group that was fined for election misconduct in Ohio and Wisconsin.

They're tied to ALEC, the conservative corporate bill mill. They've had a variety of projects, including Ed Newsfeed, a program for planting fake news stories on local media. They're still running Black Minds Matter, School Choice Boyz and Federacion Para Los Ninos. 

Their leadership is a veritable privatizer who's who. Betsy DeVos gave up her chairman of the board spot to go work for Trump. These days the chair is William E. Oberndorfer, who co-founded the Alliance for School Choice, one of the root organizations of AFC with John Walton and has his own foundation that is busy pumping up charters and groups like Jeanne Allen's Center for Education reform and Jeb Bush's Foundation for Excellence in Education and EdChoice (formerly the Friedman Foundation).

The board also includes John Kirtley (Florida School Choice Fund, Florida Charter Institute), Kevin Chavous (DFER, New Orleans voucher plan, K12), Rosemarie Nassif (Center for Catholic Education) and Scott Walker. A staff of 49. We could run through the whole crowd, but you get the idea--there's a lot more to AFC than just Betsy DeVos.

Moms on a Mission doesn't have its own tab yet, but AFC announced their launch on May 11 (Mother's Day).  

Across the nation, school choice is opening wide the doors of opportunity for children, thanks to a powerful force: Moms. Parents are the ones who know and love their children best, and moms are often the front line confronting the obstacles that would otherwise hinder opportunities for their little ones.

There's a brief inspirational video. Also, an introduction to some of the moms.

There's Clarice Jackson, an activist from Nebraska who served as Commissioner of African American  Affairs (2021-2024) under Pete Ricketts and Jim Pillen. She has worked with dyslexia organizations and founded Black Literacy Matters in February of 2022. She has a great story about working as a paraprofessional in school and encountering a young girl struggling to read and write, and coming to realize that with an incarcerated mother and "strapped" grandmother, the girl "lacked the help she needed at home." Jackson eventually adopted the girl, and the story is a compelling example of a school dropping the ball. Of course, it's also the story of realizing that someone would have to step in and take over for the actual parents, who could not manage the job because they were overwhelmed by their own circumstances. Not sure how school choice would have helped.

Tera Myers is the Ohio mother of a child with Downs Syndrome. She spoke at the 2020 GOP convention in praise of Donald Trump. Myers is a member of Mansfield Alliance Church and is a "Mentor Mom" at Berean Baptist Church MOPS Program, or Mothers of Preschoolers. She serves as a state and national parent advocate for Education Freedom, the Trump administration's proposed scholarship program, and is a consultant for Washington D.C.-based American Federation for Children. That last part doesn't appear in the Moms on a Mission website.

Holly Terei makes plenty of appearances on Fox News, perhaps because she's the National Director of Teacher Coalition for No Left Turn In Education, where the Georgia mom hopes to see "teachers and parents working together to push against the progressive woke agenda that has infiltrated America’s public schools." NLTE is yet another culture panic group fed by Tucker Carlson; a Florida chapter head single-handedly made his district the country's leader in book challenges.

Becki Uccello is also an activist parent of a child with special needs, which has made her a frequent voice speaking in favor vouchers in Missouri. The former public school teacher used a voucher from the Herzog Tomorrow Foundation to send her daughter with spina bifida to Catholic school (her son did just fine in public school). Herzog is a foundation aimed at trying "catalyze and accelerate the development of quality Christ-centered K-12 education so that families and culture flourish."

So once again, some experienced activists coded as moms, their activist bona fides downplayed or erased. There's a definite emphasis on students with special needs, which is an interesting choice given that so much of the choice school world is not available to those students. At the same time, it makes a certain sense because so many parents of students with special needs are (or at least feel) ill-served by public schools. 

Moms on a Mission is just getting on its feet, so it remains to be seen how it figures in AFC's ongoing work in dismantling public education. But if these moms ("moms just like you!") show up in your neighborhood, they aren't there to give public education a hand. 

9 Things to Know About School Choice

To help kick off School Choice PR Week, Forbes ran a puff piece about choice entitled "Kicking Off School Choice Week With 9 Things You Need To Know". The piece comes from contributor Maureen Sullivan who in 2009 was elected to the the Hoboken school board arguing "for lower taxes and higher standards" during her "nearly" four year term (Sullivan was elected as a member of the Kids First team, then defected because she found them insufficiently reformy, leading to a great deal of fiscal grandstanding and wrangling in Hoboken)

Her 9 things make a nice compendium of what choice advocates offer as arguments these days. Let's consider them in the order she presents them.

1) Sullivan cites the American Federation for Children poll as proof that Americans want school choice for realsies. As Diane Ravitch pointed out to me when I wrote about that poll, it's interesting that in all the times choice has been on a ballot in the states, it has never won once (update: my mistake-- with huge backing, a charter bill did finally just pass in Washington) . At any rate, looking to AFC for information about school choice is like looking to R. J. Reynolds for information about the effects of smoking.

2) More than 100K students use vouchers to attend private school (according to Center for Education Reform, another school choice booster group). There are a little under 50 million K-12 students in the US, making voucher students about 0.2% of the student population. It's a good number to remember the next time anybody offers students in a voucher program as proof of anything.

3) There are 6,500 charter schools open now. Well, probably, more or less. Hard to say exactly how many have opened or closed this week. According to the National Alliance for Public School Charters, 2.5 million students are enrolled. Sullivan did include one actually interesting factoid here-- half of all charters are in four states (California, Texas, Florida and Arizona).

4) The Center for Education Reform offers grades each state on its charter school swellness. It's a fifty-five-point scale, and twenty-five of those points are based on independent authorizers and number of schools allowed. Fifteen more points for a combination of state and district autonomy, along with "teacher freedom," whatever that is supposed to be. Final fifteen are for funding. The A states are DC, Minnesota, Indiana, Michigan and Arizona.

5) Eight states don't allow charters (North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Nebraska, Vermont, West Virginia, Alabama and Kentucky, though Nebraska is likely to change under a new pro-charter governor). It's an interesting list. Do you suppose the lack of any juicy urban profit centers is a factor for these states?

6) Charter schools go out of business. Sigh. I wish this weren't news to people, but as we repeatedly see, it is. The NAPSC reported that 200 2012-13 charters didn't open again the following year. The Center for Ed Reform says that of 6,700 that ever were, 1,036 have closed since 1992. I do not know how to make those figures fit with the figures in item 3.

7) Charter schools are getting better results. This is based on the wishful thinking and fluffy unicorns study released bu CATO studying Texas charters. In fact, there are no conclusive studies showing that charters do it better, and where marginally better results occur (and also when they don't, which is sad for the charter) those results are readily explained by how the charter manages its student body with selective intake and pushing out low performers. There are virtually no examples of charters attempting to educate an entire student population in the same way that a public school system must. So far we've had one all-charter district, and it failed to have any positive effect whatsoever.

8) The US Senate passed a resolution recognizing National School Choice Week, sponsored by Tim Scott (Rep-SC) with ten co-sponsors including Ted Cruz , Rand Paul, and Dianne Feinstein.

9) The two biggest teachers' unions got their asses handed to them by pro-school-choice candidates, achieving victory only over Pennsylvania's Tom Corbett, who arguably could have been beaten by my dog. There's a whole host of explanations for those electoral victories, and they do underline how disconnected AFT and NEA leadership are from absolutely anything at all. I suspect the elections mostly show that political fooferawing only moves the needle so far. Scott Walker wasn't going to lose unless someone caught him on video beating a nun to death with a puppy. Tom Corbett wasn't going to win even if someone had a video of Jesus endorsing him.

Sullivan's article is one more example of the long game that charter and choice advocates are playing. Just keep insisting something is true long enough (public schools are failing, vaccines are dangerous, fluoride makes you communist, The Bachelor is a show about finding true love, charter schools are popular and successful) and eventually it enters Conventional Wisdom as, at a minimum, a "valid alternative view." It's not necessary for the things to be true, or even supported by facts-- just keep repeating them uncritically and without argument, and eventually, they stick.

Choice Advocates Conduct Poll; Unsurprising Results Ensue

The American Federation for Children is not so much about children as they are "the nation's voice for education choice." So when they called a press conference to announce the results from their recent poll, it is perhaps unsurprising that their pollster found a deep and wide support for school choice far beyond anything I've ever seen in any polls before.

Purpose

The purpose of the poll was telegraphed right up front in the subject line for their email announcing the press event announcing the poll-- "Is school choice a 2016 sleeper issue ?"

Kevin Chavous, executive counsel for the AFC, underlined that point in his opening comments. His reading of the 2014 mid-term elections is that pro-choice candidates (that would be, of course, supporters of school choice, not reproductive choice) swept the election, sent a message to the two largest teacher unions, and put Presidential candidates on notice of which way the wind is blowing. Yes, the AFC would like Presidential hopefuls to set sail for Choiceland, and they are here to try to fill those sails with a little more hot wind.

Chavous introduced the pollster, Debbie Beck of Beck Research, a public opinion research firm. He assures us that she's seasoned with fifteen years of experience and has "represented" major corporations, which strikes me as an extraordinarily odd word to use for a pollster, unless of course you think the business of pollsters is to create "research" to help push particular opinions, and not to be unbiased collectors of facts. But then, she's been a consultant on several political campaigns and has worked for folks like Mayor Michale Bloomberg and StudentsFirst, and introduced herself as a Democratic pollster. Who knew that there was such a thing as a pollster who was partisan on purpose?

So Beck stepped up and announced that their study found that modern charters are not widely supported and lead to segregation and the bleeding off of resources from public schools, so the American Federation for Children would withdraw their support from school choice and instead work to make sure that each child in America gets an iPad and a pony. Ha! Of course not. The report that these choice advocates bought and paid for turns out to prove that they've been right all along!! And People Who Want To Be President should damn well listen to this organization and make school choice part of their platform.

Methodology

I did not study pollology in college, so I have no professional standing to critique some of their methodology. But I can say that I found some parts interesting.

They used a sample of 1800 likely voters. 800 of those were a full-on national sample. 1000 were an over sample from ten states (100 per state). The ten states were Arkansas, Florida, Illinois, Louisiana, Mississippi, New Mexico, Nevada, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Wisconsin. That does not look like an education reform cross-section of America to me, not even if I squint. But this oversample was "case-weighted" into the national samples "so that the number of voters in each state is proportional." "Weighting" in polls is basically about using math to correct bad numbers in your random sample-- say your male/female ration of responders is 70/30 instead of 50/50, so you use math to make the samples "weigh" equally. I'm not sure what that has to do with this study, but I am sure that somehow we've got 1000 respondents from educationally regressive states in the mix somehow. If someone wants to edify me in the comments, I welcome the education.

The breakdown of respondents has some interesting data points. The liberal/moderate/conservative breakdown is tilted away from liberals (22/32/39). Education is pretty evenly distributed, as is gender. Age is distributed pretty evenly by decade until we get to "65 and over," which gives us 29% of the respondents.

Some of the questions on the survey are... well.. not exactly what we'd expect in an unbiased search for The Truth. One portion of the survey tests out both pro- and anti- choice talking points (just in case, you know, anybody who happened to be running for a certain higher office might want to know how to spin). One anti-choice point was "Vouchers allow students to attend private schools that teach creationism, focus on religious studies and oppose homosexuality." Yes, I'm sure the school choice issue is best decided based on how one feels about The Gays.

Perhaps the most egregious fishing expedition in the form of a question was a choose-one-or-the-other question that asked respondents to say whether "we need to make major changes to the ways that public schools are run" or "we only need to make minor changes to the way that public schools are run." I didn't go to pollology school, but I have a degree in Word Stuff, and I respect the artful use of the word "only" to subtly tilt that question. Not surprisingly, 48% went with the major changes. Beck called this result "a big wake-up call."

Also, a ranking question asked "Regardless of your position on vouchers or charter schools, what do you think is the BEST reason to increase school choice in America." This allowed the report to claim that "quality of education" is the top reason to "embrace school choice," even if it represents people whose response was, "I hate school choice, but if I had to ever pick a reason to support it, it would be quality of education, a thing I don't believe choice actually fosters." Some folks did buck the system and say that we shouldn't have school choice, but that number was low (but only 2 points lower that the people who believed that competition creates excellence).

The Results

You can read the full report here. I'll touch on its "major findings."

Two-thirds of respondents support the concept of school choice, with an even bigger jump for special needs scholarships. Public charter schools are popular. At least, they're popular when your poll describes them as "independently managed public schools that receive taxpayer dollars and are open to all students." I'm not sure how the response would have run if they'd described public charters as schools that keep only the students they want and which never allow any auditing or transparency about how they spend the tax dollars they receive. I feel like that description might have changed the numbers a bit.

The top three talking points for school choice are:
1) rescues students in failing schools who need help right now
2) the zip code line, as in poor students shouldn't be stuck in schools because zip code
3) vouchers give poor students in crappy schools an escape to a better education. This talking point also throws in the not-exactly-truthful lines about students in "these programs" having higher achievement and higher graduation rate.

Voucher supporters mostly support them for everyone, not just poor kids. And AFC sees broad support among voters for the idea that competition improves education.

Fun side note. The poll results show Romney leading Bush in the GOP primary race. 

Conclusions

This poll does not pass the smell test.

It was produced by someone whose business is producing results for political purposes, not attempting to ferret out actual truth. It uses a sample that is oddly collected and "weighted." It was produced under the auspices of an organization that even pretended to say, "Well, you know, we just wanted to check and see if we were right in our thinking."

In fact, we know what the purpose of the poll is. Closing out the press conference Chavous said that "all the candidates [for President] need to take heed." Beck (who by the end of the press conference seemed like an actual member of AFC and not any sort of independent pollster) agreed and said she is waiting to hear more from the candidates.

You might say, "What difference do any of their biases make if their findings are True." I might reply, "If a woman goes to the alter and marries me, what difference does it make whether she wants to live a life or mutually supportive joy and union or she is just waiting to slice me open and steal my vital organs?"

This is not an attempt to further an honest and open discussion about the course of US public education-- it's just an attempt to leverage some political clout. And maybe grab some of public education's vital organs.