TX: Alpha School and Voucher Grift-- It's Synergy!

At last we are seeing some of the press that Alpha School actually deserves. Lexi Churchill, in a joint Texas Tribune and ProPublica piece, shines a spotlight on the Texas emperor's wardrobe. You should absolutely read the article, but I want to underline and expand on a couple of points.

First, the switcheroo. As it has in every other state (except, of course, Arizona), Alpha failed to get approval for its attempted charter school launch in Texas. That's Texas, where the state board of education crew is not known for its rigorous standards. This is not a surprise; Alpha School's educational bona fides are still limited to puffed up unproven baloney. As Churchill notes, several journalists have now tried to verify Alpha's claims of magical success with just two hours of screen time a day, and so far, evidence has proven elusive.

But to get into the Texas voucher program as a vendor, a school just needs approval from the state comptroller's office. For that approval, a school need only show that it operates in Texas, that it’s accredited by an approved organization, that it’s been in operation at least two years and that it administers annual standardized tests. Alignment with state education standards? Proven student success? Evidence-based program administered by qualified personnel? None of that is needed.

It's worth remembering that Alpha is by no means the only school playing this game of switching back and forth between charter and voucher status based on whichever category will let them keep the money flowing in with the least possible accountability. If your state has both charter schools and vouchers, I guarantee that there are schools picking whichever designation will keep their owners happiest.

And if you wonder what exactly is the aim of Alpha school and the husband and wife team of MacKenzie and Andrew Price, there's this reminder.

At least two state education boards also took issue with Alpha’s plan to keep Price and her husband on the charter’s oversight board while the school simultaneously paid their companies, which provide services like the two-hour learning platform. The Prices acknowledged the conflict of interest and repeatedly promised to correct it.

When the Price's made their half-baked amateur-hour bid to open an Unbound cyber charter in PA, there were multiple companies connected to the enterprise.

There's Unbound Academy, which is the charter arm of Alpha School itself. Both tout the 2 Hour Learning program, which is set up as separate business. The proposal in the PA Unbound application said “In support of its operations, Unbound Academy will collaborate with 2hr Learning, Inc. to deliver its adaptive learning platform, while Trilogy Enterprises will manage financial services, and Crossover Markets, Inc. will assist with recruiting qualified virtual educators." 

Trilogy Software is owned by Joe Liemandt, the billionaire techbro who backed all of this and is currently the principal of Alpha School; Andrew Price is the CFO. Crossover (an internet employment hub currently advertising a job as Director of Academics fore 2 Hour Learning at $400K) is supported by ESW, Joe Liemandt's personal investment company; their main client is Trilogy. Crossover has a proprietary tool called WorkSmart, which surveils employee work on their computer and was promised for the PA Unbound school. Crossover Markets and 2 Hour Learning share the same Austin address. It appears that Andrew Price was also linked to Crossover, but I find no clear current evidence.

The PA application also noted that the general and administrative service provider would be YYYYY.LLC, a company whose director, president, and principal are Andrew Price.

So Alpha School comes with a whole big web of companies that it "hires" to run the various aspects of the operation, and which in turn funnel all of that money back to the Prices. As Dan Meyer noted regarding that Arizona Unbound charter, "Ultimately, MacKenzie Price, Unbound Academy’s board president, will need to decide whether MacKenzie Price, founder of 2 Hour Learning, Inc, has set a fair price for those curriculum and resource materials. Arizona taxpayers await her decision."

Also worth noting-- Alpha School has ridden a wave of buzz mostly generate by MacKenzie Price's willingness to plug her operation to any media outlet that was willing to be impressed. And yet, according to Churchill

None of the Alpha leaders named in this story, nor the company’s press office, agreed to interviews, nor did they answer most of the newsrooms’ questions, including about their test scores. An Alpha spokesperson provided an emailed response only to questions about previous reporting by other news outlets.

 So, feeling a little shy suddenly.

But hey-- so much synergy. Synergy between Alpha's lazy charter school and Texas's lazy voucher rules. Synergy within the web of money-scrubbing corporations. Who cares about weaving a tangled web if it's a profitable one.

TN: Hiding Voucher Failure

Tennessee launched a taxpayer-funded school voucher program in 2019, with a proposal that barely squeaked through the House and narrowly passed the Senate. The idea was, as usual, that it would rescue students from ailing schools, and that voucher-receiving schools would receive autonomy in exchange for accountability. 

Well, forget all that.

This year's result for the state's Big Standardized Test (TCAP) are in and--whopoopsies!-- ESA voucher students failed hard, with their success percentage not even half of what the public schools scored. Just 17% of ESA students met or exceeded proficiency marks in math, and only 24% managed to meet or exceed proficiency for English. (It was 40% and 42% for public school students). In fact, the gap between public and private schools has been widening (as reported by Vivian Jones for the Knoxville News Sentinel).

So of course the legislature moved to find policy levers that could push private schools to do a better job with taxpayer money. Ha! Just kidding. Instead, Tennessee will no longer require voucher students to take the state test. Because what could be a quicker and easier way to eliminate those unfortunate signs of failure? Voucher students will still take the national standard test of their choice (look for that unimpressive-but-unwoke Classical Learning Test to pick up some market share). 

As voucher expert Josh Cowen pointed out to Jones:

“When they stop admin­is­ter­ing the state exam, then the lobby groups and the voucher sup­port­ers can just yell about how great it is for every­one and no one calls them out on it any­more,” Cowen said.

“If these res­ults showed good things, they’d be the first out there in the press con­fer­ence yelling ‘score­board!’ ” Cowen said. “The reason they aren’t test­ing is because they don’t want to see the answer.”

To be clear, the TCAP and other state BS Tests are lousy measures of school success. Those voucher-receiving schools might have some virtues not revealed by TCAP (ditto the public schools of Tennessee).

But this is the game reformsters wanted to play. They promised a future in which parents navigated an open free marketplace rich with information designed to inform the choices of the education "consumers," not a marketplace in which the preferred vendors-- the private ones-- were freed of any measures that might make them look bad. 

I respect folks who are pro-choice on principle, who believe that parents should have a choice whether that choice provides a better result or not. I disagree with them, but I appreciate their principled consistency.

But this kind of thing is just an attempt to give private schools an edge in the marketplace, one more sign that the goal here is not choice for parents, but public tax dollars for private (religious) schools. If Tennessee wants to play the BS Test game, let everyone play it equally. But if legislators just want to play a fixed game so that private (religious) schools can profit from public taxpayer dollars, go ahead and say that part out loud--and let the voters show if they support it. 

Cancelling the TCAP for the private schools that are failing it just reveals that the whole program is a grift.