CO: Failed Charter Accountability

“Where’s my kid going to go to school?”

That's a quote from one of the parents whose child was supposed to be going to going to Colorado Skies Academy, an aviation-centered charter school that turned out to be the 1,472.334th (estimated) charter school operated by educational amateurs who couldn't hold things together. They anounced their closing about two weeks before the school year was supposed to start.

It is one of the most undiscussed features of the charter school world-- the vast amounts of money and opportunity and, worst of all, family resources and children's education that are wasted by charter schools that are so amateur hour they can't get the job done and/or manage to stay open. It has been six years-- six years!-- since the Network for Public Education released a study showing the vast amount of federal money going to charter fraud and waste. One out of every four dollars, to the tune of a billion!

Why are we still playing at this? The deal was supposed to be a simple trade-- charter schools would get autonomy in exchange for accountability. But in some states, it's just not happening.

The weak link in Colorado is the weak link in too many other states. A charter system is supposed to depend on authorizers. Authorizers have the job of checking that charter operators can deliver on the promises they make, and shut them down if they don't. A charter is supposed to be like a contract, a deal in which the school says "We will do A, B, and C. Also, we absolutely know how to handle the nuts and bolts of staffing and funding and, you know, educating. And if we can't deliver on all that, you can shut us down."

This sounds great in theory. In practice, not so much. 

One major problem is that authorizers often have a vested interest in saying, "Yes." Take Bay Mills Community College, a two-year school with 400ish students and a location on the Might As Well Be Canada portion of Michigan. Bay Mills made a ton of money by authorizing all manner of charter schools, most of them far, far away from the college. In Michigan, as in many states, authorizers get a cut of the charter school's funding, and that's a mighty appealing argument for saying yes.

In Colorado, there's a diffrerent incentive at play. Colorado has the Colorado Charter School Instittute. CSI was formed in 2004 as an arm of state government; several states have one of these boards, and their main purpose is to answer the question, "What if I want to start a charter school and authorizers keep telling me no?" CSI has a nine-member board, seven of whom are appointed by the governor, so if the governor's policy is "Gimme more of those charter schools," the board can help implement that policy.

In other words, CSI's purpose is not to provide accountability for charter schools, but to get lots of charter schools started. Or as Manuel Solano puts it at Colorado Times Recorder, 

The majority of the CSI Board of Directors are appointed by the governor and operate by advancing their goal of approving more charter schools. CSI’s existence creates fragmented oversight, undermines local governance, and enables schools to escape accountability by switching authorizers. The result is a system where financial collapse can go unnoticed until it’s too late.

Charter schools are too often businesses masquerading as public schools, and that word "public" helps them project an image of stabilty and competence that they don't deserve. According to Solano, 32 charters have collpased under CSI's watch in the last decade. The sudden collapse of 32 schools may not seem like much, but I guarantee that if you are among the families that were counting on those schools, it's a huge deal. And or taxpayers who are footing the bill, it should also be a big deal.

The really annoying thing about charter school accountability is that it doesn't have to be this way. But too much of the charter movement believes in the Visionary CEO model, where some Elon Musk looking whizbang dudebro is free to hire and fire and remake policy as he sees fit without rules or regulations (or unions) telling him how to run his business. Let him move fast and break things, and if one of the things he breaks is the school, oh well--that's genius for you. And if someone suggests that this guy is actually an education amateur who doesn't know what the hell he's doing--well, how dare you. 

The charer accountability sec tor also suffers from a problematic worship of the invisible hand of the market place. Every closure like Colorado Skies Academy comes with at least one market clown declaring, "Well, that's just the market working the way it's supposed to," as if the workings of the market are so sacred and wise that it would be folly to take measures to, you know, protect the young human beings who are trying to get an education (or to watch out for the taxpayers whose contributions fund all these market shenanigans).

There could be accountability for charter schools, actual accountability. Standards to be met, rigorous measures before they even open their doors. It could even be done without strangling the notion of innovation (though innovation is extraordinarily rare in the charter biz). It wouldnt be any harder than what we now do with magnet or CTE schools.

We could protect the interests of young humans and their families. We could provide accountability for the taxpayers. But we don't because in some states, charter fans think the most important thing is not protecting the interests of students or providing accountability to taxpayers, but in protecting the ability of entrepreneurs to operate with little oversight and accountability. And as long as that's the primary driving force in the charter biz, we will keep hearing parents ask,

“Where’s my kid going to go to school?”

AI Nightmare Fuel

Remember Diane Tavenner? The Bay  area edupreneur started the ill-fated Summit Charter Chain, got a whole bunch of money and tech from Mark Zuckerberg, watched a whole lot of students and their parents push back hard on her automated-education-in-a-box model, and spun it all off into a non-profit thingy. 

That was back in 2018. Since then, she has been doing all the fun silicon valley stuff, including writing books like Prepared: What Kids Need for a Fulfilled Life, chaired the Pahara Institute, started a find-your-career Life Navigation Platform (and app) in Mountain View, and she started a podcast, because of course she did. And it's on The74. And that's what we're looking at today.

Her co-host is Michael B. Horn, a speaker-author with a book blurbed by Reed Hastings. He's a co-founder of the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation, and he writes blog posts with titles like "Why Tech Didn’t Fix Schools: Applying Innovation and Disrupting the Factory."

Their guest on the episode in question is John Bailey, American Enterprise Institute's AI guy. He has worked under Governor Glenn Youngkin, done some White House stints, vp-ed at Jeb Bush's Foundation for Excellence in Education, Aspen Global Leadership Network. You get the world these folks soak in.

The episode is called "How AI is Democratizing Access to Expertise in Education," so you know we're in for a good time. Let's dig into the transcript, and start by skipping the obligatory introductory shmoozing.

Bailey talks a little about how he ended up in this particular arena, coming from a background in ed tech already.

And if I have to admit, like, I’ve been part of a lot of the hype of, like, we really think technology can personalize learning. And often that promise was just unmet. And I think there was, like, potential there, but it was really hard to actualize that potential. And so I just want to admit up front, like, I was part of that cycle for a number of years. And. And then what happened was when ChatGPT came out in December of 2022, everyone had sort of like a moment of ChatGPT, and for me, it wasn’t getting it to write a song or, you know, a rap song or. Or a press release. It was. I was sitting next to someone with a venture team and I said, what is, like, what is an email you would ask an associate to do to write a draft term sheet? And she gave me three sentences. I put it in ChatGPT and it spit back something that she said was a good first draft, good enough for her that she would actually run with it and edit it.

Yes, ed tech has failed to live up to its hype before, but This Time It's Different (which, coincidentally, is a phrase that is always part of the hype). Bailey found ChatGPT fun to play with, and I agree-- I, too, played several rounds of Stump The Software, myself, but only one of us was invited by corporate to come play with the toys inside. This is going to be "so transformative," says Bailey. "It just feels different." 

So what are the rewards and risks here? Well, the internet "democratized" information access (it also democratized information creation, which has not turned out to be a great thing and has rather messed up the other thing). 

What I think is different about this technology is that it’s access to expertise and it’s driving the cost of accessing expertise almost to zero. And the way to think about that is that these general purpose technologies, you can give them sort of a role, a Persona to adopt. So they could be a curriculum expert, they could be a lesson planning expert, they could be a tutoring, and that’s all done using natural language, English language. And that unlocks this expertise that can take this vast amounts of information that’s in its training set or whatever specific types of information you give it, and it can apply that expertise towards different, you know, Michael, in your case, jobs to be done.

Yikes. Bailey has lost me already. LLMs can pretend to be these things, and do it quickly, but "expert"? I don't think so. You aren't accessing expertise; you're accessing a parrot that has listened to a huge number of experts and also a huge number of dopes who know nothing and the LLM is incapable of telling them apart. At the same time, it's not clear how using ChatGPT is any quicker or more efficient than just googling. 

Bailey thinks it's going to be a great tutor. But no-- a great tutor needs to be able to "read" the student to suss out the exact areas that the student is stumbling over, and do it in real time. Tutoring by algorithm has been the same forever-- give the student a task, check to see what the student got wrong, give the student a new task that focuses on what they got wrong. This is slow, clunky, a blunt instrument approach to teaching. It's the same theory of action behind the earliest teaching machines, and it has the same problems. 1) The machine cannot read the student with any sort of precision and 2) the student is asked to perform for a mechanical audience. At best, the AI might be helpful in generating a worksheet to specifications given by a human teacher. That's helpful. It's not transformational.

I think it’s also going to be an amazing tutoring mechanism for a lot of students as well. Not just because they’ll be able to type to the student, but as we were just talking about, this advanced voice is very amazing in terms of the way it can be very empathetic and encouraging and sort of prompting and pushing students, it can analyze their voice.

I cannot say this hard enough-- the bot cannot be empathetic. It might simulate empathy. Do we expect students to be moved and motivated by a machine that can pretend to give a shit about them? And what, I ask, and not for the first or last time, is the problem being solved here? Is there some reason it's better to have software that can mimic a human interaction than it is to have an actual human interaction with an actual human. 

What will deployment in education look like? Bailey compares it to offices where AI is deployed in "back office functions," like, say, coding. He admits that a back office low risk function would be a better start than, say, having an AI do tutoring and "hallucinating," and I am reminded of the observation that AI is always hallucinating, but sometimes the hallucination accidentally matches reality. 

What does Bailey think a low risk back office education function might be? How about parent communications? And holy shneikies, how is that remotely low risk. On what world does a parent want to hear from their child's teacher's bot, rather than the teacher? 

How about using AI to do scoring and assessments? We've been doing that for ages, and mostly the result is designing the test so that it can be scored by a machine rather than designing it so it measures what we want to have measured. Computer-assessed writing? We've been pursuing that for ages and it still sucks and, like the robocaller on your phone, can only handle responses that fall within specific parameters. 

Teacher productivity tools? Maybe, but people whose lives are outside the classroom seriously mis-estimate what "productivity" covers for a teacher. Teachers are not making toasters or cranking out footstools, and creating lesson plans and assessing tasks-- that's not like working an assembly line.

What are the risks? Well, despite the calls to keep teachers in the loop, Bailey is concerned that tired and overworked teachers might jump to AI, much like they turn to Pinterest and Teachers Pay Teachers now, So I guess AI doesn't solve that problem. Because an AI lesson plan for reading might not even be based on the science of reading or aligned to your curriculum. He thinks this is much like the concerns about students just improving an essay with a button instead of doing the struggle that is how one learns. And maybe even talking to an empathy-faking AI will cause students to miss the friction of real human interaction, which would be bad. So for a whole long paragraph Bailey made sense in a way that he hadn't up to this point. Because I'm pretty sure everything he just said is the argument against tutoring students and probably also doing the back office stuff for teachers.

Tavenner is also concerned that the increased "efficiency" of AI will reinforce the current model instead of disrupting it all. I think by "efficiency" she really means "speed," which is not the same thing at all (I would rather have my surgeon be efficient than fast).

Bailey agrees that yes, as she has often said, the system and institutions within the system are "remarkably resistant to change." Also, because of that, "technology doesn't change a system." I have a theory about this, but this post is already long, so let me just say that "change" is constantly happening in education, just not the kind of transformation that every person with a piece of ed tech to peddle envisions in their pitch. The key here is utility. Teachers adopt practices and technologies at the speed of light--when they are useful. But ed tech vendors are forever showing up to the construction sight with a case full of butter knives declaring, "This will be a huge help in building houses if you just change the way you build houses. At least, that's what our in-house testing projections say."

AI in education is still a solution in search of a problem. Bailey is going to swing back around to the "access to expertise" idea which is just-- I mean, he is clearly a smart and accomplished guy, but AI bots possess no "expertise" at all and your best hope is they can hallucinate their way to a passable imitation of it. 

[I]f you’re a school principal, all of a sudden you have a parent communication marketing expert just by asking it to be that Persona and then giving it some tasks to do. And if you’re a teacher, it means all of a sudden every teacher in America can have a teaching assistant like a TA that is available to help on a variety of different tasks.

"Variety of different tasks " is doing so much work here, and I know this is a podcast and not a dissertation, but these are the specifics on which his whole idea hangs, and what he comes up with are the vague generalities and things like asking the AI TA , "I see like John and Michael really struggling in algebra what are some ways I could put them in a small group and give them an assignment that would resonate with both of their interests and help them scaffold into the next lesson? That was impossible to do before." Well, no, not really impossible; more like regular teaching. And the teacher would still have to feed the AI the boys' interests and the scope and sequence of the next lesson.

There's some chatter about pricing which is as close a we get to asking if AI in education would be worth the cost to money-strapped schools, and then Horn has a thought he wants to toss out here. So you list bad things like losing the humanity in coaching, he says, and an easy button for writing that "jumps you ahead to the product, but not necessarily the learning and the struggle from it" but what if... and he takes me back to my college days with an analogy from Brewer Saxberg, learning scientist, that Saxberg attributed to Aristotle but I'm pretty sure I learned about studying how pre-literate cultures shifting to literacy.

The idea is this-- when cultures shift from oral tradition to the written word, certain skills get lost, like the ability to recall and recite Beowulf-sized chunks of poetry. "Kids these days," complain the elders. "Can't even remember fifteen minutes' worth of Bede. Just walk around staring at those funny marks on paper all day." 

Horn seems to be suggesting that we're on the cusp of something like that. Here's a real quote:

of these things that might hurt, which are really going to, are they still going to matter in the future or are there going to be other things that we, you know, other behaviors or things that are more relevant in the future? And how do you think about sort of that substitution versus ease versus actually like really, you know, frankly, I think when you talk about social interaction that could be, forget about disruptive, that could be quite destructive.

Interesting, says Bailey. AI is chipping away at entry level jobs, but that means that people are not acquiring the entry level job skills. His example-- legislators don't need an intern to summarize legislation. AI can do it, but then the interns aren't learning to read legislation. So now the intern has to do higher level cognitive functions, which tells me that students who coasted through high school letting ChatGPT do their homework or all the thinky parts of writing are going to be even LESS prepared for entry level jobs that require MORE skills. Bailey understates that there will be a huge strain on the education system, but then he ruins it by citing TIMSS and NEAP scores as if those tests provide any sort of measure of high level thinking. 

And he's back to the cheap expert again, offering that he can't do fancy Excel stuff, but now an AI can do it for him, so "now I could do it," except of course he still can't, and I have to wonder how much it matters that he still couldn't understand what the AI had done on the spreadsheet.

Look, there's a whole continuum here. The tech trend is always toward needing less and less understanding from the user. The first people to own automobiles had to know how to fix every last nut and bolt; now you can drive in blissful ignorance--as long as nothing ever goes wrong.

So maybe you can just count on AI magic and not care what's happening. But I don't think so--particularly because AI can only deliver in certain sorts of situations.

Catch your breath, because there's more nightmare to come. Tavenner wants to talk about the intersection between AI and ed policy. Like, could you use AI to help you decide how to use your ESA voucher money? Bailey says that sounds cool, and gives some examples, and seems stuck on hos the AI could make the "friction" between families and education institutions go better with robot empathy simulations. Let the AI help you figure out what to do with your education, your career, your life. "We're very close to that," says Bailey, repeating the motto of every tech promise of the last decade (self-driving cars have been a year away for ten years). And speaking of old familiar songs--

I think that’s going to be powerful and it’s going to make policy easier. I’m still, until we create more flexible ways for teachers to teach, for students to learn and students to engage in different types of learning experiences, I just think we’re going to end up boxing and limiting a lot of this technology capabilities.

Once we change how we build houses, the power of this butter knife will be unlocked. Because the education system is there to help unlock technological potential, and not vice versa. 

This is what's out there among the thought leaders and people who get excited by tech stuff and don't know much about classroom teaching of live humans. These are smart, accomplished folks. They even seem nice. But they are on some planet far, far away. 

I can offer you one palate cleansing chaser after all that-- two weeks later they did an interview with Ben Riley, who said a whole lot of things that need to be said. Go read, or listen to, that one. 

 

 

PA: AI Cyber Charter Rejected--Hard

The Texas business couple who wanted to launch a Pennsylvania cyber charter that used 2 hours of AI in place of more hours with actual teachers has been denied, and denied hard, by the state department of education.

MacKenzie and Andrew Price have pioneered a new school model in which students spend two hours in front of screens and the rest of the day pursuing life lessons, all with no adult involved other than a "guide." The proposed school-- Unbound Academy-- involved a set of interlocking businesses all connected to the Prices. It was going to be a sweet deal allowing them to hoover up piles of Pennsylvania taxpayer dollars. (You can read all about it here.)

Arizona (the "We'll Try Anything Except Support Public Schools" state) said yes to the Prices. Three other states said no, and now Pennsylvania has joined the list of folks passing. The 25-page letter of rejection highlights just how amateur-hour the Prices' application was (You can view the application here). 

Pennsylvania considers five criteria when considering a cyber charter application. Writes the department:

While a single deficiency would be grounds for denial, the Department has identified deficiencies in all five of the required criteria.

0 out of 5! That's a hard fail. Let's break it down.

Criterion 1: Unbound Academic has provided no evidence of sustainable support for the cyber charter school plan by teachers, parents or guardians, and students.

Does anybody actually want these guys? The application contained no letters or petitions supporting the school, and no supporters took advantage of the period of public support. The Prices mobilized zero ground troops to show the commonwealth that someone really wanted one more cyber charter in Pennsylvania.

Criterion 2: Unbound Academic lacks the capability, in terms of both support and planning, to provide comprehensive learning experiences to students. 

This broke down to several points. For one, the school didn't have insurance. "We're working on it, and we are totally insurable," they claimed. But they didn't have any quotes other than numbers from their other schools, which are neither cyber charters nor located in Pennsylvania.

They also failed to show that their proposed location was adequate for their offices, especially in light of their proposed expansion. They claimed it was a co-working space. My googling research suggests that it's actually a FedEx where you can rent a mailbox. The department notes that the application was pretty thin on physical details about the office space. And they don't appear to have an actual lease (which is normal for mailboxes).

Most brutal here is the third point: "The Applicant fails to reflect an understanding of cyber charter school finances." They appear to have failed to distinguish between general and special ed student rates, and a bunch of the enrollment assumption data turned out to be suspect (and beyond their ability to explain at their hearing). Nor do their figures match what's happening in Pennsylvania's other cyber charters. The Prices do not appear to have done their homework. 

The state notes that the Prices project becoming the 8th largest cyber in the state within five years, but appear to not grasp how churn affects cyber charter enrollment. (Fun side fact-- the letter includes some data about other cyber churn rates, which averages 20% or higher, meaning at least one in five cyber students leaves every year).

Criterion 3: There is no compelling evidence that Unbound Academic’s proposed programs will enable students to meet academic standards

The Prices included precious little information about their actual curriculum with their magical 2HourLearning program.

The Applicant did not provide documentation or description of the curriculum framework which could have provided evidence that learning objectives and outcomes have been established for each course offering in the Application or during the November 7 Hearing. The Applicant also did not provide any information regarding the number of courses required for students, materials to be used, planned activities, or procedures for measurement of the objectives, nor did it adequately explain the amount of time required for students to be online in order to meet the course standards for offered grades.

The other schools run by the Prices are all private, high-tuition, entrance exam schools. Their cyber proposal was weak-to-empty on programs for special needs or other students from vulnerable groups. Nothing at all for English Learners. 

Nor do they have any plan for professional development of staff. And while the commonwealth has some requirements for inducting new staff into a school, the Prices had nothing at all in mind for meeting those requirements.

During the November 7 Hearing, the Applicant shared that the teacher induction plan builds upon itself, and training would be based on an observed teacher’s needs, using assessment benchmarks along the way to determine future employability.

The Prices haven't hired or worked with teachers before--their private school uses AI and guides, supposedly. Looking at their application, I was a little fuzzy on whether they intend to hire actual certified teachers for Unbound. If that was the plan, there was no plan for onboarding them.

Criterion 4: Unbound Academic’s Application is non-compliant with requirements of Section 1747-A.

This is formal governance stuff, and the letter lists 16 criteria--and how Unbound failed each one. 

Highlights include the need for a board. Unbound has a board of five Pennsylvania residents, but it has never met, and as of the hearing, it had no meeting scheduled. No curriculum. No mission. No actual admissions policies. No suspension or expulsion policies written down. No agreements worked out with local districts for student participation in extracurriculars (in PA, cyber students can still be active in local extracurriculars and sports). No official clearances for student-facing personnel. No clear explanation of how instruction will be delivered. No explanation of what actual hardware will students be issued. No procedure for how student attendance and school day will be defined. No technical support for parents and students. No explanation of how data will be protected. No explanation of how student work will be deemed authentic. No truancy policies. 

Each of these items could have been addressed in either the application or the hearing before the board.

Criterion 5: Unbound Academic fails to substantiate that it will serve as a model for other public schools.

In all fairness to the Prices, I'm not sure any cyber charter in Pennsylvania meets this criterion. But the Prices were pretty much banking on the AI education thing (which, in their case basically seems to mean Khan Academy and the like). The board saw straight through this pitch.

Artificial intelligence (AI) presents unique opportunities that educators across Pennsylvania are exploring through effective, safe, and ethical implementation. However, the artificial intelligence instructional model being proposed by this school is untested and fails to demonstrate how the tools, methods, and providers would ensure alignment to Pennsylvania academic standards. When questioned at the public November 7 Hearing, the Applicant stated that this model was used “in several private schools across Texas”, although the model has been used for Ukrainian refugees in Poland [both examples are other Price operations]. At the time of the November 7 Hearing, the Applicant had not been approved for a virtual charter school, so there is no data that supports the efficacy of this model.

In other words, AI is cool and all, but you guys have only used it on select live students, and since you've never tried it on a cyber-school, nobody knows if it works, including you.

And so

I wish that were the end of it, but the Prices do have the opportunity to revise and resubmit their application, so I suppose we'll see how badly they want this. But in the meantime, hats off to the department for doing their job. 

It's Here. Replacing Teachers With AI

The interwebs have been buzzing about the new Arizona charter that will have AI in place of human teachers. But whatever you're imagining, the reality is probably different-- and worse.

The first thing to know is that the proposed Arizona charter is not new. The new school is Unbound Academy, but that's just the Arizona version of a group of AI teacher schools already up and running in Texas. They're the Alpha Schools, and they are the brainchild of one more rich person with a burning desire to revolutionize K-12 education. 

The public face of the for-profit Alpha schools is MacKenzie Price, a Stanford graduate now living in Austin, Texas. In this glowing profile from Austin Woman, Price tells the origin story of Alpha Schools, starting with her own child in school:

“Very early on, I started noticing frustration around the lack of ability for the traditional model to be able to personalize anything,” she recalls. “About halfway through my daughter’s second grade year, she came home and said, ‘I don’t want to go to school tomorrow.’ She looked at me and she said, ‘School is so boring,’ and I just had this lightbulb moment. They’ve taken this kid who’s tailor-made to wanna be a good student, and they’ve wiped away that passion.”

She launched Alpha, according to her LinkedIn profile, in 2016, and there started creating the model that would later be spun off into its own company, 2 Hour Learning. And that's the model that she now wants to move to other states.

It sure sounds like snake oil. The headline pitch on the website is this--

School is broken, and we're here to fix it. 2 Hour Learning gives students an AI tutor that allows them to: Learn 2X in 2 Hours

As at least one profile notes off-handedly, we're not talking about LLM ChatGPT AI. No, Price is still peddling one of the older models of computer-aided education.  

Price has found a way to use technology as a tool that helps create a personalized learning experience for each student. “The thing that’s really interesting about what technology has enabled is that it does a good job of giving every student the exact level of information they need at exactly the pace they need. We’ve [created]an AI tutor who is basically able to put guide rails along these kids’ educational experience in order to make sure they’re learning efficiently, they’re learning to mastery and they’re not getting frustrated. If they’re frustrated, learning turns off.”

Price is relentlessly media-ready. She has a Youtube channel, a podcast, and appears for interviews and in advertorials-- marketing masquerading as news copy. She touches all the usual talking points--the school model is 100 years old, NAEP scores show dreadful learning loss. She's careful to express admiration for the fabulous job teachers do in an impossible task! 

Salon posted a Price piece that claimed that back when Jimmy Carter created the Department of Education, the US was "ranked first in the world for academic proficiency," which is absolutely untrue. The ostensible point of the piece is to argue in favor of not ending the department of education, but mostly to argue more money should be going to AI tutoring (Salon identifies her as a podcast host, not the owner of an AI tutoring business). She also says that "attracting and retaining top teachers is the first step to any successful education reform."

Well, not at her company.

The model is simple. Students sit on the computer with their AI tutor for two hours of core subjects in the morning. After that, they move into what seems like the old open school model--they pursue their interests and passions. As Price tells an "interviewer" in one paid advertorial:

Yes, it’s absolutely possible! Not only can they learn in two hours what they would learn all day in a traditional classroom, the payoffs are unbelievable! My students master their core curriculum through personalized learning in two hours. That opens up the rest of their day to focus on life skills and finding where their passions meet purpose. Students love it because it takes them away from the all-day lecture-based classroom model. Instead, my students are following their passions.

 Price believes that one secret of success is motivated students, and she further believes that it's very motivational to tell a student "Just put in two hours on the computer and you can have the rst of the day to follow your muse."

Shiny! 

The school hires some adult "guides" to provide "motivation and emotional support." As the website promises "From 'Limitless Launches' to personalized motivational models, our guides make every student feel valued and motivated." The site also throws around scores on MAP testing as proof for how well the model works.

There are some points that don't come up in the marketing.

One is that the Alpha Schools don't appear to be accredited, a point that comes up in some complaints about the school. 

And if you were worried that this sounds like a cheapo model that is going to be foisted on poor kids, worry no more. Tuition at an Alpha School is $40,000 a year. Remember, Alpha is a for-profit company.

Also really studiously not mentioned in all of the appearing that Price does is her husband and co-founder of the business. 

Andrew Price is the CFO for ESW Capital and also for Trilogy. ESW is an private equity firm for one guy-- Joe Liemandt, who made a huge bundle in the tech world. In 2021, Price's boss was expressing some interesting thoughts about white collar jobs, as quoted in Forbes:

Most jobs are poorly thought out and poorly designed—a mishmash of skills and activities . . . poor job designs are also quickly exposed with a move to remote work

Huh.  

Andrew Price has maintained a low public profile with Alpha Schools. Maybe he's just letting his wife have her own fun hobby business, or maybe the couple has determined that the whole Mom saving schools for her kids origin story plays better than private equity guy decides to try making a buck in the education biz. 

It's also unclear why they've changed the brand name to Unbounded in Georgia. Alpha Schools, powered by 2 Hour Learning, have branched out to states outside Texas and is trying to break into others as well. It's quite possible that they have to build different sorts of shells around the core business to avoid rules about operating for profit schools. 

These are folks who have combined one old failed education model (algorithm directed worksheet generation as tutoring) with another (open free classroom) with somewhat more successful old business models (deprofessionalize your staff to reduce costs, charge out the wazoo) with education snake oil shtick (schools are failing, but because I love my child, I know how to revolutionize education) with a proven method of cooking the books (enroll wealthy, well-supported kids and you too can gave miraculous results). Here's hoping that Georgia and other states are smart enough not to fall for this. 

Mystery Coalition Pushing National School Choice

Rabbit hole warning. We're going to look at a group that's pushing national vouchers, and it will be a long trip. You've been warned.

The Educational Choice for Children Act is one more attempt to create a national program that allows wealthy folks to dodge taxes and privatize education all at the same time. Betsy DeVos tried to sell her version of Educational Freedom while she was in office. Unsuccessfully.

The idea is a tax credit scholarship voucher. In this case, an individual could write off 10% of their gross income by giving it to a "scholarship granting organization" aka "voucher management group" aka "extra set of hands so that it doesn't look like the government is giving tax dollars to private religious organizations." 

The bill was submitted (who knows who actually wrote it) by Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA),a gastroenterologist who at least deserves credit for being one of the seven GOP senators to vote to impeach Trump for the insurrection. He's also the guy who promised that he would only support health care legislation that passed the Jimmy Kimmel Test (and then didn't when he went in with Lindsey Graham to propose an alternative to Obamacare). The bill arrived with 14 co-sponsors and picked up 15 more--the usual GOP crew, from Tuberville to Vance to Blackburn to both Scotts. There's a corresponding House bill filed by Rep. Adrian Smith (R-NE-3). 

Cassidy tried this last year, too. And the year before that. This year's version dropped during National School Choice Week, and there's supposed to be a PR push to help support it.

That push is supposed to be coming courtesy of the Invest In Education Coalition. So who are they?

Their own explanation is that they are a "501(c)(4) organization that advocates at the federal level for legislation that will directly empower K-12 parents throughout the nation to choose the best school or education service for their children."

The board of directors is just three guys--

Anthony J. de Nicola is the chair. He's also chairman of Welsh, Carson, Anderson & Stowe, a New York private equity form that specializes in tech and healthcare. He and his wife are big on philanthropic giving, including supporting the Catholic church.

Thomas E. McInerny is the secretary of the board. He's CEO at Bluff Point Associates, a private equity firm. He used to be a general partner at Welsh, Carson, Anderson & Stowe.

Robert H. Neihaus is treasurer. He's founder of GCP Capital Partners, a private equity firm.  

None of their bios mention any sort of education background. But they have plenty of investment banking credentials.

The website is basically all about the ECCA. You can join the coalition, but it's not really clear who the members, if any, of the coalition are. There's a big list of groups and "leaders" that support the ECCA, and perhaps that makes them part of this group? The supporters list includes no surprises, from Betsy DeVos to Dr. Corey DeAngelis, plus national and state groups. There are links to "research" from DeVos's American Federation for Children and Milton Friedman's EdChoice. There are empty pages (like the /team page). Their LinkedIn page is just an auto-placeholder. We'll get back to their Facebook page in a minute.

The Wayback Machine internet archive shows a different picture of the team. The earliest capture of the team page is from May 21, 2022, and back then there were four more members of the leadership team and a slightly different name-- Invest in Education Foundation. 

The additional three board members are:  Robert Flanigan, co-founder of Educate, LLC (where he's  apparently just a "co-owner" since 2019) and former Merrill Lynch guy; Susan B. George of the Inner-City Scholarship Fund and the Catholic Education Advancement Office of the Archdiocese of New York; and Darla Romfo, president of the Children's Scholarship Fund, an outfit that provides "partial scholarships for low-income children in grades K-8 to go to private school," which sounds like voucher administration work. 

Back then, IIEF had a president-- Luke Messer. Messer was the CEO of School Choice Indiana. He was also elected a state legislator (2003-2006) then moved on to a US Rep from 2013-2019 (in the district Mike Pence vacated to become Governor), where he was founder and co-chair of the Congressional School Choice Caucus. He made plenty of choicer friends in the days after Trump's election and DeVos's appointment. 

By May of 2022, he was a partner at the law firm of Bose McKinney & Evans. At Invest in Education, he worked "every day to enact a $10 billion federal tax credit that would help give millions of children access to a high-quality school." By June of 2023, IIEF's address was the same as that of Bose McKinney & Evans, and the site was sporting logos for both a foundation and a coalition. One thing Messer doesn't list in his bio is his years as a registered lobbyist (2006-2012), right after he tried to privatize some Indiana highways. And he's been out there as the face of Invest in Education stumping for choice on all the usual fun places.

It sure looks like the whole business is Messer's show.

Then, by December of 2023, Messer is gone from the Team page, and Invest in Education has no address. And by today, Invest in Education has a new logo, and only three board members. 

Huh.

But there's another rabbit hole to dive down. Invest in Education has a Facebook page, and that page, with the exception of a slow period from late 2020-2021, has been active almost daily since it was set up. That set-up happened on September 11, 2017-- only it was started at the page for My Kids Future (a few weeks later, someone changed the name to My Kid's Future). 

My Kid's Future was yet another pro-choice website, a "special project of the #EdTaxCredit50 and Invest in Education coalitions." Weirdly enough, the English language version of the website is down, but the Spanish language one is up. Edtaxcredit50 has its own dormant Facebook page, launched on April 20, 2017. They set up a Twitter account at the same time and crumped out around late 2021. Invest in Education also had a Twitter account that started in October of 2013 as @OpportunityInEd, another account that joined in May 2009 and is still kicking, and there's also @Investined, which is a suspended account. All of their social media has followed the standard pandemic outrage-learning loss panic narrative.

Amidst all that, we learn that Invest In Ed had a previous president-- Tom Carroll. Thomas W. Carroll left IIE to get busy in the world of Catholic private schools; he just last summer announced he'll be stepping down as the superintendent of Boston archdiocesan schools at the end of this school year. He started there in April 2019. 

Carroll's LinkedIn says that he presided over Invest in Education Coalition and Foundation from March 2012 to March 2019, calling it "A think tank and advocacy organization focused on school choice in NY and nationally." He also says he founded #EdTaxCredit50 Coalition in January of 2017, which focused on pushing a 50-state tax credit and "the expansion of 529 college savings accounts in December 2017 to allow withdrawals for private K-12 tuition, the biggest federal school-choice initiative ever adopted."

Prior to his time at IIE, Carroll spent 2002-2012 as president of the Foundation for Education Reform and Accountability, a New York State choice advocacy group, and before that, founder and chairman of the Brighter Choice Foundation, a charter network in and around Albany. Though he doesn't mention it, a listing for Carroll at the Center for Education Reform also says that post-FERA, he headed up the Foundation for Opportunity in Education, which fits.

Carroll's 2012 arrival at Invest in Education aligns with the group's certification by the IRS. The Foundation was granted tax exempt status in 2012, and the Coalition in 2013. Both list an Albany post office box as their address, both list Anthony De Nicola (the current chair) as the principal officer. 

The 990 for the foundation from 2022 gives us yet another name, the only guy besides Messer who is listed as putting in 40 hour weeks. That's Michael J. Strianese, who was the CFO and COO for Invest in Ed, according to his LinkedIn from 2012-2018, then moved on to be CFO and COO for Northeast Charter Schools Network in Albany from 2019 on, so why he's on this 990 is unclear. Messer made $115,000 for his presidential duties; Strianese, $60K. On 2020, Messer is not on the form, and Strianese made $38,000. 

And in 2021. we find Maureen Blum, in her single 990 appearance as Executive Director. Her LinkedIn page says she was ED with IIEC for six years (2016-2022), and she says that IIEC was a continuation of Coalition for Opportunity in Education "due to a name change of company." She started out with the Coalition for Opportunity in Education in 2012 and served as Director of Outreach till the apparent name change in January of 2016. And before that she was with Brighter Choice since 2003 as director of outreach. She was also the ED of #EdTaxCredit50/USA Workforce Coalition from April 2016 through January 2022. Also, from 2002 till the present, she has been CEO of Strategic Coalitions and Initiatives, LLC, specializing in the "development of grassroots and community infrastructure designed to support and implement--" you know what? She's a professional astroturfer. 

The 2022 Foundation 990 also answers "Yes" to "Did the organization make any significant changes to its governing documents since the prior Form 990 was filed?" That turns out to be changes to the bylaws to "limit and control the board selection and removal process, and also to modify the process for hiring and firing the CEO and direct reports of the CEO" which seems like a bit of a clue about what happened to Messer and half the board. 

The Foundation took in gifts, grants and contributions totaling almost $3 million over five years; about half of that came in 2018. The low point was 2020 with $179K, but in 2022 they brought in $746K. Digging back, we a measly $155K in 2016, but almost a million in 2017. 

The 2022 990 for the Coalition shows Strianese and the three remaining board members, but not Messer. The group spent money on Bose Public Affairs Group in DC ($253K for lobbying) and in Indianapolis ($147K for lobbying), plus Linden-Grove Strategies in Albany ($127K for media and advocacy). 2021 shows those four plus Blum. 2020 shows just the three. The coalition shows much more revenue, topping a million each year. 

So what have we got here? An organization that has been around in various forms for a decade or so, agitating for national vouchers, and since the pandemic, they've been hitting all the usual choicer notes on Facebook through an account that somebody is running for them. They cut loose a bunch of members (perhaps shedding the foundation and just downsizing to the coalition). They look kind of amateur hour, but somebody is feeding them a lot of money. 

We started this with an announcement about their intent to boost ECCA. So what have they done?

Well, they have a Youtube channel with four videos. Two are from last fall, arguing for the ECCA with the usual rhetoric about failing schools and Evil People leaving students behind (pictures of Weingarten and Fauci), calling for every GOP candidate to embrace the message (series of now-irrelevant images), and offering the not-quite-true talking point that this doesn't use federal dollars (no, it just uses dollars that leave a hole in the federal revenue). Another spot links school choice to Ronald Reagan. And two more tell the story of a young woman who was saved by school choice; it does not address the question of how many private schools would refuse to honor her voucher because of her learning struggles or lack of born-again parents. You can go watch them if you must, but there's not much traffic over there and that seems like a good thing.

So.

If somewhere in your neighborhood, advertisement about the Education Choice for Children Act being paid for by the Invest in Education Coalition, now you kind of know what that's about. I'm sorry this didn't end up being a more linear, straightforward tale, but that is rather the nature of these groups--twisty and inbred with ever-shifting names and connections, because they're just mechanisms created by rich people to work their will and sell their preferred policy. These are not "organizations" in a normal sense, but just tools created for a particular purpose. In this case, the purpose is to push national school choice, a policy that has failed and failed and failed again, but hey--these folks are patient and wealthy enough to wait and keep tap, tap, tapping on the obstacles until they crumble.

Moms Launch Another Anti-Woke Group: Awake Americans

Moms for Liberty, which has done a fine job of networking anti-public school culture panic folks across the nation, has had some trouble with the brand in the last few months, what with misbehaving local leaders and reduced election prowess and founding guardians or morality failing to practice what they preach. 

So it's not surprising to find a few Moms looking to move their reactionary eggs to new baskets. One such operation is taking place in the Midwest. An Illinois-based group that has been around for a couple of years is trying to take its anti-woke massage national.

Which group is that?

Awake Illinois launched in May of 2021 and started forming chapters by counties in Illinois. They even had a cool launch video and a sort of slogan ("They can't cancel us"). The video hist the standard points-- schools didn't reopen fast enough, government is overreaching and oppressing businesses, schools are indoctrinating instead of educating. Amid the montage of stock footage is a shot of people celebrating as they cast away their masks. Who are they? "We are regular pro-human citizens." They make it a point to indicate they value humor ("Last year was gnarly" says the video at one point). Perhaps they noticed the general off-putting grimness of the M4L "joyful warriors." They want to defend education against critical race theory. All of this over the Glee cover version of David Bowie's "Heroes."

By February of 2022, they claimed 30,000 members over 32 counties. Their timeline also highlights fighting with the state union and the Tom DeVore-led lawsuits against the state over masking (DeVore was an attorney from American Freedom Society who, after a failed attempt to run for state Attorney General ran into legal troubles of his own). The timeline also notes the election of Glen Youngkin as governor of Virginia, one more reminder that some folks believed that Youngkin's election signaled a special political moment for the rights of (certain) parents. The site also touts Awake Illinois as bi-partisan, which only appears to be true if one considers right-wing and very right-wing as two flavors of partisans.

Who launched this venture?

Awake Illinois's founding president was Shannon Adcock. Adcock graduated from the University of Illinois in 2002 with a degree in BA in Communications, because a comms background seems to be the standard requirement for these groups. Adcock moved to Phoenix for a bit, did some sales and marketing work before starting her own photography studio, returning Naperville, Illinois in 2015. She's married with three kids, who attend a private Christian school. 

Adcock ran for a school board seat in March of 2021, and failed (the official Awake Illinois timeline starts with that election, noting a 12% voter turnout). From Chicago Tribune coverage of a petition calling for Candidate Adcock to step down:

Obed-Horton said she emailed Indian Prairie District 204 school board candidate Shannon Adcock in mid-March regarding the candidate’s objections to culturally responsive teaching and its intent to address implicit bias, racism, privilege and more in public schools. Adcock’s reply included a suggestion that Obed-Horton and other parents open a charter school with culturally responsive teaching in place, she said. In her Change.org petition, she said the email reply was “filled with racist rhetoric.”

Within a month the paperwork for Awake Illinois was under way. 

Awake Illinois quickly garnered a reputation for pivoting from anti-masking to anti-LGBTQ. They were "first and loudest voices" to oppose a family-friendly drag brunch and Drag Queen Bingo for teens. The latter event generated enough threats to result in a cancellation that AwakeIl celebrated on line. Then there was the time Adcock and crew managed to shut down a library.

Adcock became the chair of the DuPage chapter of Moms for Liberty. She went to a school board training session held by the Leadership Institute, the program that would have been run by Moms for Liberty co-founder Bridget Ziegler. A few days later, she announced another attempt at running for school board. Adcock has made a variety of appearances on right-wing media appearances on right-wing media. And she put up her own posts, like "The Perversion of K-12 Education," in which she proudly quotes Corey DeAngelis and argues about the evils of CRT and DEI. 

Adcock was also the center of controversy in 2022 when folks caught wind that she might be appointed to Naperville's Special Events and Cultural Amenities Commission. Once again a petition was launched. 

That appointment might have been a possibility because of Josh McBroom, the original vice-president of Awake Illinois. McBroom left the group to make a successful bid for a Naperville City Council seat. McBroom wasn't with the group long, but he had his moments, like the time he cosigned a demand that U.S. Congressman Sean Casten stop asking his opponent Keith Pekau to disavow Awake Illinois and the award they gave him for being an anti-mask, anti-vax guy. 

McBroom had previously gotten in trouble while serving on the Naperville Park Board Commission for making fun of pro-mask commissioners on social media. And he apparently wants to be a DeSantis delegate to the convention. McBroom's wife is an actual teacher. Once elected, McBroom seems to have vanished his AwakeIl leadership from his bio. 

Awake made many attempts to dabble in politics, like suckering Paul Vallas to appear on a panel while running for Chicago mayor. Only later did Vallas (never a big homework guy) discover that, among other things, AwakeIl had called Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker a groomer. But other GOP candidates signed on to the group's agenda.

Other members of the team.

McBroom was replaced by Helen Levinson, Levinson was the chair of the Cook County chapter of Moms For Liberty and at the center of battling lawsuits over racism in Skokie County schools, in which Levinson's legal team included Stephen Miller's America First Legal firm. Levinson is a sales, marketing and comms professional. 

Steve Lucie joined the leadership board in September 2021. Lucie had been a board candidate recommended by the Illinois Policy Institute until they were directed to some of his tweets on the subject of pandemic responses. In response to a post saying that the Biden administration might impose requirements to get vaccinated, Lucie tweeted "Fuck around and find out assholes!" followed by nine axes. Also, "People that choose not to be 'vaxed' will be the ones getting receipts. The vaxed will pay. Many I see with their own case numbers rising. They may even feel more pain if they continue to threaten the un vaxed." There's more in that vein. 

Lucie helped start "We Stand for Our Students" at the end of his 17-year school board career. The group drew some press, and Awale Illinois were fans. 

In May of 2021, parent John Blakey spoke before a school board about the dangers of CRT:

Watch how our teenagers interact around the neighborhoods and homes; they don't need to be split into identity groups based on skin color nor do they need to be taught how to be an anti-racist, about implicit bias, white supremacy, white privilege, etc. This will only create division.

By August, Blakey was the Director of Equality and Civil Rights for Awale Illinois, regularly speaking out against the Naperville district's equity plan.

In August, the group also signed on Dan Vosnos, who also turns up as a concerned parents, but who is also a well-connected activist and leader of One Chance Illinois-Action (joined up in 2022)-- a group connected to 50CAN (Derrell Bradford serves on its board of directors).

Expanding the brand

Awake Illinois has been busy in 2023, despite the occasional setback like the cancellation of an event about reforming sex ed, due to threats of violence.

Folks in the region have been tracking developments. Including the registration of domains for Awakes in Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, Virginia, and Florida. Those domains are "parked" except for Awake Wisconsin, which has the organizations web template in place and is "launching soon" as "a nonpartisan, issue-based grassroots advocacy movement that is partnered with national organizations such as Moms for Liberty and Courage Is A Habit."

But the real development has been the step of going national at Awake Americans. 

Awake Americans is Awake Illinois. They have the same address--2020 Calamos Ct., Suite 200, Naperville, IL 60563, which is actually a "virtual address." The building holds an investment company and also Alliance Virtual Offices, that offered (apparently they're not taking new customers) virtual office space for Naperville professionals, because a "prestigious company solidifies your reputation."

Awake Americans also has exactly the same "parents and patriots" board of directors as Awake Illinois, plus one more. Adcock, Lucie and Levinson are joined by Scarlett Johnson. Johnson is the Moms for Liberty chair for Ozaukee County in Wisconsin, and presumably the head to Awake Wi. Johnson seems particularly agitated about LGBTQ stuff (you can see her protesting with a Proud Boy here).

Awake Americans officially announced their launch in April.  They joined the Naperville Chamber of Commerce in May, raising a few eyebrows. They grabbed their domain in August of 2023 (Thanks to John Norcross and others who tracked this info down), but they had a "launch event" back in June at the Hotel Arista in Naperville. They hosted three speakers:

Noelle Mering, from the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a thinky tank and advocacy group devoted to making Judeo-Christian moral tradition influential in policy discussions. Rick Santorum was once a fellow there. 

Xi Van Fleet, a Virginia mom who left Mao's China and regularly compares critical race theory to the cultural revolution. She's done Hannity, and the far right Independent Women's Forum (the group that started as Women for Clarence Thomas) is a fan. She's popular on the "this is Marxism" circuit.

And James Lindsay, another anti-woke crusader who made "Okay, groomer" a thing. This infamous shitposter is allegedly on the Moms for Liberty advisory board these days.

One outcome if that gathering is a Woke 101 "webinar" to answer the question "Is Marxism in America?" They also offer a "Declaration of Independence from Woke." 

When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for everyday people to distance themselves from anti-Americanism or Woke sentiment which purveys current culture and policy, and to assume we have awakened to said reality, we reaffirm and "hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among there are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. 

I, therefore, as a citizen of the United States of America, earnestly publish and declare, that I am absolved from any Allegiance to Woke, Marxism, Communism, and/or Anti-Americanism, and that any attempt by the latter to coerce me shall be respectfully rejected.

Awake America proudly says it helped sponsor last July's Family Leadership Summit in Iowa, a big-time political gathering of evangelicals.

And Adcock is no longer listed as the chapter leader for DuPage County Moms for Liberty. Levinson is no longer listed as Cook County chair for M4L. Neither chapter has a Facebook page. Johnson is still listed as the Ozaukee County chapter chair (and legislation chair). 

It's not clear yet what the future holds for this Not-Woke-But-Awake crew. They don't appear to have a lot of political juice just yet. They're over-invested in last year's conservative scary word "woke." And beyond people who watch this kind of stuff carefully, they haven't attracted a lot of attention. They have Facebook and Twitter accounts, both of which are rather sleepy. 

But they have leaders who already have all the Moms for Liberty training and connections, making them perfectly positioned to be a welcoming dinghy for M4L members who want to jump ship. This is a group poised to do some rebranding for the anti-woke, anti-LGBTQ, anti-all-sorts-of-stuff crowd for whom M4L no longer works. We'll see how they do. 

 

FL: Is Hillsdale Coming For Sarasota Schools

Sarasota has been the center of so many Florida shenanigans, and now it appears they're going to show one more way for christianist conservatives to commandeer a school district.

Prologue

It is. for instance, the board with just one Democrat. That member, Tom Edwards, is a gay man who has been accused during public comments of being a "lawbreaker," a groomer, and "a threat to the innocence of our children and the rule of law in our great state." It happened once; the board chair did not stop it, but later apologized--and then failed to stop it the next time it happened, resulting in Edwards walking out of the meeting. Edwards, who just announced his intention to run for re-election to his seat, a feisty move as he is on Governor Ron DeSantis's hit list of school board members that the governor will campaign to unseat (because that's what rational, humane governors do). 

The vocal member of the public doing the attacking has alleged ties to Moms For Liberty, so perhaps she feels extra emboldened that the head of the Sarasota board is one of the founders of Moms For Liberty.

The Players

That's Bridget Ziegler. Ziegler squeaked out a victory for Sarasota School Board in 2018. Ron DeSantis thinks she's swell. And she's married to Christian Ziegler, who decided not to run for re-election to a county commissioner seat because he'll be busy helping his wife and DeSantis each run their own campaigns (that and new rules that would have made it harder for him to win).

Christian Ziegler told the Washington Post that he has been "trying for 20- and 30-year old females involved with the Republican Party, and it was a heavy lift to get that demographic. But now Moms for Liberty has done it for me." That was in October of 2021, when Ziegler's involvement had gone quiet; Tim Craig at WaPo reported that Ziegler's wife was "loosely" connected to M4L--not that she was a co-founder of this group that emerged to accomplish just what Ziegler had long searched for a tool to accomplish.

Christian Ziegler's Microtargeted Media ("We do digital and go after people on their phones") was a big player in the 2020 Florida race, on the ground for Trump and other GOP candidates. He pulled in $300K from a Trump-related PAC. He was once a Heritage Foundation Fellow. He's buddies with Corey Lewandowski. He appears to be behind the Protect Wyoming Values PAC (a Trump anti-Liz Cheney proxy), Governor Kristi Noem's election integrity website, and a bunch of other conservative Trump-backing websites. He was at Trump's January 6 rally. 

And in February, after had been "effectively... campaigning for the job for years," Christian Ziegler was elected Florida's GOP party chair. Meanwhile, Bridget Ziegler is helping the right-wing Leadership Institute train school board candidates.

Bridget Ziegler just acquired a right-wing majority in the 2022 elections; their first move was to force out the previous superintendent. And while a search for a replacement is under way, it appears that Ziegler is handing over major portion of the operation of the district to a consulting form wioth deep roots in the christianist right.

The Consulting Company

Tuesday afternoon, the board was supposed to vote on a contract with Vermillion Education, LLC (but that vote has been postponed until April 18). If their website seems a little sparse, that's because they have only been operating for a few months. Their promises and principles are suitably vague-- I mean, here's the whole pitch as of today--

The address Vermillion lists on the contract proposals is a single family home (1640 square feet) in a residential neighborhood of Hillsdale. And their personnel--well, so far, it looks like one guy.

That guy is Jordan Adams, fresh from Hillsdale. There's a lot of story with Hillsdale (here's a short-ish version or get into it more heavily with a whole series of articles), but the current version is a private right-wing christianist college whose head, Larry Arrn ("Teaching is our trade; also, I confess, it's our weapon"), is the same MAGA-fied guy who headed up Trump's 1776 Education thingy (and said teachers are the dumbest). They've provided a platform for a lot of school privatization and taxpayer subsidies for private christian school rhetoric from heavy hitters like Betsy DeVos and Christopher Rufo, all arguing that government shouldn't be running schools--churches should.

Hillsdale has long had a charter school initiative called the Barney Charter Schools, and more recently they've been behind the launch of many "classical" academies around the country.

Jordan Adams is a Hillsdale grad ('13), which means he was a Hillsdale student when they were launching the Barney schools, and eventually became their Associate Director of Instructional Resources. I'll let you draw your own conclusion about his fitness for the role:

“I mostly focus on the history and Latin curricula, figuring out how things are taught in a fourth-grade or eleventh-grade classroom,” said Adams. He looks forward to experimenting with more accessible resources for teachers: “When you’re a first-year teacher, you’re just trying to stay one day ahead of what you’re supposed to be teaching. You don’t have time to sit down and read a long text about teaching. But maybe if there’s a short video that is clearly titled and easy to access, you might conceivably watch it while you’re making dinner.”

If only there were a place to go where you could study teaching so that you knew what you were doing on more than a day by day basis. Adams's original undergrad plan was to work at a think tank, then he went to grad school for a Masters of Humanities. One more educational amateur rediscovering the wheel. But apparently reinvented it well enough to move up to interim director of curriculum for the Hillsdale College K-12 Education Office, a job he was holding back in October of 2022.

But he's not entirely new to Florida--in fact, Adams was part of the crew that screened the math textbooks that DeSantis accused of being too indoctrinatey. 

Adams is no longer listed in any current capacity as employed by Hillsdale, though there is no peep about his departure. Not sure what we can make of that. 

The Contracts

So what exactly does Ziegler want to sign this fledgling company to do? The two recent contract proposals (the ones that were going to be approved today) aren't super-specific. One consulting contract for a district improvement study lists a lot of the how, but the what is mostly in subparagraph 2:

So, basically all the things that parental rights transparency don't say stuff laws are directed at.

The other proposed contract is for "board services" covers

So, basically, if Sarasota ever hires a new superintendent, that person won't have a lot to do. 

The board services contract is a mere $4,820 per month, which is pretty damn cheap for someone overseeing all the work of a school district. And all of this--reviewing programs, curriculum, overseeing hiring, checking out all contractors, and running the board's PR--all that is supposed to happen in a mere four months (commencing immediately). So this new consulting firm is going to get the whole district up and running in time for next fall. For just under $20K. Maybe Adams is not a one man consulting firm, but if not, exactly whom will he hire with that kind of money?

And he's going to be busy, because the district-wide improvement study, both research and writing, is supposed to take just sixty days. The good news for Adams is that the contract says the costs of that study are TBD. 

Also notable in the study is that Adams will report directly to Ziegler.

So does anybody know why Sarasota is considering this?

So why, anyway?

Ziegler has not responded to press requests for comment on the Vermillion contract, so coverage has focused on comments she made at the meetings.

She said during last week’s workshop that Vermilion could help staff navigate the “challenges and issues” that happen when “components of certain types are finding their way” into curriculum and programs the district uses.

“It’s an impossible burden on our staff,” she said. “I wanted to bring it forward and present it to the board...I don’t have a specific scope of work.”

WTXL has been covering the story. They couldn't get comments from Jordan Adams or "anyone from Vermillion." Ziegler told them before scooting away.  The closest thing to a clear explanation came during a board meeting, when Ziegler brought up hiring a board consultant.

"To have someone to help us with certain things when it comes to keeping us away from the fire," she said at one point. Referring to the many political flaps of the board, she added, "It's been distraction after distraction, and I don't want to continue that."

Asked by WTXL reporter Katie LaGrone how exactly she heard of Vermillion, Ziegler didn't really say. She "works in education circles" and "certainly it was brought to my attention." 

After the meeting, LaGrone asked Ziegler if she understood that given Adams and Hillsdale's history, this move "might look a certain way."

"My focus again, whether it looks that way or not, is about getting the distractions out and making sure that our instructional materials for all our students is appropriate and in line not only to the standards but to the expectation of our families." But isn't asking a rep from a notoriously right-wing outfit a bad idea? "Why is it a bad idea to even consider how can we take pieces of that that would align to our mission as a public education institution that would not imply indoctrination of anyone's ideology but get back to the core classical components of academics. I think it's worth looking into, and it sounds like the board also agrees."

How exactly was Vermillion going to do this? "This is very beginning, early discussions," Ziegler told LaGrone before scooting away.

"Frankly, " Edwards told LaGrone, "I was waiting for something like this." In talking to reporter Chris Porter, Edwards expressed other concerns.

“The public is having the same confusion I am experiencing — but then again, I am not in their inner circle,” he said about the other board members....This has not ever been workshopped. There has been no discussion by board members … no exchange of ideas. There’s been no public comment. That, to me, is not transparent,” he said.

What's actually happening?

Either Ziegler and her crew think Adams can pull off a speedy miracle, or one of a couple of other things is true:

1) None of the parties involve know what the heck they're talking about.

2) Adams already knows the answers he's supposed to come up with and he will arrive with a suitcase full of Hillsdale classical education supplies that he will "recommend" the district adopt quickly (maybe more quickly than they will hire a superintendent, who ought to be overseeing these sorts of things).

3) Hiring a consultant to implement christianist right-wing programs gives Ziegler and her crew some insulation. In other words, you reduce the "distraction" of objections to your political agenda by claiming, "Well, I didn't say that...." and waving in the general direction of your consultant.

There are mysteries to be solved. If Adams left Hillsdale in hopes of striking it rich in the consulting biz, this isn't getting it. Maybe he thinks he's on a mission from God, or maybe he's just working some kind of deep cover shtick for Hillsdale. 

Maybe this is just proof of concept in a friendly district and what we're seeing is a new model of how Hillsdale can colonize local school districts, and all those board candidates that Ziegler has traioned are taking notes. That just means Sarasota needs to buckle up and the rest of us need to pay attention. Stay tuned.