Think of the Children

"We're doing this for the children" has been one of the most often-used excuses for bad policy ideas. "The education system puts adult concerns ahead of children's concerns," has become a golden oldie among folks who want to put their own adult goals ahead of children's concerns.

You would imagine, for instance, that putting children's concerns first would mean schools operating with accountability and oversight so that children's right to a quality education are protected. If you believe in choice, then you might want to defend a child's ability to choose by guaranteeing that vouchers provide a full cost of tuition, that schools are forbidden to discriminate against students, and that enough quality control is in place to insure that students can choose safely. Those guards for student concerns are not only not in place, but are actively rejected. 

The real tell is that old favorite, "Children do not belong to the government." That's true as far as it goes, but the problem appears when someone, for instance the Washington Senate Republicans, say the second part of the statement out loud--

Your children do not belong to the government, they belong to you.

Well, no. Your children do not belong to anyone. They are not chattel or domesticated beasts of burden or toasters. They are live human beings, and as such, nobody's property. 

But some "conservative" folks don't see it. These are the folks who are already working from a world view that says some people are more valuable, more deserving of power and wealth than others, and way too often for them, children are another brand of others, useful only as potential future Correct Believers or meat widgets. 

We have to ban books because being exposed to any mention of sex, however slight, might damage their tender psyches. We can't teach about slavery because it might make the white kids feel bad (though couldn't the white kids choose to identify with the white folks who stood up against slavery). Children are the reason that certain adults should be allowed to narrowly confine what can and cannot be taught. That way they can grow up to be the kind of adults that current adults desire them to be.

Oh, and when it comes to life-saving vaccinations, it's more important to honor the vaccine-averse desires of adults than protect the health of the children.

They can never just say, "You should stop doing that because I don't like it." No, they're only speaking up in order to save the children.

Children are also useful as bargaining chips and leverage.

Every teacher who belongs to a union that had to throw its weight around has heard the argument. You can't strike, teachers, or even just work to contract, because that would hurt the students. Would it hurt the students to go to a school that has reduced resources, a disrespected staff, and a hiring policy of "If you can't find a decent teaching job anywhere else, settle for us here at Lowest Bidder School District"? It surely would. But maybe we can guilt the staff into shutting up about it.

Or take the new Heritage Foundation report, Saving America by Saving the Family, which includes the whole "desires of adults over the needs of children" shtick, and then goes on to spend 164 pages explaining how government should not meet the needs of children unless the desires of adult conservatives are met by the children's parents. 

Bruce Lesley (First Focus on Children) has an outstanding post breaking down this report, but we'll touch on some highlights here. For instance, the part where they note that the income loss that hits poor parents on the birth of a child-- but you can't give poor parents more money to cover that period because it would be "akin to a guaranteed basic income that would discourage work."

The Heritage report plainly gets that "early investments in children have high returns," yet they spend time explaining why certain people who make The Wrong Choices shouldn't benefit from those investments. Does that put adult concerns ahead of children's needs? Of course it does, but hey, the kids should have thought of that before they chose parents who didn't match the Heritage ideas of proper parenting. (Lesley suggests that Heritage is trying to do the very sort of social engineering that they often rail against, but I'd bet they simply see themselves as trying to return society to its proper factory settings.)

This is not a new argument. We are the lousiest nation in the world for parental leave, and the reason why isn't particularly complicated-- the needs of employers rank higher than the needs of babies. 

But we're about to see children used as a prop for yet another campaign. Meet Greater Than, a new campaign that declares "Real progress means putting children's needs ahead of adult desires." Doesn't that sound excellent? Can you guess what the real goal of this new campaign is? Here's a paragraph's worth of a hint from their website:

When marriage was redefined in 2015, parenthood was too. Once husbands and wives became optional, mothers and fathers became replaceable. But for a child, their mother and father are never optional, they are essential. Children need both a mother and a father to provide stability, guidance, and the unique love only a man and woman can give. No adult desire or ideology can change that.

 Yup. The folks who want to roll back Obergefell, the Supreme Court decision that recognized same-gender marriage, are proud to declare "We are the Defenders of Children." Their core allies include Focus on the Family, American Family Association, Colson Center, Family Research Council and Them Before Us. They have other allies on the national and state level. I noticed them because of an announcement that they were being joined by Pennsylvania Family Institute, the group that has worked hard to get anti-LGBTQ policies into schools. Said Randall Wenger, the PFI attorney who has personally worked to make the lives of LGBTQ children more difficult and to thwart the best intentions of their supportive parents:

I'm part of Greater Than because, since Obergefell, our laws have increasingly treated family as an abstract idea rather than a lived reality for children. We've experimented with new definitions while drifting away from the one model that has consistently supported human flourishing-- a child raised by his or her mother and father. Greater Than brings that essential truth back into focus.

The list just keeps getting longer. We have to defund, dismantle, and replace public education in order to save the children. We have to carefully control what children see and hear in order to save them. We have to create a multi-tiered education system to save the children. We have to force folks to maintain traditional families to save the children. We have to stamp out gay marriage to save the children.  

And yet. As amazing as that list is, I am even more amazed by the things that don't make it onto the Save The Children list. 

We don't have to require parental leave that insures parents are right there for the earliest months (or even years) of the child's life. We don't have to require vaccinations whether parents want them or not. We don't have to work to provide the economic supports and systems that help a young couple raise a child. We don't have to make child care affordable for parents. And we certainly don't have to direct Defense Department-sized funding and resources to make public schools fully capable delivery systems for excellent education and other supports. 

It's absolutely true-- we need to be very careful about putting what adults want ahead of what children need. But if you want to warn me about this issue, maybe show me some sign that you are part of the solution and not part of the problem. 

Reading Boring Books

EdWeek just ran a long complaint about assigning boring books in English class, carrying some extra heft because it came from a school district superintendent. Erich May is currently superintendent of the Brookville, PA, school district, which is just down the road from me, which I guess means some day I may get the chance to meet him and tell him personally how far off the mark I think he is. 

He trots out the opening lines of The Scarlet Letter, the Nathanial Hawthorne warhorse and calls it ugly. And Wuthering Heights, too. And any author from then or before. Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Spencer, Browning, Blake, "and countless other playwrights, poets, and novelists from the 1500s through the 1800s." May says he doesn't "mean to reject the canon," but instead suggests we should "leave the canon to the English majors." 

May wants us to understand that Kids These Days have dumped books in favor of screens. May argues that "we are losing the Battle for the Book because teens and young adults are not reading books." 

For high school English teachers, the job used to be teaching students to read things that are rigorous and complex. But it is no longer a given that they will read at all. Now more than ever, the priority for high school English teachers should be instilling in students a love of reading—or even just a willingness to read.

May says we should be getting comprehension, literary analysis, interpretation and evaluation to students, but those goals are "more important than reading any particular piece of literature." 

There is, he asserts, "no excuse for assigning inaccessible or boring novels and plays" when there's other stuff out there that teens "would be more likely to enjoy." Oy.

I'm not unsympathetic to his point. Particularly with students who read little on their own, it's important to give them something with a good hook. But if we leave the canon to the English majors, where will the English majors come from?

More importantly, May, who taught English for about six years back in the Oughts before embarking on a series of administrative jobs, seems to be missing understanding of the English teacher's job. 

Annika Hernandez offers a good set of responses.

* English teachers mostly already emphasize modern works (if they teach complete works at all).

* An English teachers job is not just to assign works that students will enjoy most. Imagine, I'll add, that we told history teachers to teach only the parts of history that students like, or phys ed to teach only the games students already play, or band and choir directors to teach their ensembles only music they already know. Imagine if we told math teachers to teach only the interesting stuff.

* English class is not simply for teaching skills and the content with which the skills are taught doesn't matter. This skills-centered approach has been a huge bust for the past twenty-some years.

* The classic parts of the canon are not just for (probably snooty) elites.

May writes as if "assign" means toss the book at the students and wish them good luck. That's not the gig.

The job is to show students why a work is interesting, and to help them find their way into it. Sometimes that means helping them navigate difficult language. Sometimes that means helping them look for compelling ideas or themes. It always means pointing out the features that make the work compelling and interesting.

The Last Bookstore-- a must-visit in LA

This has always been a challenge for teachers, and one of the reasons that a narrow required reading list creates problems. I was required to teach Julius Caesar for a decade or so, and it took me years to find a way to sell it (How far would you go if you thought someone near you was about to be the next Hitler? How often has your life gotten derailed because you misread signals?). But there were also works that I was always excited to teach. We talk about teachers with "infectious" enthusiasm for a topic, but a closer examination will show that the teacher "infected" students by serving as a native guide to the territory. That's the gig. 

Please note-- the gig is not to "make" a work interesting. If you don't know what is interesting or compelling about it, you can't "make" it interesting, you shouldn't be teaching it. And the list of works that teachers find interesting and compelling will vary from teacher to teacher. 

My old teaching colleague finished a year with seniors by studying Paradise Lost. She loved that work so much that seniors would spend the last part of the school year--after their grades were set, after their diplomas were ensured, after their college admissions were guaranteed, even after they were released from a requirement to come to school at all-- would sit in her room and work feverishly on their final Milton project. I could never have done that unit in a million years-- I neither know nor love the work well enough.

On the other hand, one of my teacher boasts is that I got a group of non-college bound seniors completely absorbed with MacBeth, to the point that they confidently judged the AP seniors' MacBeth project. 

You prepare the ground. You introduce the ideas. You walk them through the hard parts and difficult language. You show them what is exciting and engaging about a work. On top of that, you also show them that there are different types of works out there, different cultures and styles and views of How The World Works, and that just because they don't like Dickenson, it doesn't necessarily follow that they will hate Browning. You can even teach them that just because they hate something, that doesn't mean it's awful, and that as sentient carbon-based life forms, they get to choose what they read. I always found it was supremely liberating for all of us in a classroom for me to say to a student, "I know you don't like this, and that is cool. Give me some time to explain why some people do, and then we'll move on to the next thing." Permission to dislike a work of literature without being told you have somehow failed is a magical thing. 

Every teacher has their own personal canon, and they should be making it wider and deeper every year, and certainly "does this have anything to say to my students" is an important question to be asking. And occasionally, when you are handed a work to teach that you find initially boring and uninteresting, you need to dig deep, do some homework, and find the hook. That's important, too, because sometimes "boring and uninteresting" as code words for "hard and confusing" and working through those barriers will help you as a teacher understand the barriers that your students are facing.

You're teaching not only reading and literature and culture and different ways of being human; you are also teaching how to be interested in something. That's work worth doing. 

What Ever Happened To Snow Days

As I type this, the Board of Directors here at the Institute is having their second Flexible Instruction Day of the week.

As in many places, we kicked off the week with a snow-piling blizzard and moved immediately from there to intense cold. And as in many places, it provides a chance to reflect on the choices that districts make.

To begin with, we're seeing a result of the choice to start school early. In sprawling rural districts, that means students standing at the bus stop at 6:30 or even earlier. So sometimes that means a two hour delay just to give the sun time to come up and the temperature to get into tolerable levels.

We're also seeing the difference between district approaches to what a canceled day means.

No districts in my county use distance learning for snow days. For one thing, everyone hated it during the covid shutdowns. For another, these rural districts include too many students who do not have access to a reliable internet connection. "Remote instruction" during the shutdown meant teachers (like the Chief Marital Officer here at the Institute) spent part of their days hand delivering printed packets to homes. 

My district's Flexible Instruction Days are simple enough. Back during the first week of school, students were given a big folder with five Flexible Instruction packets inside. When a FID is called, I pull out the next packet and the boys do the work. Here at the Institute, I check their work and they fix any mistakes; I cannot guarantee that level of oversight is present in all homes. The packets take maybe a half hour and involve a smattering of each subject area. Having been created by teachers back at the beginning of the year before meeting the students and intended to be used sometime during the winter, if ever, the packets are not exactly loaded with rigor. But once the packet is completed, the student has the rest of the day for traditional snow day activities (right now the Board of Directors is battling with Pokemon cards).

For the district, the beauty of this system is that the day will not have to be made up. It provides roughly 0.02 % of a real school day, and yet counts for the whole thing, which, at a minimum, seems intellectually dishonest.

Meanwhile, some other districts do not allow for Flexible Instruction Days-- it's get the students to school or nothing. Their opposition to the idea is hard to explain, but I suspect it's leftover from Covid, when some local boards totally bought the idea that the shut down was an evil teacher union plot, and so they'd be damned if they would ever be tricked into any form of remote learning ever again. So when they cancel school, students get a true snow day, and lose a day of vacation later in the year.

Does it make a difference? My strictly anecdotal survey suggests that Flexible Instruction Days make it easier for the district to just go ahead and call things off. This week, everyone called off on Monday. But while my district has called two Flexible Instruction Days since, the most other non-FID districts have done is call one or two two hour delays. 

Is it better to have a traditional snow day? Hard to say. Historically we are more likely to call school off over temperature than over snowfall, which means students are mostly trapped inside rather than soaring over Rockwellesque snowdrifts with their sled-shaped plastic sheets. One might argue that the act of going through the motions of a pretend work day while nature has dropped a pile of chaos on the world is good prep for the work world, but I've never been a fan of the Your Life Is Going To Suck Later So It Might As Well Suck Now family of school policies. 

FID is either the best of both worlds (You get some education-flavored stuff with plenty of time left over to play) or possible the worst (Neither a true day off or a functional day of education). Maybe we should stop trying to have pretend school and just suck it up, admit that nature has beaten us, and get an actual day of school in later. 

TX: State Mandated Canon

Back in 2023, a bill passed by the Texas legislature to spice up their education code required the State Board of Education to specify a list of required vocabulary and at least one literary work to be taught in each grade level. But the Texas Education Agency (the Texas version of a state department of education) has decided to go the extra mile. 

Rather than just one required work per level, TEA has decided that they will go ahead and lay down the canon for Texas K-12 students.

It's a hell of a bold move. English teachers regularly wrestle with the questions of 1) what is actually in the canon, 2) what ought to be in the canon, and 3) what part of the canon would best be used in my classroom?

TEA is just going to skip all of those. The proposal is here. On the high school level, there are five major works per grade, plus an assortment of supporting texts grouped by units. These works (around 20 per grade) are all required. 

Some of the supporting works are a pretty heavy lift all on their own ("Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," Federalist Paper #78, "The Open Boat"). The Bible is included at least in every grade level. The rightward tilt is not hard to spot (do sophomores really need to read Margaret Thatcher's eulogy for Ronald Reagan?) and even when Black authors are included, it's in forms that are comfy for conservatives. The one major Black work is Booker T. Washington's Up From Slavery and Martin Luther King, Jr, is, of course, represented by "I Have a Dream" and not "Letter from Birmingham Jail." (And King appears only in the 8th grade list). Frederick Douglass's comments on the Fourth of July is about as feisty as Black folks are allowed to get on this list.

The major works are--well, see if you can spot a pattern here--

English I

Animal Farm - George Orwell

Antigone - Sophocles

Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

The Odyssey - Homer/Fagles

Night - Elie Weisel

English II

Beowulf - translation by Burton Raffel

Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury

Frankenstein - Mary Shelley

A Separate Peace - John Knowles

Julius Caesar - Shakespeare

English III

The Alchemist - Paulo Coelho

Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

The Crucible - Arthur Miller

The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne

English IV

Hamlet - Shakespeare

Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

The Divine Comedy - Dante Alighieri

Up From Slavery - Booker T. Washington

Walden - Henry David Thoreau

It's really white and really male, with only Coelho, a Brazilian, as any brown voice at all. Some of the supporting works are odd choices-- do we really need to get through Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter and the Minister's Black Veil? Why are all the supports for The Crucible focused on democratic institutions? Thomas Sowell's "Flattering Unction," a screed about elites, is supposed to support Fahrenheit 451. Teachers with advanced classes may find the time to squeeze in more works to balance the list, but most teachers will be hard pressed to "cover" all of this in the course of 180 days. And yet, at the same time, the list misses so much else.

Arguing what does or doesn't belong on the list is both beside the point and also directly on it, because here's two things we know about the canon.

One is that the discussion and debate about what should or should not be in the canon is never, ever over or settled. A variety of viewpoints fight for balance even as society's beliefs and priorities shift under the canon's feet. Tension between points of view, between generations, between teaching and reading goals-- all those tensions are ever-present and shifting. Trying to set a canon in cement, forcibly resolving all tensions and ending all discussion, as TEA tries to do here, is a fool's errand.

The other is that the canon is large. One of the few things that AP ever got right was its essays that told students "Here is a list of works. Pick one or a work of equivalent weight, and write a response to the following prompt." As a teacher, you pick and choose the works that best fit your students, your own strengths, and which create a balanced and varied year's worth of work. 

Should teachers just pick whatever-the-hell list of works they feel like? Absolutely not. But neither should they be locked into a list set by state officials (particularly when those officials seem at least if not more concerned about political concerns rather than literary or pedagogical ones). Set up some guardrails, create a broad a varied list, and give schools and local English departments the ability to choose from a set list. Let professional educators use some of the judgment that you hire them to use.

In other words, this is a bad idea, and I would still think it was a bad idea even if I could personally pick the works for the list.

It matters that this is happening in Texas, one of the giant textbook customers whose choices influence publishers. Because, of course, the foundation of the teaching "canon" in most schools is the basal text, and if TEA's required reading list was my basal text, I'd be thinking, "Well, this is a pretty lousy selection." 

But it hasn't happened in Texas yet. The lists are just proposed at this point, and if I were a Texan, I'd be contacting the state board and telling them that this mandatory incomplete and tilted reading list is a bad idea, that even the idea of having such a list is a bad idea. 

The 9-12 lists are below. You can see the lists for all other grade levels here.

Stride Sued For Securities Fraud

Stride, Inc. (formerly K12), the 800 pound gorilla of the cyber charter biz, is the subject of a new class action suit alleging securities fraud. 

The lawsuit is tied to some legal problems that I've previously covered, so let me recap. 

New Mexico Issues

Stride was hired by the Gallup-McKinley County Schools, a New Mexico district that covers almost 5,000 square miles, including some reservations. There are 12,518 students enrolled. 48% of the children in the district live below the poverty line. Stride was supposed to run an online program for the district, but when the district checked to see how things were going, things didn't look so good.

* Graduation rates in GMCS's Stride-managed online program plunged from 55.79% in 2022 to just 27.67% in 2024.
* Student turnover reached an alarming 30%.
* New Mexico state math proficiency scores for Stride students dropped dramatically, falling to just 5.6%.
* Ghost enrollments and a lack of individualized instruction further compromised student learning.

At the special May 16 board meeting to terminate the contract, the board was feeling pretty cranky.

The district said that the company is failing to meet requirements outlined in their contract. “This is something we’ve literally been working on since the beginning of the year with stride, and we just finally had a belly full of it and we’re ready to make a change,” said Chris Mortensen, President of Gallup-McKinley Schools Board of Education

The board voted unanimously not just to end the contract, but to seek damages. Stride filed a motion for a restraining order to keep the board from firing them. The court said no.

Mortenson has had plenty to say about the situation. From the district's press release:

GMCS School Board President Chris Mortensen stated, "Our students deserve educational providers that prioritize their academic success, not corporate profit margins. Putting profits above kids was damaging to our students, and we refuse to be complicit in that failure any longer."

Stride CEO James Rhyu has admitted to failing to meet New Mexico's legal requirements for teacher-student ratios, an issue that GMCS suspects was not isolated. "We have reason to believe that Stride has raised student-teacher ratios not just in New Mexico but nationwide," said Mortensen. "If true, this could have inflated Stride's annual profit margins by hundreds of millions of dollars. That would mean corporate revenues and stock prices benefited at the expense of students and in some cases, in defiance of the law."

"Gallup-McKinley County Schools students were used to prop up Stride's bottom line," said Mortensen. "This district, like many others, trusted Stride to deliver education. Instead, we got negligence cloaked in corporate branding."

Stride appears to have dealt with all this by mounting a PR campaign to smear the district's superintendent.  

But you'll notice the charges that Mortensen leveled against the company go beyond a simple "They cheated us" and went all the way to "They are cheating their shareholders." And apparently somebody heard that message.

The Newest Lawsuit

On November 11, Bleichmar Fonti & Auld LLP filed a class action lawsuit against Stride, Inc. (NYSE: LRN) and senior executives Donna Blackman (CFO) and James Rhyu (CEO) for securities fraud after significant stock drops resulting from the potential violations of the federal securities laws. Investors have until January 12, 2026 to ask the court to be added onto the case. The suit was filed in the Virginia Eastern District Court.

The suit appears to charge that the complaint filed by the district caused the stock value to drop from a closing price of $158.36 per share on September 12, 2025, to $139.76 per share on September 15, 2025. Then in October, Stride had to fess up that “poor customer experience” resulted in “higher withdrawal rates,” “lower conversion rates,” and drove students away. Stride estimated they had 10,000-15,000 fewer enrollments and predicted a "muted" outlook. That led to a drop of $83.48 per share-- more than half the value.

So, in short, the suit argues that Stride got its great investment results by cheating at its business, and once it got caught cheating, those great investment results went down the toilet. The business fraud facilitated the securities fraud. Folks invested because of claims the company could do a thing when it was just faking doing the thing. Fraud.

Is This a New Problem for Stride?

Are you kidding? Since Stride was founded as K12, they haven't gone a year without some sort of legal problems.

Stride used to be K-12, a for-profit company aimed at providing on-line and blended learning. It was founded in 2000 by Ron Packard, former banker and Mckinsey consultant, and quickly became the leading national company for cyber schooling.

One of its first big investors was Michal Milken. That investment came a decade after he pled guilty to six felonies in the “biggest fraud case in the securities industry” ending his reign as the “junk bond king.” Milken was sentenced to ten years, served two, and was barred from ever securities investment. In 1996, he had established Knowledge Universe, an organization he created with his brother Lowell and Larry Ellison, who both kicked in money for K12.

Also investing in K12, very quietly, was the financial giant Blackrock, founded and run by Larry Fink. Larry graduated from the same high school as Milken. Larry's brother Steve is a member of the Stride board, and at one point ran the division of Knowledge Universe. Larry Fink is noted for his privacy about family, and a search for the two brothers’ names turns up only one article— a Forbes piece from 2000 which notes that Steve Fink, in 1984, moved next door to Micheal Milken and went on to become “one of Milken’s most trusted confidants,” a “guy he’s relied on to fix business trouble.”

In 2011, the New York Times detailed how K12's schools were failing miserably, but still making investors and officers a ton of money. Former teachers wrote tell-alls about their experiences. In 2012. Florida caught them using fake teachers. The NCAA put K12 schools on the list of cyber schools that were disqualified from sports eligibility. In 2014, Packard turned out to be one of the highest paid public workers in the country, "despite the fact that only 28% of K12 schools met state standards in 2011-2012."

In 2013 K12 settled a class action lawsuit in Virginia for $6.75 million after stockholders accused the company of misleading them about “the company’s business practices and academic performance.” In 2014, Middlebury College faculty voted to end a partnership with K12 saying the company’s business practices “are at odds with the integrity, reputation and educational mission of the college.”

Packard was himself sued for misleading investors with overly positive public statements, and then selling 43% of his own K12 stock ahead of a bad news-fueled stock dip. Shortly thereafter, in 2014, he stepped down from leading K12 to start a new enterprise.

In 2016 K12 got in yet another round of trouble in California for lying about student enrollment, resulting in a $165 million settlement with then Attorney General Kamala Harris. K12 was repeatedly dropped in some states and cities for poor performance.

In 2020, they landed a big contract in Miami-Dade county (after a big lucrative contribution to an organization run by the superintendent); subsequently Wired magazine wrote a story about their "epic series of tech errors." K12 successfully defended itself from a lawsuit in Virginia based on charges they had greatly overstated their technological capabilities by arguing that such claims were simply advertising “puffery.”

In November of 2021, K12 announced that it would rebrand itself as Stride.

The New York Times had quoted Packard as calling lobbying a “core competency” of the company, and the company has spread plenty of money around doing just that. And despite all its troubles, Stride was still beloved on Wall Street for its ability to make money.

In 2023, Stride found itself wrapped up in a lawsuit with one of its own division over broken promises and attempts to lie their way out of commitment.

In 2024, analysts at Fuzzy Panda were warning investors away from Stride, saying that, among other things, Stride was lying to investors about how many schools were operating and ghost students being used to inflate enrollment numbers-- in other words, these guys absolutely called it. Later that year, Senator and noted MAGA doofus Markwayne Mullin was in trouble for shenanigans with his Stride stock.

CEO James Rhyu used to be CFO for Stride, and before that had a prolific career as a bean counter for companies like Match.com. I've read a variety of Rhyu depositions, and let's just say he doesn't come across as a straight shooter. Here's an example that captures his style pretty well:

Q: Mr. Rhyu, are you a man of your word?
Rhyu: I’m not sure I understand that question.
Q: Do you do what you say you are going to do, sir?
Rhyu: Under what circumstances?
Q: Do you do what you say you are going to do, Mr. Rhyu?
Rhyu: That’s such a broad question. It’s hard for me to answer.

Is it? Is that a hard question to answer? Because I feel as if even a dishonest-but-correct answer isn't hard to concoct. But that's Rhyu (for a more detailed story of his slipperiness in action, read this).

For Stride, Education Really Isn't the Point

Stride has never really been in the education business. Stride is in the investment business. Just look at the people who founded and have run it-- not an educator in the bunch, but plenty of high-powered and/or shady investment guys. I've talked to more than a few Stride teachers (none of whom want to go on the record) and the picture that emerges is over-worked widgets whose main job is to keep the numbers looking good, because student "success" is an important part of marketing, whether that success is real or not.

So if investors manage to claw back some of their money, I guess that's fine. Stride has proven remarkably resilient when called out on its misbehavior. I suppose a laser-like focus on its main business helps, but we should never imagine that that business is education. 

Sandy Hook Etc Etc

You can be forgiven for not having noticed that today is the anniversary of the Sandy Hook shootings, the murder of 26 human beings, 20 of them children. There's not the usual wave of retrospective stories, perhaps because we're busy catching up on the latest US campus shooting from the weekend. 

It makes me angry, every day. Sandy Hook stands out among all our many various mass murders in this country, all our long parade of school shootings, because Sandy Hook was the moment when it finally became clear that we are not going to do anything about this, ever. "If this is not enough to finally do something," we thought, "then nothing ever will be."

And it wasn't.

"No way to prevent this," says only Nation Where This Regularly Happens is the most bitter, repeated headline The Onion has ever published. We're just "helpless."

Today was the 13th anniversary of the shooting that established that we aren't going to do a damned thing about it, other than blaming the targets for not being hard enough. Need more security. Arm the (marxist untrustworthy) teachers. And somehow Alex Jones and Infowars have not been sued severely enough for them to STFU.

One thing that has happened over the past several years is a huge wave of folks expressing their deep concern about the children. 

A whole industry of political activism has been cultivated around the notion that children-- our poor, fragile children-- must be protected. They must be protected from books that show that LGBTQ persons exist. They must be protected from any sort of reference to sexual action at all. They must be protected from any form of guilt-inducing critical race theory. They must be protected from unpatriotic references to America's past sins. And central to all this, they must be protected from anyone who might challenge their parents' complete control over their education and lives. 

Well, unless that person is challenging the parents' rights by shooting a gun at the child.

The Second Amendment issue is the issue that combines so poorly with other issues. We may be pro-life and insist that it be illegal to end a fetus-- but if the fetus becomes an outside-the-womb human that gets shot at with a gun, well, nothing we can do about that. Students should be free to choose whatever school they like--but at any of those schools, people still have the right to shoot at them with a gun. We must protect children from all sorts of evil influences--but if someone wants to shoot a gun at them, well, you know, nothing we can do about that.

The other ugly development has been the ever-growing school security industry, peddling an ever-growing array of products that serve no educational purpose but are supposed to make schools safe, harden the target. Lots of surveillance. Lots of stupid mistakes, like the Florida AI reading a clarinet as a weapon. Lots of security layers that now make entering a school building much like entering a prison. It is what NPR correctly called the "school shooting industry," and it is worth billions.

That's not counting the boost that gunmakers get after every school shooting. The panic alarm goes off and the weapons industry sells a ton more product as the usual folks holler, "They'll use this as an excuse to take your guns" even though in the 26 years since Columbine, the government hasn't done either jack or shit about taking anybody's guns. I expect that part of that sales bump is also from folks saying, "Now that I'm reminded that the government isn't going to do anything about keeping guns out of the hands of homicidal idiots, I guess I'd better arm myself." 

Miles of letters have been strung together to unravel the mystery of why this country so loves its guns and why none of the factors used as distraction (mental health, video games, bad tv shows) could possibly explain the prevalence of gun deaths in this country because every other country in the world has the same thing without having our level of gun violence. 

We are great at Not facing Problems in this country, and there is no problem we are better at Not facing than gun deaths. Hell, we can't even agree it's an actual problem. The "right" to personally possess the capability to kill other human beings is revered, and more beloved than the lives of actual human children. 

And if some of our fellow citizens and leaders are unwilling to make a serious effort to reduce gun violence and these folks insist that the occasional dead child is just the cost of liberty (particularly the liberty to conduct profitable business), well, how can we expect them to take seriously other aspects of young humans' lives, like quality education and health care. 

It is a hard thing to know, every day, that we could do better, and we aren't going to. We have already taken a long hard look at this issue, and we have decided that we are okay with another Sandy Hook or Uvalde. A little security theater, a little profiteering on tech, a few thoughts and prayers just to indicate that we aren't actually happy that some young humans were shot dead (talk about virtue signaling), and that pivot quickly to defending guns. Send letters, make phone calls, get the usual platitudes back from elected representatives, who will never, ever pay an election price for being on the wrong side of rational gun regulation.

The whole dance is so familiar and well-rehearsed that we barely have to pay attention any more. It's exhausted and exhausting, and yet I am still angry. 

Glenn Beck's Patriotic AI Zombie

Well, something like this was inevitable.

The AI zombie market has been growing steadily. Schoolai caused a stir by unleashing an AI avatar of Anne Frank for classrooms as just one of their offerings of zombie historical figures for schools. In fact, there are now more outfits offering AI avatars for student use than I can even delve into here. Some are especially terrible; Wisdom of the Ages lets you chat (text only) with some big names of history, and within the first sentence, the Einstein avatar was talking about "he" rather than "I." Their "Adolph Hitler" also lapsed quickly into third person. Humy offers a Hello History app that promises all sorts of "engaging historical simulations" and an "in-depth and personal interaction with the historical figure of your choice." And don't forget the company that offers you the chance to take a writing class taught by a dead author. 

Then there's this horrifying ad from 2wai that promises to keep zombie Grandma around so that generations of your family can enjoy her. 

Good lord. And that's just one of many examples of the AI of Dead Relatives. I'm not sure what is worse-- the idea of dragging Grandma out of the grave or the idea that a few lines of code and some scanned letters and (2wai promises) a three minute conversation are all that's needed to capture a person's essence. No, actually, the worst part is that this encourages to understand that other people are only "real" to the extent that we perceive them and they reflect our expectations of them. These are simulations that amount to us speaking to our own reflections, empty images with no inner lives of their own. Simulacrums that exist only to provide us with an experience; voices that are silent except to speak to us. What the heck does that say about how we related to Grandma while she was alive?

Into this field of the damned comes Glenn Beck. 

Beck claims to have the "largest private collection of American founding documents in the world, surpassed only by the Library of Congress and the National Archives in Washington, D.C." And now Beck has plans for those documents, and they don't involve handing them over to a museum. Instead, on January 5, 2026, he will launch the Glenn and Tania Beck Foundation for American History, a privately funded trust, to make his collection of over a million documents accessible to everyone. 

It's the "next phase" of his career (post The Blaze), his "next disruption" and "creative venture." His foundation has created "the first independent, proprietary, AI-driven American historical library." It will come complete with its own AI zombie librarian named George, "built from the writings of George Washington himself. The writings of the Founders. The thousands of sermons that they heard from their church pulpits. The books that they -- they read. And the principles they lived by."

George is going to teach you the Real Truth, Beck promises. In fact, he guarantees that his AI will generate everything without hallucination or bias, which you might think is absolutely impossible for an AI (because it is), but Beck assures us that George is "contained within a secure, isolated server, where every document is memorized verbatim." Is there any other way that documents are stored on a hard drive?

This is not ChatGPT. This is not Wikipedia. This is verified, factual, memorized, first source truth.

Beck says that George will teach the Constitution, the Federalist papers, the civics. Beck says this project "will change EVERYTHING about education." George will counteract all those lies your teacher taught you. It's a proprietary AI database that will permanently preserve "the physical evidence of America's soul." 

There are at least two possibilities. One is that George will be a Washington-lite AI zombie that will, in fact, hallucinate and spew bias just like any other AI because Beck doesn't know what he's talking about. The other is that George has taken an old version of Jeeves and slapped a tri-corner hat on him, and that this is just a digital library with a search function because Beck doesn't understand AI, but he knows that it's a hot marketing term right now.

At least three outfits claim to have worked on an AI Zombie George Washington (here, here, and here) and they are all pretty much baloney. It makes sense that AI hucksters are going to go after the low-hanging fruit of public domain persons for zombiefication, and it makes sense that Beck, a seasoned patriotic grifter, would follow that path.

But boy is this shit a bummer, because Beck is going to wave his Giant Library around and convince a bunch of suckers that he can tell them the Real Truth about our nation's founders with even more unearned authority than he already deploys. But if AI zombies are good for anything, it's grift, and we had better steel ourselves for more of it. And please, God, keep it out of our children's classrooms.

Reformster Nostalgia And New Old Mistakes

There's been a recent uptick in reformster nostalgia, a wistfulness among Ye Reformy Olde Garde for a rosy past when there was a bipartisan consensus surrounding swell reform ideas like the free market and testing and the free market and No Child Left Behind and school choice and testing (e.g. Arne Duncan op-ed).

Mike Petrilli (Fordham Institute) has been substacking and gathering an assortment of all the old players to comment of education issues, running the gamut from A to B on various education policy debate topics, and in connection with that had a conversation over at Ed Week with Rick Hess (American Enterprise Institute) under the headline "Can School Reform Be Bipartisan Again?" Which is a question that certainly makes some assumptions, but let's take a look at what's going on.

Petrilli's stated motivation is fine. For one, he notices that substack is emerging as a way for people to scratch their writing and reading itch without having to slog through a variety of social media (some of which have become extra sloggy), and he joins a large club there (I know because I attend all the meetings myself). He also misses "the early days of Twitter and blogging, when we had robust debates about policy, tactics, and direction." Also understandable, and he explains what happened:

Unfortunately, as social media became a cesspool and the reform movement fractured along ideological lines, those conversations became full of vitriol and then largely went silent.

Sure. The ed reform coalition has always been complicated. The spine back in the day was a combo of free marketeers. social engineers, and tech/data overlords. Then Trump was elected, and then the culture wars were launched. Point to the moment when Jay Greene left academic reformsterdom and went to the Heritage Foundation and started writing pieces like "Time for the School Choice Movement to Embrace the Culture War."

It's not just that the ed reform movement became infected with Culture Panic. It's that the Culture Panic crowd is, almost without exception, a bunch of very unserious people. 

Over the past decade-plus, I've come to understand that the reformster tent is large and contains many different ideas and motivations. The reformster crowd includes folks who have some core beliefs and values that I believe are fundamentally flawed and the way to conclusions that I deeply disagree with. But they are people that I can have a conversation with, who use and receive words like their purpose is to convey meaning and not as some sort of jousting tool. 

The culture panic crowd is not serious about any of it. They are veiled and obtuse, deliberately misunderstanding what is said to them and using words as tools to manipulate and lever their desired results. They aren't serious about choice or educational quality or anything other than acquiring a dominant cultural position and personal power. There have always been some culture panic types within the reform tent (e.g. Betsy DeVos), but for half a decade they have been large and loud within the movement. "Let's use choice to encourage embettering competition" was replaced with "Get those trans kids off the track team." One of those is wrong, and one of those is simply unserious. 

Petrilli points to what he calls "reform fatigue," the result of two or three decades of hard push by reformsters. He calls it society's tendency to want the pendulum to swing back to the middle. "Eventually, the public grew tired, and the opponents of reform became more motivated than we, its defenders." 

He and Hess also point to the argument that Bush-Obama school reform was "simplistic and self-righteous," and Petrilli acknowledges the self-righteous part. Without naming Duncan, he says

I cringe when some reformers return to that self-righteous language, especially versions of “We know what works, we just need the political will to do it.” It’s a lot more complicated than that.

Petrilli also gives the movement credit for getting "big things" right, like the idea that "The American education system, with its 14,000 districts, elected school boards, and entrenched teachers’ unions, is not going to improve without external pressure." And he points to "student achievement" growing during the 1990s and 2000s, by which he actually means test scores.

Well, I think he's off the mark here. Fatigue? Simplistic? No, the reason that reform flagged was because it didn't work. Focusing on high stakes testing didn't achieve much, and most of what it did achieve was to damage school systems in numerous ways, from the narrowing of the curriculum to teaching an entire generation that the point of education is a Big Standardized Test. That and it became evident that test scores were a boon to data-grabbing tech overlords and people who simply wanted a tool for dismantling public education. 

The premise of a necessary "external pressure" is also problematic. Petrilli suggests that the pressure can come from "top-down accountability or bottom-up market competition," but I don't believe either of those will do what he imagines they will. Top-down accountability guarantees policies that are mis-interpreted as they pass down through layers of bureaucracy and which result in a compliance culture in thrall to Campbell's Law. Market competition is a terrible fit for education (see Greene's Law-- the free market does not foster superior quality; the free market fosters superior marketing). One of the bizarre fundamentals of the reform movement is the notion that educators are not doing a better job because they have not been offered the optimum combination of bribes and/or threats. 

Petrilli and Hess do not confront one of the fundamental flaws of reform, which is the notion that the Big Standardized Test is a good and effective measure of educational achievement, as if the question of how to measure something as vast and variable as the effectiveness of education is all settled. When David Brooks says that Republican states are kicking the Democrats' butts in education, all he's doing is comparing scores on a single math and reading test. As a country we have repeated this so many times that it is accepted wisdom, but the Big Standardized Test is just an emperor behind the curtain with no clothes. Will raising this student's BS Test scores give the student a better, richer, fuller, happier life than they would have had with their old lower scores? There isn't a shred of evidence for that assertion, but in the meantime, we keep pretending that a single mediocre math and reading test tells us everything we need to know about education.

Petrilli makes a passing reference to how unions never liked "testing, and especially accountability" (he has maybe forgotten their full-throated, member-opposed embrace of Common Core), which is just a rage-making assertion, because teachers and their unions have never, ever been against accountability. What they have opposed is accountability based on junk that has no connection to the work they actually do. Let's not forget that test scores soaked in VAM sauce gave us accountability measures that fluctuated wildly or that had to be run through other mechanisms in order to "evaluate" teachers via students and subjects they didn't even teach. The "accountability" created under Bush-Obama involved an awful lot of making shit up. 

Did test scores go up for a while? Sure. I was there. They went up because we learned how to align the schools to the test. Not to the education-- to the test. 

Petrilli muses about the nature of the reformster coalition, like the old one with members on the "ideological left, including Education Trust and other civil rights organizations" and I must confess that I never saw much "left" in the reform coalition. Petrilli says maybe we'll get back to a world where the parties fight over the center and then business groups and civil rights groups will become involved, and maybe, though reform has had plenty of chance to demonstrate how it can lift up minorities and the poor and it, well, didn't do that. If "populism" stays big, Petrilli muses, maybe they'll have to get involved with parents' groups and alternative teacher organizations "like the one that Ryan Walters now runs."

Well, except that would take them right back to a tent full of unserious allies who are not on the left, but are further right than Ye Old Reformy Garde. 

I'm inclined to ignore the right-left thing when it comes to ed reform. I think it's more accurate to frame the sides as pro- and anti- public education, and pro-public education voices have always been in very short supply in the reform coalition. Instead, reform positions on public education range from "Let's rebuild everything" to "Let's dismantle it and sell the parts" to "Burn it all down." 

Petrilli's smartest bit comes at the end:

For the people in the trenches, I’d encourage them to remember that student learning depends on student effort. And whenever they face a big decision related to curriculum, instruction, discipline policy, grading, AI policy, or anything else bearing on the day-to-day realities of schools, they should ask themselves: Is this going to make it easier or harder for my teachers to motivate their students to work hard and thus to learn?

This is actually pretty good, and it points to my suggestion for the imaginary new revived ed reformster coalition.

Include some actual teachers. 

I get there is a challenge here. In the same way that policy wonks and bureaucrats don't have real on-the-ground knowledge of teaching, teachers don't have real on-the-ground knowledge of policy wonkage and promotion. But ed reform continually misses the viewpoint of the people who have to actually implement policy ideas. 

Ye Olde Reformy Garde has come a distance since the days when they were hugely dismissive of teachers. Many have caught on to the fact that maybe deliberately alienating the people who have to implement your policy ideas is a poor choice. Maybe, just maybe, they've deduced, most teachers are in the profession because they really want to do a good job, and not because they are lazy sinecure-seeking slackers. 

But reformsters still miss the actual aspect of how their ideas play out on the ground, and those insights could save everyone a great deal of time. 

And no-- all those education reform leaders who spent two years with Teach For America do not count. Two years is bupkis; a real teacher is barely clearing her career throat after two years. 

Would working teachers just defend the current system so fiercely that no reform could happen? Of course not-- walk into any school in the country and the teachers there could tell you ten things about their system that should be fixed. Would teachers support accountability? Of course-- if it were real and realistic. Teachers have a powerful desire to teach next door and downstream from other teachers who are doing a good job. 

Lord knows I have no nostalgia for the old days of reform, when every year brought new policies that, from my perspective, ranged from misguided all the way to ethically and educationally wrong. Neither am I nostalgic for the days before modern reform. Public education has always needed to improve, and it always will, because it is a human enterprise. 

It would be great to have a reformy movement based on asking the question "How can we make schools better," but way too much of the reformster movement has been about asking "How can we get free market activity injected into the public school system" with answers ranging from "inject market based school choice" all the way to "blow it all up." It has marked itself by and large as an anti-public school movement since the moment that the A Nation At Risk folks were told their report had to show that public schools were failing and we were subjected to decades of pounding into the "common knowledge" that American schools are failing. And if the reform movement wants to revive itself, I suggest they start by owning all of that. 

We could have school choice, if that was what we really wanted, and we could have it without the segregation effects, the inefficiency and wasting of taxpayer dollars, without the pockets of really terrible education, without the instability of bad amateur players, without, in short, all the effects we get by trying to create free market school choice (I've explained how elsewhere).  But the reformster movement has long seemed far more interested in the Free Market part than the Improving Education part. They have spent forty years explaining that public education is failing because that's the justification for going Free Market (and national standards and high stakes testing) and yet it turns out that none of those things have been particularly helpful at all.

I do sense a new trend in Ye Reformy Olde Garde, and it's there in Petrilli's last paragraph-- a focus on policies "bearing on the day-to-day realities of schools." It's a good choice which might yield some productive discussions, particularly if those discussions are expanded to include people beyond the A to B gamut, because I know where you can find about 3 or 4 million people who are familiar with those day-to-day realities. 

AI Is Coming To Evaluate You

The unending tide of AI used for stupid things just keeps on coming, and as widely predicted, the major accomplices are managers and employers, sucked in with promises  that AI will make their work faster and easier and less have-to-deal-with-humans-y. Take the ars technica piece "The résumé is dying, and AI is holding the smoking gun." This strikes me as a parallel to teacher letters of recommendation, which are about fifteen minutes away from being wiped out by a mountain of near-identical and completely useless AI-extruded letters.

So it's no surprise when Technological Horizons in Education Journal is happy to pass along a PR release from Edthena about a tech tool that will do some of your principal's job for him. 

Edthena, mind you, is a company straight from AI hell. They've been around peddling old tech types of teacher coaching (watch yourself on video!) They have all your favorite PD buzzwords-- High Impact Feedback!! Amplify Coaching Capacity!! Scale Effectively!! Some of their marketing language feels... careful. "Evidence from video feels objective" they say, without addressing whether or not it actually is. 

And they're an approved platform provider for edTPA.

So they are a perfect business for AI-ing teacher observations into a useless stupor. 

Meet Observation Copilot! Your principal can feed it a half page of loose notes about what he saw in your classroom, and Observation Pilot will pad it with a bunch of professional and framework-aligned bullshit until you have pages of mind-numbing argle bargle in mere seconds. (No kidding-- the "demo" is below). The program will even generate suggestions for the teacher to implement, including all the approved soulless jargon, though unfortunately it does not appear that the program generates a suggestion to the principal that he either do his damned job or get the hell out of the profession. 

And you know that this "tool" is only about five minutes away from the concept of letting a video-cam collect the "observation notes" and thereby reducing the human principal's contribution to zero.

Sadly, there are actual testimonials here, like Brent Perdue, principal at Jefferson Elementary in Spokane, Washington. Brent says, "Observation Copilot has been a true game changer for me. It took that piece of the wordsmithing, of having the language flow, where I could really go down and just put in the facts of what I'm seeing." 

Or Juliana Addi, a school principal in Hoboken, who says, "Observation Copilot has changed my teacher feedback process. The writing that goes into it, it just expedites that pace - much quicker." Because speed is the important thing.

I can't begin to express the rage I would feel if a principal used this plagiarism machine to flood my evaluation with mounds of bullshit. I can only hope that the teachers who are subjected to this admin-o-bot respond by having ChatGPT write their response, or perhaps sitting in the post-observation conference and asking, "So what exactly did you mean when you write [insert quote here]." They should definitely do this while holding their copy so that the principal cannot see where the quote comes from in the fake evaluation.

This is of a piece with one through line of the LLM-in-education attack, which is the assertion that the business of turning a rough idea into a coherent sentence is an unimportant technicality that can easily be outsourced to a bot without any loss to whatever task is being completed, because human expression is no big deal. Just imagine.

Abraham Lincoln: "ChatGPT, just write me something about how this war is important to democracy and stuff."

Ernest Hemmingway: "Give me something booklength about how the Great European War made a lot of people sad."

Martin Luther King, Jr.: "As long as I'm sitting in this Birmingham jail, can ChatGPT just whip up some stuff about ignoring bad laws?"

Me, several years ago: "ChatGPT, please whip up something about love and getting married and stuff."

Yeah, stringing together the actual words-- that scary "wordsmithing"-- isn't all that important. Just have the bot do it.

AI most easily moves into places where the humanity has already been hollowed out. If you are a principal looking at this and thinking it seems like a super great idea, at a bare minimum, I hope you sit and have a hard think about your concept of your job. But maybe you should just think about alternate careers, because this kind of disregard for the human teachers who work for you is truly, deeply discouraging.

This is a terrible idea. Teachers need support from actual humans, not pages of jargonated filler from a bot that knows nothing about actual teaching. Teachers need to work in buildings where lines of communication are open, not ones where communication comes from a bot and not a human. Teachers need suggestions and ideas that come from a knowledgeable educator, not bot scrapings from the bottom of the internet bird cage. Useful assessment is a conversation between teacher and administrator, but to have that, both parties have to show up personally. For a principal to use this kind of tool (because I'm sure there are more out there) is unethical and disrespectful.

This little toxic AI menace is current available free of charge, because of course it is. The charging money part comes later, after you're so used to this crutch that you'd really hate to give it up. But with a dollar price of $0.00, using this tool will carry a higher cost than a school can afford to pay. 

What Really Really Limits School Choice

EdChoice, formerly named for its patron saint, Milton Friedman, in a recent post tackles a real question-- What Really Limits School Choice? They do not, however, come up with real answers.

Martin Lueken and Nathan Sanders tip off from a Michigan study that looked at a study of Michigan's Tuition Incentive Program, a program that was supposed to make college scholarships available to students who grew up in low-income households-- and yet only 14% of eligible students used the scholarship. Lueken and Sanders (who do not link to the actual study) blame "bureaucratic friction, unclear rules, and poor communication," and from there jump to the idea that these same "implementation challenges" also get in the way of K-12 choice programs.

Bureaucracy, they argue, makes it hard for folks to take advantage of choice programs. It's the friction of all the confusing processes, informational missing links, and missed communications. They are not wrong, although they would do well to look at the number of choice schools that deliberately use that kind of bureaucratic friction to keep Certain People from getting into their school. Success Academy is a well-documented example of a school that uses bureaucratic friction to filter out families that they don't want to serve. They sort of get the idea:

Administrative hurdles can quietly limit who benefits from choice. Complicated application forms, documentation requirements, narrow enrollment windows, or poor outreach can all dampen participation—especially among families with less experience navigating state programs.

Yes-- but it's the schools themselves creating most of these hurdles, and they're doing it deliberately. And that's before we even get to the business of voucher school tuition inflation, where the school bumps up tuition costs enough that the school is no more affordable to Certain Families than it ever was.  

The authors point to an "awareness gap" for choice programs, a problem of marketing and PR that keeps parents from knowing that the program even exists. So part of their fix is essentially better marketing. Advocacy groups, think tanks, private schools and churches could do more "outreach" to get the word out. 

States could also follow the lead of Florida by allowing funds to be spent on a "choice navigator" to help you find your way through the education marketplace. They also want more timely payments, clearer lists of allowable expenses, and more certainty about the program's future. 

Most of this bumps up against the real factors that limit school choice, but Leuken and Sanders either don't see it or want to say it. I give them credit for skipping the classic arguments, which claimed that "entrenched interests" and those terrible teacher unions and misguided legislators are creating all the barriers to choice. 

No, when it comes to limits on school choice, the same thing has always been true-- the call is coming from inside the house.

It is charter and private schools the erect bureaucratic barriers, economic barriers, and "we'll reject your child if we feel like it" barriers, and "pro-choice" legislators who pass the laws that allow them to do it. School choice-- the idea of every child having a selection of schools from which they can pick the one that best suits them-- is pushed by a whole lot of people who don't really want to see it happen. Some of these folks are only interested in finding a way to get taxpayer dollars funneled to private Christian schools, and some would prefer a system in which everyone was responsible for their own kid's education and nobody else had to pay to educate Those People's Children. 

In short, what really limits school choice is that it's a policy pushed, promoted, and instituted by people who don't really want school choice.

If we really really wanted school choice, we would require all schools that wanted to accept public dollars to also accept any and all students who applied. We would fund vouchers so that they covered admission at any school of the student's choice, no matter how expensive. We would make every school that accepted taxpayer dollars accountable to those taxpayers; we would have a certification process that provided the same certainty of quality that we get from the USDA stamp on beef, so that families could exercise their choice with confidence.

But because the choice systems we've got prioritize the interests the owners of these education-flavored businesses over the interests of the actual students, we get a "choice" system with a whole assortment of restraints and obstacles not to the businesses, but to the families.

Would better marketing and PR help? Well, it would give the choice schools a bigger pool to choose from, and I'm sure they'd like the chance to have even more students to box out. 

But if EdChoice wants to get rid of the limits on school choice, they should start by talking to their own people. 

WI: Pushing For Federal Vouchers

Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers announced way back in September that he would not join in the new federal school voucher program that is part of the GOP's Big Ugly Mess of a Bill, but advocacy groups are being put together to try to sell the vouchers anyway. It's another one of those times to pay attention just in case this is coming to your state soon. 

There is much about the federal voucher program that remains undefined, but we know the basics. It's a tax credit voucher, which means if you've got some money to burn, you can contribute it to funding a school voucher and have that contribution count as paying your taxes. The contribution actually goes to a Scholarship Granting Organization (SGO) in a sleight of move that is supposed to make it look as if taxpayer dollars aren't being diverted to funding private schools, but at least one state supreme court has seen through that baloney. 

Evers correctly noted that the federal voucher would be catastrophic for public schools. 

The usual fans of dismantling public schools and privatizing the remains did not care for the governor's decision. "Why so fast," said folks at the right wing Badger Institute (a great name which really ought to be associated with something cooler than a bunch of wealthy guys who would like to not pay taxes). "There's lots of time left to decide, and this is like free money!"

It is not. Your brother-in-law owes you a hundred bucks. You send your spouse to collect it because you need it to buy groceries this week, and they return with fifty bucks and a couple of cases of beer. "Did you spend our money on beer?" you ask. "No, my brother just gave me this instead of the other fifty dollars. So this is like, you know, free beer!" Are you convinced? Or are you just out fifty bucks that you needed to feed your family?

The Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce really wants that beer, and they have come up with a whole campaign to sell the federal vouchers. If not to Evers (who is not running for a third term and so doesn't have to care about these guys), then maybe the next governor.

Pay It Forward Wisconsin is the campaign, and it tries hard to make these vouchers look swell. There's a certain amount of creativity here-- the actual rules for federal vouchers haven't been written yet, so some of this pitch might best be considered "aspirational" or "loosely interpretive" or even "made up." 

The tax credit allows "you to donate up to $1,700 to the school of your choice." Well, you'll donate it to an SGO, which may or may not be aim that money at a particular school. Some states (like PA) allow any private school to set up its own SGO, and others do not. The law suggests that an SGO has to serve at least two schools; any private schools with multiple campuses could well satisfy that requirement. The federal law suggests that donors can designate the school, but not the student. But that could change when the actual rules are written.

PIFW also suggests that public school students could use the voucher money to fund extras like a tutor or a band trip. Except that, again, the rules haven't been written yet, and no state with vouchers has allowed for this particular use of voucher funds. 

PIFW is accepting "pledges" and notes that "If you don’t have a specific school in mind, Pay It Forward Wisconsin will direct your donation to nearby schools serving students in poverty with a proven track record of improving reading and math proficiency," all of which sure makes it sound like PIFW is positioning itself to be an SGO (SGOs get to keep a slice of the voucher pie, so it can be a profitable business to be in). 

Who's the face of all this? Dale Kooyenga is a GOP politician who is currently serving as MMAC president and the main mouthpiece for PIFW. He's an accountant and private equity guy, as well as an army reserve lieutenant colonel. When he was in the Wisconsin legislature, he helped push a plan to privatize Milwaukee schools. He loves him some private Christian schools, too. 

The idea of redirecting tax dollars to private schools is particular troublesome in Wisconsin, where public schools are stuck under a cap in state funding. 

The pitch captures some of the bizarro world nature of tax credit scholarships. Do you want to support public schools and students? You can take some of your tax dollars and direct them to schools. Or--stay with me here-- you could just pay taxes. PIFW wants to answer the question, "How can I direct my money to help students and schools?" Gee-- if only there were some sort of system for collecting a contribution from every wage earner in the state and then bundling those contributions up and portioning them out to schools. If only there were a way to do that!

But of course what gives the tax credit system value added over regular old taxation is that tax credit vouchers let you make sure that your tax dollars aren't going to support Those Peoples' Children. Let's hope that Wisconsin's next governor shares the current governor's understanding of how bad the federal voucher program would be for education.