When researcher Josh Cowen is talking about the negative effects of school vouchers on education, he often points at "subprime" private schools-- schools opened in strip malls or church basements or some other piece of cheap real estate and operated by people who are either fraudsters or incompetents or both.
This is a feature, not a bug. Because as much as choice advocates tout the awesomeness of competition, the taxpayer-funded free market choice system that we've been saddled with has built in perverse incentives that guarantee competition will be focused on the wrong things.
The free market does not foster superior quality; the free market fosters superior marketing. Now, the marketing can be based on superior quality, but sometimes it's just easier to go another way.
The thing about voucher schools is that quality is not what makes them money. What makes them money is signing people up.
That's it. Voucher school operators don't have to run a good school; they just have to sell the seats. Once the student is signed up and their voucher dollars are in the bank, the important part of the transaction is over. There is no incentive for the school to spend a pile of money on doing a good job; all the incentive is for the school to come up with a good marketing plan.
Betsy DeVos liked to compare the free market for schools with a row of food trucks, which was wrong for a host of reasons, but one was the market speed. Buy lunch at a food truck, and you become part of the marketing very quickly. Within minutes, you are either a satisfied customer telling your friends to eat there, or warning everyone to stay away. Reputations are built quickly.
But for schools, the creation of a reputation for quality takes a long time, time measured in years. The most stable part of the voucher school market is schools that already have their reputation in place from years of operation. But if you are a start-up, you need to get that money for those seats right now. If you are a struggling crappy private school with a not-so-great reputation, you don't have time to turn that around; you've got to up your marketing game right now.
So the focus (and investment) goes toward marketing and enrollment.
Won't your poor performance catch up with you? Maybe, but the market turns over yearly, as students age out and age in to school. And you don't have to capture much of it. If you are in an urban center with 100,000 students and your school just needs to fill 100 seats, disgruntled former families won't hurt you much-- just get out there and pitch to the other 99,900 students. And if you do go under, well, you made a nice chunk of money for a few years, and now you can move on to your next grift.
This is also why the "better" private schools remain unavailable to most families holding a voucher. If a reputation for quality is your main selling point, you can't afford to let in students who might hurt that record of success.
Meanwhile, talk to teachers at some of the less-glowing private and charter schools about the amount of pressure they get to make the student numbers look good.
Because of the way incentives are structured, the business of a voucher school is not education. The business of the voucher school is to sell seats, and the education side of the business exists only to help sell seats. Our version of a free market system guarantees that the schools will operate backwards, an enrollment sales business with classrooms set up with a primary purpose of supporting the sales department, instead of vice versa.
Charter schools? The same problem, but add one other source of revenue-- government grants. Under Trump, the feds will offer up a half a billion dollars to anyone who wants to get into the charter biz, and we already know that historically one dollar out of every four will go to fraud or waste, including charter businesses that will collect a ton of taxpayer money and never even open.
"Yeah, well," say the haters. "Isn't that also true for public schools"
No, it is not. Here's why. Public schools are not businesses. They are service providers, not commodity vendors. Like the post office, like health care in civilized countries, like snow plows, like (once upon a time) journalism, their job is to provide a necessary service to the citizens of this country. Their job should be not to compete, but to serve, for the reasons laid out here.
And this week-ass excuse for accountability-- if you do a bad enough job, maybe it will make it harder for your marketing department-- has been sold as the only accountability that school choice needs.
School choice, because its perverse incentives favor selling seats over educating students, is ripe for enshittification, Cory Doctorow's name for the process by which operators make products deliberately worse in order to make them more profitable. The "product" doesn't have to be good-- just good enough not to mess up the sales. And with no meaningful oversight to determine where the "good enough" line should be drawn, subprime voucher and charter schools are free to see just how close to the bottom they can get. It is far too easy to transform into a backwards business, which is why it should not be a business at all.
If your foundational belief is that nobody ever does anything unless they can profit from it (and therefor everything must be run "like a business") then we are in "I don't know how to explain that you should care about other people" territory, and I'm not sure what to tell you. What is the incentive to work in a public education system? That's a whole other post, but I would point to Daniel Pink's theory of motivation-- autonomy, mastery and purpose. Particular a purpose that is one centered on making life better for young human beings and a country better for being filled with educated humans. I am sure there are people following that motivation in the school choice world, but they are trapped in a model that is inhospitable to such thinking.
At The74 (the nation's most uneven education coverage), Goldy Brown (Whitworth U and AEI/CERN) and Christos Makridis (Labor Economics and ASU) have a bold idea that involves putting fresh paint on a bad old idea--the national Big Standardized Test.
Their set-up is the usual noise about how the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) peaked around 2013, which is true if you also believe that the rise that carries I-80 across the Bonneville Salt Flats is also a peak. They are more accurate when they say that "student outcomes" (aka "Big Standardized Test scores") have "largely stagnated" over recent decades.
Yep, it's a roller coaster
Let me digress for just a moment to note the oddness of that idea of stagnation--as if test scores should keep rising like stock prices and property values. Each cohort of students should be smarter and better than the one before, a thing that would happen... why? What's the theory here? Each year's children will be genetically better than those that came before? That every teacher will significantly up her game with every passing year (because the students rotate out at a much higher rate than the teachers)? Schools get better at gaming the tests? If the expectation is that each successive group of students will score higher than the group before, what is supposed to cause that to happen? And how does it square with the people who think that education should be going "back" to something like "basics"? I mean, doesn't the vision of non-stagnating test scores include students who are all smarter and more knowledgeable than their parents?
Okay, digression over. The authors also point out that Dear Leader and his crew have "downsized" the staff that oversees the NAEP (while simultaneously insisting that NAEPing will continue normally)-- but they argue that the kneecapping will "create an opportunity to rethink the role this tool can play."
In particular, the Trump Administration could explore using the NAEP to promote greater transparency among schools, parents, and local communities, as well to enhance academic rigor and ensure genuine accountability in a comparable way across schools and states. That would mean replacing a disparate collection of state tests will a single national assessment administered to every fourth and eighth grade student every year.
Yikes. I checked quickly to see if Brown and Makridis are over 15 years of age, because if so, they should remember pretty clearly that the feds have tried this exact thing before. Every state was supposed to measure their Common Core achievements by taking the same BS Test, except then that turned out to be two BS Tests (PAARC and SBA) but then those turned out to be expensive and not-very-good tests and states started dumping them, while folks from all ends of the spectrum noted that this sure looked like an illegal attempt to control curriculum from the federal level.
With national standards and national testing, supporters argued, we would be able to compare students from Utah and Ohio, as if that was something anyone actually wanted to do. As if in Utah parents were saying, "Nice report card, Pat, but what I really want to know is how your test scores compare to the test scores of some kid in Teaneck, New Jersey."
No, these guys have to remember those days, because they are well versed in all the same bad arguments made at the time.
Parents, educators, and state leaders agree that more information — not more bureaucracy — is needed to make informed decisions for their children and communities, as well as to foster greater competition. Making the NAEP a truly national assessment would provide this information in a consistent, credible, and actionable manner.
Right. Test scores would be great for unleashing free market forces in a free market, education-as-a-commodity choice system. Also, competition doesn't unleash anything useful in education. Also also, choice fans have mostly stopped using this talking point because it turns out charter and voucher schools don't actually do any better on BS Tests. Get up to date, guys-- today it's all "choice is a virtue in and of itself" and "parents should get to choose a school that matches their values."
The writers call for the NAEP to be cranked out every year instead of every other, and for every student instead of the current sampling. No sweat, they say, because every state already has stuff in place for their own state test.
But an annual universal NAEP would be great because it's a "consistent and academically rigorous measure of student performance." There's a huge amount of room to debate that, but it only sort of matters because the writers have fallen into the huge fallacy of NAEP and PISA and all the rest of these data-generating numbers. "If we had some good solid data," says the fallacy, "then we could really Get Shit Done." We would Really Know how students are doing, we would Really Know about how bad the state tests are, and we would Really Know where the issues in the system are.
It's an appealing notion, and it has never, ever worked. For one thing, nobody can even agree on what critical terms like "proficient" mean when it comes to NAEP. But more importantly, the solid data of NAEP never solves anything. Everyone grabs a slice, applies it to the policies they were busy pushing anyway, and NAEP solves nothing, illuminates nothing, settles nothing.
The writers also want to use the test illegally in a method now familiar to both political parties. Tie Title I funding to compliance with NAEP testing mandates and presto-- "States would have a stronger incentive to align their instructional practices with higher expectations." In other words, test + money = federal control of local curriculum. Not okay.
They would also like the test to provide feedback to parents about their individual students. This also repeats a critical error of every BS Test to come down the pike. Tests are designed for a particular purpose and one should not attempt to apply them to a host of other purposes-- doing so gets you junk. Also, I still don't believe that conversation in Utah is happening. But this notion--
A national benchmark can support local autonomy while enabling cross-district comparisons that inform parents, educators, and policymakers alike.
Producing a test that generates data useful to all three groups is less likely than capturing a yeti riding a unicorn that is pooping rainbows.
The writers also argue that states could save money if the feds forced them to replace their current batteries of BS Tests with NAEP instead in just 4th and 8th grade. I suppose that depends on the test manufacturer who secures this national testing monopoly.
Their last argument is that universal NAEPery would "offer a balanced form of federal oversight." That means "less intrusive than programmatic mandates" which are not so much intrusive as they are illegal. At any rate, national standardized tests intended to drive programmatic choices are still pretty damned intrusive.
Now for the wrap up. Starting with this understatement:
Federal initiatives to improve student outcomes have historically produced mixed results.
Yes, and theater trips to see "Our American Cousin" have historically produced mixed results for Presidents. Of the whole list of "mixed" results, they include just the Obama era attempt to use test scores to drive teacher improvement (well, not "improvement" exactly, but teaching to the test in order to raise scores).
They say one right thing, which is "that policy tools must be both well-designed and responsive to local implementation contexts." But they follow that with "designating NAEP as the national assessment meets both criteria." And no, no it wouldn't, and we know it wouldn't because the last time we tried this national BS Test thing, it went very poorly. This is such a classic reformster construct-- "Historically this thing has failed, so we think the solution is to do it some more, harder."
In an era of educational fragmentation, the NAEP stands out as a uniquely credible and underutilized tool. Repurposing it as the primary national assessment — administered annually to all 4th and 8th graders in states receiving Title I dollars — would promote transparency, reduce redundant testing, and align incentives around higher academic standards. This reform would offer a shared benchmark to evaluate progress across states and districts. At a time when parents, educators, and policymakers are calling for both accountability and flexibility, a restructured NAEP provides a rare opportunity to deliver both.
Is that what parents, e3ducators, and policymakers are calling for, really? Doesn't matter, because NAEP provides nothing special for accountability (certainly not before we have a long, long conversation about accountability to whom and for what) and it certainly doesn't provide flexibility, not even under their repeat of the old argument that states could decide how to meet the national test standards, which is like telling someone "You can get to Cleveland any way you want as long as you arrive at E.9th and Superior within the next six hours seated in a blue Volkswagon, listening to Bob Marley, and eating a taco. Totally up to you what meat is in the taco, though. See? Flexible."
You know what's really flexible? An end to federal mandates for a nationalized Big Standardized Test.
A new study shows results that will be absolutely unsurprising to anyone who has been paying attention. ChatGPT is not good at grading essays.
A good robograder has been the white whale of the ed tech industry for a long time now, and failing with impressive consistency. Scholar Les Perelman has poked holes in countless robo-grading products, and I've been writing about the industry since I began this blog. And this comment from the Musings of a Passing Stranger blog in 2011 is still applicable:
What Pearson and its competitors do in the area of essay scoring is not a science. It's not even an art. It's a brutal reduction of thought to numbers. The principles of industrial production that gave us hot dogs now give us essay scores.
The main hurdles to computerized grading have not changed. Reducing essay characteristics to a score is difficult for a human, but a computer does not read or comprehend the essay in any usual understanding of the words. Everything the software does involves proxies for actual qualities of actual writing. This paper from 2013 still applies-- robograders still stink..
Perelman and his team were particularly adept at demonstrating this with BABEL (the Basic Automatic B. S. Essay Language Generator), a program that could generator convincing piles of nonsense which robograders consistently gave high scores. Sadly, it appears that BABEL is no longer on line, but I've taken it out for a spin myself a few times-- the results always make robograders look incompetent (see here, here, here, and here).
The study of bad essay grading is deep. We have some classic studies of the bad formula essay. Paul Roberts' "How To Say Nothing in 500 Words" should be required reading in all ed programs. Way back in 2007, Inside Higher Ed ran this article about how an essay that included, among other beauties, reference to President Franklin Denelor Roosevelt was an SAT writing test winner. And I didn't find a link to the article, but in 2007 writing instructor Andy Jones took a recommendation letter, replaced every "the" with "chimpanzee," and scored a 6 out of 6 from the Criterion essay-scoring software at ETS. You can read the actual essay here. And as the classic piece from Jesse Lussenhop, part of robograding's problem is that it has adopted the failed procedures of grading-by-human-temps.
Like self-driving cars, robograding has been just around the corner for years. If you want to dive into my coverage here at the Institute, see here, here, here, here, here and here for starters. Bill Gates was predicting it two years ago, and just last year, an attempt was made to get ChatGPT involved which was not quite successful and very not cheap. Which is bad news because the "problem" that robograding is supposed to solve is the problem of having to hire humans to do the job. Test manufacturers have been trying to solve that problem for years (hence the practice of undertrained minimum wage temps as essay graders).
That brings us up to the recent attempt by The Learning Agency. TLA is an outfit pushing "innovation." It (along with the Learning Agency Lab) was founded by Ulrich Boser in 2017, and they partner with the Gates Foundation, Schmidt Futures, Georgia State University, and the Center for American Progress, where Boser is a senior fellow. He has also been an advisor to the Gates Foundation, Hillary Clinton's Presidential Campaign, and the Charles Butt Foundation--so a fine list of reform-minded left-leaning outfits. Their team involves former government wonks, non-profit managers, comms people and a couple of Teach for America types. The Lab is more of the same; there are more "data scientists" in this outfit than actual teachers.
TLA is not new to the search for better robograding. The Lab was involved in a competition, jointly sponsored by Georgia State University, called The Feedback Prize. It was a coding competition being run through Kaggle, in which competitors are asked to root through a database of just under 26K student argumentative essays that have been previously scored by "experts" as part of state standardized assessments between 2010 and 2020 (which raises a whole other set of issues, but let's skip that for now). The goal was to have your algorithm come close to the human scoring results; and the whole thing is highly technical.
Does ChatGPT show bias? A study just last year said yes, it does, which is always a (marketing) problem because tech is always sold with the idea that a machine is perfectly objective and not just, you know, filled with the biases of its programmers.
This particular study found bias that it deemed lacking in "practical significance," except when it didn't. Specifically, the difference between Asian/Pacific Islanders and Black students, which underlines how Black students come in last in the robograding.
So yes, there's bias. But the other result is that ChatGPT just isn't very good at the job. At all. There's more statistical argle bargle here, but the bottom line is that ChatGPT gives pretty much everyone a gentleman's C. To ChatGPT, nobody is excellent and nobody is terrible, which makes perfect sense because ChatGPT is not qualified to determine anything except whether the strong of words that the writer has created is, when compared to a million other strings of words, probable. ChatGPT cannot tell whether the writer has expressed a piercing insight, a common cliche, or a boneheaded error. ChatGPT does not read, does not understand.
Using ChatGPT to grade student essays is educational malpractice. It is using a yardstick to measure the weight of an elephant. It cannot do the job.
TLA ignores one other question, a question studiously ignored by everyone in the robograding world-- how is student performance affected when they know that their essay will not be read by an actual human being? How does one write like a real human being when your audience is mindless software? What will a student do when schools break the fundamental deal of writing--that it is an attempt to communicate an idea from the mind of one human to the mind of another?
This is one of the lasting toxic remnants of the modern reform movement--an emphasis on "output" and "product" that ignores input, process, and the fact that there are many ways to get a product-- particularly if that's all the people in charge care about.
"The computer has read your essay" is a lie. ChatGPT can scan your output as data (not as writing) and compare it to the larger data set (also not writing any more) and see if it lines up. Your best bet as a student is to aim for the same kind of slop that ChatGPT churns out thoughtlessly.
Add ChatGPT to the list of algorithmic software that can only do poorly a job it should not be asked to do at all.
You can be forgiven for having forgotten that David Coleman is a thing. He's been laying low-ish as head of the College Board since his days of dropping Common Core on the US education system like sewage-filled water balloon. But he's still around, still sharing his ideas about education and how to use the College Board's big products-- the SAT and AP courses-- to inflict his vision on students.
Klein says, "AI tools can pass almost every AP test. Are students taught what they need to know to thrive in a future workplace dominated by AI?"
This might sound like a challenge to AP tests, but that's not what Coleman hears. "High schools had a crisis of relevance far before AI." For once, he's not entirely wrong-- by reducing writing to a simple algorithmic process divorced from expressing ideas, many educators have turned it into a task that a computer can do. You know what pushed us--hard--in that direction? Common Core, and the tests that came with it.
Coleman says we have to make high school "relevant, engaging, and purposeful" by creating the next generation of coursework. "We," he says, "are reconsidering the kind of courses we offer." So I guess he's not going to address that whole "AI can beat your test" issue.
But it's this next exchange that shows how far off the rails College Board is ready to go.
Klein: College Board has previously partnered with higher education to create courses. Will you now be partnering with employers/industry?
Coleman: What we are doing is giving employers an equal voice.
So, an example of a new partner [in course design] is the [U.S.] Chamber of Commerce. What’s cool about what we’ll do with business or cybersecurity is that it will simultaneously get you college credit at institutions that offer it and get you that workforce credential. [After successfully completing] AP Cybersecurity, you could definitely get some really good jobs and be qualified for them.
So, to expand their market, they're going to take the "college" out of College Board. Coleman says they might also take a whack at health care, sort of integrate chemistry and physiology and health care careers.
Klein points out that employers want "tricky-to-measure skills, like creativity, communication, collaboration and critical thinking." Does Coleman have a plan for dealing with this stuff?
He does, and it's dopey. The big move will be AP Seminar-- less required content, more group work. Also, the business and personal finance course "has heavy emphasis on entrepreneurship and responding to change, plus flexibility, adaptation, and resourcefulness.
So how do you measure stuff like resourcefulness asks the man who still hasn't acknowledged that AI can beat his current set of tests. And he has another non-answer:
In the business course, every student needs to make a business plan and share it and have a competition [around] it. And they have to act as a financial adviser to a family similar or different than their own. With those two projects, you can test students for their ability to adapt to changing circumstances.
Okay, but how do you test them? Give them a multiple choice question with one answer that is the resourceful one? Is there a special resourcefulness rubric for the project? Coleman is skating past a huge question here-- how do you use a standardized box to assess how well a student functions outside the standardized box?
Klein steers him back toward AI. Could an AI write the paper for that Seminar class?
The answer, buried under some verbage, is yes, and the student might be scored "whether they’ve effectively used it to advance their work. Also--
What we definitely are thinking about is, “How can students skillfully use AI without replacing their own skills development? How can you use AI resourcefully and powerfully without it totally eclipsing what you’re trying to get kids to learn?”
I think that interplay is essential for advancement in the AI world. We always want the check and balance of what can you do with it and what can you do without it, to see what you’re gaining separately from [the course].
Behind all this argle bargle is... nothing. It's meaningless noise until it's turned into specific plans. How would those "checks and balances" work? There is nothing remotely insightful about saying, "Students should know how to work AI and they should know how to work without it."
Will teachers be trained in AI or cybersecurity? Coleman's answer boils down to "Not really." Just give them enough resources to "stay a step ahead of their kids."
But Coleman also answers a question that Klein didn't ask-- would the AI replace teachers?
Teachers recruit kids who did not believe that they could do [rigorous academic work]. They give feedback and encouragement daily. It is just foolish to condense teaching to the transmission portion of the teaching job.
So sure, someday we could get wonderful lectures and tutoring through AI. But not the encouragement, support, and engagement that a teacher does in responding to humans in front of him or her.
So, pretty much like the computer-delivered education models that don't require teachers-- just coaches to encourage and monitor.
How will they keep courses up to date? The course framework will be a 'living portion," which is some great corporate baloney-speak. But hey-- Coleman never built any capability for update in the Common Core, so maybe he has learned something?
How about AP Data Science? Coleman says the AP Computer Science Principles really covers that. Also, the new verbal section of the SAT includes charts, because to be literate you can't skip the tables in a science article ("unless you're just gonna read fiction," and we know Coleman's not a fan).
Also, they're not changing the AP African American Studies course, and states, schools, and students can choose.
Look, the College Board lost its way ages ago. The SAT division now trues to flood the market with variants, like a cookie manufacturer trying to some up with new flavors in order to suck up market shelf space. I look forward to the Fetal SAT, given in each trimester of pregnancy. The Advanced Placement courses and tests were arguably a good-ish idea, but they have lost their way (read Annie Abrams' Shortchangedfor a fuller telling of that story).
But this is clearly not an improvement. Coleman has never shown himself to be a fan of the liberal arts, so perhaps it's a surprise that he hadn't already shifted the AP course from liberal, college level academics to some high end vocational training, but here we are. Never mind that artsy fartsy thinky stuff; let's dig out the graphs and charts. Dump those crazy abstract maths and get down to crunching the kinds pf numbers that corporate overlords are interested in. Maybe as colleges and universities shift away from liberal arts education and toward meat widget prep, the AP was destined to be dragged along with them.
Thing is, Coleman, at least in this interview, doesn't seem to have a real vision of where he's headed-- just some obvious platitudes and vague gestures. And he can make noises about next generation education programs, but that doesn't really address the problem that a LLM bot can breeze through his tests (and, one wonders, how much bots are being used to score that same test).
Nothing here indicates that Coleman gas a plan-- just a vague impulse to get more vocational and computery. We'll see if that's enough to hang onto his steadily eroding market share.
“Where there are kids that lack opportunity, my heart pains for them,” said Treat, R-Oklahoma City. “We need to make sure they are not forgotten.”
Expanding the program will get poor kids into religious schools, or help poor kids escape bullying.
Governor Kevin Stitt pushed in 2023, proclaiming "Now we're gonna put the parents back in charge." Also, competition will raise all boats. And poor kids will be rescued.
Yessiree-- the Oklahoma Parental Choice Tax Credit program would help poor families get their kids into super duper private schools. "This is an every kid wins policy and funding plan," said House Speaker Charles McCall back in 2023, when the bill passed.
Just barely. A similar bill tanked in 2022, opposed by rural Republicans who didn't want to see their schools drained of funding, and they didn't want to see taxpayer money going to unaccountable private schools. So the tax credit version was born. The idea was that instead of draining the general fund, taxpayers could contribute to vouchers instead of paying their taxes (which would, you know, cut revenue for the general fund.)
Lawmakers were a bit upset by what turned out to be the mechanics of the tax credit. They expected that it would come in the form of a line on tax returns (like any other tax credit). But no. In what may be the laziest attempt to maintain the fiction that these vouchers aren't a way to send public tax dollars to private religious schools, the Oklahoma system sends the voucher money directly to the school--but in a check that is made out to the parents. The parents come in to the school to endorse the check.
This baloney allows the Oklahoma Tax Commission to say, with a straight face, “No checks were issued by the Oklahoma Tax Commission to private schools."
Said some legislators, "We would not have voted for this if we thought this was how it was going to work." It took station KFOR to find out this was what was happening.
State Rep. Melissa Provenzano said that the vouchers are going "overwhelmingly" to students already enrolled in private school.
None of this should be remotely surprising, as it is exactly how vouchers have played out in other states. No mention yet about the students who were rejected by private schools.
One thing sure to be a factor-- the voucher program immediately led to private schools hiking tuition prices. Ruby Topalian at The Oklahoman reported on the issue, offering as a specific example
There’s a terrible stench that smells a lot like bull excrement emanating from the halls of our state Capitol right now, and Republicans are hoping that Oklahomans plug their nose and pretend their highly touted voucher-like program doesn’t stink to high heaven.
Many are also likely hoping that their constituents will suffer from a convenient bout of amnesia when it comes to recalling the promises made — and not kept — in 2023 about their Parental Choice Tax Credit Act.
As it turns out, Oklahomans were sold a sham when legislators sought to convince us why our hard-earned tax dollars should be used to pay for children’s private school educations even while their local public schools continue to struggle financially and academically.
And more to the point
Legislators would have you forget that they want to use public money to continue to subsidize the costs of a small subset of rich children whose parents have fled the public school system that 700,000 children rely on. The exodus further exacerbates the gap between the haves and have nots.
To further rub salt in the wound, many private schools used the new “tax credit” to raise tuition. An Oklahoma Watch analysis found that about 12% of 171 participating private schools capped tuition rates near $7,500, the max a family can receive. Some schools raised tuition rates 100%.
At this point, there's no state legislator anywhere that has any excuse. All of these issues have well documented in each of the universal voucher states. Vouchers are an expensive entitlement for the wealthy that try to hide behind a fig leaf of helping a few select actual non-wealthy folks.
Paul Cottle is a professor of physics at Florida State University (who looks, swear to God, a lot like pulp hero Doc Savage). Cottle blogs at Bridge To Tomorrow where, in a recent post, he looks at how Florida has set some priorities that are bad news for education.
Cottle sees real trouble in the state's math scores, particularly because math is necessary for careers like engineering and analytical business careers, and even degrees like construction management and nursing. (Sure enough-- Florida ranks at the absolute bottom of the barrel for the percentage of nursing school grads who pass their professional exam, with grads of private programs worst of all).
Cottle thinks back to a moment that captures the policy shift that has marked a significant chunk of the school choice crowd:
A conversation I had about a dozen years ago with a staff member at one of Tallahassee’s right-leaning think tanks provided a possible answer. I had asked for the meeting to discuss the ways that Florida might provide more of its high school students access to careers in engineering, science and health fields. I started the meeting by summarizing my concerns about what was happening in the state’s classrooms and suggesting some fixes. The staff member waved all of that off and responded with a question that I remember as, “How can we use this situation to strengthen the argument for school choice?” Prior to that meeting, I had adopted the point of view that school choice should primarily be a tool for providing high quality instruction to students who wouldn’t otherwise have access to it. That is, school choice was a means to the end of improving instruction. But the think tanker’s argument was something completely different: School choice WAS the end, not the means. Instructional quality was at best incidental to the whole effort.
Yes, you might be old enough to remember when the argument for choice was that it would improve education. Access to better school for students "trapped" in "failing" public schools. Competition would make everyone better.
Then, as Cottle discovered, it turned out that all that mattered was choice; specifically, policy mechanisms for directing public money to private school operators.
Cottle also wants to point out another factor. Florida used to run a huge budget surplus, but now it's running a deficit. Cottle and others are trying to raise an alarm about math instruction and the need to improve math instruction, particularly by recruiting and retaining high quality teachers. But the "still-growing budget for school choice vouchers is surely competing for money with ideas for initiatives to improve student learning, and the voucher budget is winning."
A state that only has so much money to go around (or less) may have to decide between pumping up vouchers or trying to improve education, and in Florida, Cottle concludes, "Florida’s leaders have bet the entire education funding farm on school choice."
The "rescue" narrative was always a lie, proposing as it did that choice would "rescue" only a small number of students, leaving the rest to cool heels in their "failing" public school. Nor do the voucher schools do a better job of educating. Nor does competition raise all boats.
Florida, always out ahead of the privatizing agenda for schools, has reached the point at which there's no longer any pretense that "choice" is about education and that, in fact, a better education for students in the state is part of the cost of school choice. As Cottle summarizes:
If a universal school choice voucher program somehow improves student learning in math and other subjects, well that is lovely. But at this point school choice is the primary goal, not improving student learning. So we should not be surprised if future Florida SAT and NAEP results continue to be disappointing.
One of the most transparent falsehoods of the choice movement has been the assumption that a state can run multiple school systems for the same money it spent on just one. And when money gets tight, states have to decide whether they want to focus on improving education for all students, or for financing their web of privatized education. It's not hard to predict which was Florida would go, but perhaps other states can be better.
Linda McMahon has her confirmation hearing this week, and let's be honest-- the Congress that okayed Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., is not going to blink twice at McMahon, who at least does a passable imitation of a real grownup. For that matter, she's more qualified than Betsy DeVos was (she's had actual jobs, including jobs leading other people) and she's less inclined to say the kind of stunningly dumb things that made DeVos a late night tv punchline.
She opens with thank you's to friends and families and for Trump's faith in her to lead a department that "was a special focus of his campaign." Yes, "focus" is probably a nicer word than "target." I keep thinking it would be something to one day see one of these nominees bring the same rhetoric they use outside the hearing room into the hearing room. But no, this has to be an all-baloney zone (a balozone).
Now she will recap Trump's bold, baloney-filled promises. "He p[ledged to make American education the best in the world," like he has the faintest idea how to do that or what it would look like and has any reason to say that other than one more way to claim that American education is failing. He's going to "return education to the states where it belongs," as if it were not already there, and "free American students from the education bureaucracy through school choice" much like Kennedy wants to free Americans from disease prevention and the administration wants to free white guys from requirements to show merit. McMahon's preferred privatization is not about freeing students; it's about freeing Americans (particularly wealthy ones) from being responsible for educating Those Peoples' Children. Just remove the promise of a decent education for all American children, and call it freedom.
More butt-kissing, citing November as proof that Americans "overwhelmingly support the President's vision." November was no such thing. Trump's margin was small, and in the few states that got the chance to vote on vouchers (something voucher supporters try to avoid at all costs), the same people who supported Trump rejected his educational vision. But she is ready to enact his vision.
"Education is THE issue that determines our national success" and therefor we should spend as little on it as possible. No, just kidding. It "prepares American workers to win the future," which is a jam-packed phrase. The future is something one wins? Education is only for producing workers?
Now she gets to her qualifications. Sort of. "I've been passionate about education since my earliest college days when I studied to earn a teaching certificate." That would be the mid-to-late sixties. Her passion continued through her business career (she reportedly married Vince McMahon in college and dumped her own career hopes to help him). She will even bring up her brief time on the Connecticut State Board of Education. Also, she was a university trustee and her chairwomanship of the American First Policy Institute, and she just kept being passionate about education through all of that. No mention of how she felt about that passion not being invoplved in the first Trump administration.
She's a "mother and a grandmother" and she also "joined millions of American parents who want better schools for our kids and grandkids." Joined them in what? Being passionate, I guess.
Here's my thing about people who are passionate about education-- if it's a thing you're passionate about, it's really easy to become directly involved. Somewhere near you is a public school, and I feel confident that not one of them has a motto like "That's okay, thanks. We don't need anything right now." Passion that does not convert into actual action is empty posturing. If a suitor told you they were passionately in love with you, but couldn't see you for the next few weeks because they had, you know, errands to run and work stuff to take care of and on weekends they're just tired--that's not a courtship that you would find very compelling.
But sure, Passionate about education.
Then the narrative. American education used to be great, but now it's a "system in decline." with low test scores (by students who in many cases started their education under President Donald Trump). Also, two thirds of public colleges are "beset by violent crime on campuses every year." I'm honestly not sure where that number comes from (and pretty soon it will be exactly the kind of number that we will have no valid way to search) and I'm pretty sure it's made up. Also, student suicide rates are up over last two decades; that's correct (and again, I'm not sure how we'll know once the CDC is fully silenced).
She goes straight from "suicide rates are up" to "we can do better by teaching students basic reading and mathematics." Also, we can do better for college freshmen facing "censorship or anti-Semitism" (freshmen facing other kinds of bias or hate speech are just SOL). And we can do better for "parents and grandchildren who worry their children and grandchildren are no longer taught American values and true history." I have an idea for this one-- we could reduce their worry by reducing the number of inflammatory lies they are told about what's taught in school. But I'll bet that's not what she wants to propose.
"In many cases," she says, not indicating which cases she has in mind, "our wounds are caused by the consolidation of power in our federal education establishment. So what's the remedy?"
Yes, it's the Trumuskian Big Government pretzel with bullshit icing.
"Fund education freedom, not government-run system." Vouchers and charters are government run systems, of course, but they are systems that absolve us all of any collective obligation to make sure that every child has the chance to get a decent education.
"Listen to parents, not politicians." But only some parents. Not the gay ones or the ones with trans kids or the ones with brown skins who are poisoning our blood. Also note that in this formulation, we don't have to listen to taxpayers who don't actually have children in school. Nor will we mention the school board members elected by those taxpayers.
"Build up careers, not college debt" by which they mean if you can't afford go to college without borrowing a bunch of money, don't go.
"Empower states, not special interests." Unless the state or local system makes choices we don't like here in DC, in which case we are going to punish them.
"Invest in teachers, not Washington bureaucrats," except when we are the Washington bureaucrats. Also, teachers are a well-known special interest group out to screw us all, so maybe we'll just hold off on this one.
Now for the "if confirmed as secretary" part where we get to the list of empty promises and action items. She'll work with Congress "to reorient the Department toward helping educators, not controlling them," which is a pretty hilarious promise coming from the administration that has an ever-lengthening list of things educators are not allowed to do or say.
Now we get one of her best non-sequiturs:
My experience as a business owner and leader of the small Business Administration as a public servant in the state of Connecticut, and more than a decade of service as a college trustee has taught me to put parents, teachers, and students, not bureaucracy first.
Yes, the World Wrestling Federation is famous for how it put parents and students and teachers first, likewise the Small Business Administration.
"Outstanding teachers are tired of political ideology in their curriculum and red tape on their desks." Which is why we are creating a bunch of policies and an actual curriculum telling them to put the correct political ideology in their curriculum, or else we'll cut off their funding. But those tired teachers are apparently why "school choice is a growing movement." Because it's a way to escape micro-managing by those stupid bureaucrats and their demands that schools not discriminate or use public funds to finance religious indoctrination or meet certain minimum standards for educational quality.
We should boost career education, especially in STEM. Fair enough. Post-secondary pathways! Career-aligned programs. Internships, "For American companies need high skill employees." More jobs in fields like tech and health-care for non-degree persons. Colleges should be transparent about courses of study that are aligned to workforce demand. None of this silly liberal arts stuff. More meat widgets, please!
"The United States is the world leader by far in emerging technologies like AI and blockchain" is not quite the boast the DOGE intern who inserted it into her speech thinks it is. "We need to invest in American students who want to become tech pioneers." Invest how?
Now pay attention to this next DOGE-approved point--
We should encourage innovative new institutions, develop smart accountability systems and tear down barriers to entry so that students have real choice and universities are not saddling future families with insurmountable debt.
Khan Academy. And remember The Ledger-- training from anywhere and your credentials stored on the blockchain, so that corporations can pick out meat widgets just like shopping at Amazon.
"We must protect all students from discrimination and harassment," she declares. Got an example? Jewish students discriminated against. Trans students in girls sports and bathrooms--no, she's not protecting them, she's protecting everyone else from them. She doesn't bring up DEI here, but it's the same model-- that stuff discriminates against white kids, and that's the discrimination we have to stop. MAGA feels picked on, and by God it's going to stop, because that's the only discrimination that is real or which matters.
Also, she wants to protect the "right of parents to direct the moral education of their children." And the federal government is going to protect that right by deciding what the correct moral education is and silencing anyone who disagrees with them. The Trumuskian Big Government Pretzel-- freeing us from a micromanaging federal government by micromanaging harder than any administration ever has before.
The question period offers more of the same, and I'm not going to wade through all of that here, and honestly, there's little to learn from any of it. She will distribute funds that Congress has authorized and appropriated, and she may want to check with her bosses on that, because that ship has already sailed, and anyway, she thinks President Musk is doing fine. She supports the idea that various ed funding streams can be shifted to other departments, because despite her passion for education, you don't need any interest in or knowledge of education to manage programs like IDEA or Title I.
She dodged the No Right Answer questions. Do Black history courses or student clubs for particular ethnicities or Martin Luther King Day celebrations violate the Trump order on "radical indoctrination"? Of course it does, but she's too smart to say so out loud in this hearing, so she takes a pass on that one, and refusing to pay even lip service to what should be an easy "No, those things are important and shouldn't be wiped out" sends a clear, chilling, and unsurprising message to schools across the country.
So we're going to get what we've known we were going to get-- someone whose agenda is to cut and slash the department, someone who is not knowledgeable about education (just, you know, passionate), someone with a childish faith in market competition, and someone who is fully on board with the right wing goal of getting the government completely out of the education biz. Someone who is not bothered by the conflicting goals of "send education back to the states" and "tell state and local systems what they are not allowed to say or do."
If you want to use up energy opposing her nomination, knock yourself out. There's no universe in which Trump and Musk nominate someone who isn't committed to privatizing education and gutting the federal department. She's going to be awful, and we'll all need to pay attention and watch to see exactly which fumes are given off by this particular dumpster fire.
My advice for folks wrestling with the Artificial Intelligence [sic] marketing blitz for education is to find trusted sources of reality based writing about the topic. Here at the Institute we follow the work of Benjamin Riley and Audrey Watters, both of whom are not only knowledgeable but who also provide lots of leads to other trustworthy sources. I also keep my eyes peeled for gems like Anne Lutz Fernandez's series about AI mania in schools.
AI skeptics come in many shades and flavors, and if you like your skepticism straight up and seriously resistant to all the magical prophecies, let me suggest Ed Zitron.
One of Zitron's key points is that AI simply hasn't produced anything to merit the unending hype.
On top of that, we are years into generative A.I. Where is the horizontal enablement? Where is the thing it’s enabling? Two years. Show me one thing which you use that you go, “Oh, damn, I’m so glad I have this.” Show me the AirPlay; show me the Apple Pay. Show me the thing that you’re like, “Goddamn, I’m glad this is here.”
Or on the need to "find the product:"
Find the actual thing that genuinely changes lives, improves lives, and helps people. Though Uber as a company has horrifying labor practices, you can at least look at them and go, “This is why I’m using the app. This is why this is a potentially world-changing concept.” Same with Google search and cloud computing.
With ChatGPT and their ilk—Anthropic’s Claude, for example—you can find use cases, but it’s hard to point to any of them that are really killer apps. It’s impossible to point to anything that justifies the ruinous financial cost, massive environmental damage, theft from millions of people, and stealing of the entire internet. Also, on a very simple level, what’s cool about this? What is the thing that really matters here?
He cites a great cognitive dissonance, where we are being told to be excited about a thing that doesn't actually do the stuff that is supposed to be so exciting.
We’re being told, “Oh, this automation’s gonna change our lives.” Our lives aren’t really being changed, other than our power grids being strained, our things being stolen, and some jobs being replaced. Freelancers, especially artists and content creators, are seeing their things replaced with a much, much shittier version. But nevertheless, they’re seeing how some businesses have contempt for creatives.
“Why is this thing the future? And if it isn’t the future, why am I being told that it is?” That question is applicable to blue-collar workers, to hedge fund managers, to members of the government, to everyone, because this is one of the strangest things to happen in business history.
These claims are exceptionally familiar to educators, who are being told relentlessly that AI is going to transform education. The advantage teachers have over the general public is that we have been told that some piece of technology is going to transform education roughly a gazillion times. Unfortunately, some teachers work in districts where the administration falls for that line every single time. Every. Single. Time.
But in education, the claim that This Is The Future will always get some folks worked up, because isn't education always supposed to have one foot in the future?
Zitron also blames late stage corporate striving. Steve Jobs once talked in an interview about how a company can only gather so much of the market and only improve its products so far, and at that point the product people are pushed out, and the bean counters take over. Zitron echoes that, and offers Zoom as an example
Zoom is a company that grew based on the fact that, “Hey, I want to easily talk to someone on video and audio.” Now they’re adding A.I. bullshit because they don’t know what else to do because they have to grow forever. That’s where they all are.
These aren’t companies run by people that build products. These aren’t companies that win markets by making a better thing than the competition. These people are monopolists. They’re management consultants.
I've long argued that education is where private sector consulting ideas go to die ("Management By Objectives is tapped out for corporations--maybe we could come up with a version for schools). It may well be the same for technology that sees education not as a set of needs to be met, but as an untapped market with money to be hoovered up. Which just gets us to the position that teachers know all too well: here's a piece of tech that someone in administration thought would be cool--now go figure out how to change the way you teach so that you can use this tech, somehow.
Zitron may have less faith in AI than just about anyone out there, so you may find him a little dark for your tastes, but he does a fine job articulating some of what's bothering you about AI that you can't quite put into words. And while he doesn't address education directly, much of what he has to say will strike a familiar chord.
I'll get to the meat of that argument in a moment, but let's start with the conclusion, because that's what really gets to the foundation of the pro-voucher argument:
Ultimately, education choices should not be based on majority rule.
This is, of course, a very libertarian argument--nobody should be able to make me do things I don't want to do. Here's the rest of the graph:
It is simply wrong to compel families to pay for, and de facto attend, government schools – places intended to do nothing less than shape human minds – that they find subpar, or even morally unacceptable, even if the majority is okay with them.
And yet, vouchers would compel families to pay for private schools that they find morally unacceptable or which would bar their own children from attending, and which allow no one--not the majority or anyone else-- a say in how public tax dollars are spent.
So perhaps the more complete version of the argument is this-- nobody should be able to make me do things I don't want to do, but I should be able to make them do things they don't want to do. And if I want their money to help me do the things I want to do, they should be made to give it to me. Or maybe it's "if I'm going to be forced to so something I don't want to do, then other people should be forced to do something I do want to do." Or maybe just "Other people shouldn't be able to make rules that bind me."
The libertarian argument has also run into the same argument since Milton Friedman was a pup and segregation academies were first conceived-- if the thing that some folks find "morally repugnant" is putting Black kids in classrooms with White kids, why should the country fund, support, or accept that?
I sympathize with many libertarian ideas. I really do. I share the distrust of government-imposed solutions, and I still think some of the best features of the US system is those parts that protect us from majority rule's excesses. But when libertarians reject democracy (under the heading of majority rule), they rarely have much to offer in its place other than "might makes right," supplemented with "money makes might," and I remain unconvinced that it's an effective or useful system, unless, of course, you already possess a bunch of might.
Private schools are a way for those with might and money to escape the democratically-operated system. Vouchers are a way to funnel public tax dollars into that system while pretending that we'll open great private school doors to one and all. But that pretense is just that-- a pretense. Voucher laws deliberately protect the ability of private schools to discriminate while also protecting their right to avoid any accountability to the taxpayers.
But I've wandered off into their complaint about how things turned out. What do they offer as an explanation of why they turned out that way.
Colorado they explain away by pointing out that the proposed amendment was both redundant and a sloppy piece of writing that was such a mess, even school choice fans had trouble with it. That's a fair assessment; I don't know what legislative assistant inter n wrote that thing, but it was a disaster waiting to happen, or, as Kevin Welner (NEPC) put it, "It's really a 'full employment for lawyers' act." I suspect that almost nobody would have been happy if that amendment had passed.
In Kentucky, the argument for the amendment was that it didn't actually create school choice, which is kind of like arguing that just because I want to pack your basement with explosives, that doesn't mean your house will be blown up. Kentucky saw multiple attempts to fund school choice shot down by their courts on the basis of constitutional language, and the amendment was clearly an attempt to remove that obstacle. Public education supporters, whose funding was equal to that of choice supporters, pushed back hard.
Likewise, the Nebraska measure was the result of a few years of trying to dodge the public in order to get vouchers up and running. Opponents outspent the voucherphiles, and those voucher fans want you to know that lots of money came from the teachers union.
In both cases, the on line explanation for the loss has been that voucher opponents used scare tactics and frightened the voters and did lots of posting and ads and campaigning and thereby snookered the voters, which I guess would be a more compelling argument if those same voters had not steadfastly ignored the huge amount of money and media thrown at them in an attempt to make them scared of Donald Trump in the White House. But in both states, Kamala Harris and school vouchers were both hammered.
Voters did not believe that a Trump Presidency was a bad idea; they did believe that vouchers were a bad idea. Campaigning doesn't explain that, unless, I suppose, you think the anti-voucher campaigns were just so much better than the Harris campaign that they should be running future Democrat campaigns.
Voucher supporters have tried a variety of pitches over the years, including "They're academically superior" (they aren't) and descending to the current "They're an escape from the woke evils of public schools" (#1 they aren't and #2 what does it say when you have to tear down your "competition" because trying to make yourself look better has failed). There's also "choice and freedom are just a better way to live" which I think is honest, but would carry more weight if they were railing against the real obstacles to choice-- cost, availability, and exclusionary practices of private schools.
At some point, supporters of modern vouchers could stop trying to put different shades of lipstick on the same old pig. But they probably won't. The tactic of skipping over voters and taxpayers in order to hook up with some cooperative legislators has worked for them so far, and in states like Texas, they've still decided it would be easier to buy a legislature than convince voters.
Kentucky has courts that can read its constitution. Nebraska let's citizens put laws up for referendum. Those two flukes forced voucher supporters to let the voters into the game. It's not a situation we're likely to see duplicated elsewhere, and there's no doubt that voucherphiles will keep trying to get past that whole pesky democracy thing. But because they're flukes, the Nebraska and Kentucky decisions are not likely harbingers of coming attractions. What they are is a reminder that across party lines, across demographic lines, across lines of race and class, voters don't like vouchers, and while voucherphiles can work around that fact, they can't just explain it away.
At Hechinger Report, Johnathan Gyurko surfaces with a curious proposition. Donald Trump is supposed to be a dealmaker, he says, so maybe instead of getting alarmed, The Left should try cutting some deals about public education. But first, he needs to redefine a few terms.
Gyurko spins off the Network for Public Education's call to arms for heading into an administration likely to herald “a new era of federal hostility toward public schools.” (Full disclosure-- I am a member of NPE).
A threat to public education, indeed, as NPE defines it. But that’s the problem.
The italics are his, because he wants to debate the definition. He says "the political left" has a single definition for public schools-- "district schools governed by local school boards, along with special purpose schools like magnet, vocational and agricultural tech schools run regionally or by state governments."
I don't know if I'm an example of the political left, but that's not quite how I would define public schools, but it doesn't matter for our purposes, because Gyurko is in the weeds in the very next sentence:
This blinkered view excludes 7,800 tax-funded and government-authorized charter schools that enroll 3.7 million children across 44 states and Washington, D.C.
It also excludes another 4.7 million children in private schools, many of whom receive tax-funded services for purposes important to the public.
He writes as if charter and private schools were somehow cast out into the darkness by public school advocates. But they cast themselves out there. School choice have consistently made the fact that they are NOT public schools central to their pitch.
It's true that charters have, at times, claimed to be public schools, making arguments like "They get public funding so they are public schools." You will note that advocates (like Betsy DeVos) have never attempted to extend that argument to voucher-accepting private schools. But charter schools have only claimed to be public when it suits them. Just this week we got yet another example of charter schools refusing to open their records to the state and arguing that they aren't subject to the kinds of transparency laws that govern public schools. The privatizing crowd has tried multiple times to get the Supreme Court to rule that charter schools don't have to follow the same rules as other "state actors," either because they aren't public schools or because, well, they just don't have to.
Voucher-fed private schools have never pretended to be anything other than non-public schools, and voucher supporters have been all in on declaring that they are separate from and superior to public schools, those woke-infested dens of gender ideology and commie teachers. Voucher laws come with carefully-crafted "hands off" clauses, guaranteeing that private schools accepting taxpayer-funded vouchers are still free to discriminate as they wish.
So let's not pretend that charter and voucher schools are not considered public schools for any reason other than they don't want to be.
So how does he want revise the definition of public school?
Instead of focusing on types of schools, we should consider a school “public” when it (1) enrolls and educates any student who wants to go there, and (2) prepares them to be engaged citizens, productive workers, good neighbors and stewards of the planet.
I note quibbles and limits. His definition does not include any sort of accountability, but if you're going to spend public taxpayer dollars, there has to be some form of accountability to the public, and to this day, the choice sector resists that.
It's hard not to notice that #1 disqualifies every voucher program in the country. Gyurko wants to note that attendance zones and real-estate-linked school funding are exclusionary practices, plus elected officials who only pay lip service to parents and community members, and learning standards imposed by experts without input from stakeholders.
It's also hard not to notice that #2 leaves lots of room for interpretation, enough to accommodate the ideas of any christianist white nationalist academy in the country.
But Gyurko wants to offer families a new way forward, and this is where he gets to his cutest ideas-- the negotiating part.
The left should play some offense and propose a transformative increase in federal funding for all schools — district, charter, charitable and proprietary — with a catch.
Dollars would need to be used to end exclusionary practices and to prepare future citizens, workers, neighbors and stewards of the planet.
I don't even know where to start, so let's begin with some of the specific "deals" that Gyurko imagines.
For example, could “hardening” schools against mass shootings also get us high-tech, 21st-century facilities? Would we trade vouchers to publicly purposed private schools for a national minimum teacher salary? Can we include patriotism in curricula that also respects everyone, equally? Might we eliminate caps on new charter schools if appointed charter authorizers were replaced with elected officials, thereby democratizing the charter sector?
Hardening for 21st century schools? Do you mean every single school building in America? I have no idea exactly what that might cost, but I'm guessing somewhere between a shit-ton of money and all the money in the world. "Publicly purposed private schools"?? That's not a thing, and our experience with vouchers so far is that no private school is going to take that deal since states already have made them a vouchers-with-no-strings-attached deal. Maybe you could get some pop-up crappy voucher schools that set up shop to cash in, but we already know that produces non-educating junk schools.
Patriotism and equity? Which part of the Donald "I Will Defund Any School With DEI or CRT" Trump administration do you think will sign on for that? Elected charter boards? I think that's a great idea, and I also think that the many folks profiting in the charter business have no interest in making such a deal.
And is there a reason for public education to offer to accept further privatization in hopes of some of these possible returns?
The central flaw in Gyurko's idea is that he is proposing to make a deal with privatizers in which they give up fundamental parts of their business model in return for stuff that they already get from their state government anyway. Or maybe the thought is to force states that have resisted voucher incursions to give up by offering some crumbs in return, but I have my doubts that privatizers would accept his conditions.
The modern choice movement is based on competition with the public system. I appreciate Gyurko's notion that we could have one big public system that embraces many forms of schooling. I've played with that thought experiment myself. But the premises required for such a system are unacceptable to the folks in the modern choice biz.
Public good, true non-profit and not free market? Public ownership, operation and accountability? No religious education? Honest discussion and support for the real total cost? Serving all students? All of those necessities for a public school system with robust choice--every one of them--has been pointedly and systematically rejected by choicers over the past few decades. They reject them either because they truly believe that a market-based competitive system is the path to educational quality for all, or because they don't actually care about educational quality for all as much as they care about profit, about a multi-tier system that keeps lessers in their place, or about pushing their own favored ideology.
My impression is that Gyurko's heart is in the right place, but his head is deep in the sand if he imagines that Dear Leader or any of his underlings are interested in any of these deals. This may be a better pitch than the privatizers longing for the days that Democrats joined a coalition in order to roll over for right-tilted reformsters but not by much. This administration will, in fact, be plenty hostile to public education, and trying to get them to make deals when they imagine they can just take what they want is a pointless exercise.
New Hampshire is getting a lesson in the real cost of trying to crack down on trans teens.
Like many other states, New Hampshire has seen many attempts to "protect" girls' sports from trans students. One attempt in 2021 to pass a legislative ban on trans athletes was shot down along party lines.
“Playing soccer with my teammates is where I feel the most free and happy. We’re there for each other, win or lose,” she said in a statement. “Not being allowed to play on my team with the other girls would disconnect me from so many of my friends and make school so much harder.”
As that might suggest, Tirrell has long been accepted as a girl at her school. In fact, she has played on the team in previous seasons. So no problems here, right?
Of course not.
Tirrell plays for Plymouth Regional High School. When parents of an opposing team from Bow High School caught wind that their daughter would be facing a trans player, they complained to the athletic director. He told them that the court decision tied his hands. So Kyle Fellers and Anthony Foote chose another path. According to court documents, they bought some pink wristbands (not the tiny "cause" ones you're thinking of) and Foote wrote "XX" on each. Their daughters asked their teammates if they'd all like to wear the wristbands , but not everyone wanted to, so the team did not participate in this "silent protest." Foote posted on Facebook the night before that he would be attending the September 17 game against Plymouth to show "solidarity."
According to the parents' account, nobody wore the wristbands in the first half, though some other spectators asked for some as well. At halftime, Foote went out to the parking lot to put a Riley Gaines photo on his Jeep's windshield. Fellers already had a "Protect Women's Sports for Female Athletes" poster on his car. Then he and Fellers put on the wristbands for the second half.
School officials and a police officer told the parents to take the wristbands off. There were words. The First Amendment was thrown about. Fellers got thrown out. When others refused, a match official stopped the game and said that Bow would forfeit if they weren't removed. Two fathers were given no trespassing orders and barred from the school grounds, one for a brief period and the other for the fall term. Did the fathers take this moment to cool down and reconsider their actions?
“Parents don’t shed their First Amendment rights at the entrance to a school’s soccer field. We wore pink wristbands to silently support our daughters and their right to fair competition. Instead of fostering open dialogue, school officials responded with threats and bans that have a direct impact on our lives and our children’s lives,” commented Kyle Fellers. “And this fight isn’t just about sports—it’s about protecting our fundamental right to free speech.”
“The idea that I would be censored and threatened with removal from a public event for standing by my convictions is not just a personal affront—it is an infringement on the very rights I swore to defend,” explained Andy Foote. “I spent 31 years in the United States Army, including three combat tours, and the school district in the town I was born in—the one my family has seven generations of history in—took away those rights. I sometimes wonder if I should have been here, fighting for our rights, rather than overseas.”
I will readily admit that transgender athletes raise some issues, and that reasonable people can disagree.
But.
When you're setting out to publicly harass and embarrass a young human teenager, you have lost the plot. When you are arguing that the First Amendment protects your right to make a 15 year old human child feel unwelcome and unsafe, you have lost any right to sympathy.
The lawsuit has been brought by the Institute for Free Speech, a law firm that is based not in New Hampshire, but in DC. They were founded in 2005 as the Center for Competitive Politics. They have ties to the State Policy Network and the Council for National Policy as well as Koch, Uhlein, and Bradley piles of money. Their previous claim to fame is going to court to help establish SuperPACs as a thing.
Plymouth is a town of under 7,000 people right in the middle of the state. Nathaniel Hawthorne dies there. How did they get connected to a big time DC firm?
Who knows. But the protesters aren't done. Though Foote and Fellers can't attend, the September 24 game drew a host of folks wearing the pink wristbands, including this fine group--
None of these folks live in the Bow and Dunbarton School District. And despite their Libertarian streak, they seem to feel that some folks should not be able to live free. But that hasn't stopped a storm from being unleashed on the district, as captured by Sruthi Gopalakrishnan for the Concord Monitor and NHPR:
Alex Zerba stood before a crowded school board meeting in Bow on Monday night, scanning the seated crowd of unfamiliar faces around her in the Bow High School auditorium.
“We don't want you supporting our girls the way you are,” said Zerba, a parent of a girls varsity soccer player. “You are not a parent of any of these girls on the soccer team. We are asking you to stop your protesting. It is hurting our girls.”
“I'm disappointed in every one of you,” said Herbert looking at the school board members. “You just silenced somebody who had a different opinion. There was nothing wrong. There was no voices, there was no mean words. It wasn't directed at anybody.”
Of course it was directed at somebody. As the superintendent pointed out, the pink bands were not intended to support women in sports, but to protest a specific player, to tell a young human being that she was not welcome, that she was not okay.
This is the inevitable end of trans panic sports bans-- either a young athlete is attacked, her identity questioned, and her family forced to endure some kind of genital or dna check because the parent of a defeated opponent demands proof. I have never been entirely clear on what the purpose of trans sports bans is supposed to be-- convince young humans not to be trans because they won't be able to play sports? To drive young trans athletes underground? But the actual effect of these bans is quite clear; they result in the harassment and mistreatment of young human beings.
Yes, I recognize there are many viewpoints and that this is a relatively new issue that we are collectively struggling to deal with. But if you cannot start from the foundational understanding that trans human beings are, in fact, actual real human beings, then you are not going to arrive at any place good.
