Should We Pay More For The Best Teachers?

Matt Yglesias has touched off social media discussion of one of the great zombie ideas of education-- the idea we should pay more for the best teachers. So let me explain, again, why this is not a great idea. 

I will admit up front that I did not read the full post because A) it is behind a paywall and B) Matt Yglesias is kind of a tool. 

Problem #1: "Best"

Modern ed reform has been obsessed with the idea of identifying high-quality teachers and low-quality teachers with hopes of getting more of one and firing all of the others. So folks have been working on the problem for twenty-some years-- and they haven't come up with anything remotely useful. 

There was the travesty that was VAM/VAAS sauce, a system that promised to translate the low-quality data from the Big Standardized Tests into data about which teachers were awesome (or not). The idea was that magical maths would allow us to figure out what a student would have scored in some teacher-neutral parallel universe, and then whatever difference there was between the imaginary parallel universe student score and the actual this world score-- that difference was either to the credit or blame of the teacher. It was always a bizarre idea, and that was even before we got to the question of how to use that score--based on math and reading test results-- to evaluate teachers who didn't teach math or reading (or, in some cases, even that student).

Anyway, that was one of our brightest ideas about how to find the "best" teachers, and it was (and, unfortunately in some states today, is) a terrible idea. 

We can all agree there are good teachers and not-so-great ones. We just can't agree on who they are. Pick out the teacher at your school who you think is most obviously awesome; somewhere out there are students who think that teacher was awful. Pick out a teacher you think is obviously awful; somewhere out there are students who think that teacher was one of the best they ever had. 

Maybe we can agree that there can be broad agreement on the very best and the very worst doing the work. That still leaves the vast middle. When I was in the classroom, I would say I was pretty ok, but I don't imagine I was "best." How do the pretty ok teachers do in world where teachers are paid according to their best-ness, and how would we parse out the various gradations of pretty ok-ness?

Nor should we discuss a teacher's quality as if it's an immutable quality. A teacher's work varies over time, influenced by a variety of factors. Personal stuff. The students in the classroom. The acquired skills over time. The material given to teach. Did I teach every month of every year at the same level of pretty ok-ness? Absolutely not. Really, it's not as accurate to say I was a pretty ok teacher as it is to say I usually did pretty ok work. 

In short, figuring out which teachers are "best" is a huge challenge. It makes far more sense to talk about doing the best work, but even then, we're talking about measuring the almost-immeasurable (particularly since some of the outcomes we're talking about don't become visible for years after the work is done. 

Does this mean we shouldn't talk about how to do the best work? Absolutely not. But trying to tie large stakes to it will not help.

Problem #2: Schools are not businesses

"We should reward the good people and fire the bad ones-- just like in the business world," say fans of this model whose brains have conveniently failed to retain examples like Enron and Donald Trump and every mediocre business guy who kept falling upwards while hardworking high-quality working stiffs lost their jobs. 

But even if we accept the meritocratcic business world fairy tale, there's another important way in which public schools are not businesses.

Public schools do not make money.

Consider how merit pay works in the business world. "We collected an extra pile of money this year," says CEO Gotbux, "So to show our gratitude to those of you helped us make that extra money, we are going to share some of the extra money with you."                                            

But public school districts don't make money. There is no extra profit to share with the folks doing the actual work. 

So merit bonuses can't work. And for the same reason, merit pay is a problem. 

One of the reasons many school boards like the current pay system is that it makes the payroll costs for the coming year very predictable. That's helpful, because the revenues are also pretty predictable; school districts don't expect sudden windfalls of revenue. School districts are dealing with a finite pie, so it's helpful to know ahead of time exactly how many slices they have to cut that pie into.

Try to imagine a school board going to the taxpayers and saying, "Evaluations are done, and we have so many teachers with top-quality ratings this year that we will have to raise taxes to meet our payroll obligations." Yeah, that's not happening. 

What's much easier to imagine is a district saying, "Here's the budget. We can afford five Best Teachers this year." Which actually is a lot like business. And if the Best Teacher ratings are set by factors that the school can't control, like test scores? Then expect the district to say, "Congratulations to all 157 teachers rated Best this year. Your merit pay bump will be $2.98." 

With a finite pie, the end result must be competition among teachers for a slice. That means the very thing a school would hope for will not happen.

Principal: Mrs. Teachwell, you have been very successful teaching students about binomial fricatives, so I'd like you to share your techniques with the rest of the department.

Mrs. Teachwell: Not on your life. My kid is going to need braces next year. 

Maybe the board or the state will kick in extra money to sweeten the Best Teacher pot. But there is one other popular way to get the money for merit bumps-- take it from the base salary of everybody else. 

Look, Robert Pondiscio has a point when he observes that with 4 million teachers, most are going to be regular folks and not superstars, and trying to get 4 million superstars is not the path to better schools. Figure out how to help every teacher to do better and best work (pro tip: a system that punishes them for being less than superstars is not the way). Extra pay for the Best does not further that goal. It just turns schools into teacher Thunderdomes.

Problem #3: The Premise

Merit-related proposals too often assume that teachers already know the secret of how to be Best-- they're just waiting for someone to either threaten or bribe them. This is both insulting and nonsensical. 

And if the premise is that this approach will retain teachers, ask yourself how likely it is that teachers will be enticed by a system that rewards them for random "data" or for factors beyond their control (like which students they get to teach).

Some supporters on the dead bird app follow another old pattern-- they don't so much want to reward Best teachers as they want to punish bad ones. The parity can rankle, and believe me, you can find teachers in any school building in the country who say, either quietly or not-so-quietly some angry version of "I can't believe that person gets paid the same as I do." A teacher who isn't getting the work done is supremely irritating to the teacher who has to clean up after them.

But whenever someone talks about getting rid of all the Bad Teachers, I am reminded of an observation from W. Edwards Deming, to the effect that if there is dead wood in your organization, there are only two possible explanations-- either it was dead when you hired it or you killed it. Either way, you are looking at a management problem.       

I get it.             

There is something hugely enticing about the idea of a pay system that rewards excellent teachers (and doesn't reward less-than-excellent teachers). It is a great concept, but the devil is in the details-- and any such system is all details. And the critical details remain unsolved puzzles.                

ICYMI: Essay Contest Edition (5/3)

 Once a year, I'm the director of a local writing competition for high school students in the various school districts of the county. The competition is in honor of one of the giants of English teaching in our area; she graduated from here, worked in the original OSS, became a lady CEO, taught English, and left the classroom only because there was such a thing as a mandatory retirement age (you can read about her here). 

The contest has run for thirty-some years, and it is precisely the sort of thing that cheatbots make challenging, though historically our winners write way better than bots do, and I work hard to design a bot-resistant prompt. But it's a fun time for me-- part of my duties include being first reader and culling the hundreds of entries down to a manageable stack for table judges. 

So that has been my week. But I still have a reading list for you. 

The Atlantic Platforms Charter School Propaganda: Anti-Woke Edition

Paul Thomas responds to the Atlantic piece about how awesome charters are and how anti-racism is killing public schools. 

Oligarchs and Christian Nationalists Aim to Plunder Massachusetts Public Schools

Maurice Cunningham peels back the masks on another Massachusetts assault on public education, and reminds us that National Parents Union is none of those three things.

AI gives more praise, less criticism to Black students

Lots of implications to mull over in this finding, written up by Jill Barshay at Hechinger Report.

Most School Vouchers Go To Students Who Never Attended Public Schools

Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has a nifty bar chart that lays out in quick and simple manner where the taxpayer-funded vouchers are actually going.

Epic founders Harris, Chaney bound for criminal trial as 2-year preliminary hearing ends

One of the nation's major charter school scams might actually result in jail time for the scammers who pocketed $22 million of taxpayer dollars in their massive fraud.

Why We Are Suing the Department of Education

It's not just that the Office of Civil Rights in the Education Department has decided only the civil rights of white guys are being threatened-- it's that they're being anti-transparent about what they are and are not doing. ProPublica has sued, and here explains why.

What Will It Take To Get AI Out of Schools?

Don't know how I missed this last week, but this New Yorker piece from Jessica Winter is well worth the read (if you can get to it).

The Big Tech Backlash

Jennifer Berkshire looks at some of the pushback against ed tech, including some of the surprising places it's turning up.

We Created the Lotus Eaters

Matt Brady writes about the students who are comfortable non-starters, and how to get them back into work.

I Write the Songs

On songwriting, music teaching, and mistakes. From Nancy Flanagan.

Broken Record

Audrey Watters finds herself writing about the same stuff, again, again. And yet, it is stuff that needs to be said, again, again.

Seniors and Kids as Profit Centers: Medicare Advantage and School Vouchers Exploit Both

Bruce Lesley explains how Medicare Advantage and school vouchers are manifesting the same philosophy to harvest profits (and provide minimum service).

Ohioans: Please Do Not Sign Petition to Get Referendum to End Property Taxes on the November Ballot

Jan Resseger has an important message for folks in Ohio.

Standardized testing and scripted lessons are failing both teachers and students

Johnathan Kantrowitz is talking about Australia in this post, but some of the description sure sounds familiar (including panic over declining test scores).

The Testing Ritual and the Steakhouse Reality

Testing, staffing, and working lunches-- TC Weber looks at it all with one raised eyebrow and more than a few questions.

Problems with the DOE's AI Guidance

There has been a lot of noise and wrestling about with the New York City schools' attempt to craft AI guidance, and while I don't generally look to NYC for guidance on anything, these five objections from Leonie Haimson are an excellent guide to the sort of questions you should be asking about your local school district's attempt to cope with AI. If you want more, Chalkbeat covers the parent rebellion here.

Kent State President claps back at Vivek. It's about damn time.

A university leader actually calls out a politician's dumb ideas. More of this, please. Stephen Dyer has the details.

At Forbes.com this week, I wrote about some important characteristics of rural schools. 

I don't love the Black Eyed Peas, but I do like an unexpected team-up.

ICYMI: Swearing Not Procrastinate More Edition (3/29)

I swear I am going to get my taxes done today, ignoring the semi-decent weather outside and every other thing that attracts my attention. In the meantime, I'm going to throw this week's reading list at you. Remember, sharing is always helpful.

Education is the Enemy

Jess Piper looks at more anti-education policy in Missouri, where a policy penalizing colleges for giving students low-earning degrees would end up penalizing any school that trains teachers.

Penn has an AI problem

The student newspaper at University of Pennsylvania says the school's leaders are making an AI-addled mess.

Telling Your Story and Our Story

Greg Wyman looks at the importance of telling your story-- particularly when you are a public school facing charter and private school competition.

Belleville parents outraged after students invited to do community service at ice detention facility

A New Jersey school's 11th graders get a surprise invitation from an unwelcome facility.

What ICE Detention Does to a Child

Andrea Gonzalez-Ramirez looks at the impact of the regime's detention camps on the children. This is a rough story to read, but a necessary one.

Rediscovering Knowledge as the Key to Reading

This piece if by Daniel Willingham and E.D. Hirsch at Education Next, so you will probably disagree with some of what's here, but there are also a few points worth thinking about. Content knowledge does indeed provide a foundation for reading comprehension.

How Can You Tell If a Curriculum Truly Builds Knowledge?

I'm not always a Wexler fan, but this post offers some useful ideas about telling whether a not a curriculum is really building knowledge or is just farting around with a topic.

Proposal to relax voucher program’s testing mandate advances in Tennessee House

Voucher programs repeatedly run into hard truth that voucher students do poorly on the BS Test. That could be a call for them to do a better job teaching students, but the Tennessee GOP would prefer to go in a different direction. Melissa Brown at Chalkbeat.

How Will Trump’s Supporters React To Seeing School Vouchers Program Increase Chinese Influence?

Jeff Bryant takes a closer look at some of the groups looking to cash in on the federal voucher program, and why the right wingers who support the vouchers might have some problems with the profiteers lining up to benefit from it. Forward this to your favorite GOP state lawmaker who thinks free federal voucher money would be great.

What It Takes to Flip a Seat

Jennifer Berkshire reports on yet another Democrat who won in part by standing up for public education.

A Federal Court Blocks RFK Jr.'s Anti-Vaccine Agenda – But the Threat to Children Is Not Over

Bruce Lesley looks at a successful court challenge to one of the bananapants policies that RFK Jr. imposed on us. That may keep your students slightly safer, but the fight is not over yet.

Claremont in the Crosshairs

New Hampshire has a court decision on the books that, as in other states, says it has to fix its shabby damned school funding system. Now some folks are trying to make that decision go away. Andru Volinsky, lawyer from the original decision, explains what's going on now.

Cutting State Funding while Intensifying Test-and-Punish Won’t Improve Public Schools

Hard to believe we are still trying to make this point after decades, but Jan Resseger is here to do the work.

Stephen Miller Pushes States to Pass Laws Denying Public Education for Undocumented Students

Jan Resseger is doing double duty this week by looking at reactions to Stephen Miller's call for Texas to bar undocumented immigrants from education.

Grade Retention is Bad Education Policy

Thomas Ultican takes a look at just some of the evidence that third grade retention policies do more harm than good (and the good is not for students, but for the district).

A Bill to Prohibit Changes to SC Monuments

I can't imagine what it's like to try teaching history in one of these confederate states that require folks to not just avoid badmouthing confederate figures, but also to actually revere these traitors. But here comes South Carolina with a "hands off our rebel statuary" bill. Steve Nuzum has the story.

You Do Not, In Fact, Have to Hand It to Them

Audrey Watters is here to remind you that, among other things, tech billionaires make predictions that are marketing baloney and also very wrong.

OpenAI's slop machine Sora is dead. We're all better off without it

True that. Sora was a blight, and now it's gone. Cross your fingers that nothing worse springs up to replace it.

The Hypocrisy at the Heart of the AI Industry

Alex Reisner at The Atlantic (this should be a gift article). The tag line says it-- "Tech companies believe in intellectual property, but not yours."

AI is not superhuman

Benjamin Riley continues to be one of my favorite AI growlers. Here he looks for a good metaphor for AI.

This week at Forbes.com I looked at a study that suggests that computer tutors work better when they aren't lying about how human they are. 

Reg Kehoe and his Marimba Queens worked for a couple of decades starting in the thirties; they played their last gig in 1962. They were out of Lancaster, PA and made a yearly appearance at Hersheypark. That hardworking bass player was out of Hershey. The woman next to the maraca player was Reg's wife. 

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Free Market Myths and School Choice

Why the reformster love affair with the free market?

Every version of school choice we've been pitched over the past few decades is wedded to some form of free market dynamics. And yet it doesn't have to be.

Educational choice can take place within the public school framework. School districts in my area all offer a choice between a traditional school path or a career-technology school, and that's in districts that are relatively small. A school district could offer different educational paths under one roof, which, as I've argued before, would be less expensive for taxpayers and more flexible for students, who would face far fewer switching costs if they changed their minds (as teens do). The taxpayers would retain ownership of the facilities and could exercise accountability through their elected school board.

School choice within the public system certainly comes with some challenges (New Hampshire is wrestling with some of them while contemplating open enrollment). But there's no particular reason to assume that school choice must be wedded to a free market system. In fact, Doug Harris, Professor and Department Chair of Economics at Tulane, who has done plenty of reformster-friendly work, has laid out why the free market is a poor match for education. 

And yet, reformsters stay deeply attached to the free market, to the point that some appear to be more committed to the "convert education to free market commodity" part than the "give families educational choices" part. Schools are called "government schools" with contempt because such a system is, to some folks, a self-evident afront to free marketry. Calling public education a "monopoly" misuses the term to push the assumption that education is already in a free market framework. 

So what drives this attachment to the idea of unleashing free market forces in education? What are the myths behind this tunnel vision?

The free market is a magical moral good.

There are folks who just believe that a free market is in and of itself good, that even if it doesn't produce better or more equitable results, the country is still better off with a free market system. As myths go, it's a pretty one. Honestly, these believers might have more intellectual integrity than followers of any of the rest of these myths.

Competition makes things better.

For some folks, it is a fundamental truth that competition increases excellence. If public schools just had some private competition, the reasoning goes, they would be motivated to new heights of excellence.

But this assumes that some schools know how to be more awesome-- they just don't bother unless sufficiently threatened. Which is both wrong and insulting. 

Nor does competition always foster excellence. History is littered with companies that won the free market competition by means other than excellence, from VHS players to a whole lot of cable channels. The free market does not foster superior products; it fosters superior marketing. Yes, excellence can be a marketing tool, but there are many other ways to compete for market share.

Free market competition is excellent at sorting both customers and businesses into tiers-- rich and poor, winners and losers. The market is good at carving itself into different sectors of more or less privilege. That's not what we want for education; the national goal is not supposed to be getting some folks an educational Lexus and others an educational 1996 Kia. 

Plus, after years of free market education, we have plenty of data to tell us that it is not making education more excellent, at all.

Money is the only motivator that matters.

Equally cynical is the assumption among marketeers that the only thing that really matters in getting people to work in the education space is then chance to make money. That's why we need to attract people to leadership roles who have a track record of making money, and then we have to free them of the rules and regulations that would frustrate their drive to make money. 

Choice schools need to be run like unhampered visionary CEOs, because only the model of a profitable business makes sense for-- well, anything at all. Education. Health care. You name it. You have to model it on a business.

Foot-based accountability.

Free marketeers believe in voting with your feet. If a school is terrible, customers will desert it and it will suffer a deserved death, to be replaced by some newer, better school. But voting with your feet is not going to exert any serious market pressure.

A charter or private school only needs a small sliver of the market to stay in business. Witness charters like Success Academy that actively chase away families that don't fit their mold, not so much customers voting with feet as it is schools voting with their boot. 

But free marketeers believe that the education market should be unregulated, and that operators should be free to do as they please, and foot-based accountability was all that was needed. This goes all the way back to Milton Friedman, who was sure that nobody needed to make laws about racial discrimination because the market would iron all that out. That turned out not to be true, at all, and it holds true for schools that teach everything from flat earth theory to creationism.

Individuals take responsibility, but not for Those People.

For many fans of the invisible hand, free markets means individual responsibility. If you need a commodity from the market, getting it is your problem. So is making sure it's not junk. 

Here's the other accountability piece. It's not just that accountability is to the customer, but that there is no accountability to society at large. If a school is teaching racism or flat earth theory or The Flintstones were a documentary, that's the family's problem, as if releasing a bunch of mis-educated adults into society doesn't cause problems for everyone else.

For these marketeers, choice isn't really the issue at all. What is the issue is that the government is taking their tax dollars to help educate Those Peoples' Children, and that's gotta be some kind of socialism. If Those People want to send their kids to a decent school, then let Those People pay for it themselves. 

And if that means some people send their kids to a lousy school, well, that's fine. These marketeers don't think the market's tendency to pick winners and losers (they might say it "reveals" or "certifies" winners and losers) is a feature. not a bug, for putting people in their proper place. Public education is just one more commie social safety net that is working against the laws of nature. 

The kind of choice that should exist is an individual one, and the choices you have will depend on what you can afford. Which is, ironically, pretty much what we have already with real estate based school district funding.

What about culture warriors?

These folks muddy the waters because they are not interested in school choice at all. They would like to send taxpayer dollars to private Christian schools, and they would like to inject Christian Nationalism into whatever public schools they aren't able to dismantle. The rhetoric of school choice was just conveniently sitting there, and it provides some cover for their actual aims, but watch these folks oppose LGBTQ charters and Islamic voucher schools. They've teamed up with the marketeers, but like the previous alliance between Free Marketeers and those seeking educational equity solutions, this alliance between two groups that don't really have the same aims is probably eventually doomed.

Could there be myth-free school choice?

Absolutely. There's a whole other argument to had about the mythical nature of a free market, that all markets are created and maintained by government and unavoidably rigged in one direction or another. The mechanics of school choice do not require a free market system. It does not require schools to be run like a business. 

School choice doesn't have to be constructed on a framework of market dynamics. In fact, school choice could be done much better without those things-- provided we accept the notion that the goal is to get the best possible education to every student, regardless of zip code. We could do it, if the goal were actual educational choice and not the conversion of a public societal good into one more commodities market. And that remains a fundamental problem with the modern "school choice" movement. 

 

American Federation for Children Ready To Cash In On Federal Vouchers

States continue to line up for the new federal school vouchers program, and Betsy DeVos's American Federation for Children is ready to make the best of it.

The vouchers are a feature of the Trump's Big Beautiful Bill; they're a tax credit scholarship set up where you can contribute to a scholarship [sic] grant organization (SGO) that manages the voucher money, and in return you get to stiff Uncle Sam for 100% of what you contributed. It's a dollar for dollar tax credit; there is no more generous tax dodge anywhere in the tax code.

Individual taxpayers can only donate up to $1,700, which will make racking up the big bucks a challenge in some states. But AFC thinks they've found a way around that.

AFC, you will recall, is a right-wing organization, well-connected to the DeVos family (Betsy had to quit being the chief of AFC in order to take the education secretary gig). They pushed hard for school privatization via "choice" for many, many years. Current CEO is Tommy Schultz, who has been with AFC for almost a decade.

Schultz went on the David Webb Show (Webb is a right wing talking head) to explain what AFC has in mind.

Webb notes that "as a scholarship granting organization" AFC is putting "real muscle" here.

Schultz explains the "transformational" tax credit scholarship bill allows people to donate up to $1,700 to a scholarship organization and get a "dollar for dollar tax credit." If you owe the IRS $2,000 in taxes, he explains, just give $1,700 to a scholarship organization and only owe the feds $300. Which is true, but doesn't leave any more money in your hands than you were going to have just paying your taxes. Schultz is pitching that as a reduction of your tax liability. This is not a surprise-- this will be and has often been the pitch, because it's more appealing than "You can personally add to the government's deficit." 

That will "free up billions of dollars," Schultz says. Frees from what? Being captured by the feds, I guess. He's going to keep pushing the notion that this will give students "access to a better education," which is the central lie of the whole program. Because first, there is no reason to believe that vouchers lead to better education, and lots of reasons to believe that they don't. Second, vouchers systems make sure that private schools retain the right to discriminate against LGBTQ persons, students with the "wrong" religious faith, students who have academic issues, students with special needs, and any students the school just doesn't want to accept for whatever reason. Laws are written to deliberately preserve that power to discriminate. 

Schultz notes that "the beauty and elegance" of this new voucher dodge is that it's a change to the tax code, and not, say, a piece of education policy with oversight and accountability attached. "There won't be any nefarious Department of Education strings attached to it." No accountability. No oversight. No rules. 

"We are very much invested in making sure that millions of kids can get access to the best education possible..." says Schultz, which, again, is baloney, because if that were the actual goal, one would call for vouchers big enough to cover tuition costs or require voucherfied schools to accept all students or demand oversight and accountability to insure that participating private schools were, in fact, best.

Oh, and tutoring, too, Schultz adds, because choicers are trying hard to sell the possibility that these federal voucher funds might be used for tutoring. Because if people who have no intention of moving their kids out of public schools can be convinced that they will gain something from this program, maybe that will broaden support for it.

Why is AFC getting into this. Schultz says they really want to scale the fundraising that this will unleash. "Our scholarship entity will be acting as a platform for other scholarship groups that they can tap into." A small, state-based SGO might be able to scrape together a few million in $1,700 increments, but AFC thinks they can sweeten that pot considerably, first by throwing $10 million into a "donor awareness, and marketing and acquisition campaign" to help scale the program "all across the country."

What does that even mean? Will this giant SGO focus on fundraising for smaller SGOs, and will that result in AFC having a controlling interest in the voucher program for many states? Will AFC have unlimited freedom to contribute as much as they want to state programs? Schultz doesn't explain more; AFC press materials indicate a partnership with Odyssey which is a company that...well...is

the only provider in the country that offers an automated, end-to-end school choice platform. Our best-in-class technology connects families with school choice programs that provide funding for school tuition and eligible educational resources that align with the unique talents, gifts, and needs of each student.

Everyone uses the word "scale" a lot. Webb says, "Again, real skin in the game" and I'm not sure whose skin in which game he means or who has been putting fake skin in there.

Webb talks about "guardrails against abuse." He swears he's a school choice OG, but there are good and bad charters and magnets and ideological, too; "it's not just about private and public." There isn't really a question here, but Schultz takes a pause and leaps in.

What this program, like state programs before it, is going to do is put "funds in the hands of families" and "really, the most accountable way to implement any policy at the state or federal level when it comes to education is to not have the bureaucrats involved." This is just dumb. The notion that parental response will be sufficient to keep private and charter schools from fraud and mischief and general incompetence has already been disproven many many many many times. Private and charter schools only have to snooker a small slice of the market in any given year, so losing "customers" is no big deal-- certainly not a motivator for higher quality. But more importantly, if we depend on parents saying, "Well, that year was a bust. We're not going back," then we are throwing away a valuable year of a child's education so that market forces can magically take effect.

I don't know if Schultz is one of those people with a childlike belief in a magical invisible hand of the market, or if he's just blowing smoke because he's one of those folks who thinks business titans shouldn't have to answer to anyone, including government. Either way, his assertion is baloney.

But he will double down. When you see parents choosing the best schools for their sons and daughter, he argues, you really see a flourishing marketplace, including better test scores and lower incidences of fraud (like the bad stuff that has crippled our public education system for 30 or 40 years, he adds). He does not offer a specific example of this magic, because no such example exists. But he will rant about the public system, rail about low test scores (schools with no students proficient, he says, ignoring what "proficient" means). He cites Florida, Ohio, and Indiana as places with "booming" school choice ecosystems going on and it's true they have lots of unregulated unaccountable choice in those states, but nothing to suggest that it's helping education at all (also, bringing up Ohio in the context of fraud-free education is a bold choice). 

The claims just keep piling up. Taxpayers are saving money. Kids are getting better educational outcome with all the research. These are not true statements. Marketplace competition makes things better, because parents can vote with their feet. Feet-based voting does not help anything, and smart market-loving economists like Douglas Harris have explained why the free market does not fit with education. 

But Schultz is going to roll right through the usual talking points. These new vouchers will really help the schools, like the Catholic schools, that are trying to help lower and middle class families. He did make a mistake there and talking about helping schools instead of helping kids, but that really is one of the points of choice-- to funnel public taxpayer dollars to private schools. And we already know, in state after state, that vouchers are mostly serving well-off families whose kids were already in private, mostly religious schools. The "We'll save the poor kids" story is inspiring-- it's just not reality.

Webb wants us to remember that anyone can donate to the federal voucher program, not just parents. Schultz agrees. Call your tax professional and learn how you can get in on this. There will be other national SGOs besides AFC (count on it). "Every single American can become a philanthropist," Schultz says. "By giving us their money," he does not add. "This can bring billions of dollars off the sidelines," he says for about the third time, so we should note that this money was not going to sit on the sidelines, but was going to help the federal government pay its bills. 

By the way, we spend a lot of money on education and the test scores didn't go up, so we need to send money to unaccountable unregulated schools to make a better future for America. "We are the best, most free, most prosperous nation in the world," Schultz says, but if we have a mediocre education system, then boo. How we got to be the best nation in the world with that mediocre education system is a mystery he does not address. Also unaddressed-- how SGOs typically get a 5% to 10% cut of the money they handle. 

Authors Sue NVIDIA Over AI Theft

AI companies are knowingly using pirated copies of published works to train their bots, according to a class action lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Northern California. Five authors have filed a copyright lawsuit against NVIDIA, a major tech company in Santa Clara, California. 

You may remember NVIDIA as the folks who made your computer video gaming run smoothly, but they are in the AI biz these days, including Large Language Models, more commonly known as chatbots. They're doing okay. In 2023, Larry Ellison and Elon Musk were among a group of tech overlords who met NVIDIA's chief for what Ellison described as "an hour of sushi and begging" to get a larger allocation of the company's H100 GPU. In March of 2024, they became the third company in U.S. history to reach market capitalization of $2 trillion-with-a-T.

Lined up against them are Abdi Nazemian (Like a Love Story), Brian Keene (Ghost Walk), Stewart O'Nan (Last Night at the Lobster), Andres Dubus III (The Garden of Last Days), and Susan Orlean (The Orchid Thief). I have no read any of their stuff, but it is apparent many people have, though I don't think they are collectively worth $2 trillion.

I have learned a lot reading this lawsuit. For one thing, there are things called "shadow libraries" aka "pirate libraries." (I didn't know about them, but Wikipedia does.) It should come as no surprise that just as the digital world makes pirated copies of music and movies available, it also provides free access to print media. Books, ebooks, and scholarly media (those journal articles that are behind a really expensive paywall). 

In particular, the lawsuit points to Anna's Archive, which is apparently the big name in pirated text these days. (I'm not going to link to it-- if you want to mess with that kind of theft, you'll have to find it on your own.) Pirate libraries are composed by violating the copyright of the various collected works. 

So here's the story the lawsuit tells. In August 2023, NVIDIA approached legitimate publishers in an attempt to license mountains of text in order to train their chatbot.

But on information and belief, NVIDIA could not secure this fast access to the huge quantity of books it needed through publishers. As one book publisher told NVIDIA, it was “ not in a position to engage directly just yet but will be in touch.” In 2023, NVIDIA had “chatted with multiple publishers . . . but none [] wanted to enter into data licensing deals.”

So they approached Anna's Archive hoping to acquire millions of pirated copies of books for "pre-training data for our LLMs." Anna's Archive offers high-speed access for a fee, and NVIDIA executives asked about that kind of access. What would it look like.

Anna's Archive replied, in effect, "You guys know that our entire library consists of pirated copies, right? Maybe you should figure out if you're okay with that." NVIDIA executives would (real quote coming) need to let Anna's Archive know "when you have decided internally that this is something that you can pursue. We have wasted too much time on people who could not get internal buy-in."

It took NVIDIA just a couple of days to decide that they were perfectly okay making a deal to use this vast library or pirated works-- all of Anna's Archive, plus works from Internet Archive (previously found to be copyright infringement). NVIDIA was promised 500 terrabytes of data. They also hit up other shadow libraries.

A few months later, they unveiled Nemotron-4 15B. As was usual, the training data used to raise up this AI beast was kept a super secret, but the plaintiffs believe that it could not have been done without using that vast library of pirated works (including their own). 

And since NVIDIA offered the NeMo Megatron framework for customers to build and train their own AI. "As part of this process, NVIDIA assisted and encouraged its customers" to go ahead and pirate those works some more by downloading and using that same dataset.

So the allegation is that NVIDIA used pirated works, knew it was using pirated works, and then offered to share those pirated works. With a few smoking emails to back it up.

NVIDIA says, who, us? We didn't violate copyright laws. Everything we did was legal, and also, fair use.

It's the fair use defense we'll want to watch. An earlier lawsuit by authors suing Anthropic over the training data used for its Claude AI was decided last summer, with the judge declaring that using the stolen works to train the AI was "exceedingly transformative" and therefor okey dokey fair use. Also last summer, a group of authors (including Sarah Silverman and Ta-Nehisi Coates) lost their similar lawsuit against Mark Zuckerberg's Meta. The judge in that case said it “is generally illegal to copy protected works without permission,” but in this case, the plaintiffs failed to present a compelling argument that Meta’s use of books to train their chatbot Llama caused “market harm.”

I don't suppose it will be easy to ever show market harm. ChatGPT slurps up my horror novel and then spits out fifty bad horror novels-- is that competition that does me market harm? 

So it's not looking good for this newest lawsuit. Is it theft if someone takes my work without paying for it and uses it to power their trillion dollar company's newest product? It sure seems like it, but it seems that the law is having trouble keeping up with the new kinds of thievery that technology makes possible. Mind you, if I stole a copy of Microsoft office and didn't use it compete with Microsoft-- just use it to run my business-- I'm pretty sure my claim of fair use would not get past the courts.

 And the AI industry--which depends on this kind of theft as to keep costs down in their business model-- certainly can't be counted on to do the right thing. So we're stuck in this shitty place where a monster industry bases its product on the theft-without-pay of other peoples' work, and nobody can do anything about it.

What does any of this have to do with education?

Maybe nothing directly, but I want you to think about all of this the next time somebody wants to talk to you about "ethical" use of AI in schools. Then ask them how one ethically uses a fundamentally unethical product.

MS: Miraculous Voucher-Fueled Irony

Mississippi legislators are fiddling with school choice. Some of their fiddling is very limited, and some is just kind of odd, given the context of Mississippi education these days. 

In the senate, SB 2002  is a bill for public school choice, called open enrollment in some states and portability in others. It would give students the chance to pick a public school outside of their own attendance area. Education Committee Chairman Dennie DeBar said that's as far as he's willing to go. As J.T. Mitchell reports for Supertalk:

“This is as far as we’re willing to go. I’m not in favor of vouchers,” DeBar said in regard to universal school choice that includes using public funds to help parents pay for private school tuition. “This creates competition amongst our schools to make them better.”

The house, however, is willing to go quite a bit further. They've launched HB 2, the Mississippi Education Freedom Act, which would establish Magnolia Student Accounts, an education savings account style voucher.

The bill proposes most of the usual features. A few notable quirks:

* Half of the vouchers are designated for students currently in public school, half for those already in private school.

* Vouchers will be awarded in a first come, first served priority order. Families with under 100% of area median income. Next those between 100% and 200%, then 200% to 300%. Then "all other eligible students." 

* Each of those eligible groups has a different voucher amount limits. It's the total funding formula, not to exceed-- $4,000 for the under-100% crowd, $2,000 for the next group, and so on. There are also limits on the total that can go to one household.

The voucher dollars can be spent on the usual stuff-- tuition, fees, supplies, equipment, uniforms, testing. Plus a whole category for "technological devices" including television, videogame console or accessory, home theater or related audio equipment, and virtual reality products. 

House Speaker Jason White authored HB 2. He explains his support:

White is a longtime advocate for school choice, the idea of giving parents more of a say in where their children are educated without being restricted by their neighborhoods. In a statement, he pointed to Mississippi’s recent gains in education, including a No. 16 overall ranking and nation-leading improvements in reading. He said the Mississippi Education Freedom Act “builds on that success.”

I am not going to get into the Mississippi "miracle" at this point, other than to say that something certainly seems to have happened, but as always with education, it appears to have more to do with hard work, teacher efforts, school resources, and maybe some tweaking of the data, none of which is miraculous.

But whatever "that success" was, I'm not clear on how you build on it by letting parents pull their kids away from it while simultaneously taking resources away from those successful schools. "Our schools are finally improving," declares White. "So let's give families more ways to pull their kids out of them." This does not seem like a recipe for success. 

For the sake of Mississippi students, let's hope the senate shuts down HB 2. 

Zeroing Public Ed

As the year winds down and the federal Department of Education continues to whittle away at public education, it's worth revisiting a ProPublica article by Megan O'Matz and Jennifer Smith Richards from back in October. Yes, I know that feels like a million years ago, but that, I think, is one of the troubling effects of living in the flooded zone of our moment-- things seem like they happened a million years ago and so surely they must be over. Except they aren't.

The piece highlighted how Linda McMahon has brought into the department many folks from the way-right-wing thinky tank advocacy world. 

That includes Lindsey Burke, the Heritage Foundation ed policy honcho who wrote Project 2025's education section-- which kicks off with a paean to Milton Friedman, granddaddy of school vouchers. The project's education priorities included erasing LGBTQ persons, turning federal money into stringless block grants, and most of all, vouchers for everyone. ProPublica analyzed hours of video and audio and discovered the same thing-- the Trump/McMahon department is focused on vouchers for everyone as a path out of public schools. They found one quote from Burke, speaking at an event for the Association of Classical Christian Schools in 2024

I'm optimistic that, you know, five years from now a majority of kids are going to be in a private school choice program.

The department also picked up two folks from Defending Education, formerly Parents Defending Education. You may have missed that back on April 9, 2025, this astroturf activist anti-public ed group dropped "parents" from its name, which may be the one honest thing they've done since they grabbed a pile of dark money and started harassing public schools across the country under the pretense that they were a group of concerned parents and not a professional political operation.

The department also hired heavily from McMahon's own group-- America First Policy Institute-- which came close to being blunt about their goals in a 2023 paper titled “Biblical Foundations” in which they wrote that "the Bible makes it clear that it is parents alone who shoulder the responsibility for their children.” That's the Friedman ideal-- no collective or societal responsibility to educate children and certainly no such responsibility exercised through government action. It's all on you, parents.

The Department has also partnered with another fresh Heritage hire for Heritage Action, the political action wing-- Tiffany Justice. Justice has dropped the whole "regular mom sitting at the kitchen table baking cookies and running t-shirt sale fundraisers" baloney and embraced her role as a professional political operative. Justice had made it known that she would be delighted to serve as Trump's education secretary. Justice helped launch the DEI tattling site (which only lasted about three months). 

It was Justice who gave ProPublica the clearest, most direct quote. They asked her what percentage of children should be in public school:

I hope zero. I hope to get to zero.

So much of what these folks do is best understood through that lens. Even the attempts to inject their religion into public schools can be understood as just an attempt to turn public schools into private religious schools.  

It's not about fairness or "rescuing" students from poor schools or the improving power of competition and not even about choice. It's about ending public education, about getting the government out of the business of overseeing and providing education, about ending the theft-by-taxation that forces some folks to pay to educate Those Peoples' Children, about ending a system that keeps True Believers from fully empowering their biased discrimination, and most especially about ending a system that tries to elevate people above their Proper Place in a society that doles out power and privilege only to those who Really Deserve it. And right now these folks are in the halls of power in the United States Department of Education. 

 

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. 

Enshittification: The Book

I've followed Cory Doctorow for a few years now, and was certainly among the masses of people who, when he coined "enshittification," pointed and hollered "That's it!"

What Doctorow has explained is the process by which the once-bright promise of the internet has been turned to crap. And now, rather than hunting down the various articles and posts in which he has elaborated on his idea, you can get it all in one book-- Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It.

The process by which so many services have been degraded is not, he argues, "the Great Forces of History bearing down on our moment," but a bunch of deliberate, purposeful choices that people with power didn't have to make. And it has a very clear pattern. Doctorow's simplest explanation of enshittification boils down to four steps:

1) First, platforms are good to their users.

2) Then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers.

3) Next, they abuse their business customers to claw back all the value for themselves.

4) Finally, they beconme a giant pile of shit.

Doctorow lays out the specifics by looking at several case studies-- Facebook, Amazon, iPhone, and Twitter. All once brilliantly important; now just a pain in the ass.

There are more details to understand. How competition is killed, and then regulation is also gutted, making it both impossible to enter the marketplace and to police that one monolith controlling the sector. Why everyone wants you to use their app instead of just accessing via web browser (nobody is regulating what they can do on an app with your info or money). Why you aren't allowed to fix anything yourself (because "fixing" might involve third party circumnaigation of what the techno-bros want). And how AI is so very useful for twidlling the dials so that our tech overlords can determine just how bad they can make things without losing customers over it.

There are applications for education here-- read enough about the digital publishing biz and digital textbooks will not seem like a remotely good idea. 

More importtantly, I think that should school choice ever reach a tipping point, it would be ripe for its own version of enshittification, where captured families and gig working teachers and even education vendors could be squeezed dry as investors profit.

But mostly this is a book that helps explain why everything is so crappy, and the broadest definition of enshittification-- actively and purposefully making a product worse so that it will be more profitable-- seems to be everywhere.

Doctrorow has some ideas about how to make things better. The bad news is that making your individual consumer choices aren't high on his list of Likely To Help Actions. The solutions are mostly political and regulatory, and that part of the book is well worth reading as well. This is a book that has an awful lot to say about why we are where we are right now. If you have been following Doctorow on this, you won't find anything new here, but you will find all of his ideas on the topic in one convenient location. An excellent holiday gift for people who are generally angry at the techno-world but haven't figured out what's wrong yet.

MS: Pushing for Privatization

Douglas Carswell at the Mississippi Center for Public Policy is excited about all the great privatization pushing that's been going on in the state lately.

MCPP is one more right wing thinky tank connected to and funded by all the usual folks; extra points for having taken on Carswell, a leader of the Brexit movement, as their president and CEO. 

This guy

Mississippi is a state that really aligns certain right wing priorities-- get rid of taxes, get rid of public schools, and just generally get rid of government, all of which is, I'm sure, fully disconnected from the state's past as a place where a lot of white folks really don't want to be told that they have to provide certain public services for those not-white folks. With all that in mind, they would really like to move to universal taxpayer funded vouchers and, really, a pure voucher system where no schools are funded at all and parents get a couple of bucks to go out and do who knows what for their children. 

Carswell sent out his weekly update, declaring that "school choice is our top focus" and "remains our north star." 

The House Education Freedom Committee heard some folks talk about choice, including Mississippi Center for Justice Director of Education Equity Dr. Kim Wiley, who described how Arizona's voucher system has become a budget-eating monster. 

But Carswell wants to underline an appearance from Erika Donalds, Florida's big-time money-making school choice advocate, who apparently appeared on this occasion wearing her Moms for Liberty hat. Donalds certainly earned that hat, who knew and worked with that crew even before they started the M4L shtick. It's just that you don't see her waving the M4L hat around very often. They also heard from Patrick Wolf, Arkansas's go-to guy for shoveling privatization baloney (sometimes he even writes up some "research"). Lindsey Burke, the education chief at the Heritage Foundation (where she authored the education parts of Project 2025) and now Deputy Assistant Secretary-- she has also stopped by.

Caswell explains how choice would work, and provides some specific answers. Particularly notable is his explanation of how choice wouldn't lead to overcrowding:

Under our proposal, schools would get to set capacity limits and decline additional students if full. Schools could also reject students with significant disciplinary issues, maintaining safe and focused learning environments.

This is remarkably frank; school choice would be the school's choice. "We're just too full," they could say. Or "We think your child would be detrimental to our school's learning environment." Which seems fine, because exclusionary education has never been a problem in Mississippi in the past, right? Not that I should pick on Mississippi-- virtually every taxpayer-funded voucher program includes provisions that allow private schools to exclude whatever students they want to exclude. School choice is school's choice. That right of the school to discriminate is, in practice, given far more weight than any supposed "parent power." But Caswell is a bit unusual in laying it out so plainly.

Caswell also argues that all the other states that surround them are doing it, which is quite the argument to make in the Deep South, with its collective history of educational inadequacy.

Caswell offers other weak sauce as well. Folks say that choice programs defund public schools, "but that's misleading." "Misleading" is a great word for when you want to say "Well, they're not wrong, but I'd rather get you to look at something else." Caswell offers the free market argument-- if public schools don't want to get defunded, they should beat the competition. Of course, they're not competing on a level field-- they can't, for instance, reject students for whatever trips their fancy. Caswell also throws in his version of "fund students, not systems" which is an education version of "I want insurance to fund my broken leg, not my doctor" as if the system is not the "how" of serving the student.

This is particularly odd coming from Mississippi, where the public school system has produced the "Mississippi miracle" which conservatives are holding up as proof of the awesomeness of phonics and Science of Reading, and while there may be a mountain of baloney behind that "triumph," it is being touted as an achievement by the system.

Caswell asserts that school choice works. It's pretty to think so, but that's not what the evidence says. But for an outfit that would like to do away from any instruments that require taxpayers to support education for other peoples' children, a voucher system that pays parents to give up their right to a free guaranteed education is just the thing. 

There are education reformsters who pursue choice because they believe in the magical marketplace or the benefits to students, or at least talk the talk. MCPP is not one of those. They barely discuss the educational aspects of their policy plans, which are coming on the heels of their successful drive to eliminate income tax in the state. They keep talking about "access to the educational opportunities that their kids deserve," but of course those opportunities will only be available to certain select children. 

It's worth noting that Mississippi was always a big state for segregation academies, and some private schools that are essentially segregation academies are still thriving in the state. I bet those private schools will be more than happy to get big fat taxpayer subsidies under a universal voucher plan. Like a little mini-brexit with a state payoff. 

What The Free Market Does For Education and Equality

"Unleash market forces" has been a rallying cry of both the right and some nominally on the left for the past twenty-some years. The free market and private operators do everything better! Competition drives improvement! 

It's an okay argument for toasters. It's a terrible argument for education.

The free market does not foster superior quality; the free market fosters superior marketing. And as we've learned in the more recent past, the free market also fosters enshittification-- the business of trying to make more money by actively making the product worse (see: Google, Facebook, and any new product that requires you to subscribe to get the use of basic features). 

We know what competition drives in an education market-- a competition to capture the students who give you the most marketable "success" for the lowest cost. The most successful school is not one that has some great new pedagogical miracle, but the one that does the best job of keeping high-testing students ("Look at our numbers! We must be great!") and getting rid of the high-cost, low-scoring students. Or, if that's your jam, the success is the one that keeps away all those terrible LGBTQ and heathen non-believer students. The kind of school that lets parents select a school in tune with their 19th century values.

The market, we are repeatedly told, distinguishes between good schools and bad ones. But what does the free market do really, really well?

The free market distinguished between people who have money and people who don't.

This is what school choice is about, particularly the brand being pushed by the current regime.

"You know what I like about the free market," says Pat Gotbucks. "I can buy a Lexus. In fact, not only can I buy a Lexus, but if you can't, that's not my problem. I can buy really nice clothes, and if you can't, that's not my problem. Why can't everything work like that? Including health care and education?"

It's an ideology that believes in a layered society, in a world in which some people are better and some people are lesser. Betters are supposed to be in charge and enjoy wealth and the fruits of society's labor. Lessers are supposed to serve, make do with society's crumbs, and be happy about it. To try to mess with that by making the Betters give the Lessers help, by trying to elevate the Lessers with social safety nets or DEI programs-- that's an offense against God and man.

Why do so many voters ignore major issues in favor of tiny issues that barely affect anyone? Because the rich getting richer is part of the natural order of things, and trans girls playing girls sports is not.

What will the free market do for education? It will restore the natural order. It will mean that Pat Gotbucks can put their own kids in the very best schools and assert that what happens to poor kids or brown kids of Black kids or anybody else's kids is not Pat's problem. If Pat wants a benevolent tax dodge, Pat can contribute to a voucher program, confident that thanks to restrictive and discriminatory private school policies, Pat's dollars will not help educate Those People's Children. 

Pat's kids get to sit around a Harkness table at Philips Exeter, and the children of meat widgets get a micro-school, or some half-bakes AI tutor, and that's as it should be, because after all, it's their destiny to do society's grunt work and support their Betters. 

One of the huge challenges in this country has always been, since the first day a European set foot on the North American continent, that many folks simply don't believe that it is self-evident that all people are created equal. They believe that some people are better than others--more valuable, more important, more deserving of wealth, more entitled to rule. Consequently, they don't particularly believe in democracy, either, (and if they do, it's in some modified form in which only certain Real Americans should have a vote).

The argument for the many layers of status may be "merit" or achievement or race or "culture" or, God help us, genetics. But the bottom line is that some folks really are better than others, and that's an important and real part of life and trying to fix it or compensate for it is just wrong. For these folks, an education system designed to elevate certain people is just wrong, and a system that gives lots of educational opportunities to people whose proper destiny is flipping burgers or tightening bolts is just wasteful. 

For these folks, what the free market in education means is that people get the kind of education that is appropriate for their place in life, and that the system should be a multi-tiered system in which families get the education appropriate to their status in society. And it is not an incidental feature of such a system that the wealthy do not have to help finance education for Other Peoples' Children.  

It's an ideology that exists in opposition to what we say we are about as a nation and in fact announces itself with convoluted attempts to explain away the foundational ideas of this country. Public education is just one piece of the foundation, but it's an important one.