ICYMI: Soccer Edition (4/26)

The Board of Directors is trying soccer this spring and their first match was yesterday, in the rain. They have not yet revealed any special aptitude for the game, but it does involve a lot of running hard up and down a field, and that is their preferred sporty activity. It gets us all outside and moving around while breathing air and touching grass and just generally interacting with real things and other humans, and that seems like rather a huge win. 

We have been a low-screen household since they boys were born. They have no phone, no tablet, little tech at all, and watch only a tiny bit of tv. Most of their screen time happens, as you might guess, at school. I'm at peace with that, for now, because they do need some basic computer literacy to deal with the world, and confining it to school seems like an easy way to put guardrails around it. We'll see if my old district (where the board attends school) will get more restrictive about this stuff.

The hard part of a school's tech policy is parents, so I am hoping that we don't-give-my-kid-a-phone parents will be growing in numbers (because if you want your child's school to have a policy restricting smart phone use, you could help by not giving your kid a smart phone). 

Here's the reading list for the week. Enjoy it in good health.

School Vouchers Fail the Civil Rights Test. The Federal Program Is No Exception

The 74 invited some folks to write a response to a Derrell Bradford piece plugging the federal voucher program. Jenny Muniz, Nicole Fuller, Ashley Harrington, and Hal Smith replied with this piece that absolutely nails the point contained in this sentence--

“Choice” is a compelling slogan, but with private school vouchers, it’s the school’s choice, not the families.

The Blue State Voucher Express

Jennifer Berkshire notes that Arne Duncan and the usual gang of reform-loving nominally-Democrat privatizers have decided to shill for Donald Trump's federal voucher program. Shame on the lot of them. She writes, "Ten years later, they’re back, armed with another pig and plenty of lipstick."

Public Schools Form Democratic Citizens

Jan Resseger looks at a paper from education and law scholar Derek Black.

 

The America We Choose: Reclaiming the Promise of K–12 Public Education

Greg Wyman examines some of the classic pendulum swings and what the pendulum is doing to public education right now. 

Anti-Property Tax Issue Proponents are either extremely dumb or extremely deceitful

Well, Stephen Dyer is pretty sure they're dumb as rocks, and he uses some colorful language to explain why the guys trying to get rid of Ohio's property tax are absolutely and spectacularly in the wrong.

What’s Behind the Push to Make Schools Adopt the Science of Reading?

Rachael Gabriel is a professor of Literacy Education at U of Connecticut and co-editor-in-chief of The Reading Teacher, so it's likely that she knows what the heck she is talking about, which puts her ahead of so many people pushing the science of reading these days. So go ahead- read one more piece about SoR. This one's at The Progressive.

Privatizers Hijack Indianapolis Public Schools

I did cover this story, but let Shawgi Tell zero in on it from another angle.

Local entrepreneurs cashing in on state funds from homeschool parents

Oh so many ways to cash in on Florida's voucher program.

‘Schools of Hope’ charter operator is moving into 5 Miami-Dade high schools

Speaking of Floridian grift, don't forget Schools of Hope, the program that allows charters schools to just take buildings from the public school system. It was supposed to only affect the low-achieving public schools, but-- surprise!

If It's About Volcanoes, Teach Volcanoes

Lauren Brown offers ideas about favoring content over the vagueness of teaching "reading skills." Not sure I agree with every single word of this, but it's worth thinking about.

Bloodbath at Mark Zuckerberg-backed California school as tech titan and his wife strip funding

Well, there's no actual bloodbath, but this is the New York Post coverage of Episode #1,659,437 of Why Education Should Not Depend Upon The Kindness of Rich Guys.

Tennessee rolls back testing requirements in early voucher program

Look, no school should be held "accountable" via Big Standardized Testing. But Tennessee lawmakers decided that since tests weren't showing voucher schools to be doing better than, or even as well as, public schools, the solution was to just not make voucher schools take the test. So much for accountability via an informed free market.

A school program got millions in welfare linked dollars and now officials want answers

Hats off to Star Academy, a for-profit company run by John Alvendia. They figured out how to run an education scam and a welfare scam simultaneously!

No Need Rushing for AI in Education

Thomas Ultican talks about the need to avoid AI, and quotes some other folks, including Benjamin Riley, a "uniquely free thinker."

Pivoting Edtech Towards Humanity

Dan Meyer writes about the misalignment between humanity and edtech companies, as well as the misalignments between people who want to teach and people who want to learn.

Scott Alexander is Wrong About Lying

George Evans reached out to me to say that he had written something I might like to read and by damn he was right. This is a layered essay about the reach of teachers and the ways things come back to us later. I am always happy to find new writers that I hadn't previously found and wish more folks would send me recommendations, self- or otherwise. One thing about the interwebs and the people who write about education on them is that those writers tend to cycle through quickly. Of the people I was reading and sharing with umpty-ump years ago, only a handful are still at it. So I'm always excited to meet new folks.

The Silent Surrender of Moms for Liberty Anchorage

Mathew Beck reports that one more Moms for Liberty chapter has quietly expired, this time in Anchorage, Alaska. Thoughts and prayers.

Why Is Lower Merion School District Ignoring Its Own Technology Policy?

James Horn reports on the Pennsylvania school district that has decided that students may not opt out of screens-- even though they have an opt-out policy.

How to Manufacture Crisis with Line Charts: NAEP Reading Edition

Paul Thomas shows us how to make everyone freak out with a chart (even if the chart isn't really very freak outable). With pictures.

Why are we holding third graders back in school?

Steve Nuzum looks at the problems with third grade retention, a policy that won't go away no matter how many times the problems are demonstrated.

America’s Students Need Great Public Schools for Science!

Wasn't it cool when the astronauts did that astronaut stuff? Nancy Bailey reminds us that those astronauts didn't just fall of an astronaut tree.

Kids don’t use augmented reality like adults, raising concerns for classrooms

Jonathan Kantrowitz reminds us that having small humans use devices designed for grown humans opens the door to all sorts of problems. So maybe let's rethink using those AR headsets with third graders.

This Scammer Used an AI-Generated MAGA Girl to Grift ‘Super Dumb’ Men

Have you heard of Emily Hart, the nurse who loves God, guns, and making "illegals" go away? She's a darling of the MAGA crowd, with a huge online following. And she doesn't exist, but she is helping put through school the 22-year-old med student who created her. From EJ Dickson at Wired.

What I Learned About Millionaires At Jeff Bezos's Private Retreat

Noah Hawley writing for The Atlantic tells of his strange encounter with the very rich. And while it's all worth reading, there is this--

It’s not that the wealthy become evil; it’s that their environment stops teaching them the things that nonwealthy people are forced to learn simply by living in a world that pushes back. When you can buy your way out of any mistake, when you can fire anyone who disagrees with you, when your social circle consists entirely of people who need something from you, the basic mechanism by which humans learn that other people are real goes dark.

This week at Forbes.com I looked to Ohio, where one more school board wants folks to understand that hate does, in fact, have a home in their district. And they're getting sued for it.  

Trombones and Danny Elfman-- what else could a person need. 

Subscriptions are free now and forever. Well, probably not forever. But as long as I'm alive and doing this. 

ICYMI: Spring Arrives Edition (4/12)

Spring does not officially arrive in Northwest Pennsylvania until we've had at least one snow after Easter, and this year that milestone arrived quickly. So now we're into the days of Spring, when one needs a coat in the morning and shorts in the afternoon and an umbrella and mud shoes all the time. Not my favorite season, but it has its charms. 

Here's some reading for the week. If you do not do so already, consider subscribing to some of these folks. 

Inside the Latest MAGA Attack on Undocumented Children in Public Schools

Josh Cowen takes a look at Stephen Miller and his targeting immigrant children as a way to punish them and their parents, because Stephen Miller just does not want those brown people around here. What a miserable man.

Old Dog, Old Tricks

Teacher Kate Roberts with a wonderfully eloquent argument for remembering and humanity.

If Astronauts Can Attend Public Schools. . .

Dear Bubbie reminds us about the connections between astronauts and our public schools, and the threats to those schools (particularly in Florida).

DeSantis signs Florida law to label groups as terrorists and expel student supporters

You may remember when Florida tried to declare the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the Muslim Brotherhood as terrorist organizations. Then a federal judge told them to knock it off. So now DeSantis and company have passed as new law that lets them call anyone a terrorist supporter they want to, and throw students out of the state. The AP has the story.

When a teacher ditched screens, class got harder. That may be why it worked.

Bookmark this piece by Matt Barnum at Chalkbeat. A teacher got rid of his computer assistance, and it made his job harder--but it worked better. Almost like speed, efficiency and ease are not critical needs for educational achievement.

Schools across America are quietly admitting that screens in classrooms made students worse off and are reversing years of tech-first policies

Marco Quiroz-Gutierrez at Fortune with the story of ed tech regret.

It’s Not about Cheating

Nancy Flanagan explains-- it's not about the cheating, but about the learning.

Primavera Online Charter School avoids shutdown for abysmal grades after State Superintendent Tom Horne steps in for multi-millionaire owner

The fairy tale that free market forces will provide accountability and excellence in the school choice world takes yet another hit. Turns out if you are a billionaire donor in Arizona, you can get an official to run interference for your crappy cyber-charter. Craig Harris at 12News continues to do exceptional work.

The Federal Voucher Program Is a Costly Illusion

Denise Forte at EdTrust explains why the federal voucher program is a snare and a delusion. Share this with your friend who keeps asking about the free federal money.

Legislators Imagine that Teaching the “Success Sequence” in Schools Will Stamp Out Poverty

Some legislators just can't fall out of love with the Success Sequence (aka "if you're poor it's because you made bad choices") and in Ohio, they'd like to make it mandatory teaching in public schools. Jan Resseger explains why that's not such a great idea.

Earlier ADHD diagnosis linked to better education

Not sure there's a big surprise here, but this study from Finland is worth noting. Johnathan Kantrowitz explains what they found.

Robert Sweet’s Early Influence on The Science of Reading

Nancy Bailey with a valuable explainer of one of the early influencers on the "science of reading." Along with a whole bunch of other folks who weren't reading teachers, either.

The Mississippi Reading Reform Multiverse (And Lessons Ignored)

Paul Thomas responds to yet another attempt to lionize the Mississippi not-exactly-a-miracle.

And I Would Have Gotten Away With It Too If It Weren't For Those Pesky Kids

Audrey Watters looks at the Matt Barnum piece about Sal Khan and his failed revolution.

I Don’t Want to Be Teacher of the Year

Matt Brady on why some of the folks doing the best work are not going to be winning the awards.

Billionaire Thinking Has Harmed Public Schools

Thomas Ultican on science, edtech, rich amateurs, and the freedom to teach. 

Scientists invented a fake disease. AI told people it was real

A case study in how swiftly and easily AI can pollute the information ecosystem. Christ Stokel-Walker writing for Nature. 

This week at Forbes.com, I wrote about a Louisiana court case that ended up okaying a charter school's power to discriminate against students with special needs. 

I am not generally a fan of folks showing off their kids on youtube, but this classic is just so sweet, and the father so centered on the child. They had just watched fireworks, the story goes, which is why she keeps stopping, just in case. And this song was built for ukelele. 

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ICYMI: Easter 2026 Edition (4/5)

I remain a big fan of Easter for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that it has resisted commercialization. There's a message of redemption that is hard for our culture to absorb, not to mention the idea that death is not necessarily the scariest thing we face. This year I'm also inclined to fantasize-- what if all these right-wing pretend Christians were actual Christians and so worshipped something other than anger and death. That would be something.

So if you also celebrate the day, a Happy Easter to you. And if you don't, a happy day to you, too. In the meantime, here's a list for the week. 

A Day in Class With Plato, the Melania Trump–Mandated Robot Teacher

Alexandra Petri is a national treasure, and she came through with this excellent take on Melania Trump's invitation to imagine a future of robot teachers.

Plato had just downloaded another update and was refusing to teach us math until we upgraded to a Be Best Platinum subscription, so we were left to our own devices. This was how our class spent most of its time. With the Be Best Basic plan, which was all that our school district could afford, we didn’t get very much instruction, mostly ads. Plato had been trying to sell us razors for the past three weeks, possibly because it had heard someone ask about Occam’s razor, but more likely because it had access to our data and understood that as tenth graders, we were entering the razor market.

Sarasota County Schools to cut teachers as vouchers divert millions from district

The Florida plan to shut down public education is right on track. 

White Texans, students previously in private school or homeschool make up bulk of voucher applicants

Zero surprises in Texas, where the newly launched voucher program is mostly not saving poor kids in failing schools, but is instead subsidizing private schools and home schoolers. Jared Edison reports for the Texas Tribune.

The Right Has a Lofty Vision for Schools. Where’s Ours?

Nora De La Cour at Jacobin points out that the right has a vision for education, and somehow the Democrats are stuck saying we should go back to No Child Left Behind because maybe those test-and-punish policies won't fail this time around.

The Right Is Using AI Content Scanners to Try to Supercharge Book Banning

Turns out one of the things you can automate badly with AI is book banning. Claire Woodcock looks at the story for 404.

Meta and Google Found Liable for Addictive Content Delivery

Two tech giants lost a big case over trying to addict users. The indispensable Mercedes Schneider explains how the case unfolded and why they lost.

The Greatest Threat To Children And Teens Isn't Social Media. It's Adults

Anya Kamenetz takes a look past the court decisions against social media giants and looks at what needs to come next to protect children. It's not the act currently proposed by Congress.

Boy, 15, dead after shooting his teacher at Texas high school, cops say

A teenaged boy shot his teacher, then killed himself. And we now live in a country where this barely earns a tiny ripple of coverage. 

Ramaswamy: Let's close two essential Ohio public universities that Ohio GOP has starved for 30 years

What the hell, Ohio. How is this guy a serious contender for the governor's office. His latest clever observation-- public universities all teach basically the same stuff, so let's shut them down. Stephen Dyer explains.

The Next Time You Hear a School Leader Say "AI Is Not Going to Replace Teachers, It Will Replace Teachers Not Using AI" Think

John Robinson with a short but--well, not sweet exactly. But he unpacks the subtext of this comment, and it's not good.

Kids Need Rec Sports To Make a Comeback

Gail Cornwall, a mother and former teacher, explains why the evaporation of chances to play sports just for fun and recreation is bad news for young humans. Do we really need to tell ten year olds that they need to pick a sport and commit to it all year round so they can be champions?

Why You Should Become a Teacher

Matt Brady says, "You won’t love it at first. You might grow to. And it might matter more than you think" in a post that reminds us why teaching doesn't entirely suck.

“Meritocracy”

The concept, says Steve Nuzum, quickly begins to eat itself. Even when it is used to combat CRT, DEI, and whatever other culture panic is on the menu this week.

Leandro Thrown Out: A Generational Betrayal in North Carolina

North Carolina has decided that the way to deal with a decades-old court ruling that they are underfunding education is to install some new courts that will throw the decision out. Justin Parmenter explains just how bad this is.

The Invisible Child: How the Supreme Court Erased Children from a Case About Their Own Harm

Whether it's conversion therapy or birthright citizenship, Bruse Lesley argues that the Supremes are being remarkably callous about the actual human children at the heart of the case.

Trump Admin. Continues Demanding and Checking Affirmative Action Data from Universities

Jan Resseger looks at how the current regime is still dedicated to making sure that colleges don't discriminate against mediocre white guys. 

Every Minute Counts—Until It Doesn’t

Nobody captures the nuts and bolts of school district shenanigans like TC Weber. He's talking about Memphis, but many folks from around the country will recognize the steps in this accountability dance.

Miseducative Experiences

The line between the poetry of Mary Oliver and modern AI policy may not be easy to spot, but Audrey Watters lays it out clear as day. 

Superintendent of basketball finalist blasts PIAA: ‘Willful ignorance’

In Pennsylvania, we have a long-standing preview of what it does to school sports when you pretend that private schools who can recruit from anywhere compete on the same level as public schools that draw from their cachement area. One superintendent decided to call the state out on it.

This week at the Bucks County Beacon I offered some suggested questions for folks whose school district wants to get in the AI game. 

At Forbes.com, I looked at some research that shows--again--that grade point averages are better predictors of college success than the SAT or ACT. 

Today, I offer a favorite movement from a favorite symphony. From the Saint-Saens "organ" Symphony, here's the 4th movement. Turn it up, if you can.

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Behind Fad-Prone Education

Robert Pondiscio posted a question-- "Why Is Education So Damn Fad-Prone?"-- that everyone who has taught for more than two years has often asked. The fad-addiction of education is exactly why every announcement of The Next Miracle Cure is met by a bunch of teachers shaking their heads, rolling their eyes, and closing their doors. 

"But this time is different!" proclaim the progenitors of every new big idea, just before they start bitching about how "the education establishment" or "the blob" or "special interests" are too resistant to their brilliant transformational idea. Lordy, Arne Duncan is still out there trying to explain how his reformy ideas were awesome and totally should have worked but the establishment just didn't try hard enmough. Spoiler alert: This Time is never different. And Pondiscio notes that it is actually teachers who keep education somewhat fad-resistant:

Why is education so damn fad-prone?

The easy answer is also the most insulting—that educators are uniquely susceptible to trends, quick to abandon what works, and too eager to embrace whatever comes next. But that answer is wrong. Classroom teachers are typically the least enthusiastic participants in these cycles, having learned through experience how quickly today’s “transformational” idea becomes tomorrow’s abandoned initiative.

He points to four structural reasons that contribute to recurring fad chasing, and they aren't a bad start to explaining the phenomenon.

Weak feedback loops. 

Pondiscio argues that "in most sectors, failure reveals itself quickly," and while I think there's room for debate there, I agree with him that in education the feedback signal is "low and noisy." There are so many variables-- student turnover and many factors outside the classroom mean that changes in outcomes are hard to attribute to any single factor. We should note that this limitation has not kept many reformsters from arguing that measuring outputs would allow us to identify teachers and methods that are effective. I would add to his list the lack of any good measure of outcomes (the Big Standardized Test is not such a measure). 

But mostly the feedback loop remains weak because it usually carefully and deliberately cuts actual classroom teachers out of the loop. Nobody is better positioned to see exactly how the hot new idea works on the ground than the people who are right there, and yet the teacher view is subject to benign neglect and at worst (as in the days of Common Core) treated as if teachers are the problem of education and not the expert ground troops. 

Publishers and other instructional materials manufacturers feed this dynamic because their target audience is usually not actual teachers, but administrators. Many instructional materials are bad because they were made to be sold, not to be used. And that means NEW! is better.

And when it comes to evidence-based choices, consider this rather grim finding from a recent meta-study which found that the rate at which education research precisely reproduces results of previous studies is-- zero.

In the absence of clear feedback loops, education is plagued with policy by assertion-- folks who just declare that Policy X or Instructional Strategy Z are excellent because it just feels true. And education has been plagued by decades of people insisting that American schools are failing, based on their insistence that it is so. Even when data is available, the loop can be disrupted by bias and political gamesmanship; just this week, Secretary Linda McMahon was one more Ed Secretary to misrepresent what "proficient" means on the NAEP.

Leadership legitimacy requires visible change.

Administrative churn is a blight. I have written before about resume bombs; a new administrator doesn't build a resume by keeping things running smoothly. No, if they want to call themselves "forward thinking change agents," they have to change something. Blow stuff up, start a new program, get that next job, then leave the district to pick up the pieces. "Implemented new widget education program" looks great on a resume, whether it actually works or not. 

Low barriers to new ideas.

"In fields like medicine or engineering, new approaches must pass through layers of validation before they reach widespread adoption. Education has far fewer guardrails." Ain't it the truth. In education, anybody with a few gazillion dollars in business success can decide that he's going to push a set of standards in an attempt to standardize the entire US education system to his preferences, and that won't even be the only time he tries to transform the system.  

And he's not the only one. So many Hot New Ideas have been pushed by folks whose education expertise is based on nothing except they went to school when they were young. Education is largely free of anyone to say, "You'll need to provide some evidence before we even let you in the door." If someone in education does try to resist, just cue more complaints about the establishment and the monopoly and putting adult concerns ahead of children's. It's not just that there are few barriers to faddish new ideas-- it's that many folks believe they have a right not to be met with any barriers to their ideas. 

Add forty-some years of politicizing of education, so that now political avenues are considered a legitimate way to pursue new instructional approaches. The reading wars have been going on for a long time, but No Child Left Behind sold the idea, now being pursued by Science of Reading fans, of using government to settle instructional debates. We're at a place where to be an education advocate or mover and shaker, it's more important to be good at politics than to be good at education.

Moral urgency.

The magical phrase "for the children" allows folks to wave away all objections to their cool new idea, along with its cousin "don't put adult concerns ahead of children's needs." Morla urgency is always part of education discussions, and rightly so. But it is suspicious that moral urgency is always used to ramp up speed rather than caution; it's always "the children can't wait another second" and not "we owe it to the children to make sure we get this right." Common Core had to be rammed through quickly because we couldn't wait a second to rescue children. These days, folks like to wave around the "terrible NAEP scores" as proof that schools had better buy the newest AI-powered edu-whizbang.

All four of these are real features of the education system. They render it vulnerable to fad-of-the-week ideas both on the macro and micro level, and these vulnerabilities have been exploited by everyone from corporate salespersons to well-meaning amateurs to reformsters of all stripes to privatizers who simply want to dismantle the whole thing. 

Pondiscio argues for slowing down and not throwing out functioning ideas to make room for this week's fad. "In short," he concludes, "we need to make competence visible."

That's a great thought. I'm just not sure how it happens. The folks who are looking to the edufad to bring them money and/or power are more invested in bolstering their own preferred fad than taking a look at whether it is successful or not. A whole wing of the reformster/privatizer world has worked hard to make incompetence visible, whether it exists or not (do not forget Chris Rufo telling his Hillsdale College audience, "To get universal school choice, you really need to operate from a place of universal public school distrust.") This is another way in which a free market approach to education is counter-productive. The free market does not foster superior quality; the free market fosters superior marketing. And marketing loves on asymmetric information in which the seller knows more about the product than the buyer.  

We could, I think, damp down the faddishness of education. There is nothing that tamps down faddishness like a level-headed district administration that eschews fads in favor of long-term investment in unexciting things that work, leavened with investment of time and attention in new things that are taken on thoughtfully and given time to prove themselves (or not). How we grow more of those high quality administrators has puzzled me for forty-some years. But more of these people would in turn affect what companies thought they could get away with selling. 

And if everyone-- edu-corporations, legislators, bureaucrats, thinky tank folks-- listened more to teachers, the whole loop, the whole education process process would work so much better. I'm not pretending that getting teachers into the loop would be easy. Out of a group of four million, you are going to find A) a non-zero number of oddball perspectives and B) a distinct lack of unanimity. On top of that, the teachers who could probably provide the most useful perspective may well be too busy to talk to you. But the current practice of locking teachers out of education discussions (unless they have been pre-screened to make sure they have agreeable opinions) is not helping education in this country avoid the latest in education hula hoops.

UT: Taking Education Back To 1952

Utah is looking at HB 312 which seeks to "modify" school curriculum and standards. Having already interjected a version of the Ten Commandments into classrooms, legislators are seeing if they can't push some more religion in there, along with a hefty dose of right-wing politics and actual Mormonism. Coverage of bill has focused on the Christian nationalism aspect, but there are few other things going on in the bill that promise to lead Utah boldly into the past.

The bill ups the requirements for US history instruction, and it has some definite ideas about what that instruction should look like. It promises the development of some "open educational resources" that are both open and at the same time, the state is supposed to own all IP rights for the resources, including copyright.

The bill calls for materials that sell the idea "America good, communism bad." America's founding principles (individual liberty, limited government, natural rights) are set right beside supporting and preserving the family, the awesomeness of the Constitution, economic prosperity through free market capitalism, and the contributions that America has made to "human progress and flourishing." This is to be deliberately contrasted with the evils of communism and other autocratic government (while noting we have a republic that rejected the pure democracy of Greece). 

The course should note that communists tried to spread their ideology in the 20th century and tried to infiltrate institutions. It should list a whole bunch of communist atrocities including the Cultural Revolution in China, Khmer Rouge genocide, Cuba's commie naughtiness, and the systematic persecution of religious groups. That last one is a particularly bold choice for Utah, the state where the US Army was sent ion 1857 to take the Mormons down a peg or two.

Meanwhile, the course should teach the benefits of "constitutional republicanism." This is a quick capsule of the right-wing fable version of US history. Unlike many attempts to push this story into schools, this bill does not include any language requiring that teachers admit that yeah, there were some problems with slavery and racism in this country, but that's all in the past. 

The Christian nationalism part comes with the list of selected documents intended for inclusion:

the Bible, including the Hebrew Scriptures and New Testament, as literary and historical texts that have influenced American constitutional history, civic thought, and cultural development; 

This has been the standard smokescreen ever since the 1963 SCOTUS ruling that suggested that suggested teaching about the Bible was okay as long as it was purely objective consideration of historical and literary merit. It's an easy game to play. When my high school experimented with 9 weeks mini-courses, one was "The Bible as History and Literature." It was taught by a devout Baptist (famously, at the end of every class, his announcement for what was coming next started with "If we're here tomorrow..." by which he meant "If the Rapture doesn't come tonight...") and he taught the class like a literature class, but the only acceptable way to understand and interpret the text was the one reflected in his own religious beliefs. So, yeah, I've seen this game. Just think of any English teacher you had who taught that there was only one correct way to read the text, and imagine if that text were a sacred scripture.

Teaching the Bible as an important historical influence on the American Revolution is almost always proposed by people who believe that the historical influence was the attempt to found a Christian nation and not, say, the efforts of people who had deep personal knowledge of how badly things go when government and religion are closely linked and who were therefor determined to found a nation that was definitely NOT based on some religion. 

So, yes-- this bill is another attempt to forcibly sneak a particular brand of Christianity into classrooms.

Since we're talking Utah, there is one other interesting item in the bill--

when teaching Utah history, an LEA may include study of religious beliefs and texts that influenced the state's early founders and the state's history.

In Utah, that means The Book of Mormon (and I don't mean the Broadway musical). In fact, Utah provides a pretty rich contrast between a country not founded on a religion and a state absolutely founded as a colony for a definitely-not-mainstream religion where the church was the government.

Bill House sponsor Tiara Auxier is a parents' rights, make Utah great again conservative, former school board member and legislative newbie. It's not clear what her church affiliation is. Lead Senate sponsor is Todd Weiler. 

There's a story that some folks on the right like to tell. Once upon a time, a bunch of white Christian men got together and, with their Bibles open beside them, they copied out a Constitution that enshrined freedom, the nuclear family, and the free market, just the way God wanted them. Occasionally some bad individuals did bad things like enslaving Black folks, but we settled at that around 1964. In the 20th century, communists, for no reason other than they're just selfish and evil, snuck a bunch of their people into elite institutions (like schools and colleges) and started trying to indoctrinate children to join them in ruining the US just like they ruined the rest of the world. But we can take those institutions back and make them tell young people the one true story of our history (and everything else). 

Folks who believe this story also believe that if we could indoctrinate teach children this story-- and only this story-- then we'd get things back on track. 

I am a little curious how things would work if Utah passes this bill and conservative christianists discover that the Book of Mormon gets to enter the classroom on equal footing with the Bible. When you keep sliding that Overton Window around, you can never know what might slip through. It might even become a portal to an imaginary past.

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. 

 

Zuck's Ed Tech Baby Goes With A Whimper

A new chapter in the long story of Summit Learning.

Summit Schools were an early entry (2003) into the world of charters, with founder Diane Tavenner trying to do personalized learning the low tech way. Tavenner was reportedly a former teacher, asst. principal and a graduate of the Broad Faux Academy of Superintendenty Stuff: she served as the board chair for the California Charter Schools Association, a board that includes Joe Williams, head of DFER as a member). 

Mark Zuckerberg, fresh off a disastrous attempt to finance an overhaul of New Jersey schools,  ran across the Bay area school in 2014 and decided that he would give it not just an infusion of cash, but an infusion of technology. Including engineering support to "make this better." Summit became one of Zuckerberg's pet projects, and it was also beloved by that other well-connected super-rich education amateur, Bill Gates, who has some of his Top People promoting hell out of it.

Summit handed off its "education. in a box" program to all sorts of schools (about 400 at its peak) and it was yet another experimennt in large scale education-via-screen. 

Many folks did not love it. . Take a look at some of the comments in this piece "The Inherent Racism of Summit 'Public' (Charter) School." And many schools have backed away from the Mass Customized Learning Program (a term that deserves a place on the oxymoron shelf right next to Jumbo Shrimp and Peacekeeper Missiles).

Indiana, Pennsylvania schools tried to quietly implement Summit programming, and parents began to squawk almost immediately. After just one month

parents began telling the school board that their kids were not adjusting to the new learning style, that they found questionable and objectionable material in the recommended online resources in their classes, and that their children were spending too much time in front of computer screens

NY Magazine just profiled Cheshire, Connecticut, another town that fought back when the mass customized learning program came to town (or rather, the town came to them, since the Summit model involves logging on to the Summit website). The Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative had paid for the 130 Chromebooks needed, but once again, reality got in the way of CZI dreams.

Students rarely met with teachers, but instead had lots of screen time with a computer program that was reportedly easy to trick (just skip the lessons and go straight to the tests). The program still has glitches, including questions that cannot be answered correctly (maybe some nerdy programmer decided Summit needed its own Kobayashi Maru?) And there's the problem of the open-sourced playlists themselves:

Nothing about the platform said Silicon Valley more than the open-source approach to the “playlists.” Teachers were encouraged to customize them, to add and subtract — and Cheshire’s teachers were working on this, Superintendent Jeff Solan said in an email — but the base material was often just a bunch of links, to sites ranging from Kids Encyclopedia to SparkNotes to the BBC. I interviewed several educators who were involved in developing the platform in 2014, and when I mentioned this to one, he agreed they were “shoddy.” “We knew it,” he said. They were in such a hurry, he said, “we were just throwing things in there, that, at least from a Google search, looked reputable.”

Yikes. It's almost as if the actual education piece is secondary to some other part of the operation. I wonder what that could be...

And there was the question of data. Summit is clear about the 18 partners it shares its data with, and subjects itself to its own strong privacy agreements in addition to the legal protections around student data already in place, but parents and other locals were nonetheless concerned. “The Chromebooks were free. Nothing’s free. There’s always a reason,” said Mary Burnham, a retired educator who was part of the campaign against Summit. “If somebody’s giving you something free, chances are, they want something back, or they’re already getting something from it. As best I can tell, with Summit, it’s data.

Like the equally tech-heavy and success-light Altschool, Summit seemed to be one part market research and one part experiment on human lab rats, with the goal of finding proof of concept for computer-managed education. But mostly Altschool lost truckloads of money, and it eventually faded away into various other products and companies (Altitude Learning was one piece, apparently part of Guidepost Learning, another edu-prenuer undertaking that has since gone bankrupt). 

Traction was not happening for Summit, either. Chalkbeat found that 1 in 4 schools dropped the program by the 2018-19 school year.

In 2018, Summit spun the digital program off into a non-profit entity whose initial four-person board included Diane Tavenner, Summit founder; Priscilla Chan; and Peggy Alford, the CFO for CZI.It seemed suspiciously like a subsidiary of the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative. The program was designed to follow what has now become the familiar model-- students getting their education from a compter-manab=ged algorithm while (low-cost) "coaches" provided some human oversight in the room. Maybe not so much oversight as "accountability sinks," because somebody has to be responsible when things go south. But Summit even went so far as to create its own special farm for training "facilitators."

The National Education Policy Center took a look at Summit's learning system, and found that it was a lot more hat than cowboy (and it was also extraordinarily reluctant to submit to any examination of their work or results). 

So in 2023, CZI (not really pretending it hadn't swallowed Summit whole) spun Summit off again, this time an outfit called Gradient, which the CZI blog said "we can help these important research-based resources more consistently reach students and educators, by focusing on coherence for educators." "Consistency" and "coherence" come up a lot in the history of Summit, because Zuck and his friends repeatedly concluded that the reason the computer-managed curriculum in a box wasn't working better and winning hearts and minds was that teachers were not implementing it faithfully enough. Damned mat widgets.

Gradient was yet another company whose promised whiz-bangery invokes the the "whole student" and a "unified learning platform," and while it can be hard to see through the smokey argle bargle, it sure looks like Trascend also wants to make computer-managed software-delivered education a thing. With a "dedicated coach." 

Gradient was going to have things chugging along by the 2024-2025 school year, but in Februarty 2026, Gradient announced its "next chapter,"

Expanding the scale and impact of this work is more important than ever. After much deliberation with our board, we are pleased to share that the future of the Gradient Learning program will move to a new home at Transcend, a nonprofit dedicated to supporting schools and systems to create extraordinary experiences and outcomes for all students. Transcend brings the expertise to take our program to the next level, as well as the ability to amplify a community of education innovators working for lasting change.

Transcend is about "model sharing" and "community innovation." They want to "reimagine educator roles" and their Leaps toward Extraordinary Learning for All is just the same old "school hasn't changed in a century" and educatyion should be relevant and a lot of nice words about what education should be like that nobody should disagree with, given that they offer nothing in the way of specific techniques that teachers should use. They jpin. a whole long line of edu-prenuers who offer pretty ideals about what education should be like without addressing any of the nuts and bolt specifics, which is where teachers live and do their work. Agency! High expectations! Rigor! Not one size fiots all! I have no evidence, but it is entirely possible that Transcend is actually headquarterd on a farm upstate, where tired old reform mcliches can run and play and are definitely not euthanized.

There is a certain symmetry to this story, however. I didn't follow up on the various team members of Transcend, so who knows-- maybe none of them were in Teach for America. The board is largely investment and business types. The CEO is Aylon Samouha, whose previous jobs include  Chief Schools Officer at Rocketship Education and several years as a Senior Vice President at Teach For America, and I feel compelled to note, lists jazz guitar as one of his pursuits, so God bless him for that.

But the kicker. The board has two lifetime members. One is Stacey Childress, former CEO of New Schools Venture Fund, and the other is Diane Tavenner, currently listed as CEO and Co-founder of her latest ventures, Futre.me.

These are the stories I think of every time some reformbro tries to argue that in the private sector, when you fail there are consequences-- not like in public education. Maybe. But it sure seems that in the private sector, the invisible hand doesn't cut failure loose so much as it just shuffles it around, to kick back and forth from one doomed enterprise to another. Will the ghost of Summit ever be laid to final rest? It may take decades to find out. 

Netflix Chief Ready To Help DFER Fix Education

Democrats for Education Reform (DFER) is delighted to announce that Reed Hastings, co-founder of Netflix, has joined their board, "bringing a disruptor's lens to education." That seems about right.

First, a reminder of who DFER really are. One of the key founders of DFER is Whitney Tilson, a big time hedge fund manager (you can read more about him here). Long ago, Leonie Haimson had a great quote from the film version of Tilson's magnum opus about ed reform, "A Right Denied," and it's a dream of mine that every time somebody searches for DFER on line, this quote comes up.

The real problem, politically, was not the Republican party, it was the Democratic party. So it dawned on us, over the course of six months or a year, that it had to be an inside job. The main obstacle to education reform was moving the Democratic party, and it had to be Democrats who did it, it had to be an inside job. So that was the thesis behind the organization. And the name – and the name was critical – we get a lot of flack for the name. You know, “Why are you Democrats for education reform? That’s very exclusionary. I mean, certainly there are Republicans in favor of education reform.” And we said, “We agree.” In fact, our natural allies, in many cases, are Republicans on this crusade, but the problem is not Republicans. We don’t need to convert the Republican party to our point of view…

DFER's mission has always been to convince Democrats that they should be backing ed reform ideas from the right. It's standard to find them trying hard to convince Democrats that it would be a winning strategy, like the recent NYT piece by their chief Jorge Elorza in which he tries to sell taxpayer-funded school vouchers.

Hastings, meanwhile, is a long time fan of school choice programs. Hastings has been plenty active in the charter sector, managing to help push through the California law that not only did away with charter caps, but made it possible to run a chain of charters with just one (unelected) board. Unelected is how he likes them-- in 2014 he told the California School Boards Association in fairly clear terms that elected school boards were a scourge and should be done away with.

Hastings likes to note that way back in the day, he was a teacher. That was with the Peace Corps in Swaziland over 40 years ago. But he's been a busy edu-preneur for decades, and he certainly knows all the classic bits.

There's the whole "unchanged classroom" shtick. Hastings sees schools as being like the entertainment biz thirty years ago-- "a model built for a different era" and has often claimed that "the traditional classroom model—one teacher, 20-to-50 students, sage-on-a-stage—is ripe for reinvention." He declares "the schools of the future won't look like the schools of the past," which is his one accurate observation, though he could easily note that the schools of the present don't look like the schools of the past. Lord, they were ushering the sage off the stage back when I was in teacher school. 

Paired with that is the claim that "Netflix replaced a one-size-fits-all broadcast model with something more personal and responsive," which is just a silly claim. In 1997, when Netflix launched, cable tv was achieving great new heights of variety. Hell, Fox News launched in 1996. Back then, boys and girls, cable provided actual variety before free market forces pushed cable channels to become barely distinguishable imitations of each other (you know, back when MTV played music and A&E stood for Arts and Entertainment, and there were two comedy channels). The broadcast model was already well and fully disrupted, and the only thing that Netflix disrupted was the practice of having to go to the store to rent DVDs. 

So guess what Hastings thinks is the key to this new shift in education? Here's a hint-- as of last year, Hastings is on the board of Anthropic, the big AI company.

"AI is a once-in-a-thousand-year shift, and what happens in K-12 is at the center of it,” Hastings continued. “The schools that figure out how to combine individualized software with teachers focused on social-emotional development are going to unlock something we’ve never seen before."

Individualized computer instruction is definitely a thing we've seen before, though what we've seen is the many ways that it crashes and burns and fails to deliver its many promises. There is no reason to believe that the newest iteration of the giant plagiarism machines is likely to change that, no reason to believe that education delivered through a screen is somehow superior to education involving other humans, both as teachers and as co-students. Hastings believes AI can help make education more personal, which highlights how oxymoronic it is to propose personalization that is delivered by non-persons. 

"He sees AI enabling a shift where teachers become more like coaches and build deep relationships with students."

Why does he see that? How does he see that happening? Could it be that replacing teachers with "coaches" solves that nasty labor problem with schools and helps make them more profitable? And yes, his description sounds very much like Alpha School, a ridiculous school model that is somehow beloved these days with its assertion that students can get a full education with two hours per day on computer. It's technoamnesia all over again, as folks just seem to forget that we have seen this model tried and failed. AI will make it better by... being more expensive, in every sense of the word?

Oh well. DFER and Hastings are just as dangerous to public education separately as they are together. May they have many lovely meetings together

FL: Replacing Immigrants With Children

This is not actually a new story, but recent comments by Florida's attorney general have reminded us that for some folks, the solution to sticking all the immigrant labor in detention centers is to fill the empty labor market with teenagers.

Many states have been stripping child labor protections in the past few years. Much of the push has been coming from employers, part of a general desire not to have to follow stupid rules. Also, teen employees are cheap and disinclined to start unions or complain about lousy conditions.

We know that businesses are pushing much of this, even writing bills, but it turns out that there's a big fat dark money lobbying group that is "helping out" in many states.

Meet the Foundation for Government Accountability.

FGA was founded in 2011 by CEO Tarren Bragdon, who himself highlights a quote that gives us a good idea of who he is:

I greatly value the ability to provide for my wife and children and want more Americans to experience the freedom that work brings. I founded FGA to pursue good policy solutions that will free millions from government dependency and open the doors for them to chase their own American Dream.

I've written a whole post about this guy, who took his show from Maine to Florida, where he helped write some legislation to give teens the freedom to be more easily exploited by employers. Yay.

It's been almost a year since Governor Ron DeSantis dropped this nugget when chatting with Border Czar Ton Homan

“Why do we say we need to import foreigners, even import them illegally, when you know, teenagers used to work at these resorts, college students should be able to do this stuff,” DeSantis said last week at a panel discussion with border czar Tom Homan, as first reported by the Tampa Bay Times.

So here comes Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier to add his two cents. Uthmeier was DeSantis's chief of staff as well as the guy who ran the failed presidential campaign of his boss. When appointed to the post a year ago, Uthmeier barked

We will not stand idly by as the left tries to infiltrate our institutions and use the court system to indoctrinate our kids. We will fight the activists that try to weaken our duly enacted laws, that try to challenge our constitutional order and try to harm the unborn.

This week, when the Wall Street Journal, reported that Florida employers are having a hard time filling jobs legally, Uthmeier got to go on Fox and respond. We're cranking out all sorts of meat widgets, he proudly more or less declared. And also "getting people into the workforce earlier." 

We passed legislation last year to help high school students get their hands dirty and get on job sites more quickly.

Uthmeier, it should be noted, is not getting his own hands dirty. Instead, he has landed a gig at the University of Florida Levin College of Law, where he will rake in $100,000 a year for teaching two hours a week. He also proposed constructing "Alligator Alcatraz," but maybe that wasn't so much a human rights abomination -- maybe he was just trying to create job opportunities for teens in concentration camp construction. He was also part of that business of shipping migrants from Texas to Martha's Vineyard. 

Maybe he just has different ideas about what getting your hands dirty actually means.

This represents one more step toward a multi-tier education system, a system where some folks get a full and rounded education and others, destined for a life as meat widgets, need only get enough education to make them useful to the employers who will start extracting labor from them as soon as possible. It's not a future I favor.

Are there students who are going to lead happy, useful lives as blue collar workers? Absolutely (I taught hundreds of them). But two things should be true-- 1) blue collar workers benefit from a well-rounded life-enhancing education just as much as everyone else, and 2) their path is to be chosen by them and not forced on them by policy makers. Certainly not as a way to patch over problems created by self-kneecapping xenophobic policies.

WV: Removing Accountability From Private Schools

West Virginia passed a law to allow taxpayer-funded school vouchers in 2021, and they've been tweaking it ever since. They opened it up to more and more students. Consequently, the costs of the program are ballooning: when the law was passed, supporters declared it would cost just $23 million in its first year, and now the estimate for the coming school year is $245 to $315 million. 

With that kind of money on the line, you'd think that the state might want to put some accountability and oversight rules in place. You know-- so the taxpayers know what they're getting for their millions of dollars.

But you would be backwards. Instead, the legislature is considering a bill to reduce accountability for private and religious schools.

SB 216, the Restoring Private Schools Act of 2026, is short and simple. It consists of the current accountability rules for private, parochial or church schools, or schools of a religious order-- with a whole lot of rules crossed out.

What are some of the rules that the legislation proposes to eliminate for private and religious schools? Here's the list of rules slated for erasure:

* The requirement for a minimum number of hours of instruction.

* The requirement to maintain attendance and disease immunization records for each enrolled student.

* The requirement to provide, upon request of county superintendent, a list of the names and addresses of all students in the school between ages 7 and 16.

* The requirement to annually administer a nationally normed standardized test in the same grades as required for public schools. Ditto the requirement to assess the progress of students with special needs.

* Since there's no test requirement, there is also no requirement to provide testing data to parents and the state department of education.

* The requirement to establish curriculum objectives, "the attainment of which will enable students to develop the potential for becoming literate citizens." Scrap also the requirement for an instructional program to meet that goal. 

So under this bill, private schools would not have to have a plan for educating students, would not have to spend a minimum amount of time trying to educate students, and would not have to provide the state with any evidence that they are actually educating students.

The bill does add one bit of new language:

As autonomous entities free of governmental oversight of instruction, private, parochial, or church, schools may implement such measures for instruction and assessment of pupils as leadership of such schools may deem appropriate.

In other words, private religious schools accepting taxpayer-funded vouchers may do whatever the hell they want.  

The bill is sponsored by Senator Craig Hart. Hart calls himself a school teacher, and is mentioned as an agriculture/FFA teacher, though I could find no evidence of where he teaches. He was elected in 2024 after running as a hardcore MAGA. He has pushed for requiring Bibles in school, among other MAGA causes. 

Said Eric Kerns, superintendent of Faith Christian Academy, “It just gives private schools a lot more flexibility in what they would be able to do as far as assessment and attendance and school days. Our accountability is that if people aren’t satisfied with the education they’re receiving, then they go to another private school or back to the public school or they homeschool.” Also known as "No accountability at all." A school is not a taco truck.

As reported by Amelia Ferrell Knisely at West Virginia Watch, at least one legislator tried to put some accountability back in the bill. GOP Sen. Charles Clements tried to put back a nationally-recognized testing requirement and share results with parents. Said Clements

I want to see private schools survive, but I think we have to have guardrails of some sort. There’s a lot of money around, and it’s a way for people to come in and not produce a product we need … I think it just leaves the door open for problems.

Exactly. And his amendment was rejected. The School Choice Committee chair said the school could still use a real test if they wanted to, but the bill would allow more flexibility to choose newer test options; I'm guessing someone is pulling for the Classical Learning Test, the conservative unwoke anti-SAT test. 

Democrat Mike Woelfel tried to put the immunization record back; that was rejected, too.

Look, the Big Standardized Test is a terrible measure of educational quality, and it should be canceled for everyone. But for years the choice crowd promised that once choice was opened up, we'd get a market driven by hard data. Then it turned out that the "hard data" showed that voucher systems were far worse than public schools, and the solution has not been to make the voucher system work better, but to silence any data that reveals a voucher system failure.

The goal is not higher quality education. The goal is public tax dollars for private religious schools-- but only if the private religious schools can remain free of regulation, oversight, or any restrictions that get in the way of their power to discriminate freely against whoever they wish to discriminate against. 

This is not about choice. It's about taxpayer subsidies for private religious schools, and it's about making sure those schools aren't accountable to anyone for how they use that money. It's another iteration of the same argument we've heard across the culture--that the First Amendment should apply because I am not free to fully exercise my religion unless I can unreservedly discriminate against anyone I choose and unless I get taxpayer funding to do it. 

We've been told repeatedly that the school choice bargain is a trade off-- the schools get autonomy in exchange for accountability, but that surely isn't what's being proposed here. If West Virginia is going to throw a mountain of taxpayer money at private schools, those schools should be held accountable. This bill promises the opposite; may it die a well-deserved death. 

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.