The School Choice Movement Is Dead

The school choice movement is dead.

Yes, there are a few advocates hanging on, and a zombified shell of the movement shambling about like the last remains of Common Core support among thinky tanks. But the movement is dead.

The second term of Donald Trump has unleashed what was only barely leashed before. When Jay Greene announced that it was time for the movement to embrace the culture wars, it was like announcing that it was time for a sheep to embrace a t rex. It was never going to end well for the goat. Greene himself had already had himself sheered and outfitted for a dino suit, leaving school choice in his rearview mirror as he joined up with the culture warriors of the Heritage Foundation, who have zero interest in school choice.

Oh, they still use the words some times, but mostly because they not quite ready to announce the new cause yet. But the cause is not school choice. It's school capture.

We really shouldn't call it a culture war at all. "Culture war" suggests two equally aggressive sides. But public schools and other folks on the side of traditional values of liberal democracy didn't ask for this any more than the Ukraine asked to be invaded by Russia. 

So let's call them culture raptors. 

And the culture raptors have actually been pretty straightforward. Chris Rufo has used the words "school choice," but what he has described repeatedly and in detail is the capture and conversion of schools (along with other institutions). At no point has he pretended that the goal is a system in which a broad variety of choices flourish. Betsy DeVos and her "find a school that is the best fit" shtick are so six years ago. Now we want schools to reflect the correct white Christian nationalist values.

It is becoming increasingly unsubtle, like the calls to fire any school employee who didn't mourn Charlie Kirk properly. When the top officials in our country announce that there is no uniting with the Left, that groups that promote any improper language or politics must be rooted out and destroyed--what do you think that means for schools, public, charter or private?

Daniel Buck, designated Young Conservative Face previously at Fordham and now at AEI, laid it out pretty clearly in a tweet a year ago: "Conservatives need to start thinking about, building, and regaining control of our education institutions after school choice becomes the law of the land. Won't do much good if all charter and private schools are stocked with teachers, curriculum, and policies out of ed schools." In other words, choice isn't about, you know, choice so much as its about making schools vulnerable to takeover.

What happened to the old champions of choice? Old school reformsters like Chester Finn have been trying to push back a tad, suggesting that maybe the culture wars and even free market affection are obscuring the goal of providing American children with a good education, and that some accountability and oversight might be useful, Rick Hess just, politely, called out Oklahoma's education dudebro-in-chief Ryan Walters for his creation of an ideological litmus test for teachers, but Walters has been clear all along that his only interest in "school choice" is as a fig leaf to cover his aggressive imposition of his own brand of christianism on schools, complete with state-selected Bibles. Mike Petrilli, Finn's successor at the Fordham Institute, just started a substack with this goal--

My hope is that this newsletter will re-start the ed reform conversation. I say “re-start” because I’m old enough to remember a time when there was a real conversation among those of us involved in reform—from the left, right, and center—about what was working, what wasn’t, where to go next, and what the whole point of our movement was really about.

That wistful nostalgia sure reads, to me, like an acknowledgement that the new crowd of culture raptors have no interest in school choice, quality, or conversation. 

Meanwhile, Robert Pondiscio is writing a substack about bridging "the gaps between education practice, policy, and research" and generally making schools work better. Democrats [sic] For Education Reform have dwindled in size and influence and are still trying to coax Democrats to come to the choice table, using old arguments currently gathering dust at that empty table. Even Neal McClusky, the CATO ed guy whose support for choice has always remained consistent, spends plenty of his social media time pointing to Trump education activities and saying, "Yeah, you shouldn't do that."

I'm not suggesting that any of these folks are any less interested in school choice than they ever were. But they do seem to have noticed that in MAGA world, school choice is a dead issue. The term has been co-opted just as effectively as Rufo co-opted "critical race theory," and now "school choice" means that everyone gets a choice of schools that push a particular brand of Christianity. When the Greg Abbott , the Texas legislature, and the state's attorney general declare that every classroom must display the government-approved version of the Ten Commandments, but not any other religion's texts, what kind of "choice" is available. 

Parents Defending Education, the activist astro-turf group, has published viewpoints like an "investigative report" complaining that LGBTQ charters are "indoctrinating: kids at taxpayer expense. There's an absolutely ridiculous piece of "scholarship" from the Heritage Foundation trying to discredit charter schools for being woker than public schools, because choice is supposed to provide a variety of educational viewpoints, except not Those Viewpoints. Governor Ron DeSantis was delighted that Florida was allowing chaplains in schools, but that was immediately followed by "clarification" because DeSantis has definite ideas about which religions should be allowed. Idaho loves choice, but won't allow Certain Ideas to be included in classrooms. And the editor-in-chief of The Federalist goes on Twitter to demand that universities be required to have a minimum 50% of their staff be conservative (but, hey, that's not a DEI affirmative action quota).

Look, I'm not opposed to the general idea of school choice. I've even explained many times how I think we could do it. I don't think school choice works as a free market-based idea, but right now, the "school choice" culture raptors are talking about a whole other thing-- you can have your choice of a public school that features their preferred ideology, a charter school that features their preferred ideology, or a private school that features their preferred ideology. That ideology would include the state-approved religion. The new system would also recognize that people do not all have the same value, so those who are entitled to power and privilege get a "better" school, and future meat widgets get the training they deserve (and women get ready to make some babies). 

None of the culture raptor discussion of school choice has anything to do with school choice. The conversation is now about the ideological capture of schools, universities, and a variety of other institutions. If the actual school choice movement isn't dead, it's at least hiding in a cave, a victim of identity theft, waiting for the day it will be safe to come out again. 

ICYMI: Fresh Apple Edition (9/14)

We have a curb market in town. Once a week in the fall, local farmers and some other folks bring their wares to town and you can buy some fresh produce. Yesterday I took the board of directors up town and we got a big bag of apples (among other things) which they then snack on for the rest of the--well, a bag usually lasts two days.

The boys don't have screens of their own, and they are not allowed to piggy back on their grownups' screens. The use chromebooks at school, which I'm not delighted about, but at least it's a closed system where they can't just roam. Their mother and I can live with that.

Among the lessons from the murders this week is a simple one-- pay attention to what your sons are doing on line. Both killers this week were apparently radicalized by hard-right nihilistic groyper crap on line. I taught teenagers for decades, and I'm plenty familiar with the teenaged male impulse to be transgressively shocking, but folks on the interwebs have taken this impulse and fed it into something more monstrous. If you're a parent, pay attention.

Okay, here's the reading list for the week. 

Voucher Push Is Reshaping Private School Education

Dana Goldstein at the New York Times looks at a newly released study that shows that vouchers are raising tuition, spurring growth in religious schools, and mostly benefitting families that were already private schooling. If I did it right, this should be a gift link.

These Charter Superintendents Are Some of the Highest Paid in Texas. Their Districts Are Among the Lowest Performing.

ProPublica and the Texas Tribune take a look at Texas charters, where the students aren't doing so well, but the administrators are making money hand over fist.

Ohio to allow Dolly Parton Imagination Library signups from hospital at birth

Lord knows that Ohio gets so much wrong, but I have to give them credit for getting this one thing right.

The school shooting industry is worth billions — and it keeps growing

Meg Anderson at NPR looks at how much the industry is making on the business of keeping children and parents scared out of their wits.

Ohio Charter Schools Prove Private Sector Less Efficient than Public Sector

Stephen Dyer examines that age-old claim that private sector (as in charter schools) is just so much more efficient than the public sector.

Portland Catholic school loses students over LGBTQ+ enrollment controversy

A Portland, OR, Catholic school threw a student out when they learned the parents were a same-gender couple. Now they are losing a bunch of other students as well. 

Everyone’s a Hypocrite

Rick Hess points out that many voices in the education debates abandon principles for any advantage for their team. He's got a point.

Records show Ryan Walters has a pattern of poor attendance at state boards

I don't really want to write more about Oklahoma's dudebro-in-chief of education, but I don't want this piece from Nuria Martinez-Keel at Oklahoma Voice go by, either, because as awful as Walters is when it comes to ideological baloney, it's worth noting that he's also awful at the basics of doing his job.

AI is More Con Than Reality

Thomas Ultican takes a look at The AI Con, a book you really ought to read.

How Emily Hanford’s "Sold a Story" Became a Conduit for the Public Dissemination of the Right-Wing "Project 2025" Agenda to Affect State Laws and Reshape Reading Instruction in Public Schools

Publisher Denny Taylor is writing an education newsletter these days; this is part 3 of a four-part series that looks at what some rightward folks are doing to influence reading instruction.

What Do Corporate Earnings Reports and Standardized Test Scores Have in Common?

Larry Cuban looks into the American obsession with making numbers get bigger all the time.

Public School Finance Is Fragile at Federal and State Levels

Jan Resseger breaks down some of the financial challenges and potential problems in the state and federal funding world of education.

Gutted

Meg White looks at some of the education funding that has been cut in the House version of a federal budget.

The sound of things falling apart

Paul Bowers on listening to William Basinski's The Disintegration Loop on September 11. I'd never heard about the work before, so I learned something from this thoughtful meditation. 

Killer Democracy: How a Corrupt Supreme Court Turned Debate Into Death

Thom Hartmann on gun laws, court rulings, and how they helped bring us here.

An old favorite here, and the theme for yearbook my senior year of high school. 

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ICYMI: Fallish Edition (8/24)

Autumn is my favorite season, hands down, so I get excited when the tail end of summer even starts to hint at what is coming. Can I wear shorts and a sweatshirt today? Yes, please.

Here's your list for the week.

The Double Burden of School Choice

This paper looks at the burdens that fall on parents when they are assigned the responsibility for finding an education for their own children. Honestly, the research here involves a sample of 39 whole parental units, which doesn't strike me as compelling. But I'm saving this link here because the paper includes a host of clickable links to all sorts of research in the field, and that alone makes this valuable.

“The Play’s the Thing….”

John Merrow was one of the nation's top education reporters. This post is a masterful connec tion between theater, student producers, and cell phone bans.

Uncritical Promotion of AI: Educators Should Know Better

John Robinson, the 21st Century principal, reminds educators to think before being pushed into AI adoption.

Rows and Aisles

Jose Luis Vilson explores the connections between our classrooms and the societies we wish to live in.

Selling Florida’s Public Schools, Piece by Piece

Florida continues to lead the nation in the dismantling of public education. Sue Kingery Woltanski observes that when public schools and the people who choose them won't get with the free market program, Florida's politicians find ways to make them.

KIPP NYC College Prep Cheats (again!) On US News & World Report Rankings

Gary Rubinstein explains how KIPP in NYC cheats its way into a high ranking on the silly US News list of schools. It's actually pretty clever, as cheating goes.

Prescriptive Practices

Audrey Watters, as always, covers a ton of stuff. But the headliner this time is Michael Pershan, a math teacher who demonstrates the value of seeing learning as a social activity, not a solitary one.

Something wicked this way comes

Ben Riley has some thoughts about the many institutions trying to sell AI in education, especially that op-ed writing former Google CEO.

Trump-appointed judge rebukes Oklahoma’s Ryan Walters

Ryan Walters, America's worst state education chief, tried to sue a religious freedom group into submission because of course he did. A Trump judge told him he was way full of it.

Important New Court Ruling Protects Equity and Inclusion in Public Schools and Students’ Civil Rights

This week a judge ruled against the Department of Education's threat to defund any school caught doing DEI things. This is kind of a big deal, and Jan Resseger has a guide to some of the coverage of this decision.

Trump’s Anti-DEI Guidance Crusade Just Got Struck Down

Julian Vasquez Heilig looks at the decision and its implications. 

DOJ Deems Definition of Hispanic-Serving Institutions Unconstitutional

Once again employing their legal theory that the only discrimination that happens in this country is discrimination against melanin-deprived penis owners, the regime has decided to cut all aid aimed at colleges with large Hispanic enrollment. Ryan Quin at Inside Higher Ed explains.

Persistent Straw Man Claims About Literary Skills: Grammar Division

Paul Thomas takes us down another rabbit hole involving a Science Of person taking a bold stand against things that nobody actually does.

Education Department quietly removes rules for teaching English learners

The Washington Post noticed that the Ed Department is just backing away from English Language Learner as a thing, in keeping with Dear Leader's "Speak English because Murica!" policy, and Laura Meckler and Justine McDaniel report on it. This is a move so dumb that even the increasingly dim-witted WaPo editrial board criticized it.

Florida will phase out certificates of completion for students with disabilities

Florida will stop giving certificates to students with special needs showing that they had diligently done their level best in school. Watch for erosion of special needs services to follow.

More than 1,000 SC voucher recipients were improperly enrolled in public schools

A whole lot of South Carolina's voucher students are apparently taking the money wbhile staying in public school.

Why America still needs public schools

Sidney Shapiro and Joseph Tomain at The Conversation explain, again, why public schools arew important and valuable and shouldn't just be trashed.

Tennessee to give more average per-pupil funding to voucher participants than public school students

Yup-- the state will give more money to educate a private school student than a public school one. Melissa Brown reports for Chalkbeat.

New Illinois Law Aims To Protect Access To Public Education For Immigrant Students

Chalkbeat coverage of legislators getting it right in Illinois.

AI Is A Mass Delusion Event

Charlie Warzel at the Atlantic, and some help in realizing you're not crazy for thinking that much of the AI stuff is crazy.

A teen band needed a pianist. They called Donald Fagen.

Cool story. Yes, it has a whiff of nepo baby about it, but it's also about how music gets passed down the generations.

James Taylor is delightful, and the kids are so full of joy, but I am also here for Howard Johnson, the great jazz tuba player, who just makes this sing.

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PA: School Choice Lobby (And Jeff Yass) Spends Big

Stephen Caruso and the crew at Spotlight PA did some trememndous work on Pensylvania campaign contributions back in March and it deserved more attention than it got at the time. But it has a lot to tell us about who some Pennsylvania politicians are deeply indebted to when it comes to education.

The big industries playing in PA politics are energy, gaming, transportation and, surprise, K-12 education-- more specifically, the charter school industry (health care and real estate get a separate article). The researchers at Spotlight PA looked at contributions from January 1, 2023 through December 31, 2024. Over those two years, lawmakers raised over $42 million-- $17 million by Shapiro, and $25 by the other lawmakers.

Of that $42 million, over $10 million came from those four industries. Add to that another $7.6 million that those industries contributed to party caucus political committees.

Of that almost $17 mill, just under $9 million came from teachers’ unions, charter school operators, and private school backers.

"Yeah," I hear someone complain. "That teachers' union spends a lot of political money, and the privatizers have to try to keep up."

Sure. Spotlight PA found that of the almost $9 million, under $1.2 million came from the Pennsylvania State Education Association (PSEA) through their politicazl action wing (PACE-- which is funded by teacher contributions but cannot, by law, be funded with dues money).

The bulk of the rest of that money comes from two sources-- the Commonwealth Children's Choice Fund and Students First PAC.

Students First PAC emerged in 2010, and it is very simply, Pennsylvania gazillionaire Jeffrey Yass dressed up in a PAC suit. He is their sole contributor. It appears they haven't even bothered to maintain a website since shortly after their founding. Yass is the richest man in the state, a guy who won his initial stake playing poker, then moved into the investment biz.

Who does Students First PAC mostly give money to these days? Mainly the Commonwealth Children's Choice Fund. The website Transparency USA shows CCCF taking in $31,763,400. Of that, $31,505,000 came from Students First PAC. The #2 contributor is Clay Hamlin with a measley $100K. The Commonwealth Children's Choice Fund turned around and spent $33,579,570. Of that (take a deep breath), $27,234,761.63 was handed off to the Commonwealth Leaders Fund; that group and CCCF are the two Political Action Committees of Commonwealth Partners, a group that says it "engages entrepreneurs to lead free-market change in Pennsylvania," and they do appear to involve more than just Jeff Yass.

So Yass through Students Firsts PAC and Commonwealth Children's Fund is spending millions and millions of dollars to elect and support the GOP, especially the part of it that wants to privatize education. Some of the money coming into the races is astonishing. Spotlight PA found $1.4 million from privatizers to help PA State Senate President Pro Tem Kim Ward-- far more than came in from other sectors and far more than raised by Dem candidates. And that pile of money came in despite the fact that Ward ran unopposed in 2024! What the heck did she need over a million dollars for? 

The House GOP Campaign Committee pulled in $3.5 million from the K-12 privatizer crowd; the Senate GOP committee drew $1.9 million. Meanwhile the corresponding Dem committees together pulled in barely $600K.

So yeah-- a million dollars plus being put into campaigns by a union that is bundling the contributions of a tens of thousands of working teachers is totally as significant as a few million dollars being pumped in basically from one individual. Absolutely the same thing. But how wild to imagine that Pennsylvania politics for the past decade or two might have unfolded completely differently if one man hadn't hit a winning streak playing poker. How wild to imagine that if just one guy suddenly cvhanged his mind, state politics would suddenly lurch in a whole new direction. Interesting times we live in.

CO: Failed Charter Accountability

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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. 

Mattel Promises AI Toys

Today in our latest episode of Things Nobody Asked For, we've got the announcement that Mattel has teamed up with the folks at OpenAI to bring you toys that absolutely nobody has asked for.

It's a "strategic collaboration," say the folks at Mattel corporate. The announcement comes with lots of corporate argle bargle bullshit:

Brad Lightcap, Chief Operating Officer at OpenAI, said: "We're pleased to work with Mattel as it moves to introduce thoughtful AI-powered experiences and products into its iconic brands, while also providing its employees the benefits of ChatGPT. With OpenAI, Mattel has access to an advanced set of AI capabilities alongside new tools to enable productivity, creativity, and company-wide transformation at scale." 

Josh Silverman, Chief Franchise Officer at Mattel, said: “Each of our products and experiences is designed to inspire fans, entertain audiences, and enrich lives through play. AI has the power to expand on that mission and broaden the reach of our brands in new and exciting ways. Our work with OpenAI will enable us to leverage new technologies to solidify our leadership in innovation and reimagine new forms of play.”

You'll note that the poor meat widgets who work for Mattel are going to have to deal with AI and the "new tools to enable productivity, creativity, and company-wide transformation at scale." 

As for play, well, who knows. Mattel's big sellers include Uno. If you don't have card-playing children in your home, you may be unaware that Uno now comes in roughly 647 different versions, including some that have new varieties of cards ("Draw 125, Esther!") and some that involve devices to augment game play, like a card cannon that fires cards at your face in an attempt to get you to drop out of the game before your face is sliced to ribbons. So maybe the AI will design new cards, or we'll have a new tower that requires you to eat a certain number of rocks based on whatever credit score it makes up for you.

Mattel is also the Hot Wheels company, so I suppose we could have chatting toy cars that trash talk each other. Maybe they could more efficiently make the "bbbrrrrrrrrrrrrrooom" motor noises quickly and efficiently, leaving children more free time to devote to other stuff. The AI could also design new cars; I'm holding out for the Datamobile that collects as much family surveillance data as possible and then drives itself to a Mattel station where it can download all that surveillance info to... well, whoever wants to pay for it.

But I think the real possibilities are with Mattel's big seller-- Barbie! Imagine a Barbie who can actually chat with little girls and have real simulated conversations so that the little girls don't have to have actual human friends. 

The possibilities of this going horribly wrong are as limitless as a teen's relationship questions. Which of course are being asked of chatbots, because they trained on the internet and the internet is nothing if not loaded with sexual material. So yes, chatbots are sexting with teens. Just one of the many reasons that some auth0orities suggest that kids under 18 should not be messing with AI "companions" at all. 

Maybe Mattel isn't going to do anything so rash. Maybe Barbie will just have a more 21st century means of spitting out one of several pre-recorded messages ("Math is fun!") Please, God, because an actual chatbot-powered Barbie would be deeply monstrous.

Scared yet? Just remember-- everything a bot "hears" and responds to it can also store, analyze and hand off to whoever is interested. Don't think if it as giving every kid a "smart" toy-- think of it as giving every kid a monitoring device to carry and be surveilled by every minute of the day. And yes, a whole bunch of young humans are already mostly there thanks to smartphones, but this would expand the market. Maybe you are smart enough to avoid giving your six year old a smartphone, but gosh, a doll or a car that can talk with them, like a Teddy Ruxpin with less creep and more vocabulary-- wouldn't that be sweet.

It's not clear to me how much AI capability can be chipped into a child's toy (do we disguise it by giving Barbie an ankle bracelet?) especially if the toymakers don't figure out how to get Barbie or the Datamobile logged into the nearest wi-fi. Best case scenario is that this mostly results in shittier working conditions for people at Mattel and toys that disappoint children by being faux AI. Worst case is a bunch of AI and child horror stories, plus a monstrous expansion of surveillances state (buy Big Brother Barbie today!). 

But I have a hard time imagining any universe in which we look back on this "team" and think, "Gosh, I'm really glad that happened."

The Perverse Incentives of School Choice

When researcher Josh Cowen is talking about the negative effects of school vouchers on education, he often points at "subprime" private schools-- schools opened in strip malls or church basements or some other piece of cheap real estate and operated by people who are either fraudsters or incompetents or both. 

This is a feature, not a bug. Because as much as choice advocates tout the awesomeness of competition, the taxpayer-funded free market choice system that we've been saddled with has built in perverse incentives that guarantee competition will be focused on the wrong things.

The free market does not foster superior quality; the free market fosters superior marketing. Now, the marketing can be based on superior quality, but sometimes it's just easier to go another way. 

The thing about voucher schools is that quality is not what makes them money. What makes them money is signing people up.

That's it. Voucher school operators don't have to run a good school; they just have to sell the seats. Once the student is signed up and their voucher dollars are in the bank, the important part of the transaction is over. There is no incentive for the school to spend a pile of money on doing a good job; all the incentive is for the school to come up with a good marketing plan.

Betsy DeVos liked to compare the free market for schools with a row of food trucks, which was wrong for a host of reasons, but one was the market speed. Buy lunch at a food truck, and you become part of the marketing very quickly. Within minutes, you are either a satisfied customer telling your friends to eat there, or warning everyone to stay away. Reputations are built quickly.

But for schools, the creation of a reputation for quality takes a long time, time measured in years. The most stable part of the voucher school market is schools that already have their reputation in place from years of operation. But if you are a start-up, you need to get that money for those seats right now. If you are a struggling crappy private school with a not-so-great reputation, you don't have time to turn that around; you've got to up your marketing game right now. 

So the focus (and investment) goes toward marketing and enrollment.

Won't your poor performance catch up with you? Maybe, but the market turns over yearly, as students age out and age in to school. And you don't have to capture much of it. If you are in an urban center with 100,000 students and your school just needs to fill 100 seats, disgruntled former families won't hurt you much-- just get out there and pitch to the other 99,900 students. And if you do go under, well, you made a nice chunk of money for a few years, and now you can move on to your next grift.

This is also why the "better" private schools remain unavailable to most families holding a voucher. If a reputation for quality is your main selling point, you can't afford to let in students who might hurt that record of success. 

Meanwhile, talk to teachers at some of the less-glowing private and charter schools about the amount of pressure they get to make the student numbers look good. 

Because of the way incentives are structured, the business of a voucher school is not education. The business of the voucher school is to sell seats, and the education side of the business exists only to help sell seats. Our version of a free market system guarantees that the schools will operate backwards, an enrollment sales business with classrooms set up with a primary purpose of supporting the sales department, instead of vice versa.

Charter schools? The same problem, but add one other source of revenue-- government grants. Under Trump, the feds will offer up a half a billion dollars to anyone who wants to get into the charter biz, and we already know that historically one dollar out of every four will go to fraud or waste, including charter businesses that will collect a ton of taxpayer money and never even open.

"Yeah, well," say the haters. "Isn't that also true for public schools"

No, it is not. Here's why. Public schools are not businesses. They are service providers, not commodity vendors. Like the post office, like health care in civilized countries, like snow plows, like (once upon a time) journalism, their job is to provide a necessary service to the citizens of this country. Their job should be not to compete, but to serve, for the reasons laid out here. 

And this week-ass excuse for accountability-- if you do a bad enough job, maybe it will make it harder for your marketing department-- has been sold as the only accountability that school choice needs.

School choice, because its perverse incentives favor selling seats over educating students, is ripe for enshittification, Cory Doctorow's name for the process by which operators make products deliberately worse in order to make them more profitable. The "product" doesn't have to be good-- just good enough not to mess up the sales. And with no meaningful oversight to determine where the "good enough" line should be drawn, subprime voucher and charter schools are free to see just how close to the bottom they can get. It is far too easy to transform into a backwards business, which is why it should not be a business at all. 

If your foundational belief is that nobody ever does anything unless they can profit from it (and therefor everything must be run "like a business") then we are in "I don't know how to explain that you should care about other people" territory, and I'm not sure what to tell you. What is the incentive to work in a public education system? That's a whole other post, but I would point to Daniel Pink's theory of motivation-- autonomy, mastery and purpose. Particular a purpose that is one centered on making life better for young human beings and a country better for being filled with educated humans. I am sure there are people following that motivation in the school choice world, but they are trapped in a model that is inhospitable to such thinking.

ICE vs. Filipino Teachers

This week news broke of an ICE raid on Maui, with the US official thug patrol out to grab any brown people who might present “threats to national security or public safety, or who otherwise undermine the integrity of U.S. immigration laws.”

The “targeted, intelligence-­driven operation" included rounding up some of the Filipino teachers who work in Hawaiian schools. Said one special agent

For the safety of the agents and the occupants, residents of the home were briefly detained and interviewed in addition to the search. At the conclusion of the search, HSI special agents left the location without any arrests made.

 I'm sure that left the Filipino with a warm, fuzzy, welcome-to-the-United-States feeling inside, and that this will in no way affect Hawaii's attempt to shore up the teacher shortage with imported educators.

But here's a thing worth noting-- Hawaii is not the only state with Filipino teachers. 

Way back in 2014, in an article now accessible only via Wayback machine, Joseph Willams at takepart, a website that has since shut down, reported on the rise of the Philippines as a source for teachers. Heck, Williams pointed back to a PBS piece from 2011 about four Filipina teachers who took jobs in Baltimore. Williams found teachers transplanted from the Philippines to Louisiana, Arizona, Los Angeles, and Kansas.

And a decade later, it's still a thing. There are agencies devoted to placing Filipino teachers in the US. There are websites explaining how to get a job here. There are still periodic stories about how this is working out, like this 2022 Washington Post portrait of a Filipina teacher trying "to help save a struggling school in rural Arizona." There are whole youtube channels by Filipino teachers, like this one from Alyssa who appears to teach in Arizona. Her channel covers everything from how to find a US job, to filling out the paperwork, to issues like what to do if a student lies. She has posted 271 videos, has almost 39K subscribers, and also runs a busy Facebook page.

Here's short video on the issues involved, focusing on a teacher in the schools of Shelby, Montana, a city of fewer that 4,000 people. 

The video hits several of the issues involved, but the title-- What if your Filipino teacher disappeared-- points to one in particular. These teachers come on J-1 visas, which are good for 5 years for teachers. The video is from 2019. 

But these programs have always been problematic, a kind of low-cost outsourcing that let's policy leaders use the "teacher shortage" as an excuse to look for cheaper "solutions"--anything to avoid the basic free market lesson that if nobody wants your job, you have to sweeten the offer. Instead, the "exchange" teacher program lets states look for a place where people think te unsweetened pot looks like a good deal. I can't fault the Filipino teachers for grabbing a good opportunity. I can't even fauilt small towns like Shelby for searching for ways that fill gaps and don't break their bank. But this is a patc h, not a solution. And sometimes it's not even that.

In some cases the programs are borderline human trafficking. In 2017, one of these placement companies lost a lawsuit filed by 350 Filipino teachers "who were held in virtual bondage." And that was in Baton Rouge-- you know, coastal Louisiana where 7500 teachers were laid off after Hurricane Katrina. I'm pretty sure that's a region where there were options beyond outsourcing to law-cost Filipino teachers. But Filipino teachers are cheap, and while they depend on those visas, they are unlikely to cause trouble. 

Now, the current regime looks to gather up any immigrant who has any kind of smudge on their record (because to fulfill the promise of deporting millions of hardened criminals, the regime has to redefine "hardened criminals"), and it has to be scary for some of those teachers here on a visa as "exchange" teachers. 

I'm wondering how many of the targets in Maui were relatives of the teachers, but I feel certain the Maui teachers won't be the last exchange teachers to get a visit from ICE. These programs, like much of US immigration, have problems, but my solution of choice wouod not be to turn the US into a hostile police state where immigrants have to worry about someone kicking down the door to drag them away. 

I don't love the Filipino teacher patch for US schyools, but it is clearly working for some folks. Being in ICE crosshairs will clearly not help it work better.

The Failed Case for Super-NAEPery

At The74 (the nation's most uneven education coverage), Goldy Brown (Whitworth U and AEI/CERN) and Christos Makridis (Labor Economics and ASU) have a bold idea that involves putting fresh paint on a bad old idea--the national Big Standardized Test.

Their set-up is the usual noise about how the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) peaked around 2013, which is true if you also believe that the rise that carries I-80 across the Bonneville Salt Flats is also a peak. They are more accurate when they say that "student outcomes" (aka "Big Standardized Test scores") have "largely stagnated" over recent decades. 

Yep, it's a roller coaster

Let me digress for just a moment to note the oddness of that idea of stagnation--as if test scores should keep rising like stock prices and property values. Each cohort of students should be smarter and better than the one before, a thing that would happen... why? What's the theory here? Each year's children will be genetically better than those that came before? That every teacher will significantly up her game with every passing year (because the students rotate out at a much higher rate than the teachers)? Schools get better at gaming the tests? If the expectation is that each successive group of students will score higher than the group before, what is supposed to cause that to happen? And how does it square with the people who think that education should be going "back" to something like "basics"? I mean, doesn't the vision of non-stagnating test scores include students who are all smarter and more knowledgeable than their parents? 

Okay, digression over. The authors also point out that Dear Leader and his crew have "downsized" the staff that oversees the NAEP (while simultaneously insisting that NAEPing will continue normally)-- but they argue that the kneecapping will "create an opportunity to rethink the role this tool can play."

In particular, the Trump Administration could explore using the NAEP to promote greater transparency among schools, parents, and local communities, as well to enhance academic rigor and ensure genuine accountability in a comparable way across schools and states. That would mean replacing a disparate collection of state tests will a single national assessment administered to every fourth and eighth grade student every year.

Yikes. I checked quickly to see if Brown and Makridis are over 15 years of age, because if so, they should remember pretty clearly that the feds have tried this exact thing before. Every state was supposed to measure their Common Core achievements by taking the same BS Test, except then that turned out to be two BS Tests (PAARC and SBA) but then those turned out to be expensive and not-very-good tests and states started dumping them, while folks from all ends of the spectrum noted that this sure looked like an illegal attempt to control curriculum from the federal level.

With national standards and national testing, supporters argued, we would be able to compare students from Utah and Ohio, as if that was something anyone actually wanted to do. As if in Utah parents were saying, "Nice report card, Pat, but what I really want to know is how your test scores compare to the test scores of some kid in Teaneck, New Jersey."

No, these guys have to remember those days, because they are well versed in all the same bad arguments made at the time.

Parents, educators, and state leaders agree that more information — not more bureaucracy — is needed to make informed decisions for their children and communities, as well as to foster greater competition. Making the NAEP a truly national assessment would provide this information in a consistent, credible, and actionable manner.

Right. Test scores would be great for unleashing free market forces in a free market, education-as-a-commodity choice system. Also, competition doesn't unleash anything useful in education. Also also, choice fans have mostly stopped using this talking point because it turns out charter and voucher schools don't actually do any better on BS Tests. Get up to date, guys-- today it's all "choice is a virtue in and of itself" and "parents should get to choose a school that matches their values."  

The writers call for the NAEP to be cranked out every year instead of every other, and for every student instead of the current sampling. No sweat, they say, because every state already has stuff in place for their own state test. 

But an annual universal NAEP would be great because it's a "consistent and academically rigorous measure of student performance." There's a huge amount of room to debate that, but it only sort of matters because the writers have fallen into the huge fallacy of NAEP and PISA and all the rest of these data-generating numbers. "If we had some good solid data," says the fallacy, "then we could really Get Shit Done." We would Really Know how students are doing, we would Really Know about how bad the state tests are, and we would Really Know where the issues in the system are.

It's an appealing notion, and it has never, ever worked. For one thing, nobody can even agree on what critical terms like "proficient" mean when it comes to NAEP. But more importantly, the solid data of NAEP never solves anything. Everyone grabs a slice, applies it to the policies they were busy pushing anyway, and NAEP solves nothing, illuminates nothing, settles nothing. 

The writers also want to use the test illegally in a method now familiar to both political parties. Tie Title I funding to compliance with NAEP testing mandates and presto-- "States would have a stronger incentive to align their instructional practices with higher expectations." In other words, test + money = federal control of local curriculum. Not okay.

They would also like the test to provide feedback to parents about their individual students. This also repeats a critical error of every BS Test to come down the pike. Tests are designed for a particular purpose and one should not attempt to apply them to a host of other purposes-- doing so gets you junk. Also, I still don't believe that conversation in Utah is happening. But this notion--

A national benchmark can support local autonomy while enabling cross-district comparisons that inform parents, educators, and policymakers alike.

Producing a test that generates data useful to all three groups is less likely than capturing a yeti riding a unicorn that is pooping rainbows.

The writers also argue that states could save money if the feds forced them to replace their current batteries of BS Tests with NAEP instead in just 4th and 8th grade. I suppose that depends on the test manufacturer who secures this national testing monopoly.

Their last argument is that universal NAEPery would "offer a balanced form of federal oversight." That means "less intrusive than programmatic mandates" which are not so much intrusive as they are illegal. At any rate, national standardized tests intended to drive programmatic choices are still pretty damned intrusive. 

Now for the wrap up. Starting with this understatement:

Federal initiatives to improve student outcomes have historically produced mixed results.

Yes, and theater trips to see "Our American Cousin" have historically produced mixed results for Presidents. Of the whole list of "mixed" results, they include just the Obama era attempt to use test scores to drive teacher improvement (well, not "improvement" exactly, but teaching to the test in order to raise scores). 

They say one right thing, which is "that policy tools must be both well-designed and responsive to local implementation contexts." But they follow that with "designating NAEP as the national assessment meets both criteria." And no, no it wouldn't, and we know it wouldn't because the last time we tried this national BS Test thing, it went very poorly. This is such a classic reformster construct-- "Historically this thing has failed, so we think the solution is to do it some more, harder."

In an era of educational fragmentation, the NAEP stands out as a uniquely credible and underutilized tool. Repurposing it as the primary national assessment — administered annually to all 4th and 8th graders in states receiving Title I dollars — would promote transparency, reduce redundant testing, and align incentives around higher academic standards. This reform would offer a shared benchmark to evaluate progress across states and districts. At a time when parents, educators, and policymakers are calling for both accountability and flexibility, a restructured NAEP provides a rare opportunity to deliver both.

Is that what parents, e3ducators, and policymakers are calling for, really? Doesn't matter, because NAEP provides nothing special for accountability (certainly not before we have a long, long conversation about accountability to whom and for what) and it certainly doesn't provide flexibility, not even under their repeat of the old argument that states could decide how to meet the national test standards, which is like telling someone "You can get to Cleveland any way you want as long as you arrive at E.9th and Superior within the next six hours seated in a blue Volkswagon, listening to Bob Marley, and eating a taco. Totally up to you what meat is in the taco, though. See? Flexible."

You know what's really flexible? An end to federal mandates for a nationalized Big Standardized Test. 

Oh, Bill. Hush.

The important thing to remember is that Bill Gates has never been right about education.

He invested heavily in a small schools initiative. It failed, because he doesn't understand how schools work.

He tried fixing teachers and playing with merit pay. He inflicted Common Core on the nation, because again, he doesn't understand how schools and teaching and education work. He has tried a variety of other smaller fixes, like throwing money at teacher professional development. He has made an almost annual event out of explaining that NOW he has things figured out (spoiler alert: he does not) and with the new tweaks, he will now transform education (spoiler alert: he does not).

I remind you of all this because nobody should be freaking out over the recent headlines that Gates has predicted that AI will replace teachers and doctors in ten years and humans will, just in general, be obsolete. The Economist called this prediction "alarming," and I suppose it might be if there were any reason to imagine that Gates can make such predictions any more accurately than the guy who takes care of my car at Jiffy Lube.

AI tutors will become broadly available and AI doctors provide great medical advice in an era of "free intelligence." It's all “very profound and even a little bit scary — because it’s happening very quickly, and there is no upper bound,” Gates told Harvard professor Arthur Brooks (the happiness research guy).

Meanwhile, tech companies still won't make and market a printer that reliably does what it's supposed to as a reasonable price. 

Ed tech is always predicting terrific new futures, because FOMO is a powerful marketing force, and making your product seem inevitable is the tech version of an old used car sales technique (called "assume the sale," you just frame the conversation as if the decision to buy the car has already been made and now we're just dickering over terms).

I'm not here to predict the future of AI. I'm sure it will be good for some things ("Compare Mrs. Smith's knee MRI image to a million other images to diagnose what's going on") and terrible for others ("ChatGPT, please answer this email from Pat's parents for me"). 

I'm not sure what the future holds for AI in education, and I am sure that Bill Gates has no idea, either. I am also sure I know which one of us has a better understanding of education and schools and teaching (spoiler alert: not the one with all the money).

Ed tech bros are, like Bill, putting a lot of their bot bets on AI tutors--just sit a kid down with a screen set to "Teach the student grammar and usage" and let it rip. The thing is, we've been playing with education-via-screen for decades now, and it has still not proven itself or taken off. You may recall we ran a fairly large experiment in distance learning via screen back in 2020, and people really hated it-- so much that some of them are still bitching about it.

I'm not sure what is going to be "free" about the AIU when it is so expensive to make, and I'm not sure how obsolete Gates imagines humans will be. It may be that he just dreams of a world in which he doesn't have to deal with any those meat sack Lessers.

But the thing to remember is that the Gates track record in education is the story of a lot of money burned to accomplish nothing except choking a lot of people on the smoke from the fire. 

We will never escape our culture's tendency to assume that if someone has a bunch of money, they are expert at anything at which they wish to pretend to be expert. So people are always going to ask Gates what he thinks about education and its intersection with technology. I'd love to see the day when he says, "You know, I don't really know enough about education to make a comment on that," but until that day comes, we don't have to get excited about whatever he says. 

Another Anti-Union Teacher Union

Those wacky folks at the Freedom Foundation are at it again, trying to convince teachers to dismantle their own unions. And they have a new high-profile edubro to help.

Who are they? Well, their website gives us a good introduction to them:

The Freedom Foundation is more than a think tank. We’re more than an action tank. We’re a battle tank that’s battering the entrenched power of left-wing government union bosses who represent a permanent lobby for bigger government, higher taxes, and radical social agendas.

Their language when approaching teachers and other members of public sector unions is a lot about liberating public employees from political exploitation. Their language in spaces like fundraising letters is a bit more blunt:

The Freedom Foundation has a proven plan for bankrupting and defeating government unions through education, litigation, legislation and community activation ... we won’t be satisfied with anything short of total victory against the government union thugs.

Destroy unions and defund the political left. And they work hard at it, too. They have put an army of foot soldiers out there going door to door in hopes of turning an entire state blue. In one example, they sent activists dressed as Santa Claus to stand outside government buildings, where they told workers they could give themselves a holiday gift by exercising their right not to pay that portion of union dues that goes to political activity.

The foundation was launched in 1991 as the Evergreen Freedom Foundation by Lynn Harsh and Bob Williams. These days Harsh is VP of Strategy for the State Policy Network, the national network of right wing thinky tanks and advocacy groups founded in 1992 (it appears that the foundation may have helped with that launch). Her bio says she started out as a teacher and went on to found two private schools. Williams was a Washington state politician and failed gubernatorial candidate. He went on to work with SPN and ALEC, the conservative corporate legislation mill before passing away in 2022. SPN started giving out an award in his name in 2017.

The foundation is not small potatoes operation-- the staff itself is huge, and the foundation operates out of offices in five states (Washington, Oregon, California, Ohio, and Pennsylvania).

Longtime CEO Tom McCabe is now the Chairman of the Board, and he has been pretty clear in his aims. “Labor bosses are the single greatest threat to freedom and opportunity in America today,” he wrote in one fundraising letter. The current CEO is Aaron Withe, the guy who headed up the door-to-door campaign the get Oregon union members to quit their unions. Presumably he didn't go door to door with the same smarm evident in his company bio pic.

The foundation gets money from a variety of the usual suspects, including the Koch family foundations, Sarah Scaife Foundation, Donors Trust, Ed Uihlein Family Foundation, the Richard and Helen DeVos Foundation, and the State Policy Network. The have gotten small mountains of money from the Bradley Foundation, which also heavily funds the anti-union Center for Union Facts.

Many of these same folks helped fund the Janus lawsuit that did away with Fair Share, and the Freedom Foundation was one of the groups that immediately started to work to get teachers to leave their unions.

The Freedom Foundation has tried various pr stunts to get teachers to quit the union, like the time they sent out Halloween mailers exhorting teachers to "Stop these money-sucking vampires and TAKE BACK YOUR PAYCHECK TODAY"

But now they've added a new feature to the mix. Meet the Teacher Freedom Alliance-- an alternative to those evil unions! It's even Free Market! (What does a free market union even mean? Shut up, you!)

They held a big launch party for TFA (they should have checked to see if that acronym was taken) with special guest ranter, Oklahoma's Education Dudebro-in-chief, Ryan Walters! Walters pointed out that the union fights him on cool stuff like merit pay and signing bonuses. Of course, merit pay has never worked and is usually just an excuse to lower base pay, and signing bonuses are a one-time raise that is useless for things like home loans. But Walters is sad that they draw opposition from those awful unions that he has called terrorist organizations (meaning either they are really awful or Walters is easily terrorized). 

Walters's part of the festivities is a greatest hits collection. Teachers union is on the run! The Left is mad about dismantling the Department of Education (cheers) because they want bureaucrats in DC to tell teachers how to teach math, how they should teach our kids that America's an evil racist country. He even brings up Common Core! Free market, which I guess turns out to mean that the market tells teachers how much they can have. That teachers union-- they don't care about teachers or students. And Trump is great. And we should put the Bible in classrooms. 

Walters has gone all-in on promoting TFA, which has led at least one Oklahoma legislator to ask the state attorney general if it's legal for the state education chief to use state resources to promote this thing. Just add that to the list of Walters's questionable choices in office. Meanwhile, he issues a typical non-statement statement in response as reported by Murray Evans at The Oklahoman

"Democrats and union bosses are grasping at straws because teachers finally have a real choice," Walters said. "My office will always communicate with educators about their options, no matter how much it upsets the political establishment."

So what is TFA offering? For one thing, culture panic:

We are a group for teachers and by teachers, ready to change the direction of public education, returning us to traditional, American values. Excellence, not ideology.

On the website, that's in all caps. I spared you the shouting.

Turns out the "by teachers" part is a stretch. The three members of "the team" include Rachel Maiorana is the Director of Marketing and Advocacy; she is also the former Deputy National Director of the Freedom Foundation after serving as California Outreach director since 2021. She was also a Campus Coordinator for Turning Point USA, after doing "brand ambassador work for Coke and serving as a cheerleading coach. Coms degree from Cal State Fullerton.

Director of Member Programs Ali Abshire joined the program in December 2024. Before that she was a Behavioral Health Specialist at Cincinatti Children's, a program officer at the Reagan Ranch, a nanny, a kitchen team member at Chick-fil-A in Lynchburg, and a manager at Zoup! Eatery! Her BS in psychology is from Liberty University in 2022.

Executive Director Eloise Branch came from the Director of Teacher Engagement post at Freedom Foundation, after a couple of years as curator at Young America's Foundation (a campus conservatives outfit) and teaching for two non-consecutive years at The Classical Academy. She got her BA in History from Grove City College in 2017. GCC is about 30 minutes away from me, and it has fashioned itself into a small Hillsdale College of PA. 

So not exactly a deep bench of seasoned and experienced educators here. What benefits do they offer? 

Well, there's "dignifying professional development." And when it comes to that Big Deal that everyone frets about-- liability insurance-- their offer is novel. You get a chance to piggy back on the liability coverage offered to two other "alternative" teacher unions. You can choose the Christian Education Association (you can read their story here) or the Association of American Educators (more about them here). Both are longstanding non-union unions, with CEA very Christ-in-the-classroom emphasis and AAE more aligned with the Fordham-AEI axis of reformsterdom. Neither is large enough to provide credible support for a teacher in a big-time lawsuit, nor am I sure how hard they'd try to defend someone accused of reading Naughty Books or doing socialist DEI things. 

There's a third benefit offered, and that's "alternative curricula" which includes "alternative curriculums and teaching pedagogies ranging from the science of reading to classical mathematics to explicit instruction to the Socratic Method" which may lead one to ask "alternative to what?"

If you can't already guess based on the source of these folks, the website drops more hints about what these folks consider "alternative." 

We exist to develop free, moral, and upright American citizens.

That "free, moral, and upright" appears frequently. There's a blog post outlining the benefits of dismantling the department of education ("funding and decision-making authority" will shift to state and local levels, which is at least half right). There's a small assortment of news articles about education, including one from the conservative Illinois Policy website, a harmless Natalie Wexler article, a Rick Hess interview with Daniel Buck, an article from the right wing Daily Caller, and another from the wingnut right Daily Wire.

And you know, there's no reason that there can't be a right wing union for right wing teachers (though this is only the latest of many failed attempts), but their other repeated idea is "Excellence, not ideology."

We support the right of every educator in America to pursue excellence in the classroom free of ideological interference.

Except our ideology, because, you know, that's just "common sense." The fictional narrative is that teachers are too busy teaching Marx and Crazy Left Ideas to ever cover actual reading and math, which is a thing you can only believe if you have never spent any time in a public school. Anyway, by replacing Cray Lefty Stuff with academics laced with Common Sense (aka right wing ideology), we can Make America Smart Again. At the launch party, Withe said that their curricula would teach students “to love our country; we’re going to teach them that capitalism is the best economic system ever created.”

Now, how deeply they want to actually pursue this is anyone's guess, given that the organization's a wing of a group that has explicitly stated that they want to dismantle the teacher unions, which makes the actual mission of TFA secondary at best.

The launch party was attended by 50 whole educators and a bunch of Freedom Foundation staffers. 

Also worth noting-- the Center for Media and Democracy reports that Freedom Foundation tried this on a smaller scale in the Miami-Dade district, where they backed another faux union and, aided by Governor Ron DeSantis-backed anti-union legislation. They promised that they would "bring the nation's third-largest teachers union to the brink of extinction." They did not-- teachers voted 83% to 17% to stick with their existing AFT affiliate. 

TFA is mum on one other union function-- negotiating contracts. At the launch party, Withe promised that TFA would “provide benefits and resources that are far superior to anything that the teachers unions do.” He even made an emphatic gesture on "far." That's another piece of the free market fairy tale-- the free market will just pay teachers a whole lot. This is a silly argument. First of all, the free market doesn't work quite the same when you're talking about people paid with tax dollars. Second of all, the notion that people are just dying for the chance to pay great teachers a whole lot more, but that darned union is holding them back is unsupported by any reality-based evidence. You'll occasionally find young teachers declaring that left to their own devices, they could negotiate a far better deal than the union, and, oh, honey. What kind of leverage do you think you have. But even if you could, the finite pot of money that schools work with means that you would be negotiating against all the other teachers. Maybe teaching Thunderdome would be fun, but I doubt it. 

People don't pay teachers much because A) they can't afford to and B) they don't want to. And C) they especially don't want to spend a lot on education for Those Peoples' Children. And this is especially true of folks like the Freedom Foundation, who do not want to end unions for the teachers own good but because A) ending the unions would hurt the Democratic party and B) without unions, it would be even easier to pay teachers bottom dollar. 

At that same launch party, Ryan Walters said, "The Freedom Foundation-- it sounds too good to be true. I promise you it's not." I suspect he's right both times-- it's not too good, and it's not true.