Heritage: How To Make More Babies

I'm not sure where to start--this is the most mind-blowingly boneheaded "report" I have ever seen come out of a reformster activist group in maybe ever. This is not off the rails or in the weeds. It has left both rails and the weeds far behind, careening into some parched plain where the blazing light of political desire has dried up every drop of sense. Let the record show that I am perfectly capable of engaging in serious discussion with serious making serious ed reform arguments, but this is spectacularly unserious.

The title of the blog post masquerading as a report is "Education Policy Reforms Are Key Strategies for Increasing the Married Birth Rate" produced by Jay Greene and Lindsey Burke for the Heritage Society, and it needs a "Not The Onion" label, but I suppose it signals yet another tack for the culture panic crowd. Heritage made this point with a little less verve just last year, and it was bunk then, too. I've read it so you don't have to. Let's dive in.

The Problem We're Trying To Solve

The United States fertility rate has dropped below the replacement rate, and that is Very Bad. Fertility rates are dropping all over the planet, and resist policy efforts. 

While no silver bullet can increase the married birth rate, developing pro-family policies is essential if Americans want to maintain their political and cultural traditions, avoid economic decline, and strengthen national defense.

Spoiler alert: by "pro-family policies," they do not mean what you think that means. This will not be a discussion of how to provide support for young families, nor will we talk about how the US trails the rest of the industrialized world when it comes to family leave. We just love to talk about supporting families in this country as long as it doesn't inconvenience employers or involve spending taxpayer dollars. 

Sure, some governments try financial incentives and subsidized services. But that, they argue, doesn't work all that much. Besides, raising kids has always been expensive. So with a quick wave of their hands, they dismiss any economic concerns that might be holding young folks back.

No, they argue, "the decline in the number of children is driven primarily by values and priorities." Kids These Days lack the moral fiber to have kids these days. Why, back in 1970s (when, they remind us, that birth control pill was first legalized) the standard of living was lower, the GDP was lower, but people were popping out babies left and right. Now people have more wealth and less inclination to spend it on children.

Now, there's a ton of research out there about this very question, but Greene and Burke aren't going to bring any of that up. Some of it actually offers some support for their idea that we're seeing a slightly selfish values shift (and some of it says "Shut up, Boomer-- you're the selfish ones"), but it also brings up a host of other concerns, including economic worries, the environment, the general state of the world. But never mind any of that. They have a different thought.

"The general standard of living and overall societal wealth" are up compared to 100 years ago, they point out, and at this point I, a non-academic non-sociologist, would question how those "general" terms break down. Averages hide a lot of highs and lows, and lots of folks don't get to participate in "overall societal wealth." But never mind. People are getting married later than they used to. If you know actual young people, a hundred possible explanations may spring to mind, but we aren't looking at any of that, because Greene and Buke have a different culprit in mind.

College. Specifically, college financial aid.

People are spending more time in college. "Much of the trend can be explained" by the "subsidy-induced explosion" of college enrollment, and college campuses don't include many young student parents. 

Put plainly, massive and unnecessary education subsidies are artificially steering people into delaying or even foregoing marriage and children.

Has college enrollment exploded? Has college financial aid exploded? How "non-existent" are married parent students? These all seem like points for which actual data exist, but none will be mentioned here.

And if you were getting to make the excuse that the job market demands increased skills and education, Burke and Greene say no, it doesn't. Only a third of secretaries have degrees, compared to 9% in 1990, which proves... something? There are too many "excess" credential requirements, and too many subsidies keeping too many people in college for too many years, postponing markers of adulthood. 

I have more questions. Like, if college is the culprit, what part of the population does that affect? About five seconds of research reveals that roughly a third of the adult population had a bachelors degree. So what about everyone else? Are they slacking off, too, or is the college crowd just dragging the numbers down all by themselves? 

Finally, a Heritage post about education wouldn't be complete with a demand for privatization:

Finally, to reverse the tide of declining fertility rates, it is necessary to consider barriers to parents educating their own children in ways that increase the likelihood that those children will have pro-fertility values.

They call this "universal education choice," but it is clearly meant to be one particular education choice. They want it for "all families" which of course means "wealthy families already using private schools." 

Let's Drag Religion Into It

Here comes the Institute for Family Studies, another Bradley and Koch funded right wing outfit creating a basis for policies right-tilted folks want--in this case, traditional straight parents raising children with mom at home. IFS has connected the lower birth rate with a decline in religious connection. Church attenders make more babies, and fewer people attend church so the decline accounts for “virtually 100% of the decline in fertility in the United States from 2012 to 2019.”

Now, other countries with higher religious observance don't have higher fertility, admit the authors, but that's because the politics, economics, and culture are different. There's a lot implied and suggested by that observation; the authors will not be examining any of it. We're just going to leave it at the idea that religiosity differences affect fertility differences with countries, but not between them. Because, I guess, there's no such thing as meaningful political, economic, or cultural differences within a country. It sure would have been interesting to examine, say, fertility differences between the different sub-cultures and regions of the US, but we're not going to do that.

Anyway, religious people put more value on children, making parents "more greatly appreciate the personal, societal, and even eternal benefits of having more babies" and therefor not mind the cost.

Now we get to some big time baloney.

When the government compels parents to enroll their children in school and then provides secular, public schools as the only tax-supported option, it is erecting a significant barrier to parents giving children a religious education.

This is simply not true. I've made the long argument before, but this time, let me offer a simple observation. If we're looking for data, let's consider that the decrease in religiosity in this country has occurred at the same time as the rise in school choice. Most of the religious people making this argument themselves came through public school with their religious devotion entirely intact. That's because not telling you what to believe is not the same as telling you what not to believe. Public education leaves the religion spot in a student's life wide open for the family to fill in as they like. 

Conservatives like to argue that they don't co-parent with the government, but this complaint amounts to a demand that the government should co-parent with them, to back them up on a faith that apparently they can't inculcate and grow in their children without someone else's help. 

Then there's this:

Families must be able to afford to pay twice—once in taxes supporting the district public school, and a second time for private school tuition—to be able to access instruction that matches their faith and values.

No. Families don't even pay for tuition the first time. That's the beauty of the system--nobody pays all of the tuition ever. This is especially true for some quiverfull family with multiple children. Do they also suggest that it is unjust for folks with no children at all to pay taxes? (They do not). But the unspoken premise of modern choice is that education is a service provided to families; it ignores the notion that public education is there not to serve only families, but to serve the public as a whole. 

Nor do religious private schools serve even a large number of families. The authors argue that vouchers put religious private schools on a level playing field with public schools. They do not, at least not as long as private religious schools retain the right to reject and expel students for any and all reasons. And not only do they pick and choose which families to serve, but they frequently fail to serve society by failed and unaccountable teaching.

Greene and Burke argue that religious private schools make children more likely to grow up religious, and gee, that's a pretty thought, but it also shows for the gazillionth time that this is not about actual school choice at all--it's about replacing a public system with a particular, limited set of values. It's about taxpayer subsidies for private religious schools. "Parents should have a choice of schools--as long as they choose a properly religious school."

Education savings accounts, tax-credit-supported private school scholarships, and vouchers should be viewed as key pro-fertility policies. Lowering barriers to families selecting a school of their choice, including religious education for their children, increases the odds that parents will have children and that a larger share of those children will retain religious beliefs and practices that boost marriage and fertility.

"You know, Ethel, I wasn't really planning on having children, but now that our state offers school vouchers, let's go ahead and pop out a bunch."

Early family formation and damn that college racket

Greene and Burke lead with a bunch of stats showing that the median age for getting married and for having children are higher than they used to be, and pair that with the assertion that "fertility is significantly reduced for people who delay" those activities. 

Now for some research slight-of-hand. The next paragraph will start by saying that while "many factors" contribute to the late start, "one of the most important is the longer period of time that people spend in school." This is followed by a lot of stats showing that people spend a lot of time in school. Is there anything to connect the cause and effect, other than putting sentences together in one paragraph? There is not. Data about what percentage of late starters are college-educated? Nope. 

They note that grad student population increased from 2.9 million to 3.2 million from 2010 to 2021. So... those 300,000 grad students are the cause of the nation's fertility drop? They blame that hop on the Grad PLUS loan program. That has "likely" played a key role, they argue (without data). Some number of people are spending 6 to 10 years in higher education. What number? "Most of them" put off marriage. How many?

We do finally at some data. 43% of women with degrees wait till 30 to have children; of high school diploma women, the figure is 8.5%. Of degreed women, 22% will never have children; for diplomas, it's 11.5%. How do men figure in this? 

The authors decry businesses that "chase degrees," which they do in part because those damn "overzealous" enforcers of civil rights have "made it exceedingly difficult for businesses to administer job-related pre-employment tests, and I would love to learn more about this thing that I've never, ever heard of before, but there is no source cited for this widespread practice. But you know-- emphasis on degrees over merit has tricked people into pursuing credentials that they don't need, but which keep them from taking advantage of their peak baby-making years. It's that damned government "free" money in the form of loans (which are kind of the opposite of free money, but if they want to argue that 19-year-olds don't fully grasp that, I won't disagree) and those loans create a huge debt load that further delays baby-making.

Here follows an assortment of data to support the notion that college is expensive and doesn't pay off for lots of folks. Again, I won't argue this. 

Now, you might think that a logical conclusion here might be to argue that the government could hand out more grants instead of loans, or that colleges should be restructured to be less money-grubbing, or that government needs to address the economic weaknesses that result in so many people stuck in so many crappy jobs that pay subsistence wages while still allowing employers to demand credentials just because they can further fueling the notion that a college education is important for involving life in the bottom of America's economic barrel.

But this is the Heritage Foundation, so no. Instead, the proposal is for the government to stop helping people go to college and just start working at a young age so that they get straight on to that baby-making. I am sure that everyone at Heritage, and their many fine rich donors stand behind this and refuse to put any of their children through college, insisting that they get out there and get a job. But I get the feeling this is aimed at the poors.

Proposals to cut subsidized student loan programs should therefore be seen as key pro-fertility policies.

The actual agenda here--  "An Education Reform Agenda to Increase the Married Birth Rate and Support Families"

Here's what Burke and Greene say the states should do.

Adopt Universal School Choice.

Well, not choice exactly. But if taxpayers would fund religious private schools so that more students would attend them, more students would grow up religious and go through the "success sequence" by graduating high school, getting married, getting a job, and then having kids, just like Jesus wanted them to. 

Eliminate Teacher Certification Requirements

Speaking of too much emphasis on college, how about teachers? Why get certification? Just let school leaders hire folks "whom they deem to have sufficient subject-matter expertise to teach in K–12 classrooms" so that teachers can get straight to baby-making (though I'm not aware of certification lengthening teacher college time). They cite some research from reformsters that I am not going to take time to chase here to argue that certification doesn't make teachers any better. 

Eliminate Bachelor’s Degree Requirements for State Government Work.

Eliminate degree requirements for government work, because surely a high school diploma is enough. Hell, over the next four years, we may find that a high school diploma is too much. 

Eliminate PLUS loan programs

Both Grad and Parent loan programs should be tanked. Go get a private loan, or a job. 

So, to summarize our argument so far, in K-12, lack of resources should not deprive families of educational choices, but after high school, if you are too poor for college, tough noogies. Also, if government aid causes tuition inflation in colleges, will it do the same in K-12 (spoiler alert: yes).

End Student Loan Cancellation

This seems backwards--after all, if you want young adults to stop worrying about their debt and start making the babies, making the debt go away seems like a productive choice. But the authors are afraid that such largesse encourages more debt. Better to make sure that young men and women understand right up front that college will mean crippling debt, and maybe they should just not bother with such aspirations beyond their class and get on with the job and the baby making.

Revive Industry-Recognized Apprenticeship Programs (IRAPs) to Expand Apprenticeships.

Also an excellent path to getting to work and making babies sooner without wasting time at college.

Good Lord in Heaven 

So many questions, and so little curiosity. Why are young adults putting off family stuff? What are the economic and cultural factors? Are there any patterns surrounding where, and among whom, this does or doesn't happen? Are there other policies that could support family formation, like doing something about the world's worst family leave, plus other measures that would make it possible for women to have a family and a job (maybe even make it as easy as it is for men)? What about minimum wage? Are there any possible solutions that fall outside the preferred social engineering policies of right wingers? How effective are religious schools at creating religious adults? Are there any actual data connecting college and late-starting families? If college is an issue, are there other policy solutions to the weight of extra years and financial burdens? What does the data tell us about who does and doesn't follow the "success sequence" and why? What does the data tell us about people who follow the sequence and end up with a crappy job and a family they can't support (and is that related to a reliable supply of meat widgets who can't afford to leave no matter how poorly their employers treat them)? What is really behind the drop in church attendance in this country (hint: there are whole books about this)? How do schools add religion without needing a government bureau of religion approval? Wouldn’t increased immigration be a possible help here? Oh, and do private voucher systems produce good educational results that benefit society as a whole?

There is a whole lot of territory to cover in questions about national birth rates, national religiosity, college and university policies, changes in family structure, and credentialling for various professions. But Greene and Burke show no interest in actually examining these areas--they are simply intent on hewing out a path that leads to their pre-selected conclusions. 

Do they hit on some worthy points along the way, like the effects of over-selling college to a generation? Sure. But mostly they craft an incurious case to support the policies they want to support. This "report" is just a blog post in a tux.

One thing to note--this adds to the list of items revealing some sort of baby panic on the right, an apparent fear that they will somehow run out of pliable meat widgets. It lurks around forced birth policies, the end of child labor laws, the attempts to create parallel education system (one for the haves and one for the have-nots), as well as the concern that a social safety net makes it too easy for the poors to walk away from crappy jobs. The hum and buzz suggest that a certain sector of the country is really worried that they're going to run out of cheap laborers, that our meat widget supply is in trouble. Whether Greene and Burke share that fear or are simply playing on it to sell taxpayer subsidies for religious schools is up for debate

Is It Time For Conservatives To Get Back To Ed Reform

Robert Pondiscio was at AEI after the election to wonder if the time had come for conservatives to get back to the ed reform biz. It's an interesting question, partly because Pondiscio has correctly called the winds of change in the past, partly because a new Trump administration is a fine time to consider how "conservative" and "liberal" don't precisely map onto the education debates. I haven't changed my mind about ed reform; I still love public education and disagree with massive critical chunks of the reform agenda. But for purposes of this discussion, that's momentarily beside the point.

Did conservatives go somewhere?

Here's my over-simplified history of the modern school choice movement.

Since Milton Friedman helped birth the modern choice movement, its heart has been small government, free market conservatism--and that has never been enough. At first the only people to run with it were pissed off post-Brown racists. Reagan tried to set the stage with A Nation at Risk, beginning the process of eroding public faith in and support for public schools. 

Skip ahead to No Child Left Behind, a policy project that was either an attempt to improve public education or an attempt to start loosening the bolts so it could be dismantled. Either way, it birthed a new bipartisan movement centered on accountability, standards and charter-style choice (and in barely a whisper, vouchers). 

That coalition required a sort of bargain. For conservatives, an emphasis on market-empowered choice, and for their partners, a promise that choice would be aimed at improving equity in education for marginalized group. That deal was hard to maintain, especially as it emerged that 1) choice didn't really fix America's equity issues and 2) free market conservatives didn't really mind. Some conservatives complained at being pushed out of the coalition, but then Trump was elected and the coalition was pretty much blown apart-- the social uplift side was not going to have anything to do with Trump, but there were some conservative issues as well.

Meanwhile, dating all the way back to the Obama administration, a new anti-public school wave was building, a culture panic fed by opportunists like Chris "Critical Race Theory Is Scary" Rufo and wackadoo scares like the Great Imaginary Litter Box Panic. 

In February of 2022, we could the closest thing to a formal announcement of a new partnership. Jay Greene, who in a somewhat symbolic move left academia to join right-wing activist group the Heritage Foundation, published "Time for the school choice movement to embrace the culture wars." He argued that trying to pretend to care about things that lefties liked such as equity and uplift wasn't helping the cause (also, the growing body of research showed that, academically, vouchers are a losing proposition), so instead, why not throw in with the culture panic crowd.

Which they did. The problem for conservative free market fans is that the culture panic crowd has zero interest in school choice. They have worked for two goals-- a taxpayer-funded public system that is dominated by their values, and a private taxpayer-funded voucher system dominated by their values. So instead of arguments for letting a hundred education flowers bloom and to each their own, Greene went on to cobble together fake research to show that school choice would end wokeism in education. 

So what could be changing now?

Pondiscio sees an opportunity within the election results, specifically the observation that the GOP made big goals in Florida and Texas, two states that have pushed school choice hard. Pondiscio also notes that "Republicans’ 'red state strategy' has been a yielded important victories, particularly passing universal Education Savings Account (ESA) programs in about a dozen states in the past few years."

He also sees the need to try, because (as Pondiscio regularly points out) the vast majority of students are educated in public schools, so walking away from public ed reform is essentially giving the other team a bye. "The majority of American children—future entrepreneurs, engineers, doctors, soldiers, and citizens—will continue to be educated in traditional public schools for the foreseeable future. Surrendering these institutions to the left would be an act of educational and cultural self-destruction."

There are obstacles and opportunities

It’s also an opportunity for thoughtful conservatives to re-evaluate past missteps and even make amends. That means engaging with public school teachers, a group that has borne the brunt of conservative ire in recent years. As I argued recently in National Affairs, while it’s true that teachers’ unions have often been obstacles to meaningful reform, there’s more common ground between conservatives and teachers than most people realize on a host of issues including teacher training and pay, school safety, student discipline, even curriculum.

Well, yes. It has been a couple of decades, starting with No Child Left Behind operating on the premise that a bunch of teachers were everything wrong and failing in public education, continuing with Common Core premised on the idea that no teachers could do their jobs without careful direction, and all the way up through assertions that teachers are satanic groomers and pedophiles. Not all of that is the fault of conservatives, but is true that conservatives--or anyone else--who wants to work with teachers (and they all should) will have to first apologize and second prove they aren't there to punch teachers in the face again. 

The bigger obstacle is hinted at in Pondiscio's piece. Choicers may have gotten voucher bills in many legislatures, but vouchers were on the ballot in three states and they all lost, decisively. The path to implementing vouchers remains what it has always been-- around the voters and through the legislature.

The presents a problem for conservatives, because the folks in legislatures are increasingly MAGA, and MAGA is not conservative in any traditional sense of the word. Sure, they have some of the language down, but consider, for instance, the Trump MAGA plan for education, which boils down to 1) we want to dismantle the department of education because the federal government should have no control over local schools and 2) we would like to exert total control over what local schools may and may not teach.

Actual Queen of Rumania

One key problem with choice has been accountability. Market forces do not create accountability, certainly not the kind of accountability needed to protect the educations and futures of young humans. Likewise, the argument that we can't "just trust" public schools with all those taxpayer dollars, but handing those dollars to private or charter schools is just fine-- that's not particularly conservative accountability. But MAGA is not real big on any accountability at all, which means more choice legislation that forbids taxpayers from knowing how their money was spent.

That's why I have my doubts about conservatives finding a path back to the heart of education reform, because that path is being guarded by MAGA, and if MAGA is conservative, I am the Queen of Rumania. 

But there is a useful piece of an idea here, because I'm going to argue that you can in education find plenty of conservatives involved in education. The place is schools.

Conservative and liberal and education

I have been surrounded by conservatives my whole life. My grandmother was a staunch GOP legislator in New Hampshire for much of her life, and my father was a faithful Republican as well. My ideas about conservatives come from direct contact, not what the liberal media says about them. I don't spend a lot of time worrying about political labels, and I have never fully understood exactly how political labels track onto sides of education debates.

Free market conservatives are a fine old tradition for conservatives; I think their belief in the invisible hand is sometimes sorely misplaced, but I get it. The supposed leftie allies of ed reform? That never tracked for me. Democrats for Education Reform was a deliberate attempt to manufacture a palatable political package for Democrats. Michelle Rhee, Bill Gates-- liberals? Neoliberals seem like Friedman's nieces and nephews. 

Trying to track a Dem-GOP divide in education seems fruitless, particularly now that MAGA has squeezed most actual Republicans out of their own party. Too many actors are just muddying the waters by using party affiliation to cover their actual affiliation, which is to power and money.

In education, let's instead divide the teams up this way-- Team Burn It All Down and Team Make It Work. 

Conservatives and liberals, nominal Republicans and Democrats can be found on both sides of the debates. But I would argue that "Let's take this time-tested institution and simply trash the whole thing" is not a particularly conservative point of view. Likewise, I think we would find among choice fans both people who want to trash the current system to make room for choice and people who want to use choice to make the system work better. Unfortunately, MAGA and the culture panic crowd are largely Burn It Down--and they just won an election.

As for public schools-- most everyone working in the school wants to make it work better (I suppose it's theoretically possible that there are schools which everyone believes cannot be improved, but I doubt it). Preserve and improve the institution is a fundamentally conservative position, and if you look closely, I believe you'll find that most schools have adopted policies that draw objections not because they are trying to embark on a leftie crusade, but because they believe those policies will help the school work better. Teachers mostly support free lunch and breakfast for students not because they want to promote socialism, but because students are easier to teach when they aren't hungry. 

In other words, education debates can go so much better if folks worry more about the goals and less about which team jersey the policy is wearing.

This is not to say that there isn't a huge divide between the Burn It Down and the Make It Work folks, as well as some huge and definitive differences of opinion amongst the Make It Work crowd. And as with every issue in America these days, the entire field is clogged with unserious people who are simply trying to find an opportunity and angle; red and blue don't matter much to someone focused on green. 

So what were we talking about, again?

Could traditional ed reformsters from outside the Burn It Down crowd get involved in the education debates again? Are there bridges that can rebuilt and fences mended? Can any of it be done while Trump is unleashing God-knows-what over the next few months, and the Burn It Down crowd rules the discussion? And would you like to argue that all I've said is void because you disagree with my definition of conservatism?

Lots of maybe's there, but I do know this-- the last few years we've had lots of really loud reformster voices hollering nonsense. It surely wouldn't hurt to have more rational voices concerned about education rather than politics, and maybe not burn everything down.

Another Choice Advocate Gathering

The Interational School Choice and Reform Conference has been a thing since 2010. Here's the goal:

The goal is connect scholars who engage in rigorous research about school choice in ways that illuminate current policy debates.

The conference is historically held in Fort Lauderdale over the long Martin Luther King Jr. weekend (though last year it was in Madrid). It claims to be "academically sound" with a "rigorous peer-review process." This year they're at the Sonesta Fort Lauderdale Beach hotel. 

This year's list of sponsors isn't up yet, but it doesn't seem to change much from year to year, so we're looking at last year's list. It tells us what kind of operation we're talking about.

Top two Platinum sponsors are EdChoice (previously the Friedman Foundation, the grand mac daddies of school choice policy) and Stand Together, part of the Koch web of philanthroactivism. Those are $30,000 spots.

At $20K Gold level, we had The Heritage Foundation. For Silver ($10K) The Hoover Institute, National Alliance of Public Charter Schools, the Walton-funded and choice-pushing University of Arkansas College of Education, and Stride, the 800-pound cyber-guerilla of the virtual charter biz. In the cheap seats, CREDO (the "research" outfit that studies choice), the Education Freedom Institute (the outfit run by Corey DeAngelis), Kennesaw University (in Georgia), VELA education fund (a joint Koch-Walton that funnels money to choice), and the American Federation for Children. 

The planning committee is folks from universities, plus Drew Catt, the executive director of EdChoice; also Jay Greene, formerly at University of Arkansas and now with Heritage Foundation. The ISCRC "partners" with the Journal of School Choice, which is edited by Robert Maranto at the University of Arkansas. The editorial board includes Neal McClusky (Cato), Rick Hess (AEI), Robin Lake (CRPE), and Mike McShane (AEI). 

To attend, you register as a senior scholar, junior scholar, grad student or as guest of a regular attendee. So clearly we're heavy on the academics at this thin, even as it clearly has advocacy aims-- fostering what Josh Cowen quotes voucher advocates as calling "soldier-scholars" or "counter intelligentsia."

If that doesn't provide enough of a hint of where this is headed, we can look at the schedule. It lists topics and not speakers

The History of the School Choice Movement (Part 1)
Breaking Through Lines: The Impact of School Choice Assignment and Zoning on Education Opportunity 

School System Reform: Cross-Country Insights on Drivers of Student Achievement 

Identities, Ethics, and Rights 

Rural and High School Charters 

Success and Quality in Virtual Schools 

Teachers and School Choice 

Imagining a Free Market in Education: Concepts, Accountability, and Barriers 

Charter School Authorization and Access 

Education Freedom Tax Credits

Regulating Private Education Choice

School Choice Victories: Woo-Hoos and Whoopsies

That's just Day One. I'd come back on Saturday for a couple of topics that invoke the culture war, market research on choice, implementing and measuring school choice, charter school accountability and ROI, and "ESA's: Strengthening This Ever-Growing Option."

The nature of many topics lead me to suspect that some sponsors are also presenting some of their own stuff.

It looks like a fun time. The website pitches it as not too large and therefor great for networking. And it's one more thing to watch for whatever the next reformster pitch is going to be, to see what sort of germs of school choice advocacy will be grown in this particular petri dish. Note: It's not too late to register, if you've got the academic credentials. 

Power and Priorities

This week the Washington Post ran a story about the millions of Americans who do not control the thermostats in their own homes. It's a feature of a deal that many folks make-- in exchange for a cut on their utility costs, they let the electric company take control of the HVAC in their home. It's one more way that the US is finding to cope with a demand for electricity that is, a certain moments, outstripping the ability to generate and deliver the needed power. These deals are pretty commonplace; at my folks house, certain major appliances cannot be run during certain mornings of the week.

This is wrapped up in a larger issue--a power grid that is struggling to keep up. Experts have been sounding the alarm for a few years now. Our electricity supply is not infinite, and our ability to deliver electricity is not limitless. 

More humans means more demand, and as demand increases, the grid is more inclined to stumble. 

Which takes me back to the conversation that we aren't having about AI.

We talk a lot about the ethics of students using AI to cheat. We talk about the various techniques and methods for taming the AI beats by embracing it in the classroom. 

But we generally have these conversations as if there is no cost to the choices we make. And that's a false assumption.

Should a family do without heat or air conditioning for part of the day so that a group of seventh graders can cheat on their homework? Should a home go through a brown out so that someone can get AI to generate a picture of Donald Trump riding a unicorn? Should anybody have their HVAC turned off so that Google can generate a bad summary of search results that people ignore anyway?

Plus, you know what happens to a commodity when it becomes more scarce--it becomes more expensive as the folks competing for it bid the price up and up. Are we all going to pay more for electricity so that AI can crank out more mind-numbing content for internet advertisers? Is steady, dependable electricity going to become a luxury item only available to the well-to-do?

Meanwhile, Microsoft has made a deal to reopen the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant, site of one of America's most alarming nuclear accidents, to help power their AI data center. 

AI is a big part of this, but Crypto also eats an awful lot of processing power. And for people who love their electric vehicle because it runs on cheap, readily available energy--well, that's what folks thought about automobiles for decades. 

And all of that is before we even start to talk about the other rare resource involved, used to cool the server banks that make the magic happen. AI is sucking up mega-gallons of water. 

Maybe clever people and market forces will sort all this out. But I would feel better if we were having an actual conversation about the cost-benefits ratio involved in using precious resources to create state-of-the-art CGI porn and help Junior whip up an Animal Farm book report. AI isn't a lot of things, and one of the things it isn't is free. 

Why, Jeff Yass?

I've read some Jeffrey Yass profiles, but it will be hard to beat the one just published by Robert Huber at Philadelphia's City Paper. It's not just an illuminating profile of Yass, but of the motivation behind many of the privatizers.

Huber traces Yass's devotion to school choice back to his time on the Cato Institute board and a conversation at a Cato event with Milton Friedman.

“‘If you had a lot of philanthropic money, what would you do with it?’ And Friedman said, ‘I would fight for school choice. That’s the fundamental problem with the country. Nothing is more valuable than school choice.’ So as a gambler, I was like, well, I got to ask the guy who has the best opinion. I want to bet with him. So it certainly made sense to me. … [It’s] pretty obvious that nothing could impact society as much as school choice.”

Which is a window into Yass’s way of thinking: He drills down into the most rational viewpoint held by the smartest people — ­of course, he’s the one deciding what’s most rational and who’s the smartest — ­and then runs with it.

Yass is a free market true believer. Competition will improve education. Education will reduce poverty. And he sees one other outcome that he likes:

“As students flee [to schools of their choice], those government schools would have to shut down,” he says, trotting out his favored term for public schools. “And that’s a good thing. If a school cannot fix itself, if it does not adequately educate its children, if it shortchanges the families it is supposed to serve, it doesn’t deserve to be open.”

Huber mentions, not for the last time, the complete self-assuredness with which Yass pitches his ideas. Schools are a big wasteful bureaucracy. Having the money follow the child will work. And all the rest because, as Huner writes, "Jeff Yass has absolutely no doubt that he is right."

Huner delves into Yass's technique of primarying anyone from his own party who doesn't back his choicer agenda (an old DeVos tactic). And while one of his PA partners, state senator Andy Williams, says that Yass just loves kids, Councilwoman Kendra Brooks argues that he does not give a damn "about education policy for the families and children in my community. He just doesn't want to pay taxes. Asked what she would say to Yass, she offers Huber this:

“I really would like to know the why,” she says. Why his focus is on Black and brown children and why he thinks he knows best what they need. “Why does it have to be grounded in pulling these children out of their communities and transforming them into something different?”

 Folks often rush to accuse privatizers of looking to make plenty of money, but one old friend of Yass's, when pressed, offers a motivation--

Power. Huber expands. "The power to upset the apple cart, to blow things up, to have his say."

Power and focus, perhaps. Huber pulls an example from a Texas race in which he backed David Covey, from the far right wingnut part of the GOP, simply because Greg Abbott told Yass that this guy would be their friend on choice. Telling Yass about Covey's extreme beliefs, Hubert mines the following:

Yass claims that he was unaware of that; Governor Abbott, he says, told him Covey was a sane human being, and if there were a really bad guy who was in favor of school choice, Yass says he wouldn’t support him.

Later, I press Yass on that: What of conservative candidates he supports who would try to cut spending on programs that help schoolchildren — Head Start-type programs, say, or school lunch programs — in the name of cutting taxes? Does that concern him at all?

“No, frankly,” Yass says. “Because the school choice issue is so much bigger than anything else that I don’t really consider those things.”

Perhaps whether Covey is a bad guy is debatable, but Yass not knowing exactly whom he supports — or considering the fallout from what policies they’ll pursue — is chilling. (In the end, Covey lost. Barely.)

Huber believes that Huber sincerely wants to fix US education, and agrees that we "desperately need to have an open debate on the state of our schools, our urban schools especially." Yass says he welcomes that debate.

But to many people, it looks like he leaped from debate to certainty long ago, and that he is dangerously gaming our politics with all the money he is throwing around in the name of education. That criticism doesn’t matter, not to Yass. Because he believes he is right.

Because he is utterly certain that he knows the answer:

We have seen this movie before. Bill Gates, because he successfully launched a technocratic empire. Betsy DeVos, because she has a direct line to God. Jeff Yass, because he's gotten incredibly rich beating the system. Countless other wealthy people, because they have been successfully in one business endeavor or because they are sure they know the mind of God.

Each certain that they know The True Answer, and each endowed with a mountain of money that they can use to appoint themselves the Boss of All Education. True Believers who don't feel the need to hear other opinions and able to use a juggernaut of money to roll over anyone who disagrees (aka "people who are wrong"). 

Folks like Yass aren't really interested in wealth, but money is how they keep score (literally true for the guy who made his stake playing poker). I reckon that Yass doesn't want to pay taxes not because he wants that actual money, but because how dare the government try to take something that belongs to him. How dare they try to exert power over him. Still, these rich privatizers attract a whole host of folks who are happy to follow in their wake and gather up the cash they shake loose. But for Yass et al, it's about exerting power in order to make the world conform to what they know is True. It's about winning. 

This is the legacy of Citizens United and every other SCOTUS decision allowing unrestricted spending by the rich in politics. Want to find a person with ideas about how education ought to work? You can find one on every street corner, but only a few have the financial might to inflict their view, no matter how ill-informed, on the rest of us. 

Read this full piece. It's a good window on how these folks think and operate. 

How Khan Academy (And Others) Fudged Their Research

Computer tutoring is the hot thing, and the big players have all sorts of sexy research numbers to back them up. Are the numbers bunk? They sure are. 

I'll warn you--this is spun from an article by Laurence Holt, a guy who has worked with NewSchools Venture Fund, Amplify, and, currently, XQ. But most of my readers don't also read Education Next, where the piece appeared in April. But his point is too important to ignore. 

Thanks to COVID, computer-delivered instruction has experienced a boost, from microschool to catch-up interventions. Programs include Khan Academy, i-Ready, Dreambox--but here's the question--

Do they work? In August 2022, three researchers at Khan Academy, a popular math practice website, published the results of a massive, 99-district study of students. It showed an effect size of 0.26 standard deviations (SD)—equivalent to several months of additional schooling—for students who used the program as recommended.

A 2016 Harvard study of DreamBox, a competing mathematics platform, though without the benefit of Sal Khan’s satin voiceover, found an effect size of 0.20 SD for students who used the program as recommended. A 2019 study of i-Ready, a similar program, reported an effect size in math of 0.22 SD—again for students who used the program as recommended. And in 2023 IXL, yet another online mathematics program, reported an effect size of 0.14 SD for students who used the program as designed.

Did you notice a key phrase?

"For students who used the program as recommended."

So how many students is that. Well, Holt checked the footnotes on the Khan Academy study and found the answer--

4.7%

Not a typo. The study threw out over 95% of the results. Holt says that the other programs report similar numbers. 

I suppose the takeaway could be that folks should be trying harder to follow the program as recommended. Of course, it could also be that students who rea motivated to follow the program as recommended are the most ready-to-learn ones. 

But if you hand me a tool that has been made so difficult or unappealing to use that 95% of the "users" say, "No, thanks," I'm going to blame your tool design. 

It's a problem eerily similar to that of ed tech itself, where the pitch to teachers is so often, "If you just change what you do and how you try to do it, this tool will be awesome." When the main problem with your piece of education technology is that it's not designed in such a way that your end users find it actually useful, that is on you. 

In the meantime, schools might want to be a little more careful about how they select these programs. Ed tech companies are interested in marketing, in selling units, and if they have to massage the data to do it--well, the free market. As I've said many times before, the free market does not foster superior quality; the free market fosters superior marketing. And nothing markets in the ed sector like Scientific Evidence Supported by Hard Data.

Always check the data. Always. 

Why The Microschool Love?

Microschools are having a moment, again, according to Politico. 

This time it's because Florida's latest grab bag of education policies (i.e. a bag full of opportunities that lets profiteers and privatizers grab whatever they can get their hands on) includes some microschool gifts, a loosening of regulations about where and how you can set these up.

A microschool is a simple thing. All you need is a handful of students, probably a computer, and some adult. Doesn't have to be a teacher--the teacher's in the software--but just some "coach" to keep things organized and on track. It's a super-modern iteration of a on e-room schoolhouse. It's a homeschooling co-op. It's also a version of the distance learning that so many people hated during the pandemess, but you won't hear that mentioned often. The Microschools Network website defines it this way:

An intentionally small student population,
An innovative curriculum,
Place-based and experiential learning,
The use of cutting-edge technology, and
An emphasis on mastering or understanding material.

Microschools are a big business, particularly if, like industry giant Prenda, you can get an entire state to give you a contract. The Koch-topus loves micro-schools. Reformster Travis Pillow wrote a legitimately strong response to one of my microschool pieces. Betsy DeVos says nice things about them. And Prenda itself got a healthy shot of investment money from a newish Koch-Walton initiative called VELA Education Fund. Headed up by Meredith Olson (a VP at Koch's Stand Together) and Beth Seling (with background in the charter school biz), the board of VELA is rounded out by reps from Stand Together and the Walton Foundation.

In short, Florida is jumping on a bandwagon that has already drawn a crowd.

So why so much love for what is a meager holdover from the bad old days of pandemic pods?

As with every other "innovation " in education, I have no doubt that you can find some examples of people accomplishing good stuff. But I don't think that's why privatizers love microschooling.

Microschooling plugs a huge hole in the privatization marketing argument. It's the solution to the marketing problem of school choice, which is that school choice really isn't. 

Says a parent, "I gathered up my voucher and started shopping on the free and open market. But first I noticed that there aren't any actual choices in my area. So I widened my search, and then found a school that I liked but which told me they would not accept my child. Apparently they can reject my kid for religious reasons or academic reasons or whatever-they-feel-like reasons. Oh well-- what difference does it make because my voucher would barely dent the tuition anyway. You promised me and my fam ily choice, but we got none."

"Never fear," respond privatizers. "You can have a microschool! Anyone with a computer and an internet connection and an adult with some free time on their hands can have a microschool!"

Microschools let privatizers maintain the fiction that school choice works for everyone. Can't make choice work for you? Don't want to return to a public school that has had its funding gutted by choice? You can always have a microschool. 

Microschools allow choicers to push back against the argument that a free market commodified education system will not honor the promise to educate all students. Microschools buttress the argument that choice will serve everyone. 

"This stinks," bemoan parents shopping in the Big Grocery Store of Education. "I've got this voucher, but I still can't afford the meals I want or any vegetables and the people at the meat counter said they refuse to sell to me."

"No problem," reply privatizers with an expansive sweep of their well-clothed arms. "We have a whole shelf of ramen noodles for you right here. Nobody goes hungry at our store!"

Again- are there people who can fashion a delightful meal out of ramen? Probably, but that's not really the point. The point is that Microschools help complete the con, the trick of getting people to give up the whole notion of education as a public service that promises a decent meal for every student. Florida's support just underlines that con job.

The Free Market Won't Save Public Education

It's been an article of faith since Milton Friedman first started fantasizing about getting government out of education and replacing it with a voucher system.

Competition will spur excellence. Free market schools will save students from failing schools in poor districts. Free markets will stave off inequity. 

Folks keep saying it. And yet there isn't a shred of evidence that it's true.

Name a single free-market sector of the economy that serves all citizens with excellence. Automobiles? Restaurants? Technological tools? 

None of them, because what the free market excels at is picking winners and losers. The free market says these folks over here can have a Lexus and these folks over here can have a used Kia and these folks over here can take the bus (if there is one) and these folks over here can just walk. 

What the free market excels at is sorting people into their particular tier, their particular socio-economic class. If you want to move up a level, then show some hustle and grab those bootstraps to prove that you deserve to move up the ladder. Otherwise, we'll just assume you're right where you belong.

There's no version of our free-ish market that is about lifting every single citizen up to a decent level, no function of the free market that says, "Let's get every single person in this country behind the wheel of a Ford." The free market doesn't like the poor. 

Economist Douglas Harris laid out a solid explanation of why education is a lousy fit for the free market, and there's one more problem-- the free market and the public education system don't want the same thing. The free market wants to sort people out, put them at the top, bottom, middle-- and then provide them with what they deserve. The US public school system, however imperfectly, promises to provide every student with a quality education, without ever asking if one child deserves something different from another. 

For some free market fans, inequity is not a bug but a feature; it's a way to sort people into their proper place. Equity for them means "equal chance to prove that they belong in a particular tier." The social safety net is disruptive and wrong because it "rewards" people with stuff they haven't proven they deserve. 

Some free market fans believe that the free market will provide equity and even things out. Hell, Friedman appears to have believed that the free market would fix segregation and not, say, give rise to segregation academies. But the notion that free market mechanisms will bring greater equity than we now have in education is silly. Your ability to vote with your feet will always be directly related to your wealth.

But more to the point, we know that the free market will not correct the inequities of the education system because it is the free market that cemented them there in the first place. The primary mechanism for creating public school inequity is the policy of linking school funding to the housing--one more free market where winners and losers are sorted out. The free market was instrumental in giving us educational inequity; how can we possibly imagine that the free market would help get rid of it?

Well, that's not really a free market, free market fans will complain; it's a market that has been hampered and hamstrung by various government policies. But that's all markets. To start with, money is just made up stuff, and it takes government policies to maintain the illusion. Nor is there some pristine natural economic playing field that exists naturally; all economic playing fields are created, maintained, and regulated by governments. "That's not a true free market" just means "that playing field is not tilted the way I want it to be." 

There are playing fields more severely tilted than others, markets more free-ish than others. I'm actually a fan of our free-ish market system. And some free-ish markets are excellent at handling some sorts of commodities, companies and customers. But education is not a commodity, and no free-ish market is going to help us create a more equitable system fir universal education of young humans in this country. 

Premiumization and Education

Six Flags and Cedar Fairs (the parent company of my beloved Cedar Point Amusement Park) have merged, with the more successful Cedar Fair owning 51% of the resulting amusement park behemoth. Like many park fans, I have followed this news with some trepidation-- Cedar Point is a tight, well-run operation with a park carefully laid out to deal with their geographic limitations (unless they dump a mountain of fill into Lake Erie, they aren't expanding any time soon), and Six Flags parks are like someone dumped some attractions in a sack, shook it up, and dumped it out.

Six Flags is the gazillionth business to suffer from a lack of focus on the main thing. One regular has noticed their strategic misstep:

Six Flags, he noticed, focused on adding thrill rides and overlooked smaller rides for kids and families and other park activities, such as evening entertainment and shows. Staffing at the park and customer service also became inconsistent.

“Six Flags can feel a bit disjointed,” he said. “Finances were more important than the guest experience.”

The coverage notes a technique that Six Flags used to boost its sagging fortunes.

Six Flags hiked ticket prices in 2022, raising the average price of admission to $35.99 from $28.73. The move caused a 26% drop in annual attendance

It was part of Six Flags’ “premiumization” plan to bring in fewer people to parks but get them to spend more. CEO Selim Bassoul complained in 2022 that Six Flags had turned into “cheap day care centers” for teenagers and said the company wanted to “migrate…a little bit from what I call the Kmart, Walmart to maybe the Target customer.”

In other words, here is Example #28,911,237 of how the Free Market is not geared toward making sure every customer is served. The Free Market picks winners and losers, not just among businesses, but among customers. Some customers are just too poor and annoying, say some businesses, and we choose not to serve them.

Premiumization is already a feature of the private school world, where pricing structures help signal that some schools are for the elite. A study now confirms that in one state, vouchers led to private school tuition hikes as schools took the opportunity to "migrate" to a higher tier in the education biz. 

Voucher fans picture a country in which privates schools throw their doors open wide, ready to accept poor young refugees of failing school systems. But the history of free(-ish) markets shows no such behavior. What the free market does is set tiers of service and quality, including the bottommost tier which may get nothing at all, with many businesses working to climb the profitable ladder of premiumization. 

It's no way to run an education system for an entire country. 

Have Charters Been Captured By The Wokeness?

Pity the poor charter school advocates. Once upon a time they were the darlings of the "school choice" crowd. But then privatizers and the culture panic crowd saw a chance to pursue their true love-- taxpayer-funded vouchers-- and the charter school fans suddenly found that their prom date was already out the door with someone else.

This is not aided by decisions like the Oklahoma high court ruling that A) charters are so public schools and so B) they have to follow the same rules. Granted, SCOTUS may eventually overturn that, but in the meantime, charters were just a foot in the door, and now that privatizers have wedged the door open, they're just going to stomp on charter toes on their way through.

An excellent example comes from the Heritage Foundation, where scholars Jay Greene, Ian Kingsbury, and Jason Bedrick have issued a Report (aka Blog Post With Professional Grade header) entitled "The Woke Capture of Charter Schools" which uses Woke Panic as a way to discredit charter schools, even as it discards some of the old choicer tropes.

A host of assumptions

To make their argument work, they have to first posit that "woke" is unpopular with parents. Sure, they write, there are some woke-preferring parents out there, but "tend to be a distinct minority." But "past research suggests" that "when parents have more control over the education of their own children, that education tends to be less woke." I would be interesting and looking at that research, but we'll get back to that.

Now we're off and running. The anti-woke parent preference is now a given, as in "Given that parental empowerment is associated with less woke education..." They argue that given that given, charters ought to be less woke than nearby public schools. But what we're going to discover that this is not true--that charter schools are in many cases more wokified than their public school neighbors. 

How could such a thing be? Let's consider the possible explanations:

1) The nearby public schools are not actually very woke at all.

2) The instrument used to measure wokitude is not very accurate.

3) You assumption that a parent-driven education market favors non-wokeness is incorrect.

4) Some outside force is forcing charters to be excessively woke. This would also require us to consider

4a) Market forces that should be forcing the closure of schools built on unpopular values-- for some reason, that market dynamic is not working.

Yes, they're going with explanation four. 

Charter schools, on the other hand, might become less responsive to the preferences of local parents if they have to please state authorizers to be established and remain open and if they are overly dependent on national philanthropies to subsidize their operations. Those charter schools may have to adopt woke values to gain permission to open from the public authorities that grant them their charter and to receive funding, especially for capital expenses, from large donors with progressive values.

So here our assumption is that authorizers and charter-backing philanthropists are themselves in with the woke. The report is going to try address a bunch of the assumptions we have breezed past so far, but first, let's roll out the argument that's really being made here, one more knife in the back of the charter movement. Maybe parents choose charters because they are woke, or maybe because the charter offers safety and quality instruction, so the wokeness is overlooked. 

By contrast, policies that permit private school choice with vouchers or K–12 education savings accounts do not require permission from an authorizer for schools to open their doors and therefore are less likely to require capital funds from donors since they often already have school buildings. That means that private schools are typically more directly accountable to parents than charter schools and so are more likely to reflect the values of the families they serve.

Got it? Taxpayer-funded vouchers provide better, more correct choices. Are we going to do some kind of research to establish that? No.

So let's start looking at the foundation beneath some of our assumptions.

When parents have more control over the education of their own children, that education tends to be less woke

The writers will now cite some surveys. Heritage itself found that 83% of parents nationwide believe their children's school should “engage with character and virtue.” A large survey of using school choice found that religious environment and instruction made the list of top three factors behind their choice. An EdChoice survey found parents want children to learn to discuss contentious topics in a calm and rational matter, and to become patriotic. Same survey found a majority of parents want teachers to keep their politics to themselves, no naughty books, and no discussion of LGBTQ issues. 

They also cite the USC survey "Searching for Common Ground" as proof that parents mostly don't want various topics discussed, without mentioning that the report's delving into wide gaps between different groups of parents (they especially don't mention that respondents overwhelmingly say they would rather their tax dollars go to support public school than to send a child to a private school).

We could dig into the quality of the surveys performed by people with a definite privatized ax to grind, but the bottom, line here is that if this is meant to support the boldfaced assertion, it doesn't. It doesn't show that, for instance, "character and virtue" are somehow incompatible with wokosity. And it certainly doesn't show that when parents have more control over their children's education, that education is less woke.

Regulations beget wokeness

"Given that markets tend to reflect the preferences of consumers and that most parents prioritize the teaching of values and want schools that eschew “woke” values," the charter school sector ought not to be woke. Except those "givens" are both doing huge amounts of heavy lifting. 

Highly regulated and constrained markets are not as effective as freer markers at giving consumers what they want. 

The charter market is highly regulated and constrained. The authors are going to keep saying this without any particular support other than to nod at another Heritage Foundation report by two of the authors of this one that declared that highly regulated states were more woke than less regulated ones. Missing from both that report and this one is any example of a rule or regulation that fosters all the woke. Exactly what rules and regulations lead to all this wokosity? The authors never say.

Heavy regulations make it more difficult to open and operate charter schools, thereby giving more power to charter school authorizers and philanthropies that help charter schools open. If those gatekeeper organizations espouse certain values, then it should be no surprise when charter schools in states with heavier regulations espouse values that are closer to them than to the general population of parents.

Which "certain values," and how are these values translated into specific rules and regulations. Hard to say. Is it just a sort of atmosphere that hangs over the authorizers and philanthropists? We'll get to that.

The woke atmosphere

The National Association of Charter School Authorizers is all up the wokeness, arguing for social justice and equity and vocally in support of DEI.

The Walton Family Foundation is woke! Who knew? But among its priorities in grant making has been DEI. The WFF even sponsored a drag show.

The Gates Foundation? Those guys have been pushing woke math and critical race theory.

NewSchools Venture Fund? All over the DEI. 

Again, we're cutting so many corners. Is DEI woke? Is it an idea co-opted by corporations and implemented as a sort of BS paperwork exercise? Are the corporate hedge fund guys who animate much of the charter industry all that interested in actual DEI, or will the performative type suit them? 

The writers cite KIPP's decision to be less racist as one sign of creeping wokeness, hinting that it was just to mollify authorizers, because the 500-pound gorilla of the charter school sector needs to worry about such things. They also raise the specter of those various LGBTQ charters that "have a focus on indoctrinating students in radical gender ideology." 

Sigh. This is the classic cultural conservative stance. These things that you say are a problem aren't a problem, says I, so therefor your attempts to address the problems must just be made up excuses to try some political trick. Did KIPP have sincere concerns about its treatment of Black students? Are there reasons for LGBTQ students to want a separate educational environment? Heritage is just going to chalk it up to wokeness.

The irony here is that they already know a way to untangle this mess. Let the invisible hand sort it out. Start a hundred LGBTQ charters; if nobody wants that, then 99 of them will go out of business. The report is heavy on explaining why there are an excessive number of wokinated charters, but it doesn't really address why people choose them and the market supports them. "It's not a fully free market" explains why these schools exist, but not why parents choose them. If the argument is that parents choose these schools for academics or safety, well, that's the market saying that it cares more about safety and academics than it does about wokeness. You can argue that the market wants the wrong things, but the invisible hand wants what the invisible hand wants.

Measuring the woke

So how did Heritage reach the conclusion that charters are more wokinated than their corresponding public schools? By going on line and looking at handbooks and scanning for certain woke words that "signal" wokeness in the school.

They "repurposed" the stuff they collected for the previous report, and found 211 handbooks they could pair with local public schools. That left them with 211 charter schools (out of around 7800) to compare with 211 public schools (out of roughly 97,000). The sampling by state is a bit wonky-- Utah is represented by 16 pairs, Colorado by 14, Pennsylvania by 12. Florida gets 4 pairs, California 3, Michigan 5, and Texas and Tennessee just 1. The authors blame this in part on public school handbook availability and say that's probably not a source of bias. I'm wondering if there's a paper in relating wokeness to being forward-thinking enough to put your handbook on line.

So, searching for the keywords-- diversity, equity, inclusion, justice, restorative, social-emotional, gender identity, and culturally relevant/affirming. The presence of those words is "woke" signalling. Here are the results

Note that they indicate that the ties mostly occur when both schools have zero instances. So one could argue that the results might show that mostly, nobody is wokified.

Or one could argue that such a small, oddly-distributed sampling is not very useful for drawing conclusions about the nation as a whole.

Blaming the authorizers

The report includes a whole section on how NACSA uses its power as a "kingmaker" to push wokeness. I have questions. 

One would be what NACSA board members like Rick Hess (American Enterprise Institute) and Kathryn Mullen Upton (Vice President for Sponsorship & Dayton Initiatives, Fordham Foundation) would have to say about the notion that they are out there pushing woke. 

Another would be just how far reaching NACSA's reach might be. For instance, remember that Pennsylvania is 12 of the 211 samples, but in Pennsylvania, charters are authorized by local school districts. In states where elected school boards are the authorizers, do they belong to, listen to, or care about what NACSA has to say? 

Recommendations

Defund NACSA. Cut them off from state and federal funds, and take away their power, such as it may be. Cut the CSP? That sounds excellent; it has blown a ton of money precisely by not being regulated nearly enough to guard against fraud and waste. 

States should have multiple authorizers of charter schools. You know what would make an interesting study? Compare states like Michigan, where authorizers spring up like wildflowers, so much so that charter hopefuls can go authorizer shopping, and Pennsylvania, where elected school boards authorize. 

Charters should get long term charters, and not be subject to closure for things like test scores or what Heritage calls "the preferences of regulators," as if authorizers are out there shutting down charters on a personal whim rather than a failure to perform. How far we have come from the days when charter fans declared that charters were about trading autonomy for accountability. "Set the terms out in the charter, and if they fail to meet them, shut them down," was the old refrain of charter supporters. But then, as this report suggests, Heritage isn't really a charter supporter.

Last recommendation? More vouchers. 

So what have we got here?

It has been over two years since Jay Greene argued that the "school choice" movement should ditch all attempts to appeal to lefty things like equity and social justice and go all in with the culture panic crowd, and he has certainly done that. But that alliance comes with certain challenges, the biggest being that the culture panic crowd has zero interest in actual school choice.

So choicers can try to use this new frame of "school choice should be about having a school available that reflects the families values," but that's not what culture panickers want. They want a system that reflects their values and their values alone. The real consistent market-based, education freedom, school choice stance would be, "Look, choice is providing schools for lefties and conservatives and LGBTQ kids. Isn't that great."

Instead we get rhetoric about "rooting out DEI" and the evils of tax dollars going to LGBTQ charter schools. Culture panickers want one choice--their choice.

This suits privatizers insofar as it undercuts support for public education and makes that easier to dismantle. For that same reason, it suits them to attack charter schools for being too much like public schools. The foot that once propped the door open is now in the way, and just beyond the door is the land of All Voucher Education, with no oversight, no regulation, no accountability to anything except the market (in which they only believe in some of the time). Maybe if they feed the panic over "woke" (which means nothing in particular and everything about a pluralistic society) will help get enough people to rush the door and push us through it. 

There's a whole other missing piece for this research. DEI, SEL , restorative justice, and the other various woken buzzwords they're searching out are so very often signals for which there's no corresponding action. Is a school "woke" if it puts a bunch of wokified language in the brochure, but barely goes through the motions of implementing actual functional programs?

The whole report is a curious exercise in trying to feed that panic by invoking woke and using it to fill the empty parts of the argument. "We should have more vouchers and less public education!" Well, why exactly? "Look! The woke zombies are coming to get your kids! Run away!" But that gets us to a familiar place. In their conclusion, the authors write

School choice should empower parents to obtain an education for their own children that is consistent with their values.

We've done that. It's exactly how we got segregation academies in the post-Brown world.  

Stop Calling It School Choice

When framing a debate, it helps to pick just the right names. Just ask the folks who decided to call their respective sides "pro-life" and "pro-choice." 

One of earliest victories for education privatizers was to coin the name "school choice." I don't know if somebody cleverly designed and tested it, or they just sort of stumbled over it, but it's a handy piece of coinage.

The Google Ngram for American English shows barely in use up through the mid-1980s, when it suddenly rocketed up the charts (aka immediately after the release of A Nation at Risk, A Nation at Risk, the Reagan era hit job on public education). That peak comes at 2001, then a steady drop since that year. 

I'm willing to bet that the vast majority of those instances are actually a misuse of the term. Because the privatization and reformster movements have got us using "school choice" to mean what it does not mean.

After all, we already have school choice, and always have. We have a requirement in most states that each child must get some sort of education, but how the child gets that education is a parent choice. Public, private, parochial, religious, home-- you can choose the school you want. But that's not what modern choicers mean by school choice.

Instead, they use the term "school choice" as a blanket term to cover a whole bunch of ideas that are not actually school choice.

Instead, "school choice" refers to a constellation of policies aimed at directing taxpayer dollars into the pockets of private operators. 

Charter schools do so by creating privately owned and operated schools that are nominally part of the system. They offer an alternative to some students, based not on what the students want but on what the school is willing to accept and able to provide.

But nothing looks less like school choice than vouchers. Vouchers--no matter what form they take--allow unregulated, non-transparent, oversight-free private schools to hoover up public tax dollars while discriminating and/or providing education of questionable value for society as a whole. The voucherized system envisioned by Milton Friedman and modern christianist nationalists is a system in which taxpayers subsidize religious schools and the government schools are cut to a bare minimum. 

Voucher schools retain the right to pick and choose their students, to reject or expel students for a variety of reasons or no reason at all. 

"But the public system we have provides good schools for rich kids and less great schools for the non-wealthy," argue voucher fans. But a voucher system would make that problem worse, not better. With universal vouchers, the wealthy would get a rebate to help pay for the schools they already send their kids to, and for poor kids, the high cost schools will stay out of reach (especially as they raise tuition). The biggest difference would be that in a voucher system, the public schools serving non-wealthy students would have even less funding. 

None of this is school choice. And it slips into the discourse. In an otherwise excellent Washington Post article that talks about "school vouchers," Laura Meckler and Michelle Boorstein write:

The growth follows a string of recent victories in the Supreme Court and state legislatures by religious conservatives who have campaigned to tear down what once were constitutional prohibitions against spending tax money directly on religious education. It also marks a win for the school choice movement, which has spent decades campaigning to let parents use tax money for any school they see fit.

Well, no. That wasn't a win for the school choice movement. It was a win for the Tear Down The Wall Between Church State and Force Taxpayers To Fund Christian Schools movement, which doesn't really have anything to do with school choice at all. 

The AP style book defines "school choice" as a sort of blanket term for a whole world of policies aimed at dismantling or privatizing public education. At least they suggest that writers "avoid using the general term when possible."

Fans of voucherizing public ed like "school choice" because it tests well. Ask people if they favor parents having the chance to send their children to the school of their choice, and they absolutely do. Ask them if they would like their tax dollars to go to help someone pay tuition at a private school instead of going to fund public schools, and they turn a big thumbs down. 

We already have school choice. What some folks are looking for is school choice that someone else pays for. And while it's a legitimate complaint that the choice we have is more accessible to the wealthy than the not-wealthy, there isn't a thing in the world of charters and vouchers that changes that a bit, and quite a bit that makes it worse. 

Both the public school system and the charter/voucher system are tied to the free market system--the public system through real estate and the charter/voucher directly--and all the problems that come with it (predatory marketing, picking winners and losers among customers, providing the bare minimum, discrimination, etc etc etc see also: a few thousand posts on this website). But the public system comes with an assortment of safeguards and guardrails that protect (sometimes very imperfectly) the rights of students, families, and taxpayers. The charter/voucher system, in most cases, has no such protections. 

Calling it all "choice" or "freedom" is a canny choice, just like calling a voucher a "scholarship" or a "savings account."  It's good marketing, but like good marketing it only sort of reflects the reality of the situation. Would more choices be better? Sure. I've even laid out how to do it, within certain boundaries (no public dollars for private schools that want to play by their own discriminatory rules). 

My frustration with various forms of education reform, from standardization through universal vouchers, is that I largely agree with the stated goals, but don't believe for a second that any of the favored policies will actually achieve any of those goals. I roughly divide the reformster crowd into people who really believe that their favored policies will work and those that know they won't (or don't care one way or another) because they have their eyes on other goals. 

So let's call it what it is. Privatizing school. Creating a market-based system. School vouchers.It's easier to have useful conversations about things like fundamental changes in the very nature of the country's education system if we call things by their name.

 *But only in America-- the British English Ngram British English Ngram shows a 2002 peak, a 2012 dip, and an all time high in 2019. But I'm not going down that rabbit hole right now.