Utah: It's not a voucher bill--it's worse.

Its sponsor says it's not a voucher bill--it's a scholarship. What HB331 proposes is an education savings account, which is a voucher on steroids. There are a few significant differences between the two systems, but they are fundamentally the same thing.

With a voucher, the state gives you a "ticket" to the private school of your choice (if they will accept you). With an ESA, the state gives a pile of money to a "scholarship" organization which in turn gives you a pile of money to spend on whatever education stuff you wish, including, but not limited to, tuition at a private school.

The advantages for choice advocates are these:

1) It makes the free market even freer. With ESAs you don't have to operate an entire school to get a shot at collecting some of those sweet sweet public tax dollars.

2) The scholarship organization adds a level of protection in case someone wants to bring up that pesky wall between church and state. "We did not give public tax dollars to a religious school," the state can say. "We gave them to a scholarship organization." It's a defense familiar to every underage teen who had an older sibling buy beer for them

3) The term "voucher" doesn't have as much success or appeal as "scholarship." Utah voters hated Utah's 2007 voucher law so much that 62% of them voted to overturn it. No wonder none of the sponsors want to use the V word this time.

ESA laws have been popping up around the country, including extreme versions in Alabama and Oklahoma. Each have their own special features--let's see what Utah's bill HB 331 looks like.

Utah's ESAs are indexed to the poverty line--the further above it you are, the less you get. But at the high end (the greatest level of poverty), you get more than the state would have given to your public district. 1,000% of the federal poverty level is the cap.  

To fill out the application form, parents must acknowledge "that a private education service provider may not provide the same level of disability services that are provided in a public school." It also requires that parents acknowledge that taking a scholarship has the same effect as "a parental refusal to consent to servoices." Giving up the right to an IEP is not uncommon in choice programs. Proponents, like Alison Sorensen of Education Opportunity 4 Every Child, basically argue, "Well, yeah, but since you'll be able to pick a school that's a great fit, it won't matter." Thing is-- students with special needs are expensive to educate, and not a financial winner for education-flavored businesses like private schools. If I were one of the many parents of special needs children who have had to fight with public schools to protect my child's rights, I'd be leery to move to a school where I had zero legal recourse if I didn't like how things were playing out. 

Parents must also sign off on "I will assume full financial responsibility for the education of my scholarship recipient if I agree to this scholarship account" which is the closest I've seen to the quiet part out loud--in which the state says, "We cut you a check, and so we wash our hands of you. Good luck. You are no longer our responsibility." This is largely the point of vouchers and neo-vouchers--to get the government entirely out of education thereby ending public education as we know it. The bill also wants you to know that setting up this program in no way implies "that a public school did not provide a free and appropriate public education for a student," because if it did, somebody could get sued.

The bill includes the usual list of eligible expenses, but goes further than some in listing expenses that aren't eligible, like travel unrelated to education (never forget that $700K in Arizona ESA money spent on cosmetics and other sundries). 

The bill also goes further than some by listing some qualifications for vendors that want to get involved in the sales side of the program, as well as qualifications that private schools must meet, including an independent audit to determine their financial viability. Private schools enrolled in the program don't have to have fully certified teachers (a Bachelor's degree and "skills, knowledge or expertise" will do). Also, the school can't make the student sign a contract agreeing not to transfer out during the year. The private school has to resubmit an application if it changes owners.

And the bill calls for annual random independent audits, which is certainly more than several states do.

But it also includes what has become typical "hands off" language, indicating that the state cannot mess with "service providers" by extending its authority over them. The providers "may not be required to alter the qualifying service provider's creed, practices, admission policy, or curriculum in order to accept scholarship fund." So private religious schools can refuse students whose families aren't sufficiently "born again," expel students who come out as LGBTQ, and require whatever religious practices they want on the public dime. In Florida that has made a mess in many ways, but that's Florida. Maybe Utah will be different--religious issues have never been a big deal before there, right? 

Actually, since posting, I've learned on the Twitter that Utah already has a problem with some extremist groups using choice systems to fund their activities; this bill is going to give them even more taxpayer funding while insuring that the state won't interfere with their white supremacist ways. 

The program, called the "Hope Scholarship Program," gets $36 million in its first year ($2 to set things up), and can be grown after that.

As usual with these bills, some of the critical parts are the ones that aren't there. While this bill goes  marginally further than others, it is still lacking any sorts of protections for parents and students in the program. What happens if you run out of ESA money? They signed off on this to get into the program--it's all their problem. And they do have an out, because unlike some ESA/voucher bills, this bill has no requirements for what minimal amount of education the parents are required to provide--which is not great for students. If parents get hoodwinked by a grifter, or left in the lurch by a vendor that shuts down mid-year? Well, in all these cases students can return to public school (though the money that's supposed to follow them everywhere will not follow them back to public school). 

Look, it's a voucher bill, only instead of just signing students up for a private school, it also contains the possibility of paying off various other "providers" of education-flavored products. As a voucher, it drains money from public schools. 

Also--and this isn't discussed nearly often enough--like every other voucher/ESA bill, it completely disenfranchises taxpaying non-parents. Don't have a kid? Then you have no voice in this marketplace. If you think your tax dollars should not be going to support America First High School or Critical Race Theory Central, there is no elected school board for you to go yell at. 

But make no mistake. This is a voucher bill, only worse because it has even less focus and accountability than a straight voucher bill would have. If you're in Utah, call your elected representative and say no. 

Just How Discriminatory Are Private Christian Schools

We've heard--heck, the Supreme Court of the United States has now heard--that private religious schools feel a powerful need to reject and exclude LGBTQ students and teachers. But it turns out that there's an entire industry devoted to recruiting and retaining students for private Christian schools.

Meet Schola Inbound Marketing, a company in Ephrata, PA, that has a mission "to help Christian schools throughout the world grow enrollment and become sustainable using proven marketing, admissions and retention practices that will enable each school to impact their community for Christ and be a blessing to students and parents for many years."

Schola posts plenty of webinars, but one from last December caught my attention, warning schools not to admit the wrong sorts of people. You are probably thinking, "Well a bunch of atheists or Muslims or members of the Satanic Temple wouldn't want to enroll in a Christian school anyway, so what's the problem?" Well, here's the pitch:

A mission-appropriate family is actively committed to your school's mission. When this type family enrolls in your school, you want 2 dozen more of the same type because both the students and their parents enhance the culture of your school. You don’t want to lose them! One of the easiest ways to lose them is by enrolling families who are not mission-appropriate.

During these uncertain times, your school can easily make this mistake! And it’s natural! There are families that look like they are mission-appropriate but could change the culture of your school.

They dub this the rotten apple syndrome, and talk about how to avoid it.

The webinar (which I had to sign up for to gain access, you're welcome) is hosted by Schola pres Ralph Cochrane, a 1995 graduate of Grove City College (if you're from northwest PA, you already know about GCC, the powerhouse school for academically advanced heavily-churched kids). He's a business guy and "entrepreneur" 

So in the webinar, he elaborates on the idea of rotten apples and retention, noting that when public schools got all radical about masks and things, plenty more folks became interested in making the switch to private Christian schools (he also notes that such schools are seeing a loss of teachers who are burning out) and that these new families can "infect" the culture of the school. The big worry here isn't even the infection of the school culture, but the worry that letting these not-mission-appropriate families in may drive out the families that the school does want to keep.

One of the questions he answers is "Should we try to keep everybody?" The answer, of course, is no--some of those students and families may not be mission appropriate (I love that phrase, because it sounds so much nicer that "Christian enough"). He suggests ranking families in tiers, and has a company agent show off a spreadsheet that helps rank them both on how likely they are to return and also how mission appropriate they are "like, they may be really likely to return, but you really don't want them to." Ther are categories offered for mission-appropriateness, ranking families A through F. 

He also wants to address the "elephant in the room"--what if we take a bunch of public school kids and then they turn around and go back to public school because the mask thing is over. You can, he warns, be blindsided by both the new enrollees who turn right around and leave, plus, you can be surprised by the long-time families who are disgruntled because "these new students are ruining it." 

Look, this is absolutely within the rights of any private school. It's part of the point of being a private school. But when we start talking about sending public tax dollars to these schools via vouchers or education savings accounts, it's important to talk about the ways in which these schools are not aligned with the mission of public education. It's not just that they are exclusive in all the ways that make big headlines, but that they have a fairly narrow definition of their perfect student. If you're thinking that you'll have no trouble using your voucher to send your kid to the local private Christian school because your child is straight and is nominally a Christian--well, you may still find yourself nudged out the door because you're just not Christian enough. We talk a lot about the big obvious ways that these schools may discriminate; we should also pay attention to the small, subtle ways.

This is a model of schooling that absolutely does not align with the mission of educating every child in the country no matter what. We should not be connecting that model to public funding without at least talking about the change in mission. 

America First Academy Is A Sign Of What's To Come

 Charlie Kirk, Trump activist and leader of Turning Point USA, had a plan. It's hit a big speed bump, but the plan is a warning about what's coming next in the privatization of US education.

Kirk's plan was an academy, marketed directly to families after an "America-first education." To do this, he had hired StrongMind, an Arizona company that specializes in setting up virtual and hybrid learning (and suffers from an unfortunate name choice that always reminds me of StrongBad). (My old school district hired StrongMind to operate their virtual academy.) They were planning for 10K students and a gross revenue of $40 million. 

There were several speedbumps, as revealed by investigative reporting at the Washington Post. For one thing, it turns out that StrongMind depends on a lot of labor in the Philippines; that didn't fit the America first brand well and Turning Point asked if the work on their project could be done in the US. The contract also required StrongMind to "adjust" some of its content (can't use a GOP President speech as an example of propaganda). None of that didn't seem to bother StrongMind, which saw this big contract as a chance to become the Amazon of school choice.

However, a StrongMind subcontractor disagreed. Freedom Learning Group was hired to provide the content (StrongMind is more an infrastructure outfit). FLG is run by military spouses and veterans, and its CEO told WaPo, “When advised that the ultimate client was Turning Point USA, we notified the curriculum developer that we are terminating the contract.” At that point, StrongMind had to back out of the contract that they could no longer fulfill.

So Kirk's plan to rescue students from schools “poisoning our youth with anti-American ideas” has hit a bit of a snag. 

The plan gives us a glimpse of the coming supply side of the education savings account (neo-vouchers) revolution. Already several states have launched expanded versions of this program that hands parents a loaded debit card and says, "Your child's education is now your responsibility. Be free--and don't bother us any more." Alabama, Oklahoma, Utah--  multiple states have or are planning to pass laws opening up this new world where parents can take their neo-voucher and spend it on whatever education-flavored product they wish. 

Just as veteran education benefits gave rise to a world of predatory for profit colleges, we can expect any ESA advances will include predatory for profit K-12 schools, aimed at soaking up those sweet, sweet tax dollars and peddling whatever extreme message they think will bring some market share. The ESA laws we're seeing are very explicit in saying that the government must keep its hands off the private schools collecting neo-voucher money and allow them to do as they please (hence the Florida voucher schools discriminating against LGBTQ students and teaching anti-science). 

This is what an ESA world of education would have--ideological (or at least those who can pose) grifters setting up concept schools that market well, but which may or may not have any real goods inside. But as long as the investors are happy, what more will we need.

You can say, "Well, the market worked--people weren't willing to help Kirk set up his crappy jingoist nationalism school," and I will say, just wait. Somebody out there will more than happy to slap together some content for the chance to hoover up some of that taxpayer cash. Kirk may be down, but sadly, I don't believe for a minute that he's out. And if more neo-voucher and voucher laws are enacted, he'll turn out to be just the tip of a scummy iceberg. 

Furry Panic. Yes, Furry Panic.

Add to the list of school-related panics a panic over furry students. Specifically, a panic over schools making special accommodations for students who like to dress up and take on characters of life-sized fluffy animals. Kelly Weill at Daily Beast has been collecting the stories.

In York, PA, a concerned parents Facebook group warned that furries "could be in your child's classroom hissing at your child and licking themselves." 

In Michigan, a speaker at a school board meeting said, "Yesterday I heard that at least one of our schools in our town, has in one of the unisex bathrooms a litter box for the kids that identify as cats, And I am really disturbed by that.” Michigan GOP co-chair Meshawn Maddock picked that up and ran with it on Facebook. "Kids who identify as ‘furries’ get a litter box in the school bathroom. Parent heroes will TAKE BACK our schools."

In Texas, a Moms for Liberty activist tweeted "Cafeteria tables are being lowered in certain @RoundRockISD middle and high schools to allow ‘furries’ to more easily eat without utensils or their hands (ie, like a dog eats from a bowl)."

Bloggers in Idaho and Iowa have repeated the stories, adding that furry students didn't have to do homework (paws can't hold pencils), based on what they'd heard from people at the county fair.

Just to be clear--none of these furry tales are true. It would be easy to just dismiss all of this furry panic and make jokes about the people freaking out, but there are two things to take away from this, and I think they're important.

First, these stories indicate just how low the level of trust has become among some members of the public. If you hear these furry stories and your first reaction is not, "That's ridiculous. There's no way that could be true," then you have traveled far down a dark rabbit hole. These panic attacks are a measure of how effective the steady drumbeat of "You can't trust those evil schools and teachers. They're just out to indoctrinate your children" has been. 

Second, it's worth noting the nature of the outrage, because similar issues inform other panics in schools these days. The panic trigger, specifically, is that the schools have accommodated these "abnormal" students. It's not hard to imagine some parents saying, "Look, I have nothing against furries. I don't have an anti-furry bone in my body. But if they want to be in our schools, they need to adapt and act like our other students--you know, normal." 

This, in both schools and society, is the panic trigger for so many people. It's okay for Those People to be different, but our institutions should remain fixed and centered on Us. When we start adapting to fit or accommodate or acknowledge Those People, then that's just wrong. That's the argument too many times. 

About That Maus Controversy

The Tennessee flap over Maus has burned up a lot of space. Is it really worth all that fuss. 

Even though the McMinn County School Board members themselves talked about "banning" the book, but what they actually did was remove it from the curriculum. It will not be part of the officially adopted ELA reading work for eighth grade in the district. Nobody has said anything about removing it from the school library. The actual motion that was passed was "we remove this book from the reading series and challenges our instructional staff to come up with an alternative method of teaching The Holocaust."

Maus hasn't made the ALA list of challenged books in three decades. It's a prizewinning stunning modern work of literature, and there's very little in it to be offended by, which makes it an attractive choice for school programs. (Though decades ago a Polish friend complained to me about the portrayal of Poles as pigs in the work.) Except in this one district.

On any given day, you can find a school board somewhere in this country doing something dumb. And there was a lot of dumb in the room. Reading the transcript of the board meeting, you will find panic over the lascivious lyrics of "I'm Just Wild About Harry," a surprise Broadway hit song of 1921, plus a lot of uncertainty about copyright law and a serious concern about words that students, they acknowledge, might very well hear outside of school or on the tv, but wouldn't be tolerated in school itself. Also, Art Speigelman used to draw cartoons for Playboy, so, you know...

If you don't want to read the full transcript, you can get a good summary here at Mother Jones. What David Corn's summary doesn't fully capture is how the educators tried to calmly and reasonably explain the presence of the book in the curriculum, and how completely Not Heard they were by the board. It certainly was not the first time professional educators were ignored and disrespected by their board, but it's always frustrating when it happens. Nor does most of the coverage capture that this board, while stubborn and a bit thick, were not hell bent for leather to do ditch Maus; at one point in the meeting they even tabled the motion. 

It sucks to have your board override your professional judgment, particularly for prudish, rather than educational, reasons. And if these guys think the exceedingly tame Maus is problematic, just wait till someone explains the dirty parts of Shakespeare to them. But I suspect that this story would have been a strictly local issue if book banning weren't having a moment right now. 

Book banning sucks and is stupid and on top of that doesn't even accomplish what banners want to accomplish. But reconfiguring the reading list for a curriculum happens regularly, often as works are reconsidered for appropriateness and current standards. Schools across the country have reconsidered To Kill A Mockingbird and English teachers are always painfully aware that for every book they do teach, there are ten other worthy books out there--and they occasionally decide to do something about it. This stuff happens, but forbidding teachers to use a certain text in their classroom (without actually listening to their explanation for using it) is tying their hands and professionally insulting. But until you're taking all the copies out of the school library or throwing them on a big bonfire, it's not a ban.

In the end, I don't think McMinn County and Maus are actually a national new story (I'm aware of the irony in my devoting a post to them here). They don't appear to mark the start of a trend nor do their actions seem informed by any of the current agitating groups. It's a bad decision, even an insulting one for their faculty, but it's a local one. As attempts to ban books and gag teachers go these days, this is small potatoes, and most notable for getting a lot of people to read one of the modern classics that everyone should read, including all the Tennessee children now being showered with free copies of the work--which in McMinn County, unfortunately, they'll be left to negotiate without the insights and support of their teachers. 

Which is perhaps the weirdest message to come out of McMinn-- "This book has naughty words and disquieting images while discussing a hugely important and terrible time in human history, so we feel that students should definitely not have the support and assistance of a trained educator while they're sorting it out." Good luck to the folks in McMinn County.

ICYMI: Ice Sculpture Edition (2/6)

 Every year in my small town we have a mini-festival in which part of the town park becomes a showplace for ice sculptures. It has survived COVID mostly unscathed because it's outside and it's cold, so crowds don't exactly gather. Fun times. Best to go at night, when the sculptures are lit up. And you can revisit it for weeks, depending on the weather because, in one of those small towny things, nobody bothers the sculptures while they're up.

Here's your reading for the week.

Moving the SATs online won't restore them to relevance

At The Hill, Josh DeSantis argues that the SATs latest move isn't going to help them escape irrelevance

Glenn Youngkin Tip Line Update

Mother Jones has a follow-up on Youngkin's snitch line. Doesn't seem to be going well, despite refusals to honor FIOA requests. 

The Highly Unqualified Teacher

Nancy Flanagan remembers when a cornerstone of ed policy was the "highly qualified teacher." Now that we've completely thrown that out the window, what could be the results?

DeVos touts voucher ballot initiative

Michigan voters have beaten back DeVos voucher plans numerous times, but this time the family thinks they may have a way to circumvent the people and just get those tax dolars flowing to private religious schools. And they are spending a ton of money on it

People are fighting. Is that news?

You may not agree with this piece, but at a minimum it may spur some thinking. Greg Toppo suggests that education coverage might benefit from more light and less heat.

Conflict entrepreneurs

I don't usually do video clips, but this two minutes with Amanda Ripley is an awesome explanation of my favorite new term. 

Research points to effectiveness of tutoring and challenge of scaling it

At Th 74 (yes, I know, but some of their straight journalism is pretty useful) a look at research about tutoring and the challenge of making it big enough to help students in larger numbers.

Why there hasn't been a mass exodus of teachers

Rebecca Klein takes a look at some of the details behind that mass teacher exodus that is often touted, but rarely backed up by actual numbers.

Teachers are quitting and companies are hot to hire them

At the Wall Street Journal, an article that suggests the prospects for ex-teachers (however many there actually are) are actually pretty good.

CRT gag law map

Having trouble keeping track of how many states are trying to clamp down on teaching about race and other discomfort-inducing topics? Chalkbeat has a map.

Efforts to ban CRT affect roughly a third of US students

At EdWeek, Eesha Pendharker has done some tallying as well, and the numbers are large.

Madeline Morgan's vision for Black history in schools

A first person Chalkbeat piece from the guy who's writing the book about the Bronzeville visionary.

Parents Defending Education Targets Black Lives Matter

Parents Defending Education is one of the more prominent groups fueling the crt-making-teacher gag law panic; they are led by folks who are seasoned political players including Nicole Neily (Cato Institute, Independent Women's Forum, Speech First, Charles Koch Institute fan), Asra Nomani (Pearl Project, supporter of Trump Muslim ban), Erika Sanzi (Education Post), Marissa Fallon (Coalition for Tj-an advocacy group demanding "merit-based" admissions for school), Aimee Viana (founder of her own edu-consulting business, served in USED under DeVos), Kim Richey (USED under DeVos, counsel in Office of Civil Rights under Bush II), Rachel Hannabass (Institute for Justice, Leadership Institute)... you get the idea. Many of them have logged Fox appearances. This is not a bunch of moms gathered around the kitchen table. Also, they've got a Private School Advocacy Associate, who is "a passionate proponent of school choice, private schools, and Catholic liberal education."

PDE decided to come out against Black Lives Matter at School. Per their press release:

From Boston, Mass., to Seattle, Wash., school districts, schools, teachers’ unions and educators around the country are teaching the controversial activist curriculum, lesson plans, activities and, even, official coloring book of “Black Lives Matter at School” starting Monday, January 31, according to a national review of schools by Parents Defending Education.

PDE was savvy enough not to be directly alarmist about this, but the digs throughout the press release are clear. They note that Seattle Public Schools held the first Black Lives Matter at School events , "amid controversy over political activism in the schools, particularly linked to a highly political organization." The material for the week comes with branding from Black Lives Matter, an organization "which has been riddled with controversy over alleged misappropriation of funds and the purchase of multimillion-dollar homes by its founder." 

This, in fine PDE style, leads to a list of schools where they are doing this stuff "to help parents, grandparents and others understand the reach of Black Lives Matter at School." 

And, of course, "parents and others are encouraged to submit tips about Black Lives Matter at School" on the PDE website; then PDE can "investigate the tip" and post details on their IndoctriNation map. Because Black Lives Matter at School is clearly all about indoctrinating our children. The follows a list of schools districts and teacher unions that were promoting the program (or just mentioning BLM on their website). 

While this page tries to avoid direct criticism and relies largely on subtext (the words "critical race theory" don't even appear), PDE is okay lending their voice to groups like Church Militant, which features Neily in a video about how "activists are pushing an anti-White agenda" as part of their "harmful agenda" (which includes ideas about gender fluidity). Over a chyron saying "BLM nuking the nuclear family," a "news" reader declares that BLM is "kicking off Black History Month with a week of indoctrination across America." Neily appears on screen to deride the "condescending, derogatory messages. Our country is very frayed right now," she says, and adds, without a trace of irony, "People are pitted against each other." 

Again, no attempt to even cover this with the fig leaf of ideological objections to critical race theory. Not even the bracing confusion of the people in Alabama who reported Black History Month as an illegal use of CRT. This is aimed directly at Black Lives Matter and schools and the whole idea of addressing race directly in schools.