One Choice Fan Taps The Breaks* On Vouchers

It's an interesting day when I agree with Checker Finn (at least a little bit). And Finn's piece today is kind of extraordinary.

Chester Finn Jr. (b. 1944) is one of the Old Guard of reformsterism, long-time cheese-in-chief of Fordham, VP of the Maryland Board of Education, frequent scolder of Kids These Days, champion of charter marketing, fellow at Stanford's right-tilted Hoover Institution, common core cheerleader, and a figure of standing in the whole AEI-Fordham axis of reforminess.

And this morning, in the Thomas B. Fordham website, he's expressing concern as he writes "Why I’m wary of universal education savings accounts."

As we've noted, the ESA brand of school voucher is having a moment, including the "universal" variety, and if you think you've noticed some problems with these, well--so has a guy who is well-ensconced in the school choice world.

Consider me wary, particularly of the free-swinging, almost-anything-goes version of universal ESAs. I’m a long-time advocate of school choice and, over the decades, have lauded many versions of it....

Yet I’ve also lived through enough school-choice enthusiasms to conclude that doing this right is not quite as simple as empowering parents. With three decades of experience with charter schools under the country’s belt, we’ve learned a few things. At least I have.

Here comes his list. And he's not wrong.

Start with the fact that even good parents often make dubious education choices, choices that ill-serve their kids in the long run.

Finn wishes parents would always choose schools that "maximize children's future prospects" by inculcating skills, knowledge and values. Yet parents choose for things like location and are "sometimes  beguiled by the claims and advertisements of shoddy schools in search of pupils." Yes, Mr. Finn, sometimes the free market involves a lot of scam artists and fraudsters using shady marketing to sell their shoddy wares. I am not sure how, exactly, a guy who has spent so much of his life claiming that market foirces would improve education has only just noticed this issue, but here we are.

We can (and should) push for more rights and decision-making for parents, but let’s not be naïve about what will result, much of it good for kids, but some not. Too many of today’s “schools of choice”—charter, private, and district-operated—have mediocre-to-awful outcomes and aren’t racking up solid gains, either, yet they’re full of kids whose parents selected them.

It's true. And there's more.

Sadly, we must also acknowledge that some kids have lousy, absent, or overwhelmed parents, some of them addicted, abusive, or simply oblivious. That’s why we have—for better and worse—Child Protective Services, the Milton S. Hershey School, and much more. Again, it’s important to empower parents and give them choices—but there needs to be suitable backup when parents don’t exist or can’t or won’t take responsible action. Mostly that means operating quality district public schools as the default for kids whose parents aren’t choosers.

I can tell you stories. Every teacher can tell you stories. But we'll come back to this in a moment.

Turning from demand to supply, we need to recognize that, when lots of money is floating around, some folks will grab for it by starting shoddy (but lucrative) schools, filling board and staff with friends and relatives, leasing a facility at exorbitant rates from themselves or their cousins, and deploying nothing that resembles a coherent curriculum. This potential hazard is well understood by sophisticated ESA supporters, but may not be clear to hyperventilating lawmakers. But they can reduce the risks by setting criteria for schools and insisting that whatever agency licenses them engages in due diligence and regular audits.

And Finn sees some other problems as well with the new universal brand:

the “windfall” effect when tax dollars are used to pay for private school tuitions that well-off parents (which does not include many private-school families) were already paying for on their own; the possibility that entrepreneurs will set up shop in wealthy areas where parents can “top up” the ESA dollars while ignoring communities with greater need for good education options; and the use of ESA dollars by parents to purchase things with, at best, a hazy relationship to K–12 education—tickets to amusement parks, trampolines, and such.

Yes. Accountability and oversight are necessary. Again, this comes from a guy who has for decades argued that the parental power of choosing with their feet is all the accountability that the market needs. But it's not, and it never has been. 

Now part of Finn's concern is that this unjudicious behavior threatens to damage the brand, to give the school choice movement a black eye. But I think there's more going on here.

Finn finds himself boxed into a corner where he has to acknowledge the need for oversight. He notes that public policy can't stop parents from making bad decisions, and he's absolutely right. But what policy can do is make sure that most of the available decisions are not bad ones. Even if you believe, like Finn and his marketeer crowd, that education is best understood as a commodity to be sold and marketed, that doesn't mean we do away with oversight. Nobody wants to shop in a supermarket where the food for sale may or may not be toxic. Nobody wants to buy cars knowing that the brakes may or may not work and the car may or may not blow up. 

I think there's something else going on here as well. 

The school choice movement has allied itself once again with people who have fundamentally different goals. The universal voucher crowd is not interested in school choice; they are the culture warriors, the CRT panic crowd, the christianist nationalists who want a school system of their own, a system that enshrines and inculcates their values and ideas and which collects plenty of tax dollars. They are happy to either "take back" the public system or dismantle it; either is fine. The legitimacy of a school (and a government) is, for them, based on how closely it hews to their ideas. They are not interested in choice, and they are not interested in preserving a public system that welcomes and supports all children in this country.

Finn-style old school choicers believe in choice. They believe in a free market and its ability to serve everyone what they want, with a public school system as a sort of safety net, a place for, as Finn puts it, those whose parents aren't choosers. Finn's free education market won't be for everyone; Mike Petrilli (Finn's successor at Fordham) once argued that charters and choice could be lifeboats to get "strivers" away from Those Other Students. It's a view of education that sees schools as a means of sorting students, a place where the cream can rise and the others can prepare to be useful meat widgets. 

For that vision to work, there have to be many schools of many types serving many different groups of students. That's not what the culture warriors want; they want one system, devoted to the One True Word, and the devil take the rest. 

Finn's vision, as he acknowledges in this piece, needs a marketplace that is not choked with junk and fraud (my impression, right or wrong, is that Finn always assumed that providers could be trusted to conduct themselves in a gentlemanly and upright manner and he's a bit put out that some folks have appeared to be willing to stoop to such unseemly behavior). The culture warrior iteration of vouchers brooks no oversight, because that would just involve the government stepping in to say that you can't teach your religious beliefs or discriminate freely against your long list of people against whom you must discriminate in order to fully practice your faith. 

There are many things not to like about Finn's vision, not the least of which is that it fails to explain how the safety net of a public system can be maintained while shoveling all that taxpayer money away from public schools and into all the various alternative systems you've set up. 

But ultimately what Finn describes in this piece is all the ways in which classic free market choicers and culture warriors disagree about what should come next in education policy. Finn would like a genteel shift to a well-ordered system of privatized choice and a public safety net for the leftovers. The culture warriors would like to burn everything down and build their own system. And in this alliance, it's the burn-it-down crowd that has the political power of the moment, and I'm curious to know just how much Finn understands that he has been setting up their arguments for decades. I mean, he may not like this mess, but he sure helped make it. We'll just have to wait and see how long the alliance lasts and when it finally breaks.

*Yes, I know. I was shooting for clever by using "breaks" to go with the breaks and cracks in the choice alliance. It has become clear that I missed clever and hit plain old misspelled. One more reminder that it's usually best to avoid being clever.

AR: Governor Sanders Has A Very Bad Plan For Education

Arkansas Governor Sanders has compiled a Greatest Hits album of ideas to disrupt, defund and dismantle public education in her new Arkansas LEARNS plan. Here are the highlights.

Early childhood ed

Early childhood ed will now come under the Department of Education, which will have the job of managing all federal grant money for ECE, licensing, and maintaining a website for families with pertinent information. That will include "accountability" scores that will be based on "ratings indicative of child outcomes" and God Only Knows what the heck that means. But there will be a bunch of locally controlled "early childhood lead organizations" (GOKWTHTM) that are going to "create alignment among the community's public and private providers and agencies." So local control, but not, or something.

Early literacy

Everybody has to get on the Science of Reading bus. Do I think the Sanders administration has a deep, full understanding of SOR? I do not. But plenty of folks on the right have found SOR as one more cudgel with which to club public education. Also, phonics are conservative?

The state will be hiring 120 literacy coaches for low-performing schools. The schools will, clearly, be judged on performance, but the coaches will be judged on student growth. 

Students who don't pass the 3rd grade reading test are eligible for up to $500 to hire a tutor. If that doesn't work and they still fail the test, they don't pass 3rd grade. This is a terrible, abusive policy, and it doesn't even do any good (except for politicians who are promising to get tough with those slacker eight year olds. Also, they'll be sure to loop parents in on how things are going, because parents' rights are super-important and parents know their kids best, except for third graders who don't pass the standardized reading test--those parents don't know jack and they get no say in this.

Numeracy

If a third grader "falls behind on math" (GOKWTHTM), there will be an intervention plan. And parents will be notified.

Tutoring

Arkansas is going to have a High-Impact Tutoring Pilot Program, "which will fund high-impact tutoring services and providers. Because everyone agrees that High Impact Tutoring is awesome, even if they aren't sure what it is exactly. But if you claim the folks at your company do know, you can make some money on it.

Career Readiness

This has several facets. One is that schools will ask businesses what kind of meat widgets they'd like to have and set up programs to train meat widgets for them, identified by special career-ready diplomas. The Arkansas Workforce Development Board will collect a ton of data on "student outcomes" so the programs can be tweaked. As you work through the rest of the plan parts which involve a clown car full of alternate education systems, ask yourself how anyone can possibly track it all.

Eighth graders will have to pick a diploma pathway; in other words, declare their major. They can change it later, but only with parental approval.

Also, 75 hours of community service, which always sounds like a great idea until you're the community service organization dealing with "volunteer" workers who don't want to be there.

Transforming Schools

Must be a misprint, because what they actually mean is literally privatizing schools. Any local school board can just hand a school over to a private company or charter school (I know--redundant). The state might even throw some money in to sweeten the pot. That's right--not money to help the district improve the school, but money to help convince a company to take it over, aka to pay someone to privatize the school.

School Facilities and Transportation

Cops, everywhere, in every school. And somebody playing the part of School Safety Expert gets to make consulting money every time a new school is built.

School Safety--Training and Support

Schools will "establish a behavioral threat assessment team," so, a future crimes bureau (GOKWTHTM). This is one of those areas where the right falls all over itself because A) there should not be intrusive surveillance by the state and B) there should be total all-seeing surveillance by the state in order to stop Bad People. 

The other piece of this is that it's a Harden The Target approach to school safety, as opposed to making any sort of attempt to reduce the threats or, God forbid, touch anyone's precious guns.

Sexual Abuse Prevention and Education

Sigh. There will be absolutely no discussion of any sex stuff before fifth grade, but there will be a K-12 program incorporating "age-appropriate curriculum materials on the detection, intervention, prevention and treatment of child sexual abuse." There will be ways to make sure that "any substantiated allegation, arrest, or charge, involving a teacher" is reported to the state, and teachers will be trained to deal with abuse. 

Educator Workforce--Teacher Pay

Minimum teacher salary will be moved from $36,000 to $50,000. Does $50K sound like a good starting salary? Does it sound like a good salary to make for the rest of your entire teaching career? Because with that $50K salary comes the end of all steps for years of experience or a Masters Degree. Arkansas teacher pay is so lousy that a $50K salary might actually represent an increase in career earnings, even though inflation will steadily whittle it away. Also, three more days in the school year.

And no mention of where the money for this is going to come from in a state with an administration bent on cutting taxation to bathtub-drowning proportions.

Surely that can't be the whole thing, you say. Well...

Educator Workforce--Teacher Incentive Pay

"Eligible teachers" (GOKWTHTM) might get an annual bonus of up to $10K. Maybe for extra duties or mentoring. It'll be measured with the Value Added Model, aka That Thing That Has Been Widely and Thoroughly Debunked. A Texas court rejected it. Even reformy Oklahoma booted it. VAM only provides direct scores for Reading and Math, so other teachers get rated based on scores of students they never taught. VAM systems are an absolute nightmare, a scam that evaluates teachers no better than reading warts under a full moon. 

The section refers to "this fund" which suggests that the available money for teacher bonuses in any given year will be finite, meaning that teachers get to fight each other for a limited slice of a limited pie. There will also be a program for some loan forgiveness for teachers in "critical shortage" areas (but not the "ineffective" ones). 

Also--and this is not nothing for a young teacher starting a family--bonuses don't count when you're applying for things like mortgages.

Paid Maternity Leave

Credit where credit is due. Up to 12 weeks of paid maternity leave. That's not perfect, but it's far better than our embarrassing national standard of nothing.

Teacher Academy Scholarship Program

Study to teach in a subject area or geographic area that really needs you and get a scholarship. 

School Board Authority

Yeah, there's going to be less of that. Superintendent contracts must be submitted to the state. Personnel, including teachers, will be hired based on "performance, effectiveness, and qualifications." Principals get to hire and fire.

Teacher Fair Dismissal Act

It takes balls to eliminate something calling for fair dismissal, but Sanders has got them. "This will allow schools and districts to make personnel decisions that are best for children and eliminate unnecessary red tape." Well, sure. It will also allow schools and districts to make personnel decisions based on petty, political and personal reasons.

AR Children's Education Freedom Account

Here comes the education savings account voucher system. All the usual features for funneling public tax dollars to private vendors, phased in over three years. Shockingly, she actually proposes that a vendor could lose eligibility if it "demonstrates a lack of academic competence," which is pretty tough talk compared to most voucher programs. But the program still appears to demonstrate the usual lack of accountability or oversight that distinguishes these voucher boondoggles.

Charter Schools

No cap. No local to approve or not. State will speed up renewals. And the taxpayers will be pumping money into a fund created to help charters buy or build facilities.

Indoctrination and CRT

The Secretary of Education will review Department of Education regulations, policies, materials, and communications to ensure they do not indoctrinate students with ideologies that conflict with the principle of equal protection under the law.

Cool. Since CRT does not conflict with that principle, there should be no problem. Ha. Just kidding. Arkansas will continue to work hard to keep that Race Stuff out of schools.

Course Choice

Remember unbundling, that beloved idea of choicers in which students would get their various courses from various vendors. Arkansas wants that. The state will keep track of all the available courses, and students can get whatever courses from wherever, somehow. GOKWTHTM.

Good Lord

It's all the hits. Teachers get no job security at all, and no raises, ever, either. Any kind of choice is okay, and taxpayers will fund it. Meat widgets for business. Total accountability to monitor for Bad Things, but total freedom for Folks On Our Side. 

It's a disaster, an attempt to run the 3D playbook (disrupt, defund, and dismantle) all at once. It's as if whoever wrote this for her originally handed it in saying "Okay, here's a plan to roll out in stages over the next several years" and she just said, "Nah, let's let 'er rip all at once." 

This plan would be a disaster for public education in Arkansas, a state that is not exactly at the top of the heap to start with. Here's hoping folks in Arkansas can beat it back. 

NCTQ Has Some Thoughts About Teacher Layoffs

The National Council on Teacher Quality has some thoughts about teacher layoffs and the practice using seniority in making the decisions (you get no points for guessing what they think). NCTQ is an organization with a longstanding history of producing headline-grabbing sort-of-research papers. Here are some of their highlights:

NCTQ is the group that once declared that college teacher programs are too easy, and their research was (and I swear I am not making this up) to look through college commencement programs.

NCTQ is the group that cranked out a big report on teacher evaluation whose main point was, "It must not be right yet, because not enough teachers are failing."

NCTQ used to create the teacher prep college rankings list published every year by US News leading to critiques of NCTQ's crappy methodology here and here and here, to link to just a few. NCTQ's method here again focuses on syllabi and course listings, which, as one college critic noted, "is like a restaurant reviewer deciding on the quality of a restaurant based on its menu alone, without ever tasting the food." That college should count its blessings; NCTQ has been known to "rate" colleges without any direct contact at all.

NCTQ's history has been well-chronicled by both Mercedes Schneider and Diane Ravitch. It's worth remembering that She Who Must Not Be Named, the failed DC chancellor and quite possibly the least serious person to ever screw around with education policy, was also a part of NCTQ.

NCTQ depends on the reluctance of people to read past the lede. For this piece, for instance, anybody who bothered to go read the old IES paper that supposedly establishes these as "bedrock" techniques would see that the IES does no such thing. Anyone who read into the NCTQ "research" on teacher program difficulty would see it was based on reading commencement programs. The college president I spoke to was so very frustrated because anybody who walked onto her campus could see that the program NCTQ gave a low ranking was a program that did not actually exist.

And yet, they remain firmly ensconced in the e-rolodex of many education reporters and policy folks.

NCTQ was headed up for almost twenty years by Kate Walsh. Had a long phone conversation with her once; seems like a nice person. She stepped down last May, to allow for a "fresh set of eyes" (Walsh is my age, so retirement is not a surprise). 

Her replacement is Dr. Heather Peske, whose credentials are right in line with the very reformstery organization: Education Trust, Teach Plus, a "Future Chief" at Chiefs for Change, Broad Academy Fellow. Her bio includes the phrase "after having started her career as an elementary teacher" and having seen the rest of her credits, you'll have already guessed that what she means is that she spent two years as a Teach for America temp (though it appears she did spend a whole year in a classroom on her own after that). 

The article itself is from Patricia Saenz-Armstrong, an economist who started her career in Peru.

She starts from a not-unusual premise-- decreased enrollment and the expected drop in funding when ESSER funds run out will probably lead to layoffs. 

How should those be handled? Not with seniority, she writes. Getting rid of LIFO (Last In First Out) has long been a dream of reformsters, who have often leaned toward a high-churn model where teachers move in and out quickly (like TFA temps), thereby not running up big pension bills and high salaries, not to mention not sticking around long enough to start that whole collective action thing. Some atempts have been made to argue for tying teacher retention to test scores (Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders is making that argument again in Arkansas) but the problem there is that test score data is crap, and running it through some kind of Value Added Model does not reduce its crapness. 

For the past couple of decades, however, any small sneeze in the education world will be greeted from somewhere in the great reformster chorus with, "Well, actually, we could solve that problem if we just got rid of LIFO."

This time the argument is an old favorite-- LIFO means that layoffs primarily affect the diverse ranks of newer hires, and therefor these policies are a threat to the diversity of the teacher workforce, and we need a more diverse workforce.

The piece includes a sample of the usual NCTQ research shortcut. This time, to show that LIFO is really common, the researchers scanned the policies of 148 of the largest school districts in the U.S. That's a questionable approach, because, for instance, New York City schools and Chicago schools are unlike any other districts in their state. On the other hand, I think we can all accept that LIFO is the prevailing model in the vast majority of U.S. districts.

It's a prevailing model because nobody has ever proposed a model that works any better.

First, teacher experience is positively connected to teacher effectiveness. It takes a teacher about 5-7 years to really get a handle on the work; a handle, it should be noted, that they can best find if mentored by an experienced teacher. That's why it's absurd to call yourself a teacher or education expert or educational thought leader after you've spent two years in a classroom (years that you did not spend trying to build a career foundation of practical knowledge because you knew that this was not your real career). 

Second, you do not recruit capable teachers by saying, "We would love to hire you. Just be aware that we'll fire you at any time for any reason." Maybe you drew the short straw for test takers in your class. Maybe you just became too expensive. Maybe you made the mistake of vocally advocating for a student's rights. 

In fact, we already know that one of the big problems with non-white non-female teachers in the field is not just recruitment but retention. You do not convince people to sign on for a career with you (particularly a low-paying one) if your message is that they can expect that career with you to be short. 

Saenz-Armstrong does not make any actual recommendations in the piece beyond this:

Given the negative effects that the pandemic has had on student learning, and the disproportionate impact on students of color and students living in poverty, districts that serve these students should evaluate their layoff policies in order to promote equity and effectiveness in their teacher workforce.

Fair enough. But ditching LIFO is unlikely to help with any of that.

ICYMI: Eagles Edition (2/12)

Yes, I'm sure some other team is playing. I'm just not sure I care. In the meantime, here's some reading from the week.

Gay fathers confronted at Arizona religious school accepting vouchers

When you add vouchers to protecting the rights of religious schools to discriminate, you get this-- and Arizona school that accepts the dollars from these taxpayers, but won't let their gay feet step onto its campus.

Teacher of the Year: Popularity Contest or Tall Poppy Syndrome?

Nancy Flanagan takes a look at Teacher of the Year contests from the perspective of someone who won one.

Should African Americans Trust the College Board with African American Studies?

Is the College Board the right group to be on the front lines of the new arguments over teaching Black history? You already know the answer, but watch Ivor Toldson at Diversity tease out the details.

Actually, it should be damn hard to ban a book in Iowa

Todd Dorman writing for The Gazette has some thoughts about book banning and the folks driving it in Iowa.

Advocates Who Want to Protect Ohio’s Public Schools This Year Must Pursue Three Priorities

Jan Resseger looks at the three most pressing issues for public school advocates in Ohio.

Vermont State University to close libraries, downgrade sports programs

Still scratching my head over this one. The VTDigger reports on a new plan to so away with those bulky old physical books and let everyone work digitally.

This book is considered pornography in Ron DeSantis' Florida

Judd Legum at Popular Information with one of the many stories we're going to read about crazy choices in book banning.

Ralph Fiennes's Cheeseburger

I didn't watch the movie and probably won't, but this post from Anne Lutz Fernandez is a solid look at the state of work in this country, including the work of teaching.

Nation watches as Arizona’s universal ESA voucher fiasco fails

In the Arizona Capitol Times, Beth Lewis explains how Arizona's universal voucher system is a wasteful mess.

Voucher Schemes Are Failing Students with Disabilities

In The Progressive, Jacob Goodwin explains how voucher programs are bad news for students with special needs.

Bhutan earns first-ever Academy Award nomination with "Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom."

A short clip from ABC News (Australia) about the unusual film about teaching under extraordinary conditions.

These radically simple changes helped lawmakers actually get things done

Not about education, exactly, but this essay by Amanda Ripley for the Washington Post looks at a little-known Congressional committee that actually got stuff done in not-usual-for-Congress ways.

At Forbes.com this week, I looked at the landmark decision by Pennsylvania's court ruling the entire funding system unconstitutional, and the Illinois voucher program that is scheduled to sunset. 

And as always, you're invited to subscribe to my substack to get all the stuff in your email for free.

School Choice Hasn't Won

There's an old saying: when you add religion and politics, you get politics.

Well, when you add culture wars and school choice, you get culture wars.

Robert Pondiscio points to the recent school choice winning streak in Iowa and Utah (and it looks like Oklahoma may well follow, though Virginia and Wyoming have decided to get off the choice train for the moment), and he attributes the success to the choice movement's embrace of the culture wars. 

He points out that the "test score" argument was never going to move many people either way, and I agree. The Big Standardized Test has been around long enough that folks aren't that impressed any more. And when he criticizes the "unquestioned assumption" that "the purpose of schools is to raise test scores" he's echoing a critique that many of us have offered for ages. 

But in the alliance between school choice advocates and culture warriors, I question exactly who is successfully using whom.

The school choice movement has always included free marketeers, folks who believe that education would best be delivered by a free market navigated by parents with freedom to choose. The free marketeer faction contains their own sub-groups, including folks who sincerely believe in the free market, folks who sincerely believe in Freedom, folks whose opportunity-tuned noses smell money, and folks who share the Kochian desire to simply eliminate government so that they don't have to pay taxes to provide services to the Lessers. For that last group, choice itself is just a tool for dismantling the public school system.

The free marketeers have made alliances before, most notably when they teamed up with the social justice crowd, pushing choice as an equity issue and giving us the claim that school choice is the "civil rights issue of today." Like the free marketeers, the social justice crowd contained an assortment of sincere believers and less-principled opportunists, plus a solid helping of right-tilted folks pretending to be left-ish (looking at you, Democrats for Education Reform). 

For a variety of reasons, that detente fell apart (Pondiscio was one of the first to point out the cracks). The two groups wanted different things, and when Trump happened, some folks found it hard to stick with the coalition, and when Obama and the Dems went away, some folks found it unnecessary to stick with the coalition. 

There's a certain irony in the choicers' new alliance with a different sort of social justice movement. Jay Greene announced it and has been pushing it ever since, even as Christopher Rufo has made himself the face of the anti-woke choice crowd.

The trouble with this alliance is that the culture warriors are not remotely interested in school choice at all.

From the attempts to suppress reading rights to the anti-LGBTQ laws and policies to the regulations coming out of CRT panic, the culture warriors have made it abundantly clear that what they want is a school system that conforms to their particular set of values and beliefs. Take back the public system and force it to conform, or set up a new parallel system in a constitution-free zone--or both. Any of those is fine. 

For those choicers who see school choice as a tool of dismantling public ed, that's great. But for folks actually interested in school choice, the culture wars are a dead end.

Bringing me the long away around to this point-- school choice hasn't won any victories in Iowa or Utah or even in its beloved paradise of Florida. Culture warriors have won victories, and used some school choice language to do it. But Ron DeSantis isn't expanding choice--he's constricting it. 

It may be that the free marketeers believe that letting the culture warriors blaze the trail will start with scorched earth and end with a thousand beautiful school choice flowers blooming. I think that's a miscalculation, that culture warriors will keep stomping on every flower that offends their delicate, narrow sensibilities. 

For those who simply want to see public education demolished, who see culture wars and school choice and any other opportunity that presents itself as a means to dismantling public education, a part of government that they'd like to see on the chopping block right beside social security, medicare, and welfare, none of these distinctions really matter as long as the fire keeps burning. But for those who sincerely want to see school choice? That's not what's happening.

I've seen that movie before. My county housed a very early Tea Part chapter, and it started out as an alliance between local Libertarian types and local religious christianist conservatives. Within a year or so (as also happened to some degree on a national level) the Libertarians were squeezed out, because when they said "Everyone should be free to choose as they wish," they meant it, but the religious conservatives meant, "Everyone should be free to make only the right choice, and we will tell you what that choice is." (Just like our forefathers the Puritans, who came here not to escape religious persecution, but to establish a place where they could enforce their own strict rules).

The culture warriors are not interested in choice or freedom; they are the embodiment of Wilhoit's definition of conservatism-- Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

So maybe Jay Greene and Jason Bedrick and Core DeAngelis and Christopher Rudo and the rest can take a victory lap. It would be interesting to know what exactly they're celebrating, because something may be on a bit of winning streak right now, but it's not school choice. 

Pre-K And The Long Haul

You may remember a study from Tennessee that suggested that pre-K actually led to worse results for students further down the road. It was a little alarming, and lots of folks tried hard to come up with an explanation, because it looked like the worst results happened to the poorest kids. Threw a major monkey wrench in the whole Universal Pre-K Will Bring Equity To Education thing.

Well, just hold on there for a second.

Now there's a study from Oklahoma that suggests that you just have to take a longer view to find the benefits. A brand new study find that preschool grads were way more likely to go to college, either right after high school or within a year or two. Here it is, summed up nicely:

“Don’t give up on the protagonist until the story is told,” said William Gormley, a professor of government and public policy at Georgetown University and co-director of its Center for Research on Children in the United States, which has overseen much of the Tulsa research. “This is a classic story of a big bounce from pre-K in the short run, followed by disappointing fade out in standardized test scores in the median run, followed by all sorts of intriguing, positive effects in the longer run, and culminating in truly stunning positive effects on college enrollment.”

There are more studies that are roughly in line with this new one. What's still missing is an explanation. Various explanations being offered include:

The parents who are likely to send their kids to preschool are the same ones likely to send their kids to college. It's just a Family That Values Education thing. Researchers think they can kind of sort of adjust for that, and still find that preschool improves college chances, probably, kind of. But they can't come up with any clear data for Head Start grads.

The preschool program could actually help with both attitudes toward and attainment of education. But if that's the case, why the big dips in the intervening years?

I have a theory.

You are growing a tree, and you decide to start measuring it with a measuring stick that you came up with yourself. You measure and measure with your made-up measuring stick, and find no signs of growth--in fact, at one point you find the tree has shrunk. The finally, you measure the tree with a regulation yardstick, and find that it has grown far more than your previous DIY measurements. 

You are trying to boil a pot of water. You measure the water temperature with an instrument that you came up with yourself, and it consistently tells you that the water is 45 degrees. Then, thirty seconds later, you see the water is boiling.

You can reach two conclusions here:

1) The stuff that I'm measuring is behaving in strange, mysterious, and counter-intuitive ways. We will have to figure out what is causing this strange behavior.

2) My DIY measuring instruments are crap. I should throw them away.

In other words, despite decades of insistence to the contrary, Big Standardized Test data is not predictive of college attainment. 

The data is largely junk. First, the tests are not good. Second, before the tests can collect useful data, students have to care.

It's the same thing with the infamous middle school dip, the drop in scores that schools experience from their 8th grade test takers. It has baffled districts and led more than a few to change their district organization so that 8th graders are folded in with either higher or lower grades, thereby mitigating the results. It's a mystery. Why do 8th graders lose so much learning?

The mystery can be solved by the two step process of A) meeting middle school students and B) watching them actually take these tests. You will not find any group of people who are more tired or taking the damned test and more likely to be unmoved by what the olds want from them. If you want to measure middle school educational attainment, you could not devise a worse system than giving them a Big Standardized Test after giving the Big Standardized Tests for the previous seven years of their lives. 

We get sign after sign that the Big Standardized Test does not measure what we want it to measure, but we keep ignoring them.

I'm a fan of pre-K done right, so hooray for some research supporting that, I guess. But I wish we could learn some of the other lessons hinted at here. 

PA: Court Ruling Is Not A Victory For School Choice

This week, a ruling by Commonwealth Court Judge Renée Cohn Jubelirer declared that in the state of Pennsylvania, “students attending low-wealth districts are being deprived of equal protection of law.” The state's famously inequitable funding system was found to be unconstitutional. 

The suit has been kicking around for a decade, and the decision is, as one of the lawyers working on it said, "an earthquake." The governor and legislature are now required to work together to come up with a new funding system.

What happens next is not clear; it could be anything from fully funding the public schools of Pennsylvania to a lot of stalling and foot-dragging to procedural shenanigans to using a combination of feigned deafness and various pretend solutions to keep the clock running forever. These are all techniques that have been used in other states that faced similar court decisions (North Carolina's legislature has been ignoring a court order to fix their broken funding for something like 25 years). Lots of mystery lies ahead.

Weirdly, the decision has been applauded by some folks on the anti-public ed side. 

Nathan Benefield, regular speaker-upper as VP for the hard right Commonwealth Foundation, offered these insights:

“The only way to ensure that ‘every student receives a meaningful opportunity’ is for education funding to follow the child,” Benefield said. “Students that are trapped in their zip-code assigned school—especially in low-income and minority communities—often have no alternatives when their academic or social needs are unmet. Only by giving every student direct access to funding for an excellent education of their choice can we meet the court’s new requirements.”

Rep. Seth Grove, the GOP rep from York and Republican Appropriations Committee Chair, tweeted 

Commonwealth Court Judge just ruled we need more school choice in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania to ensure every child has the same opportunities no matter their zip code! Huge school choice victory!

Grove even included a screen shot of the decisions final two-page summary (the whole decision is 786 pages long), which means he had ample opportunity to see that he was cheering counterfactually. Maybe he hadn't had a chance to scan all 786 pages, but it's a pdf, so searching terms is easy.

The phrase "school choice" appears twice. Once to indicate that Philadelphia has it (p. 328) and once to indicate that one witness believes the Philly charters are swell (p. 348). 

"Backpack funding"? Zero. "Voucher"? Zero. There was ample representation of charter schools as witnesses of fact for the legislative side--in other words, they tried to bolster what turned out to be the losing side. "Money follow the student"? Zero. 

In other words, not a single concrete piece of evidence that this decision in any way supports school choice.

Granted, the suit is good news for choicers, because more money for public schools means higher per-pupil spending which means charters get to rake in more bucks. But this decision does not suggest choice as an answer to the larger funding problem.

The decision, in fact, reaches a conclusion that choicers resolutely avoid. Because Judge Jubelirer does agree that no child should suffer in a lousy school in their zip code, and she has mandated that the state must take steps to make sure that no school in any zip code is lousy. This is a much different solution than "Give each child an inadequate amount of money so that a few who are able to be accepted by a private school can get out, leaving everyone else behind in a even-more-underfunded public school." Different because, unlike the choicer solution, it makes actual sense. 

Jubelirer was exceedingly clear that additional money would have to be part of the solution, and that simply shuffling the same old inadequate amount of money around would not cut it. Since shuffling the same old inadequate money around is the preferred model for the modern school choice industry. 

As Benefield put it, he was grateful that the judge was not "mandating more money to a broken system." Well, no. First of all, her decision had some clear ideas about why the system looked broken, and those ideas had to do with a lousy funding system. Second of all, the ruling itself suggests the options for reform are “virtually limitless,” and don’t have to be “entirely financial." That's clear language is clear enough. If help me buy a car and I ask what I owe you to even us up and you say, "Well, it doesn't have to be entirely financial," I don't think "Oh, so it's free, then" is the response you're looking for. 

The fact that Benefield is so excited about the prospect of further defunding public schools does not mean that it's what the judge said.

Choicers can squint real hard as long as they like. This ruling is not some sort of victory for school choice. It may well result in some nice windfall profits for them. They should probably just be happy with that.