USED: Dear Colleague

TO: State and Local School Officials
FROM: Faceless Federal Bureaucrat at US Department of Education

I hope that our recent letter about participation rates in accountability testing has clarified the department's stance on the 95% participation requirement. This most recent threat of Dire Consequences should be heeded, and should not be confused with this other time we made the threat, or the time before that. This time, if more than 5% of your test-worthy students are opted out of testing by their families, we will rain hellfire and damnation down upon you, or at the very least take away some of your funding.

ESSA requires a 95% participation rate. Yes, ESSA also recognizes the right of parents to opt out, but that does not mean that we can't hold you responsible for what they choose to do.

In fact, we like this regulatory principle so much, we have whipped up some regulatory extensions of this great idea.

We note with alarm that more and more of our younger children are unattractive. We are also concerned that parents are selecting clothing for their children without proper regard for aesthetic qualities of the child's wardrobe. Therefore, if we determine that more than 5% of your state's children have been told, "You're ugly and your mother dresses you funny," we will be cutting your federal subsidy.

We believe children's health is suffering because they are being fed too many fried foods such as french fries. We would like to see healthier choices made, such as broccoli. Therefore, if we determine that more than 5% of your families are not feeding their children broccoli every night, we will be cutting a portion of your Title I funding.

We are concerned that American children are falling behind other countries in median height at age 8. We recognize that height is often genetic, and so we intend to encourage short people to procreate with tall people. If we find too many short people pro-creating with other short people in your state, we will slash all federal school funding.

Of course, most experts agree that even mild corporal punishment is inappropriate and bad for children. Therefore, if we discover that more than 5% of the parents in your districts ever spank their children, we will send somebody over from USED to punch one of your administrators in the face.

We are certain you share our belief that when adult citizens of the USA choose to exercise their rights in ways that are inconvenient to federal purposes, it is the state and local school system's responsibility to separate those citizens from their rights; and that it only make sense that systems which fail to convince those citizens to give up their rights should be punished. Parents may have a federally-recognized right to opt out, but schools have a federally-imposed responsibility to keep parents from exercising their rights.

We are aware that some critics have argued that schools have no control over factors such as parental choice. We believe that concern will be addressed in our upcoming letter in which we will outline our plan for tying federal school funding to the price of tea in China. 

OH: Opt Out Under Attack [Update]

UPDATE: Courtesy of Board Member Wagner in the comments below:

UPDATE: OEA spoke with the primary sponsor of the bill that contained the provision to penalize educators who suggest opting-out as a possibility, Representative Kimberly Roegner. Roegner agreed to completely remove that provision from the bill in question, House Bill 420. Apparently she and others on the education committee have realized that this provision went way too far, was ill considered, and should have received more thoughtful consideration before being placed in the bill.

My thanks go out to all of you, including Crumudgucation, who joined into the collective voice that changed the minds that needed to be changed. My thanks go out to Representatives Roegner and Brenner, chair of the House Education Committee, for being open to our message. 

Here's what the original fuss was about.

Word came from a high-ranking official through Facebook today that somebody is gunning for those mean old Ohio Opt Outers.

The vehicle is Ohio House Bill 420, a bill "to amend sections 3302.01 and 3302.03 of the Revised Code to prohibit the Department of Education from including students who 'opt-out' of state assessments in calculations of certain grades in the state report card and to declare an emergency."

But that title sounds like a Good Thing, right. In fact if we look at some of the specific changes, we find versions of this language:

any student to whom a district or school is required to administer an assessment under section 3301.0710 or 3301.0712 of the Revised Code, but who chooses not to take the assessment, shall not be included in the calculation of the district's or school's grade under division (B)(1)(b) of this section.

In other words, students who opt out of the Big Standardized Test (still PARCC, in Ohio's case) will not be counted against their school's state rating.

However, the bill is listed as still in committee, where apparently the following language has been tacked on as an amendment:

“No employee of a school district or public school shall negligently suggest to any student, or parent, guardian, or custodian of that student, enrolled in the district or school that the student should choose to not take any assessment prescribed by section 3301.0710 or 3301.0712 of the Revised Code.” Violation of this law is termination, loss of license, and a criminal record. 

That's right. Tell your students or any of their friends and family that you think opting out might be a good idea, and you would lose your job, your license, and your clean record. Post a complaint about PARCC on the book of face, and you are in the slammer. Testify before a government agency that you think the PARCC is a big fat waste of time, and you could be an unemployed lawbreaker.

Word of this astonishing (and probably illegal) amendment slipped out courtesy of Ohio Board of Education member A. J. Wagner. We've met Wagner before-- he's the board member who led a small revolt when Ohio tried to cut special area requirements for elementary schools. And he shared a few thoughts about this move on his Facebook page which I am sharing now with his permission.

So, a teacher who says on Facebook, “These tests aren’t helping our kids;” a janitor who reports to his neighbor what he heard in the teacher’s lounge about the waste of time these tests are; a superintendent who honestly says to the PTO president who challenges the tests, “I’m only doing this because the state makes me do it, this doesn’t help your children;” a principal who testifies to a legislative committee that the tests are damaging our schools; a counselor who says to a parent of an anxiety ridden child on the verge of a breakdown, “The testing pressure is too much for her;” a parent who works in the cafeteria and opts her son out of the tests; a school board member who votes for a resolution condemning the tests; all of these risk losing their job and can end up with a criminal record. 

“Silence them!”
“Stop them before the public finds out what we’re doing!”
“Ruin their lives before they ruin our political careers with the truth!”

Let’s review.
 
• These tests have had no real value, at least not to student performance. They have tremendous value to testing companies.
 
• They cost a lot of tax dollars taken from your house budget and given to testing companies rather than classroom instruction.
 
• They cost significant time. Last year teachers in Ohio spent as much as 8% of their classroom time on tests.
• They cause needless, harmful angst in children who understand the high stakes placed on the outcomes.
 
• They cost schools the loss of good, experienced teachers, especially schools in poor communities where teachers are blamed for the poor performance of kids who come to school, hungry, stressed, sick, and beaten.
 
• They cost discouragement and hopelessness in impoverished communities whose houses are vacant as parents move, when they can, because they’ve been told, falsely, that their schools aren’t any good.
 
• They are telling us that our kids are stupid when they’re not. If the scores from last year’s tests are believed, about two-thirds of Ohio’s kids are not on track for college or a career. That’s not true. But just in case you don’t get the message, standards are being raised for next year’s test to make that point more emphatic. TWO OF THREE OHIO KIDS ARE TOO DUMB TO GO TO COLLEGE!
 
• These tests aren’t timely. More than half the school year is gone and we still don’t have final scores on last year’s tests! What is a parent or teacher supposed to do when they find out, in late February, that Junior didn’t do so well? Send him back a grade?
 
• Education Week has moved Ohio from a state ranking of 5 to a ranking of 23 in the past two years. Ohio hasn’t seen a meaningful increase in NAEP scores in more than a decade. Last year’s NAEP scores for Ohio moved us down.
 
• The test results are used to terminate local control by firing elected school boards and allowing outsiders appointed by outsiders to take control of our schools. They are not just burying the constitution; they are ending democracy.

If you are an Ohioan who cares about education, you might want to send Wagner a little message of support. And if you're employed by a school district, feel free to share this post-- but do it soon, because before you know it, spreading this kind of dissent and disagreement could cost you your job.

Coercion, force, threats, and more threats-- this is what it takes to get people to go along with the PARCC. You would think that legislators and policy makers might ask themselves why exactly PARCC has failed to win hearts and minds. but no-- instead, we'll just force people to shut up about it at gunpoint. Good luck with that, Ohio.

Power and Order

It's School Choice Week and all the usuals have to check in, and I've been trying to read the work of the more serious choice advocates. And that would have to include Andy Smarick.

Smarick's entry at the Fordham Institute blog is School Choice: The end of the beginning in which he would like to suggest that charter-choice systems are a done deal, and he has a lesson from his years of pushing choice that he wants to share:

But probably the most important lesson I’ve learned over the last fifteen years—the reason why school choice progress moves so slowly—is this: An education system without school choice makes perfect sense from the point of view of central administrators.

Thas's probably true in the sense that it's true to say that I married my wife because she smells nice-- it's true, but a rather incomplete picture. Or to phrase Smarick's observation another way-- we have the traditional pubic system we have because the trained professionals who have devoted their adult live to working in the ed biz have, in their constant work at growing and testing and refining, have settled on several best practices. Smarick might as well complain that the only reason that surgeons like to operate on tables instead of floors is that it makes it easier to operate safely and accurately.

Smarick observes that a centralized authority for a large cityful of students (like most people in the ed debates, Smarick is really talking just about large urban school systems) is efficient and sensible, except when it isn't.

When there’s a single school operator, it’s a big problem if it’s not good at operating schools. Large, centralized bureaucracies remove power from practitioners. A single political governing board can be captured by interest groups. Monopolies are able to resist unwelcome reforms and find it difficult to evolve to meet changing circumstances. A family may not like the school to which its children are assigned. A teacher may not like the school to which she is assigned. A school assignment system, as Senator Elizabeth Warren has pointed out, reinforces residential segregation. A single-provider model, as Ashley Rogers Berner argues, undermines pluralism while implying ideological neutrality. And so on.

All of these are, again, sort of partially legit kind of. Large centralized bureaucracies are nobody's favorite thing, though as a classroom teacher, you can appreciate a large central bureaucracy that is too lumpy and slow to really interfere with you. A school board can be captured by special interests, but the election process allows them to be UNcaptured-- and a charter operating company IS a special interest, and it cannot be changed by the voters. Teachers and students "may not like" their school. I'm not sure that rises to the level of a Big Problem. School assignment systems may reinforce residential segregation, but the charter record on fixing segregation is crappy. You know who could fix school segregation? A centralized school administration. And I think Berner is full of baloney.

There are actually other legit complaints about a centralized single-payer-provider for education, particularly states and systems that exacerbate the effects of segregation along racial and class divides on purpose through policies loosely described as Let's Not Spend Any Money on Schools for Those People. That's a problem. I'm just not convinced that a choice system offers any solution to it instead of, say, "rescuing" a small handful of students from underfunded schools while making those schools even more severely underfunded for the many students still there.

Smarick is ideologically predisposed to be in favor of "our transition from a highly legible, single-provider model to a decentralized, choice-based model." But we have a pre-existing model for a decentralized choice-based model for providing a human service, and that would be the world's most expensive, inefficient and mediocre health care system.

Smarick sees a tension between the orderliness of our traditional system and a system that "empowers families and educators." And this may be one of the key points on which we disagree, because I'll be damned if I can see how a choice system empowers anybody except the people who want to run (and profit from) a choice system (also, a good public system allows for a great deal of energizing anarchy under the surface, but that's a topic for another day.)

Smarick is one of the few people to make the claim that a choice system empowers educators. Most choice fans correctly note that it's a great system for Putting Teachers in Their Place by getting rid of unions and job security from day one.

But choice doesn't empower families, either. In fact, it takes away one of the most fundamental powers a family has when it comes to education.

It's the power to make a school take your child. Show up at the school in your community with your child in tow, demanding that she be educated. The public school cannot say no. In fact, if your child comes equipped with challenges or disabilities, not only can the public school not say no, but they must provide your child with the necessary tools and instructions. If you don't like what the school is doing, you can call school officials, and if you don't like their answer, you can call a school board member. If you're really unhappy, you can attend a meeting where, by law, all decisions must be made in public view. You have the power to do all that, and in many cases you can even follow your complaint up by dragging the school district into a court of law.

What power do families have in a charter choice system? The power to take their business elsewhere. That's it. You do not have the power to demand that a school take your child, or that they teach your child in the most appropriate way. If a charter decides that it wants to push you out, you have no recourse. Information for judging choice schools is limited and mostly parents face a barrage of marketing rather than useful information.

Smarick is, finally, interested in assuming the sale. He lists some legitimately important questions about how a choicey chartery system would work (how do we do decentralized organization? who owns the buildings?) as a way of saying, "See! Choice-charter systems are a done deal. We just need to work out the details." That is perhaps premature, given that no charter-choise system has yet proven to actually work well at anything (other than making some charter operators a bunch of money) and none answer the question "How do you have redundant educational systems without ending up with a system that is an inefficient money-sucking tax dollar black hole?"

I agree that many centralized school systems need a great deal of work, and there are some problems that some public school systems need to solve. What remains unclear is how a choice-charter system solves any of those problems.

CATO, Choice and Freedom

It's School Choice Week, one more faux celebration created as a hook on which to hang a hundred press releases.

School Choice Week does indeed launch a thousand events and commentaries, and plenty of them are not very serious puff pieces by not very serious people. But some choice supporters are reasonably thoughtful people, and their words are worth reading if for no reason other than to spark the mental exercise of figuring out why, exactly, you disagree with them.

Which brings me to Neal McClusky's pro-choice piece for CATO, the Koch-flavored Libertarian thinky tank. It's short and sweet and draws a line directly between school choice and freedom. And I appreciate the clarity of his argument, because it helps me understand why I believe he's wrong.

First, the liberty part.

Freedom must have primacy because society is ultimately composed of individuals, and leaving individuals the right and ability to control their own lives is fundamentally more just than having the state – be it through a single dictator, or majority of voters – control our thoughts, words, or actions.

The sticky part here is "the right and ability to control their own lives."  The ability to control your own life is directly connected to wealth and status, and wealth and status are directly connected to the wealth and status of your parents. The state is not the only entity capable of limiting individual freedom, and more and more often, it does so not out of its own interests, but at the behest of the corporate interests who have paid mightily to have government represent their interests and not the interests of citizens without wealth, access of power.

Then, the extension of the liberty argument:

But a corollary to free individuals, especially when no one is omniscient and there is no unanimous agreement on what is the “right” way to live, or think, or believe, must be free association – free, authentic communities. We must allow people and communities marked by hugely diverse religious, philosophical, or moral views, and rich ethnic and cultural identities and backgrounds, to teach their children those things. Short of stopping incitement of violence or clear parental abuse, the state should have no authority to declare that “your culture is acceptable,” or “yours must go.” Indeed, crush the freedom of communities and you inevitably cripple individual liberty, taking away one’s choices of how and with whom to live.

This is a swell ideal, and I would love to live in that country, but it requires a level playing field and a shared definition of free. For instance, I can't think of any way in which same-gender marriage in any way infringes on or damages my perfectly happy heteronormative (second) marriage. But I know plenty of people who are pretty sure there IS an infringement, and now are equally angry and certain that they have been told their culture must go. When it comes to crushing the freedom of communities, there is wide difference of opinion of what constitutes crushing, and there is no level playing field for the debate between those cultures. For centuries the traditional straights have had the upper hand, and the loss of that upper hand feels to many of them as if their freedom is being crushed.

The state does not have to declare winners and losers (and in fact I agree that it mostly should not), but it does have an obligation to even the playing field and to decide when certain communities are not fighting fair, which means it has to decide what is fair, which means while it may not decide winners and losers, it sure will look like it. While there's a level on which McClusky's ideal is an appealing and worthy goal, I cannot imagine how, for instance, we would solve, sans government, the collision of  one community that believes blacks should be subservient and poor colliding with another community that is composed of blacks who don't accept racist foolishness.Or a community of wealthy corporate heads who believe they should be able to reap all the benefits of corporate success and the community of laborers who believe they are entitled to a share as well.

Nor does it seem like a blow for equality to look at a authentic, poor urban community and an authentic, rich gated community and declare, "Well, let's let everyone be free to pursue their own goals without government interference." It's like a race between a one runner standing on the starting line and another tied up at the bottom of a deep hole, and the race officials say, "We can't untie that runner and lift them out of the hole-- that would be unequal treatment. Only if we leave that runner tied up and in the hole will it be a fair race."

In fact, one of our problems with the traditional system is that some folks identify authentic communities and then cut them off at the knees. Let's not fund schools in non-wealthy non-white communities and then just say, "Well, that's just how things are" when in fact we made things that way by failing to properly fund the schools we have.

This (to digress) is my problem with Libertarianism-- it assumes a level playing field. Rich guys who run companies are pitted against little guys who work in factories and that's okay, because Libs assume that the rich is rich because he earned it. But when the little guy wants to organize, say, a union, that's wrong. The rich guy has extra power because he deserves it, but for the little guy to try to acquire more power is wrong and unfair. Let the wrestling match between The Rock and Betty White commence. libertarians are too often happy with an uneven playing field because they think it's uneven in a just and correct way, not the result of previous unjust game-rigging.

If there are things on which all agree, choice is moot – all will teach and respect those things. But if we do not all agree, forcing diverse people to support a single system of “common” schools yields but three outcomes: first, divisive conflict; then, either inequality under the law – oppression – when one side wins and the other loses, or lowest-common-denominator curricula to keep the peace.  

Again, I appreciate his clarity because I can see exactly where we part ways. I agree at the start-- if we all agreed on what schools were supposed to do, we'd have far fewer educational debates and faux reformers. But his list of three outcomes is incorrect.

Divisive conflict is inevitable only if we imagine a school that must treat each student identically. There is no reason to imagine such a school. Properly operated, a school can be designed to meet a wide variety of needs for a wide variety of students. It's not even particularly hard to do. We only need a common denominator (low or otherwise) if we are putting all the students in the exact same class in the exact same program (one more reason that national standards and national standardized tests are stupid ideas). One side does not need to win at the expense of the other. My school's vocational training program does not need to thrive at the expense of a high-powered college prep program. Black students and white students, rich and poor, super-smart and struggling-- we can support all of those student populations at the same time. There is no reason at all for winners and losers.

In fact, charters do not even have to thrive at the expense of public schools. All we need is a commitment to fund all of these things. The problem is not that we are trying to force diverse people into common schools-- the problem is that we want to do it on the cheap.

The practice of squishing diverse people together in a system that denies sorting them into clear cut winners and losers is a foundational American practice, going all the way back to a Constitution that virtually every founding father hated some portion of. The idea that all cultural disagreements must be solved by the complete and utter obliteration of one side is a relatively modern invention, and we are not better off for it.

There is no net gain to freedom and excellence of our nation if we set up separate schools so that everyone is educated only among those with whom they agree. And I don't imagine that any government can erase all differences and create a happy land of perfect equality. But choice does not fix any of the problems McClusky refers to-- it does not make our country, or the people in it, more free.

UT Offers Gobbledeegook Education Program

Here's one for the Has To Be Seen To Be Believed file, or perhaps the Ugly manhandling of English Language file, or most especially, the Why Regular People Don't Listen To Academics file.

The University of Texas is launching a... well, to be honest, I'm not sure. Some kind of MOOC. A newly tech-based instructional delivery system. Probably a version of Competency Based Education.  But Marni Baker Stein, Chief Innovation Officer of the University of Texas System’s Institute for Transformational Learning, is at Inside Higher Ed to plug the... whatever it is.

The entry is entitled "The Future Is Now." Treasure that phrase, because it's the last thing in the piece that will make plain sense (and was probably written by the IHE editor and not Stein). Can we figure it out?

UT is onto something new, and they've launched an initiative to "envisage" new models of delivery for a college education. For the first couple of paragraphs, one can almost make out some sense in the fog, some notion that a new workplace calls for new modes of preparation, and the UT campuses have been working on this in conjunction with certain disciplines and programs. But then we hit this...

These experimental sites disaggregate the post-secondary pathway as we know it into scalable and affordable verticals of connected educational experiences that can begin in high school and persist throughout a lifetime. In order to drive exponential increases in student engagement, retention and post-program success, our future models reinvent every facet of the learning experience, from the way that curricula and educational experiences are designed, developed, and delivered, to the services that support students along their educational journey, to how student learning is monitored and assessed.

You know, there's nothing I like better than a scalable and affordable vertical, though now that I think about it, that could also refer to an inexpensive rock-climbing wall at a gym, so maybe there are things I like better. But boy-- little old UT is going to reinvent every single part of the education process. How smart are they!?

What are some of the features of this Brave New Exponentially Disaggregated Cosmos of Educational Implementational Experientation?

Outcome focused. Well, you knew that was coming. And that outcomes focus will be, um, based on, um, "on the definition of the graph or scaffold of assessable outcomes that underlies each programming trajectory."

These graphs are complex and dynamic, often sketching out hundreds of outcomes across multiple levels of competency, and serve as the master blueprint over which we can then trace (and over time as the field evolves re-trace) the outlines of flexible program “packages” including foundational instruction, stand-alone modules, micro-certificates, stackable credentials, and degrees.

An atomic approach to design. This, sadly, will not involve plutonium or nuclear power plants. Instead, "atomic" refers to the high level of granularity in the pathway. Because the units will be extremely granular, they can be extremely personalized. Also, a bicycle, because a vest has no sleeves.

The approach also allows for more efficient management, updating, and expansion of learning experiences as we analyze object-specific impacts on student behavior or performance and as the targeted learning outcomes graph continues to evolve.

Commitment to high-impact pedagogies. 

High impact pedagogies such as problem-, project-, and team-based learning underlie the better part of instruction across every learning experience, presenting students with authentic assessments and driving challenges that need to be actively investigated and that are social by design.

I am beginning to suspect that we have moved beyond buzzword bingo and are in some sort of dimension of jargon-infused slam poetry, a world where Sarah Palin actually finished a college education but only learned the words.

A focus on personalization and gamification. Oh, hey! This part makes sense, and is the worse for it. "As learners make progress toward short-term and long-term goals, they earn points and are credited for a wide range of academic, co-curricular, and professional accomplishments." So, your education will be a video game which you will keep paying until you level up into a degree of some sort.

A persistent progressive profile that builds a universal transcript. This will go on your permanent record, young man. And when we say permanent, we mean permanent.

A next generation digital learning platform. Good gravy. The sun will come out tomorrow. Stop talking about next-generation software because if you actually had it, if you could actually do all the things you say you want to do, it would be THIS-generation stuff. "Next-generation" means "available only in my dreams." Which is useless. Oh, but they have it-- and it has a cute name.

Among TEx’s distinctive features is its ability to collect and integrate data from a variety of silos (including the Student Information System, Learning Management System, content services, and a broad array of learning and assessment applications) that offer real-time actionable insights into student pace, engagement, persistence, and performance, as well as measures of self-efficacy. This infrastructure empowers faculty and staff to provide high-touch services to those students most in need of encouragement and to personalize support and instructional development efforts as never before possible.

Software that can measure "self-efficacy"!! And it will offer real-time actionables (unlike say, a next-generation software platform which would, by definition, be offering tomorrow-time hope-to-actionables). And I have't told you the best part-- this will be a mobile app!! That's right-- play your UT Bachelor's Videogame on your phone! Is that cool, or what!?

A commitment to research. And that appears to be the most creative way to say, "While you are playing your TEx Earn-a-Bachelor's videogame, we will be data-mining the living daylights out of you. Why, in TEx's first season, it collected over two million data events. I was invited to a data event once, but I wasn't sure what to wear. I had to settle for the data after-party.

This data collection will involve many partners. "This is a strategy that rests on strong partnerships between campuses and the university system, between the System and best-in-breed application developers and analytics service providers, and between solver teams of faculty and curriculum and instructional designers, educational technologies, assessment specialists, and data scientists. " I cannot wait to find out how solver-teams are chosen, though I imagine it must be hard to be the kid who gets chosen last for a solver team. Probably makes you want to just sit in the corner and play TEx games on your phone.

At the end, Stein allows herself to get a little verklempt and personal:

The work is fascinating, complex, and rife with both opportunities and challenges.

Well, it is certainly rife with something. I've been concerned what will be coming down the pike marketed as personalized, digitized learning, but if this is how they're going to sell it, I'm less concerned, because this is more likely to induce giggles than fear. An e-mail sitting here tells me that UT is offering all manner of MEd's on-line; maybe this is part of that, in which case heaven help the teacher who has to get through it with a straight face.

Vouchers: Why Do Conservatives Love 'Em?

If the plaintiffs in Friedrichs vs. California Teachers (or the people for whom they're sock puppeting) don't like paying union fees (they already don't have to pay dues) because the union will spend their money on activities with which they do not agree, boy, they would really hate school vouchers.

The rhetoric of pro-voucher folks (who at this point are the most long-twitching of the various undead unsuccessful reformster species) is to frame the decision about those tax dollars in a very specific way. "These tax dollars belong to the students and their families, not the bureaucracy of government schools" or some equivalent is the usual construction. This money belongs to the deserving child, not the money-grubbing public school system. It's a clear choice. And it's a false choice.

The tax dollars associated with public schools belong to neither the child nor the school system.

Those tax dollars belong to the tax payers.

The foundation of public education is pretty simple. "Hey," said the members of various communities. "Let's put some money together and get the kids an education, because if they grow up stupid, we'll have to live with and depend on a bunch of stupid adults, and that seems like a bad idea."

Oh, "and we'll elect some of us to keep an eye on the school and the money we pooled to run it."

In fact, one the weird things about voucher-choice systems pushed by conservatives is how very un-conservative these concepts are.

Those communities did not say, "Let's collect a bunch of money, give it to the parents, and they can spend it on their kids however they like." That would be another entitlement, and conservatives are not huge fans of the E word. In fact, conservatives have been pretty vocally unfriendly to the idea of "free" college for any who want to attend, because it would just be another entitlement by which students would feel entitled to attend college paid for by tax dollars ripped from the public's wallets.

But how is a voucher-choice system anything other than an entitlement for children to attend private school with tax dollars ripped from public wallets?

Conservatives also dislike it when publicly funded universities use public tax dollars to pay professors who say things with which some conservative taxpayers deeply disagree. How is a voucher-choice system any different-- particularly in a place like Ohio where I can set up a charter based in Sharia Law or White Supremacy or Flat Earth Cosmology?

Because one thing is certain under a voucher-choice system-- taxpayers without school age children have no voice in how education is managed in their community. Yes, public schools can make choices that the taxpayers hate-- and then the taxpayers can come tell the elected school board how much they hate those choices, and the taxpayers can replace the board members with more amenable ones. In a voucher-choice system, if you have no child, you have no voice.

Conservative support for vouchers continues to mystify me. It's a new entitlement. It's taxation without representation. It's also expensive-- because as the public system loses money through vouchers, they have no choice but to raise taxes. Okay, that's not entirely true-- a community with a large majority of childless taxpayers could elect a board that gives everybody a huge tax cut and tells the voucherfied system, "Screw you. Go find the money for schools somewhere else." And then the system would either collapse or need a government bailout.

So tell me again why conservatives love vouchers and choice?

Counting on Superman

One of the saddest days of my life was when my mother told me Superman did not exist... I was like what do you mean he's not real. And she thought I was crying because it's like Santa Claus is not real and I was crying because there was no one coming with enough power to save us. 

-- Geoffrey Canada (Harlem Children's Zone)

That's the quote used to set up the 2010 edu-propa-mentary film Waiting for Superman. Like many parts of the education reform movement, it's an inspired piece of misdirection, because reformsters have not only been waiting for Superman-- they've been counting on him.

The Flint and Detroit school disasters have focused national attention on Michigan's emergency manager law. That law has been percolating in Michigan for years, heated up by the folks at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy , a right-wing thinky tank that loves the idea of privatizing government and which has been funded by the usual suspects (Koch, Walton, DeVos). They started pushing for a new, powerful Czar-ship in 2005 and finally sold it in 2012 (You can read a more detailed account of the rise of the Emergency Manager in Michigan in this piece.) The adoption of the law was contentious, but the leaders of Michigan were determined that Superman would come, and when he came, they would be ready.

Because the emergency manager model doesn't just believe that Superman is coming-- it depends on it. Superman is coming, and we must prepare a place for him.

The emergency management system we see in Michigan is just one way of expressing the Superman Theory of Change-- there are Supermen among us, and they could save the lesser beings, if only we stopped holding them back. Superman could bring us excellence, but the enemy of excellence is bureaucracy and regulation and rules and, most of all, democracy.

Counting on Superman has led to a variety of initiatives. The various attempts to break tenure (like Vergara and Reed before it) have come from the belief that when Superman takes over a school district, he must (like a CEO) be free to hire and fire based on what he alone can see with his super vision. (And schools would work so much better if every classroom was taught by another Superman).

The need to break unions is part of the same trend. Unions tie Superman down, forcing him to follow a bunch of stupid rules every time he wants to strap on his cape and take to the skies.

Likewise, government regulations get in Superman's way, keeping him earthbound in a web of red tape. For a Superman believer like Jeb! Bush, it makes perfect sense to say that Flint's crisis was caused by too much regulation-- if the Supermen who emergency manage Flint and Detroit hadn't had to deal with local and federal authorities at all, they would have avoided this whole mess.

Superman also needs to be un-hampered by "politics." Reed Hastings (Netflix) famously supported the idea of doing away with elected school boards entirely, because they are too unstable, too susceptible to the will and whims of the public. This distaste for politics gives, in hindsight, a new understanding to the common complaint from reformsters a few years ago, who kept bemoaning how ed reform ideas like Common Core were being tripped up by "politics," meaning, we can now see, that people were trying to keep Superman from exerting his full powers.

Hastings saw a solution, and he wasn't the only one, in the steady replacement of public schools and their kryptonite mountains of rules and unions and regulations and democracy-- replacing all that with charter schools which are, after all, simply schools run by Superman as a permanent emergency manager from Day One. You can see it on Eva Moskowitz's bemused face every time someone tries to argue with her- "Why are you questioning me? Do you not see that I am Superman, come to save the less fortunate? Nobody tells me what to do."

Superman will save our schools. Well, not all our schools. The Ubermensch is most needed where the cities and schools are filled with Those People, those Lesser Humans who can't be trusted to vote properly, act properly, learn properly, and certainly not to chart their own course properly. No, it is Superman's burden to rescue those lesser beings.

Of course, those lesser beings are rarely found in rich communities. No, it's the poor, the brown, the black that need to be rescued by Superman, and anybody who stands in Superman's way is a racist on the wrong side of the Civil Rights Issue of Our Time, which is, apparently, that poor black and brown people deserve the opportunity to be rescued by Superman. Of course Those People should be silently grateful that Superman will choose for them what choices they are desperately in need of, which often includes training in how to be properly compliant, how to be happy in their proper place.

So across the country, some are not just waiting for Superman, but counting on him. Banking on him. Michigan needs Superman to come run many of its cities ( particularly the mostly-black ones). States across the nation need Superman to come run their school districts (particularly the mostly not white ones). Superman somehow knows the secret of running a city. Superman somehow knows the secret of educating children.

Some folks, folks who have been paying attention, have seen this coming for a while. The old emergency manager model was like a nurse, a FEMA or Red Cross coming to town to help stem the tide of disaster until folks could get back on their feet. But the new emergency managers are here to deal with the crisis that never ends because the Crisis is democratic local control. The crisis is that The Wrong People are in charge. We can work the problem slowly by setting obstacles to keep The Wrong People from voting, but it's even easier in a city like Detroit or a school district like Philadelphia to simply remove the need to vote, to strip democratically elected officials of any actual power.

Peoples' willingness to go along with this is at times frightening. What is the Friedrich case except a group of teachers saying, "We really ought to know our place and stop tugging on Superman's cape." And what kind of dark road have we traveled down to find so many people who think that Donald Trump is the ubermensch who will Save America (from all those non-white Those People) ?

There are people who believe that Superman really will come to actually save us, that he will do Really Good Things and therefor it's okay to prepare his throne. We give up democracy for nothing but the very best reasons. Scratch an NEA or AFT leader and I believe you'll find a sincere argument about why the union must back Clinton no matter what union members think they want. Scratch some reformsters and you will find a sincere argument about how some of the poor and downtrodden really must be saved by Superman.

And some of the crisis are real (and some have been manufactured-- but are still real). Detroit was no sunny paradise before an emergency manager was installed. Democracy can indeed be twisted to create unjust, unfair, oppressive outcomes. Democracy is not magical.

But here's the thing. Democracy may not be perfect. But Superman is not real.

The Superman plan is no plan. The Superman plan is, "We have a bunch of problems and challenges, so we will install Superman as an emergency manager of the city or the school district, or we will build a school district from scratch with Superman as the CEO, or bring Superman into a turnaround school, and Superman will just fix all the problems. That's our plan!" That's not a plan.

Look at the Great Lakes Education Project (GLEP) slide show about Detroit schools. GLEP is a charter-favoring group started up by Dick and Betsy DeVos (Amway billionaires), and they are currently pushing for Detroit Public Schools to just be shut down. The slides collect a litany of DPS wrongdoing, screw-ups and failures, and it's a pretty horrifying litany. But at the end of this long list of DPS inadequacies, the "plan" is "close down DPS and replace it with a bunch of charters, so Superman can come save the children, somehow." That's not a plan, but it's not the first time a similar proposal has been made in this country.

Superman is not real. Superman is not waiting out there with deep, complete knowledge of how to make a school or a city successful and healthy in a single bound. I know this because if a Superman with such knowledge existed, we would have heard about him or her, and that ubermensch would be famous, and probably rich. Not only that, a real Superman with real answers would be convincing millions of people to follow those answers.

Superman is not real, but democracy is. The genius of this country has never been a single superbeing who provided the answer for an entire system or city or even corporation. There may have been people who were the face of a system or city or corporation, but they had an army of collaborators behind them, every single time. Superman comes equipped with powers bestowed at birth which he then proceeds to use as he best sees fit, but our nation's genius is to understand that the powers belong to the people, that government is created by the people, deriving its powers "from the consent of the governed." And, of course, there's that all people are created equal thing.

The people counting on Superman don't believe in democracy because they don't believe in equality. In their model of the universe, some people are just better than others. Some people should be in charge, and some people should not have a say. Some of the people who believe in Betterocracy or Rule by Superman are clearly evil and amoral, believing that it's okay to bilk those Lesser People for every penny ("If they didn't want to be treated like crap, they shouldn't have chosen to be poor.") Some Bettercrats are not destructive thieves; they feel an obligation to look out for the Lesser People, to provide those Lessers with what Superman decides they should have. These Bettercrats may even occasionally lessen the suffering in the world. But at the end of the day, they still believe that they are better than the poor and downtrodden, that they know best, that they are right to substitute their own voices and judgment for the voice and judgment of the people they take care of.

Because, after all, if Superman can come save the day, if Superman can replace mere mortal judgment with his own, if Superman can be given the freedom and power to take run a corporation or a school or an entire city, what better system could we have? Why simply wait for Superman when we can plow the road for him, remove the obstacles, silence the opponents (and for that matter the allies or beneficiaries) that might get in his way? Whether he has "emergency manager" on a business card or a big S on his chest, Superman will save the day.

They are counting on it.