DeVosian Threat Inventory

So now Betsy DeVos has her very first big girl job, and we live in a Trump-DeVos education era. Time to take an inventory of what education issues to watch for. Here's my set of best semi-educated guesses.

Common Core

Pshaw. Common Core continues to be a zombie policy, existing in various mangled forms both under its old name and its new one. This administration will claim to have gotten rid of it while having not done much of anything. It's like building the Wall; people keep saying Trump can't do it, but they forget his most potent policy tool-- lying.

So we will claim that CCSS is dead and gone and applaud states for adopting strong college and career ready standards, which will continue to be the Core oinking through one more layer of lipstick. None of it will be the source of much fuss.

Charters and Choice

Technically, Secretary DeVos can't really do anything much to get states to go all in on charters, vouchers, and choice. But then, technically Secretary Duncan couldn't do anything much to get states to adopt the Common Core.

The tools available to USED just happen to be tools that DeVos is familiar with-- bribes and extortion. Jump through this hoop and get a big fat check! Displease me and I will cut off your Title I funding.

Expect to see every possible tool used to throw money at charters and push for some version of vouchers. Watch for skirmishes between former allies, as charter-loving accountability hawks face off against a USED that doesn't want to restrict "innovation" or hurt "flexibility" by making charter schools follow actual rules. Cyber-school operators can now breathe a sigh of relief; for a while it looked like someone might actually hold them accountable for their crappy results, but that ship has, well, not so much sailed as been blown up in the harbor.

Watch for the references to parental choice, the idea that parents are more important or better than the government at choosing for the child. This is the foundation for a voucher system-- it's also the foundation for disenfranchising every taxpayer who is not a parent. And (see below) it's a rationale for abandoning those children whose parents are not good stewards of their children's interests.

And be prepared to fight on the state level to keep pubic schools from being sucked dry in order to fund choicey stuff. Remember-- throwing money at public schools is a huge pointless waste, but throwing money at charters is super-awesome.

The Most Vulnerable Students

What I guess we can now call old school reformsters liked to keep poor students, disadvantaged students, students with special needs center stage as part of their argument that we were doing all of this For The Children. Mind you, much of that rhetoric was baloney, but at least it kept vulnerable students in the conversation.

As hinted by the DeVosian ignorance of IDEA, we're probably done with all that. Oh, we'll talk about students in need from time to time, but students who are costly and not very profitable are going to treated like a hot potato. The feds will insist that taking care of Those Students is a state responsibility and the states will protest that they are meeting the letter of federal law and the emboldened charter-choice industry will declare that those students are totally free to choose any school that wants to invest the time and money to serve them if any such noon-public schools can be found.

And civil rights? Civil rights are for corporations. Non-wealthy black and brown folks, on the other hand, should smear some powdered grit on their hands so that they can get a better grip on their bootstraps. 

This will be a cause for vigilance, because my guess is that in many cases these students aren't so much going to fall through the cracks as they are going to be stuffed through them.

College Finances

It has been clear all along that DeVos has neither knowledge of nor interest in the federal role in managing college loans and grants. I expect some statement along the lines of

I don't really know what's going on, exactly, but there's a whole lot of money involved which means some corporation should be making profit off of handling this stuff, so let's find a company to run the college loan/grant biz, hand them the money, and wash our federal hands of the whole business (though I think maybe I have some investments in a company of two that might be good for this). You ask me if we will check to make sure that the whole college finance thing is going well, and we absolutely will, though by "going well" we mean "making a good profit for the company running it."

Attacks on Unions

Already under way. Look for a big push for a Right To Work nation. And don't look for DeVos to schedule a meeting with Lily Eskelsen Garcia or Randi Weingarten any time soon. Do look for explanations of how teachers unions have ruined education in this country, and how the teachers unions are robbing teachers of the freedom to work for low wages with no job security.

Attacks on the Teaching Profession

Ditto. Teachers are supposed to be the fry cooks of the school industry, and all these regulations that require them to have training just interfere withe the flexibility of school operators, which is ridiculous because, after all, any mook can teach. Prepare to be nostalgic for the days when Arne Duncan would blow all that smoke up our skirts. And watch for an explosion of "alternative" approaches to licensure, so that anybody can jump over a broom and holler "teacher teacher teacher" and that will be good enough. Because making sure people are qualified is just reducing flexibility and taking away everybody's freedom to be a teacher.

Local Control

We've seen in the past years that the GOP has abandoned its ideas about small government and interfering with local control. Like many on the left, the right now believes that the purpose of government is to force people to behave they way you think they should. We will see how long the DeVos USED can holds onto a prime directive for non-interference. We'll also see if the GOP can really work up the nerve to kill the department entirely.

In the meantime, watch your state, where legislatures are feeling free to do whatever-the-hell-they-want to the education system. Many of the most important policy debates will be on the local level, right up until the moment the feds decide that certain state decisions are not okay. So, just like the old days.

Big Data (and small)

I'm honestly curious to see which way this wind blows. The ability to run a cradle-to-career stuffed with every piece of data on students (including what kind of character and personality they have) is not an obvious area of interest for DeVos, and conservatives have been known to get kind of testy when the feds get all Big Brothery. On the other hand, there's a ton of money to be made here, and what the free market wants, the free market ought to get. My bet is that money will win and the push to digitize all human life forms will continue.

At the same time, DeVos is an ideologue. If data conflicts with her view of How The World Works, then it's bad data and can be dismissed. Data and facts are, in this administration, malleable things, not based in reality and only useful for scoring points in the larger argument. This will change the nature of the debate. I imagine that we will see versions of this conversation:

Resistance: Look at these pictures. Look at this data. Can't you see the damage your poicy is doing?
DeVos: It doesn't matter. My policy is Right.

DeVos may be, as some have claimed, pragmatic. But she is still a perfect appointee for a post-fact administration. And it's okay to lie to the rabble.

Personalized Competency Based Computer Learning Micr0-Credential Education Stuff

This will not be going away, and if you haven't been paying a lot of attention, it's time to start.

For one thing, the personalized/competency based education stuff lends itself easily to fitting choice on crack-laced steroids. Give every kid a education debit card, and let them take whatever course they want from whatever vendor is on the market. The deserving rich kids can get all the education they want, and the undeserving poor (which is the only kind of poor there are because if you deserved to be not-poor, you wouldn't be poor) can make do with the bare minimum that noblesse oblige throws their way.

For another thing, the best market/audience for this type of education has always been people who don't know anything about education. Which is what we have in charge now. Vendors are going to have a field day pitching this shit.

This will be the new growth industry. It will be the hot new investment. It is going to be huge. Hyuuuugge!

The New Priorities

It's important to remember that Betsy DeVos didn't have to come to this office ignorant of public education. With her giant stacks of money, her political clout, her bulldog-playing-hockey charm, she could have spent the last twenty years becoming a first-hand expert on public schools. She didn't, because she didn't want to, because the issues of public school are not important because public schools are not important beyond the fact that they're an obstacle to how things should be.

Students, the worthy ones from the right homes, should be in Jesus schools, learning to understand how God made the free market as a way to sort out His beloved chosen few from the rabble. The rabble should also be in Jesus schools, learning how to follow rules and behave themselves and fit comfortably and happily in their proper places.

Everything else is a waste of time and money, and we're only having to bother with it because too many of the Godless rabble have been allowed to run loose in our country, and if we can't put them back in their place overnight, well, we can at least start to undo some of the damage they've done and blunt some of the systems they've put in place to do more damage and start bringing children up properly.

And the best way to manage all of this complex operation is as a business. Wherever something can be taken over by a business, that is in and of itself a Good Thing. Business is always better-- that's part of the ideology in play here, a foundational value of the new regime. Put another way-- if nobody is making a buck off it, it's probably no good. 

If we don't understand the new set of priorities,  we're going to find ourselves trapped in looped versions of the same conversation

Resistance: If you pursue this policy, you will do irreparable damage to X!
DeVos: And your point is....?

Don't Bet the Farm

This is my early read on what the threat levels are for these various issues. I could turn out to be wrong on any or all of them. Bottom line-- we are all going to have to pay close attention ajnd remain vigilant, because the new normal is not going to be all that normal at all.

Uplift Checklist For a Dispiriting Day

Honestly, my expectations are always so low that it's hard to really disappoint me, and this day was no exception. Defeating DeVos depended on finding a GOP senator who was willing to separate himself from his senate pack and also piss off a President known for his unreasoning grudgeholding rage in the first days of a new administration whose main goal seems to be sorting the people of the world into "kindling" and "marshamallows." A 24-hour parade of speechifying Democrats wasn't going to shake that imaginary GOPster loose; today went down pretty much as I expected.

Still, many of my colleagues are pretty bummed. "This just seems so bad. So just really so bad. What do we hold onto." So I'm going to try to rein in my usual bloviation and just give you a list. This. This is why you don't have to totally despair.

* We have company. A whole lot of company. When we go off on our next rant about the assault on public education, a whole lot of people will no longer look at us like we're nuts. We have company, and that means we have help.

* The Trump-DeVos administration means that our national unions no longer need to play nice in hopes that they'll get a seat at the table. No more of this, "Shhh. Try to be polite" shit that we had when Arne Duncan was in office. These guys aren't Democrats, and the union doesn't have to pretend to get along.

* The reformy coalition is all splintery. Pretend reform Democrats can no longer pretend that their preferred policies are not conservative orthodoxy. The in fighting may or may not help, but it will at least be entertaining.

* Despite the depictions of her as clueless, DeVos is better known as a hard-nosed political street fighter. Between her ignorance and her bare-knuckles gracelessness, we will not have to try to read the nuances to divine her goals and intent.

* We already know the territory. Five, six, ten years ago, when things started to unfold, lots of folks spent a lot of time trying to figure out what was really going on, if they saw what they thought they saw, if people in power really were saying crazy shit and trying to do crazy things. Some of us napped through a lot of that, eventually startled and surprised to see that a bunch of people really did want toi gut public education like a prize trout. Now, the element of surprise is gone. We know the face of the other army, and we have folks watching every single road into the territory. No surprises. We're ready.

* The resistance has flexed its muscle. Granted, I'm far from the heart of the action, but my sense is not of widespread helplessness ("My God. We gave it our all and we lost. It's no use") Instead, what I'm hearing is a feisty energy (Damn! We're a lot stronger than I thought!")

* The real action, the meaningful action, the action that counts is right where it has always been-- in our classrooms, with our students. Folks can throw shade all day, but we work in the heart of the sun.

* Love really does beat the rest of that crap. You can already see, just ten days in, the Trump administration splintering and churning up so much bile in its own barrel that it keeps spitting it up. It's ugly and awful and gut-wrenching and not a good look on anyone-- but it is also a sign that this administration is literally sick, sick with an illness that makes it violent and dangerous, but also weak and doomed sooner or later to fall. Love, friends, and don't get any of that shit on you. The space in your head belongs to the people you love; don't throw them out just to make room for unworthy tenants.

Finally, from my own personal vantage point-- just because you can't clearly see the way forward doesn't mean it's not there. You listen, you wait, you watch, and you move forward with as much clarity and purpose as you can, and you find the way. Look, I never in a gazillion years would have predicted where I would be today, yet here I am. Sometimes the struggle just finds you, comes to you and you rise up to meet it.

This is a marathon, not a sprint. Take a breath. Get some rest. We can do this.

WI: Destroying the Profession

Wisconsin State Superintendent Tony Evers would like to lower the bar for teachers.

Heading up the Leadership Group on School Staffing Challenges, Evers has teamed up with some members of the Wisconsin Association of School District Administrators to try to solve the mystery that is Wisconsin's shrinking teacher pool-- veterans are quitting, and the pipeline for new teachers is drying up.  Their solution? Make it easier to become a teacher.

Wisconsin's teacher loss is not unusual-- neighboring Michigan and Illinois have comparable or greater teacher problems, and may well be effectively headhunting in cheeseland. We've seen a national problem with the teacher pool, which might just have something to do with the continued assault on teachers, the profession, and schools. Or maybe it has to do with a reform movement that has tried to reduce teaching to script-reading and clerical work. Some argue, no, that's not it. It's not that we've devalued teaching right out of existence-- it's just the end of the Great Recession has made it possible for people to choose anything other than teaching as a career. Which doesn't really seem to contradict the previous argument.

I don't say this often, but God bless the Daily Beast for this

On top of all that, Wisconsin is the land of Scott Walker's Act 10, the act that effectively ended collectively bargaining for all public unions (it also put a cap on wage increases for teachers, ended their ability to auto-deduct dues, messed with health care, and just generally stuck it to working class folks in Wisconsin. Do you suppose that might have anything to do with the issue?

Lots of folks are pretty sure it does. The wage set-up in Wisconsin is fairly competitive for about five years-- and then any teacher wanting to support a family needs to get out of the state (hence the descriptive career plan, "five and flee.") The website Teaching In Wisconsin ("Act 10 Made Wisconsin the Worst Place To Teach in America") shows, for instance, how a Minnesota teacher would make double the lifetime earnings of a Wisconsin teacher.But five and flee is only problematic if you wanted to keep teachers around, and if you keep them around you might have to pay them more or even provide a pension. It can't be surprising that many Wisconsin teachers got out after Act 10 passed, because the clear message of Act 10 to professional career teachers was, "Get out!"

Some observers say, "No, it's just a random fluctuation and the massive drop-off in Wisconsin teachers that came right after Act 10 was passed? Gee, there's just no way to know if those two things are related."

Folks like Will Flanders, education research director for Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL), suggest that we could solve the shortage easily because "We have a lot of folks out there with college degrees."

Which brings us back to the Leadership Group on School Staffing Challenges, and the report they just issued. Here are some of their cool ideas:

* Consolidate certification levels. Everyone will be certified either PK-9 or PK-12, because if you've trained to teach pre-school, you can totally handle 8th grade math, and if you can teach senior AP English, you should be able to handle first graders. Imagine the kind of exciting suspense each year as teachers wait to see what their new assignment might be, because it could be pretty much anything.

* Consolidate certification subjects. Let's crank out teachers certified in math-social studies-music-ELA. Teachers could still specialize, but would be "allowed to teach" in any area of the broadfield license. Again, remember that "allowed to teach" equals "district is allowed to transfer you to." Also, make it easy for someone who has a teaching certificate to "take on new challenges" by just adding more subjects to it.

* Simplify and consolidate multiple pathways to licensure. Get 'em in there any way you can. Create a "clearinghouse" for all the many creative ways we can rush someone into a classroom.

* More interns. Let districts hire pre-teachers as interns, so you can be in the classroom before you have actually gotten your license.

* Reciprocate with anybody who's using edTPA to certify teachers, because that way we'll know the teachers involved have already resigned themselves to helplessness in the face of stupid bureaucracy and pointless hoop-jumping.

* Let pro-teacher students "demonstrate competency" by having a high GPA or by passing a content test. In other words, any college honors student can have a teaching certificate.

So basically, the group charged with finding ways "to ensure the long-term recruitment, retention, and development of Wisconsin's education workforce" has focused on how to get more people into the classroom. So that's recruitment. But retention and development? While some folks might have been inclined to address those issues by providing decent pay, professional respect, some self-determination and power over their own work, Evers and his buddies have got.... nothing. Anybody can be any kind of teacher, because a teacher is a teacher is a teacher and what schools really need are interchangeable widgets so that if you're running a little short on third grade teachers, you can just move your middle school math-science-music-art teacher into the spot. 

This is a recommendation that screams, "Anybody can be any kind of teacher" and you don't get much more professionally disrespectful or destructive to the profession than that. 

The New Friedrichs Anti-Union Lawsuit

Well, that didn't take long.

The Center for Individual Rights has filed a lawsuit against the state of California and the California Teachers Association -- Yohn v. CTA.

CIR is the same right-wing group that brought us the Friedrich's lawsuit, and this is basically the same suit with a new teacher used as a prop. They cut their teeth doing anti-affirmative action work, but have more recently joined in the effort to bust the unions, or at least render unions less effective in opposing GOP candidates. The one-percenters love them. While their original founders have moved on, they are currently led by Terry Pell who, ironically, used to work in the US DEpartmet of Education as the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights.

Our Very Special Plaintiffs this time?  Bruce Aster, George Meilahn, Darren Miller, Allen Osborn, Michelle Raley, Robert Vehrs, Stacy Vehrs, Ryan Yoh. Yohn, the suit's namesake, is an eighth-grade American history teacher at Stacey Middle School in the Westminster School District.

Friedrichs stalled and died because, well, Justice Scalia also died. But now that Trump has his conservative-approved justice picked out, CIR is ready to try again with an attempt to get all the way to the Supreme Court.

The argument is unvarnished baloney:

The Supreme Court has recognized the grave First Amendment problems that arise when a state coerces political speech. In 2014, Justice Alito observed in Harris v. Quinn, that, “Agency-fee provisions unquestionably impose a heavy burden on the First Amendment interests of objecting employees.” As he explained, it is a “bedrock principle that, except perhaps in the rarest of circumstances, no person in this country may be compelled to subsidize speech by a third party that he or she does not wish to support.”

Cool! May I please have a refund on all the taxes I paid to support pointless wars and the actions of various government agencies with which I disagree?

The goal here is simple-- give the union less money. It's a popular idea-- in fact, some legislators are trying to legislate the same thing in PA right now.

The goal here is to establish a whole class of free riders-- teachers who don't support their local union, but still benefit from the collective bargaining process (where it still exists) as well as the representation that the union is legally required to provide these folks should they ever get in trouble. It's like having the government require you to drive your neighbor to work every day, but forbidding you to ever ask him to chip in for gas--oh, and if he needs to be taken way out of the way for an appointment, you have to drive him there, too. Oh-- and all the way there, you have to listen to how you're oppressing him by giving him a ride.

Plaintiff Yohn contends that he doesn't need the union to negotiate for him because he can totally do better on his own. He is 38 years old, far too old to believe in fairy tales, but personally, I would be happy to let him try. And then I would like to sell him a bridge.

CIR expects to work their way up to the Supremes by the summer of 2018.  So dig out your old files-- we're going to literally re-litigate Friedrichs all over again, and that light at the end of the tunnel is probably the headlight of an oncoming train. 

The DeVos Alarm Clock

The Betsy DeVos nomination, in its sturm and drang and distress and noise, is quite different from any nomination we've ever seen. And yet, Betsy DeVos is not that much different from what we've seen before.

As a political operative seeking to remake public education in her own preferred image, DeVos is a bush-league Bill Gates. "I'm rich. I've got a tn of money. Why shouldn't I rewrite the education rules to better suit my own preferences?" Granted, Bill Gates actually did something to earn his money beyond simply being conceived. So that's a difference. And Gates wants to remake education to suit technocrats, while DeVos seems more interested in creating a system that fits her personal version of Jesus. So that's a difference, too.

As an education expert, DeVos is someone who holds tight to her set of beliefs about how education should be run despite pushback from people who actually work in the field and despite the lack of any credible evidence for her preferences, which she actively rejects. In this respect, she is not really very different from Arne Duncan or John King or Rod Paige.

As a policy leader, DeVos values deference to moneyed interests.I think it's a mistake to think that DeVos is motivated by greed; like many of the folks playing this game, she uses money to keep score. It's not that it's important to grasp and grab at money-- it's just that wealth is a sign of God's favor, proof that you are a Better Person who has been justly rewarded for your Betterness. In this respect she is no different from many folks who work in government like, for instance, all the folks who let Bill Gates and Eli Broad and a dozen other well-heeled reformsters have a seat at the policy table because, hey, these guys are rich, so clearly they must be worth listening to. They must Know Something. They must be the Right Kind of People.

As I type this, the Democrats are continuing their long-form theater piece in which they take turns railing against some of the issues of privatization, the chopping of public education into parts and the selling of those parts to various corporate interests, and on one level I'm glad that the Democrats are actually saying something, but on the other hand, much of what they've been railing against has already been going on for well over a decade with nary a peep from any of them.

And while I would love to think they are now suddenly awake and aware that public education is being systematically attacked, I suspect that in the DeVos nomination, they have simply identified a hammer with which they can whack at Trump. When some reformsters worry about the splintering of the reform coalition, they're just recognizing that while it used to be politically expedient for some folks to back reform, right now it is politically expedient to oppose it. I'm never all that encouraged when people take my side for reasons that have nothing to do with matters of principle.

The good news though, is that while politicians swing back and forth in whatever stiff wind blows, there are plenty of regular citizens who have been startled awake by what the DeVos nomination has revealed. What!? There are people advocating education policies who don't know what they're talking about, who don't have any expertise in the field, whose main allegiance is to corporate moneyed interests, and who would rather destroy public education than strengthen it??!! Do tell. I'm shocked. Next you'll try to tell me that there are people involved in the US government who are racist and classist?!

Yes, some folks are going to want to berate these late-waking citizens for not catching on sooner, for just now awaking to concerns that others have been hollering about for years. That berating is wrong, a mistake, a bit of self-indulgence that we don't need. Teachers already know this truth-- people come to understanding in their own way and in their own time, and you cannot treat somebody like a unloved poor cousin because they got to the party later than you did.

DeVos has accomplished what nobody else could. Jeb Bush banked on education being a major topic of the Presidential campaign. He was wrong. Campbell Brown thought she could set herself up as a political force by positioning herself as an arbiter on education, betting that education would be a top concern of the election. Lots of folks thought that 2016 would be education's turn on the main stage. It never happened.

But now, somehow, in a field crowded with a plethora of terrible selections, education has emerged as the most contested, the most controversial, the most hotly debated cabinet appointment of them all. Education is actually having a major moment on the national stage.

Folks can say that the debate, the phone calls, the 24-hour Demo-harangue-- these are all a waste of time because the Senate will no more reject Betsy DeVos than a football team could blow a 17-point lead in the last minutes of a game.

But they are not a waste of time. DeVos, Trump, and their allies have been forced to use political capital-- hell, they've dropped hundreds of thousands of dollars of real capital to bolster her-- and hwne you can't prevent someone's victory, the least you can do is make them pay for it.

More than that, the commotion has awoken citizens. People who have never paid the slightest bit of attention can now tell you who the nominee for the Secretary of Education is, and why she's a bad choice. Thanks to DeVos and Al Franken, people who two weeks ago didn't even know there was more than one way to look at standardized test scores now have some inkling of the difference between growth and proficiency and why anyone cares.

Twenty-four hours from now, we'll probably have a terrible new Secretary of Education, and a huge portion of the electorate will already know to keep an eye on her from the very first day. And if they keep watching her, and keep growing in understanding of just what she's been up to, they will also start to notice that she's got plenty of company, and maybe folks will finally start to become alert to the ways in which our education system is being gutted and stripped.

DeVos is awful. She'll be awful every step of the way. She'll be the most awful occupant of the office in a long line of awful occupants. The only upside of that is that people, understanding her level of awful, may actually wake up and pay attention. It's not a full return for the shellacking public education is about to take, but it's not nothing, either. It's going to have to do for the moment. Let's just hope that after Tuesday everyone doesn't just roll over and go back to sleep.

Choice and the Un-opened Door

There are so many criticisms and counter-criticisms that swirl around the issue of choice and charters in the Great Unending Education Debate, but there are some criticisms of choice that have never been answered, because they can't be.

It's not all the surprising that Betsy DeVos came up stumped by IDEA at her hearing-- charter-choice systems don't spend a lot of energy, effort or (most importantly) money on students with special needs. This is not news-- we were talking about it back in, say, 2012, when Nina Rees president of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, "said she'd like to provide schools with more assistance on special education, but said she believed the lower rates were mostly the result of parental choice."

If they're not selecting charter schools it's a reflection of where parents decide to send their kids and not so much a reflection on charter schools, in my opinion.

Please. It is exactly a reflection on charter schools. Imagine making this same argument about segregated lunch counters. "Hey, if black folks don't choose to come in here just because we won't serve them, well, then, they're just exercising their freedom of choice!"

No business sets out to attract and serve all customers. The most fundamental part of a business plan is to know what your target audience is, and then aim at them while ignoring all others. You can't open the door to everyone, and you can't be welcoming to everyone. McDonalds is unwelcoming to fancy people in search of fine dining. Lexus dealerships do not open their doors wide to poor folks looking for a beater.

And charter schools are not open to all comers. Saying, "Well, that customer didn't choose" is a pile of baloney when you made no attempt to be chosen, or made efforts to make sure that customer did NOT choose you.

It doesn't change this to talk about "access" or "opportunity." Black folks had "access" to the doors to segregated businesses, and they had the "opportunity" to walk through those doors before they were shoved back out of them. Every customer has the opportunity to buy a Lexus-- but plenty don't have the money. Every passenger on the Titanic had access to a life boat, but only some could actually be saved.

Nor do charters have to worry about what becomes of the customers who choose not to enter a school where they're unwelcome. Did that student who walked away from us find a school that would serve their needs and make them feel welcome? Who knows? We are not responsible for other peoples' customers.

The promise of public education is that every child or every ability level and family background will be welcomed into a school where they will be given a great education. The door must be open to everyone, and once through that door, they should all be welcomed. The idea of a charter-choice system that does not keep the door open for everyone runs counter to the promise of public education.

PA: Another Attack on Unions

It's an idea that crops up from time to time, unique in that there isn't really any camouflage for it-- it just baldly attempts to make life more difficult for unions.

This time it's coming up in Pennsylvania under one of its common names-- "Paycheck Protection."

This bill pops up in Pennsylvania roughly as often as Punxsutawney Phil, and the rationale is as simple as it is transparent. Here's the bills favorite boosters, the free market think tank Commonwealth Foundation, being excited that the bill is up and rooting around again:

Since 2007, government union leaders in Pennsylvania have spent more than $95 million on politics—both from members’ mandatory union dues and voluntary campaign contributions—and taxpayers have been forced to help them do it.

That is mostly lies.

Union leaders have spent a bunch of money in Harrisburg, but it's illegal for them to spend member dues money on political stuff. That's why PSEA, for example, has a whole separate category for member giving for political action (PACE), and a teacher's money doesn't go to PACE unless they sign up to do so. The argument that unions spend dues money on political activity, from Friedrichs to this new bill, is that everything a union does is political. If they spend dues money on negotiating a contract-- well, negotiating the contract is political. Putting an ad in the school's yearbook is political. Virtually everything a union does outside of retirement teas and new teacher welcomes is branded political by folks who believe that teachers should most properly shut up and do as they're told and never, ever get involved in life outside their classrooms.

But even GOP pushers of these don't always have the cojones to just come out and say, "Lot's of teachers give money to the Democrats and we want to stop that. We want to starve the Democratic Party as just one more way to take total control of state government."

So we have to throw in that second point-- that taxpayers are somehow being charged tons of money for automatic deductions from paychecks. The clearest sign that this is simply baloney is that this complaint never comes up in regard to taxes or social security or the United Way or all the other things that are automatically deducted from paychecks.

But automatic deductions make paying your union dues easy, and opponents want to make paying dues hard (just like they try to make voting Democrat hard) so that some smaller number of people will do it.

One bill (SB 166) was sponsored by State Senator John Eichelberger, the same guy who also recently sponsored the bill to make it easier to strip teachers of sick days.

But also emerging from the Senate Government Committee this week was a bill from Senator Scott Wagner (SB 167) that simply seeks to make automatically deducting union dues illegal for public employees.

Wagner is not particularly shy about his hatred for unions of any sort-- this will be good to remember as he launches his bid for governor on a platform of "liberals suck and government should be shrunk to the size of a pea." Here's what he had to say about his bill

“Paycheck protection has been a top priority for me since coming to the Senate in 2014,” said Wagner. “Taxpayer money is being used to collect dues and PAC contributions for public sector unions. The unions then use that money to lobby against major issues like pension reform and the elimination of property taxes, both of which are taking a toll on the Commonwealth and its taxpayers.”

“Opponents argue the cost to taxpayers is minimal,” continued Wagner. “But cost has never been my focus. These unions are getting away with an activity that would send anyone else to jail – using taxpayer resources for political purposes.”

Got that? He doesn't care about the cost, except that it gives him an angle by which to attack the unions. By this argument, of course, teachers should only be able to get involved in political activities if they work for free and are never paid with tax dollars.

SB 167 is extra special because it actually proposes a constitutional amendment, so that we can really establish Pennsylvania as a union-hostile state.That also means that it would have to be approved in two consecutive sessions.

So if you're a teacher in Pennsylvania who has been getting lots of exercise trying to contact Pat Toomey about Betsy DeVos, you'll  want to keep those dialing and writing muscles warmed up, because our elected officials are going to need to hear from us again.