You probably already heard about H.R. 899, a bill elegant in its simplicity. Here's the whole text of the bill:
The Department of Education shall terminate on December 31, 2018.
Thanks to Rep. Thomas Massie (R) of Kentucky for this little zen koan of legislation. It raises many questions. Will the department evaporate? Will it be terminated with extreme prejudice? When the ball drops on New Years Eve, will fall onto the department and crush it? Will the offices terminate, or just the people in them? Will it be like the obliviate spell that Hermione cast, causing everyone to forget that the department ever existed?
But H.R. 899 is actually not the first proposal for the 115th Congress to trash US Education. An earlier bill (filed on January 23, the Monday right after His Regal Orangetude was crowned President) proposes to erase ESSA, launch a national voucher system, and end federal financial support as we know it. And fix a big problem with school lunches, too.
Meet H.R. 610, a bill from Rep. Steve King (R) of Iowa. Its official not-very-musical lead is "To distribute Federal funds for elementary and secondary education in the form of vouchers for eligible students and to repeal a certain rule relating to nutrition standards in schools." The punchier press-ready title is "The Choices in Education Act."
Whose Baby Is This?
If you're not familiar with Rep. King, his picture can be found in the dictionary next to "piece of work." Born in 1949, he attended Northwest Missouri State University, majoring in math and biology. He did not earn a degree, but he did earn three 2S student deferments from serving in Vietnam. Once upon a time he claimed to be Latino, but he's not. This college dropout has, in his political career, displayed a real gift for quotable baloney.
In a discussion of the DREAM Act: For everyone who’s a valedictorian, there’s another 100 out there that weigh 130 pounds and they’ve got calves the size of cantaloupes because they’re hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert.
On maintaining the border: We could also electrify this wire (on the border) with the kind of current that would not kill somebody, but it would simply be a discouragement for them to be fooling around with it. We do that with livestock all the time.
Harry Reid can defend those ghoulish and ghastly and gruesome practices that Planned Parenthood is advocating along with child prostitution and illegal immigration. He can play defense on that.
We could also throw in his thoughts on how immigration laws are like picking a dog, but we need to get back to his proposal for education. Just want you to know what kind of guy we're talking about here.
Let me walk you through the parts of the bill. After we get past Section 101, which gives it its name, we get to--
Section 102
Scrap ESSA. Done, dead, gone. Give Secretary of Ed only the power to read applications for grants under Section 104.
Section 103
States will receive block grants in amounts proportional to the number of students in the state. The purpose of the block grants will be to fund a voucher program. Section 104
To get the grant, states must show that they'll spend the money on a voucher program (as defined in Section 105) . They must also show that they are going to make it lawful for parents "to enroll their child in any public or private elementary or secondary school in the State" Emphasis mine, because, really, in the whole state? Granted, Iowa is the Tofu Block of states, a valuable and vital, yet flat and featureless expanse of corn-fed homogoneity, so maybe any corner of the state is indistinguishable for any other. But really-- legal to put your kid in any school in the state? How does anyone even begin to manage that?
Oh, and the state must also promise to make homeschooling legal as well. Section 105
The feds will distribute money based on how many kids you have in your school. In other words, the money will follow the child. Also, it's the "sense of Congress:" that said money should be distributed in a way that "promotes competition and choices."
The amount of money will be determined by straight division-- total stack of federal money divided by number of eligible children, so there will be no special considerations. A kid from a poor family is followed by the same amount as a rich kid. Kids with special needs get no extra money to meet those needs.
The set amount of money will also follow students to private schools, and to home schooled children. Home school your child (however you personally choose to define that), get a check from the federal government. King has built in some restrictions-- you may not collect a voucher for greater than the cost of private school or home schooling. How, I wonder, will home schoolers "prove" how much their home schooling cost? And to whom will they prove it?
Also, funds sent to local schools must be used to supplement, not supplant. Just in case you thought we were past that argument. And the vouchers sent to private and home school parents will not be considered income. Section 106
Vocabulary. Children that fall under the bill are ages 5 to 17 inclusive. Which I guess means that if Junior takes a couple of extra years to finish high school, his federal funding is shut off.
The Other Part
Title II covers the lunch thing. King apparently is still upset about the whole healthy lunch thing and wants to add a couple of clauses to school lunch program regulations so that no school can restrict maximum calories in a lunch, nor can they poke their noses into lunches brought from home. Glad to see a solution to those problems.
How Concerned Are We?
One of the features of life in Trumpistan seems to be the steady volley of whackadoodle ideas for rules and regulations, some of which are destined to die quickly and quietly, and some of which will win the approval of the Beloved Leader himself. So not only do we have to pay attention to what's being thrown about, but we have to assess real threat level.
This bill comes to us from the same guy who is sure the best way to deal with Obamacare is to kill it with fire, not "even if" there's no replacement but "especially if" there's no replacement. His voucher program would be a way to spend that $20 gazillion dollars that His Royal Trumpitude wants to throw at school choice, and vouchers fall right in line with what Betsy DeVos has long desired. On the other hand, he wants to scuttle ESSA, a bill that it took Congress eleventy-jillion years to put together and represents a crowning bi-partisan achievement of some Senators, even if they immediately started arguing about what they had accomplished. That alone makes this look like the kind of bill that the Senate swipes away with the back of their hands while quietly complaining about the nut jobs in the House of Representatives. Plus, folks who were excited about getting the feds to stop dictating state ed policy will not be fans, either. "We stopped the Department of Ed from telling you what to do so that WE could tell you what to do" is not a winning argument. So actual threat level could be only medium.
But.
But if you have been comforting yourself that a national voucher program could never be achieved, particularly by people who are bent on destroying the Department of Education, well, here's one example of how it could work.
Granted, it would be terrible. It would gut programs, leave many schools impoverished, and absolutely abandon students with any sort of challenge, from poverty to learning disabilities to English language learners. It requires absolutely zero accountability measures, inviting exactly the sort of fly-by-night hucksterism that has been fostered in Michigan by DeVos. On top of that, by scrapping ESSA and replacing it with nothing at all, the feds would leave all sorts of mundane-but-necessary functions and decisions of schools in a state of chaos and mystery.
Because it's one thing to get rid of the entire Department of Education, and another thing entirely to get rid of the entire body of education law.
But if you are the kind of person who believes that we ought to shut down all the gummint schools and stop giving special treatment to anybody who claims to need it and if you're poor that's your own damn fault so stop asking for help-- well, this approach would be might appealing.
So keep your eyes peeled. We haven't yet seen the last of this bill, or the many bills just like it waiting for their own special moment in the sun.
In the meantime, public ed supporters might want to drop Rep. King a line. And while you're talking to him, ask about all those tax dollars going to Iowa corn subsidies.
The charter world (which is mostly all that's to what we mean by "education reform") has been wrestling and fracturing and considering serious marital counseling over the past year or so. This bit of a crisis has been exacerbated since, oh, November. I've been drawn into conversations about this schism several times in the last week, which means it's time to write a simple explainer.
Feel free to grab some popcorn and watch
Warning: the goal here will be to make this issue simple, so I'm going to strip out all nuance and grossly oversimplify. I am also not going to get sidetracked into where I think they're wrong, misguided, or twisty-- you have the whole rest of the blog to read my thoughts on that. That's not the focus here today. Just so you know that going in. Let the questioning begin:
Aren't all education reformers on the same side of everything?
No. Lumping all reformsters together is a mistake, just like lumping all of their opponents together.
So what are the two camps when it comes to charters?
We can divide charter supporters into two groups.
The social justice crowd wants charters as an engine of equity and opportunity. They see non-wealthy non-white students, mostly in urban centers, as desperately in need of alternatives. Urban school, schools that serve the poor, schools that are tied up in institutional racism-- these schools should be helping students to rise, and instead are seen as part of the mechanism that holds those students down. So social justice charteristas want an alternative, a choice, a place that isn't the "failing public school" to send their child.
The free market crowd believes that a free market approach to education is just inherently better. They believe it will lead to quality through competition. They believe that businessmen will do a better job of running schools, better meaning both "producing better graduates" and "producing profitable outcomes and good ROI."
They worked essentially on two different problems. For social justice charteristas, the problem was that too many non-wealthy non-white families couldn't get into a good school. For free marketeers, the problem was that the education sector wasn't functioning on free market principles. They were able to forge an alliance based on, "If we solve our problem, I think it could solve your problem, too." What's the difference? They both want charters.
True. But they have different priorities and goals.
The social justice charteristas aren't that concerned with spreading charters everywhere. They see greater need in poor urban areas, and that's where they want the focus to be. If charters spread because of it, then fine, but that's not the main goal.
The free market charteristas want to see the business model scaled up for the entire country. They're not above using poor urban minority students as a foot-in-the-door approach, but that's only to get things rolling. They want more business-operated charters in more places capturing a greater market share. If non-wealthy non-white students get a more educational equity and quality out of it, that's fine, but that's not the main goal.
So what does this have to do with accountability?
Accountability has become one of the wedges in the charter movement. For social justice charteristas, accountability is super-important. The people they're worried about, the non-wealthy non-white folks don't need to be taken advantage of by charter sharpers, and as it has been increasingly clear that some folks are getting into the charter biz just to make a buck, social justice charteristas have called for accountability measures so that the people who are supposed to be getting rescued don't get screwed instead.
Free marketeers, however, believe that the fewer regulations, the better. Any kind of accountability measures or regulations are seen as inhibiting innovation or reducing flexibility or just generally interfering with some business visionary's ability to realize his cool idea. Could people get screwed? Why worry-- the free market will let parents vote with their feet and bad actors will be run out of business.
In other words, accountability measures help solve the give-poor-kids-good-schools problem, but they interfere with solving the more-free-market-education problem. What's one reason this is ramping up now?
ESSA moved a lot of responsibility to the state level. Free marketeers are championing the states' right to regulate (or not) schools as it suits them, but plenty of folks recall that using a states' rights approach to social justice has not always worked out very well. Many states and cities have shown huge creativity in ways to implement and institute massively unjust policies; the feds could barely keep them under control when they were sort-of-trying.
What's another reason?
The election of Donald Trump and his appointment of Betsy DeVos.
DeVos is solidly on the free market side of the charter industry. Like all such operators, she's smart enough to make mouth noises about non-wealthy non-white families, but her history is solidly on the free market side, not social justice.
So free market charteristas have been saying, "Well, I think we can work with her. Anyway, who said that real charter reformers have to put social justice ahead of everything else." And social justice charteristas are saying, "We didn't get into charters so there'd be one more way for white people with a ton of money to get more by screwing over poor non-white people."
The neo-liberal Obama administration was well-positioned to represent the interests of both groups, to say it was working both problems. The Trump regime is not.
Anything else?
No, I said I would keep this simple. We could talk about how some charter fans fear vouchers, the role of super-vouchers and choice on steroids (put your education together class by class rather than choosing a school), or the general pressure being exerted on the charter sector by their general failure to create any decisive successes. And, as promised, I have left out all the ways in which both some charter goals and some charter methods are arguably bunk.
I will acknowledge again that there are nuances and wheels-within-wheels here, that there are people of good faith and hucksters and charlatans on all sides, and that these things often come down to the vagueries of local politics. We will leave all of that for another day. In the meantime, people far smarter than I are also writing about this, or you can put your two cents in the comments. I'm going to go make some popcorn.
Jennifer Berkshire's trip to Michigan yielded a lot of good writing. This piece appeared in the Baffler and explains a bit more about DeVos's Amway roots, among other holy things.
A defector from the world of ultra-conservative Christianity gives us a picture of what education looks like in the world of Mike Pence and Betsy DeVos
Reformster Robert Pondiscio at Education Next explaining how much of a mess high stakes testing makes out of schools. I don't agree with his solution, but it's a pretty good explanation of the problem.
I've worked my way slowly through two panel discussions held at the American Enterprise Institute a couple of weeks ago. They're interesting and mostly thoughtful discussions among reformsters about how reformsterism (by which, mostly, they mean the charter movement) can navigate this new era and the fissures that it has opened up in reformland. You can read about the first panel here, but I'm going to walk you through the second one now.
This conversation is a bit broader than the first one, and I'm going to give you broad strokes of broad strokes. If you want to watch yourself, the second panel starts around the 1:10:00 mark on the video below.
Who's here?
The panel moderator is Stacy Childress (New Schools Venture Fund), and participants are Andy Smarick and his winter beard (AEI, Bellwether), Chris Stewart (EdPost), Marilyn Rhames (Teachers Who Pray, EdPost), Jason Crye (Hispanics for School Choice) and Derrell Bradford (NYCAN). Interesting assortment.
So, we can't assume that we can do the work of school reform without discussing race equity etc. Our charge is to stay in dialogue even across our disagreements. Childress is saying that the goal here is to hash out differences without "permanently alienating potential allies" There was apparently a conversation about all this earlier, so Childress is asking for a sort of reflection-recap of that.
Note: There's a lot of discussion in this panel about disagreements and dialogue. They mean disagreements and dialogue within the reformy community. Nobody here is going to talk about how to achieve dialogue with their "opponents" or the "enemy" or, as someone will put it later, the "bad guys." This is about dealing with internal discord. What was one thing you heard today from a colleague that helped you have a clearer understanding of a perspective that's "distinctively different" from yours?
Smarick: This is such a sensitive set of issues that we tend to surround ourselves with people who make us feel safe about the views that we have. This can create an in-organization echo chamber. We need to do a better job of hiring people for our organization who have different views.
Stewart: Pretty sure there are some political differences in the room. He's pre-occupied with black and brown children who are not served by public schools, but he knows some reformers are there for other reasons. His realization is that everybody feels marginalized, and he notes that reform is a loose confederation of people working in different ways toward sort of same goals.
Bradford: There's still a lot of fluidity for where people can come down on this stuff.
Rhames: Realized that "some of us are solving different problems" and therefor solutions clash. She came into for equity for black and brown children, but there are reformers who are more concerned with reform everybody and if equity occurs, that's fine.
Crye: There's a lot of energy here. We agree on many things (choice).
Sometimes we talk about our differences as conservatives and progressives, white, black and latino, all these categories, and seeing someone as one category leads to assumptions about persons. Thoughts?
Bradford: The labels are so imprecise. The pluralism is a good thing. He used many more words. Bradford is good with words.
Smarick: It's easy to make guesses, but then you hear their stories. It's harder to parody or categorize them once you know their story.
Crye: As an agent of change, you know you're doing a good job when you're uncomfortable and a lot of people are yelling at you from different sides.
Stewart: Calls himself an expert at people being mad at him, which is an interesting observation. To digress-- Stewart is one of those reformsters (Dmitri Melhorn is another) who can talk and write and sound totally reasonable and relatable, but his approach to people he disagrees with is a sort of scorched earth assumption-jumping total warfare that is not exactly conducive to dialogue. He's turned it on those of us in the resistance (I've had my turn for a reductive misreading of my own story) and on some reformsters as well. It's the kind of thing that's more befuddling than angering, but it definitely slams the door shut on any kind of dialogue. Anyway.
Stewart describes the birth of his child as the moment he entered ed reform, and he talks about that journey up through his son's college graduation. And he sees that as beyond political labels.
Rhames: Be motivated by the needs of children and not how can I profit or get a better position. What do kids need. Put your money where your child is. Focus on children keeps you honest.
Across various categories we are going to have different goals and tactics. How we behave toward each other when we differ can affect how we achieve things, and apparently the earlier discussion included admissions of behaving poorly in social media etc.
So, what do you commit to do differently?
Crye: We can work out the details, but we must commit to the principle that many children in this country are not getting the education they deserve and they need access to choice. And he goes into a story about a woman who has children in many different sorts of schools, but I am back to my usual question about choice, which is-- do we really need choice more than we need good schools? I agree that not all schools are serving students well, but to me that means we need to improve those schools, not that we need to start more schools, thereby stretching thin resources even thinner. If we know how to make a great school, why not use that knowledge to improve the school we've got? If we don't know, starting a second or third or twelfth school makes no sense. I agree with some charter-choice premises-- not all public schools are getting the job done. But that premise does not lead me to "so we should start charter schools and choice systems." And I have yet to hear a convincing explanation of what gets reformsters across that gulf.
But Crye believes that woman with kids in three different school systems is success, and he wants power back in the hands of parents, but we are not going to examine the assumptions behind either of those assertions.
Rhames: Ed reform is centered in inner-city schools for black and brown students. Maybe people had other bigger ideas. But reform looks very black and very brown and very poor, but leadership looks very white, and teaching staffs look very white, and families are not part of the decision-making. With these dynamics, the issue of race has to come up, both because of both optics and influence. "If we are going to liberate children of color," women of color like her should not feel oppressed by the power structure driving reform. She gets applause for that. Can you empower black and brown children if you aren't empowering the black and brown adults?
Bradford: Talking about the "perpetual discomfort" of trying to navigate power. He addresses the question of working with Trump or not. If you're a person of color waiting for a perfect framework for getting power "your ass is going to be waiting forever." How much discomfort are you willing to go through to make your point. Plenty of reformsters (this is his point, not mine) haven't had to pay a price or suffer discomfort to push their public policy, and maybe now there will be. Not as big as that paid by folks with crosses burning on their lawns, but still a price.
Stewart: Be realistic about peoples' lives. Education is one of many issues; poor people are facing many others. And now he will be legitimately funny:
Sometimes reformers are like having the worst date ever. they just want to talk about themselves constantly. So you tell them all your problems and they're like, "You know what would cure that? A charter school." And you say, "But my foot hurts." And they say, "You know what's good for feet? Charter schools."
There is a range of problems. Education is just part of it. Compartmentalizing education and refusing to talk about any of the rest of the stuff except schools misses the mark. Any responsible parent wants a good education for their child, and any responsible person talking to that parent realizes they've got fifteen other things to worry about. Ed reform has not been very good about understanding the contxt in which they put schools. And for at least a couple of minutes, Chris Stewart and I agree on something.
Smarick: Those of us who write and talk for a living have to strike a balance between having a sharp edge but not being a jerk about it. Nice conversations don't necessarily get anything done, but toxic public debate is a bad thing. Be mannerful and respectful, but as Douglass said, "Power concedes nothing without demand." I will give Smarick credit for following through with this in his own work.
Childress underlines the principle of disagreeing with someone without caricaturing or belittling them, and I'll remind you that she's talking about within reformsterland, not outside it. She also notes that building relationships matters because it's hard to be a jerk to someone who is a real person. Mostly true. Mostly.
Crye: Notes that discussions of race often pretend that Hispanics don't exist, or don't acknowledge the different Hispanic and Latino history and thoughts and ideas.
Now, floor questions.
Oh boy.
The first question is (which I will shorten for clarity, because he had some trouble getting it out, but these are his words):
How do we keep our internal differences of opinion and perspectives from dividing us so that the Bad Guys, who are universally, single-mindedly focused on killing us, don't succeed?
So much for avoiding the caricaturing and demonizing of people we disagree with. And yes-- many's the time that I have stalked the halls of power carrying a crossbow and hunting down reformsters so that I can kill them, gut them, and hang them on my wall. Kill?? Seriously?
But I'm glad the question was asked, because this is a recurring theme in reformyland-- that public school advocates are tightly organized and well-financed and more of a well-organized army that the reformers who have nothing on their side except billionaires and a bunch of organizations that employ people full-time to do nothing but push their point of view. It seems transparently ludicrous to me (why did I watch this as a recording and not on live stream? Because I was busy at my actual job while this panel discussion was going on) but I have now heard it so often (Eli Broad and some friends wanted to start EdPost because he felt that his point of view just wasn't getting out there) that I have to believe they believe it. Which is, seriously, just nuts.
But let's hear form the panel.
Bradford: Throws out the word maturity, meaning that the institutions, the bad guys (he uses those words) have been around longer than the rough confabulation of reformsters-- and he actually uses the descriptor "hang out" as if people like the folks this panel just sort of get together on their free time to do this. No-- that would be public school advocates, who do all of our advocacy work for free on our own time. It is just the height of disingenuousness for reformers like these folks to pretend they aren't making a good living pushing this stuff. They may well be utterly sincere and doing work they believe in, but if you think I could leave teaching and go get a good-paying full time job just advocating for public ed, you are high.
Bradford also calls it a central command thing, which is, again, a statement without any foundation in reality. Where, exactly, is that central command? Who is the High Overlord of public education from whom we all take our marching orders? Bradford again calls the reform movement a loose confederation, and I believe him (though it is an awfully well-connected and interconnected one), but this notion that they are the little guys facing off against some massive, monolithic, unified army is an alternative fact.
He also suggests that reformsters are mostly young folks who don't know what it's like to live in difficult and uncomfortable times.
Stewart: Also calls opponents the "bad guys," with a vested interest in the status quo. He doesn't think reformers will "replicate their unity of purpose" which makes sense because that would be like replicating a unicorn or hippogryph or other imaginary creatures. He also suggests that public ed defenders are defending their mortgage, which is not, he says, for reformers. Also, we're defending our Disney vacations. And it's true that those of us who work in public ed depend on it for, not only Disney vacations (ha), but for food and clothing for our own children. "Everything we're talking about has a cost." Which is true.
Rhames: Defines bad guy as anyone who is not working in interest of children, whether it's a reformer or union member or mayor. Watch what work people are doing. Hold people accountable for what they produce, regardless of who they are. I would have liked to see reformers work within the school district to fix things-- e.g. Chicago with charter schools but no busing. Rhames is an anti-label kind of lady. We fight the bad guy by holding each other accountable. An audience member questions basically what about Asian people?
Stewart uses this to slam public education for "just waking up now to discover we have Asian people" which seems like a bit of an overstatement. He talks about ethno-centic charters in Minnesota. And he throws in that schools districts are where good ideas go to die.
"No abolitionist ever talked about slavery reform," Stewart says, just in case you wondered whether or not he thought public schools should be fixed or reformed or just done away with. "We talk about school reform as if these schools are good," he says, but no-- we talk about school reform as if schools are a necessary and valuable part of our country and our culture. The abolitionist line is a crowd pleaser, but slavery was an institution with no useful purpose, no redeeming value. Nor did abolitionists want to replace the old form of slavery with some new form of slavery. It's a lousy analogy. And apparently Chris Stewart and Betsy DeVos are on then same page when it comes to public school.
Rhames: The public system has the majority of our students. The majority of districts don't have charter schools. I think she's trying to scold Stewart without scolding him-- there's a place for people to try to work with the public school because that's where the students are and not all charters are high performing.
Smarick: Rattles off some urban districts where charters are majority providers. Distinguishing between principles of public education and delivery system for it. Shifting decentralized delivery systems brings up issues in new ways.
Stewart: Now he's agnostic and about systems and religious about outcomes. Make it about results.
Audience: Parents who want options but can't make it happen because of practical things like busing. Also, about parents who are breaking the law to get their kids the best education.
Rhames: It's true, e.g. lying about address. People do what they have to do, and some systems force "cheating." In a perfect world, choice is a quality street across the street from you, she says. Actually, in a perfect world, public education is a quality street across the street from you. Then she gets into the ins and outs of Chicago politics, and the mass closing of black schools. Which I would call symptomatic of Chicago politics and the problems of a mayor-run school system. But she calls for leadership courageous enough to do the right thing and not the political thing, which seems like a long shot in Chicago
Stewart: Education reform needs to be more parent driven. In New Orleans we thought that if we set up good schools you would love us, but we hadn't done the homework and we weren't there on the ground to see things like students going to school in the dark and coming home in the dark. They didn't have an education problem, they had a listening to the customer problem. Stewart doesn't think that will survive much longer.
Audience: What kinds of themes and venues and messages can we use to build coalitions?
Crickets. And then they dump it on Smarick.
Smarick: The story of choice systems is the story of particular states and cities and we sometimes force too much trying to carry a lesson from one place to another. You need a group of people with a vested interest. Every day, millions of children are assigned to schools that are not working for them. And while I get Smarick's point, once again, I don't see how charter schools change that. The market cannot support choices for everybody, and choice has frequently failed to provide any more choice than the public system did. Smarick says that parents desperately need power to change things, and I don't disagree (though this sidesteps the issue of the many parents who are not remotely engaged in their children's education or even lives) but I also don't see charter-choice systems as providing that power.
Closing thought?
Bradford: This too will pass. Sometimes it feels like this is the worst moment ever and we will never get past it, and then we do.
Crye: Parents need more power. There is nothing more persuasive than the love a parent feels for their child.
Rhames: Crossing political and ideological lines-- make sure you have a friend in your life who doesn't agree with you.
Stewart: He says that's called a wife. Har. We need to stop skirting the issue of the millions of teachers that can't teach and schools that suck etc etc.
Smarick: There really are very few bad guys in this. People with different priorities and perspectives, and we don't have to give up our own principles and priorities to listen to them.
Well, this is kind of scary. We're going to do this two parts. First we're going to look at the Center for National Policy's documented proposed plans for education. Then, because you probably don't know who this poorly named group represents, I'll show you why their desire to create a conservative theocratic system is worth taking seriously. I laughed at this plan, right up until the point I saw whose plan it was. This is going to take a little while, and if you are prone to conspiracy theory-based paranoia, you may want to sit down. But stay with me to the end.
The Proposal
The Education Reform Report is a pdf hosted on CNP's own site. [Update: Not any more. Once the Washington Post got hold of this story, the document disappeared from the site. But the good people at Eclectablog have a copy hosted on their site.] It's only five pages long, including a cover letter from CNP executive director Bob McEwen. That letter does not get off to an auspicious start with its reference to "Mrs. Becky DeVos, Secretary-designate," but it corrects itself one paragraph later. It's an odd mistake, given that Betsy's father was president of this organization for two multi-year spans. But let's move on.
The Four Assumptions
The report starts by asking the question of whose worldview should be represented in the soul of a culture and hints that the answer is "not the government's." Then it lays out the four assumptions and a pledge for the rest of the report:
1. All knowledge and facts have a source, a Creator; they are not self-existent.
2. Religious neutrality is a myth perpetrated by secularists who destroy their own claim the moment they attempt to enforce it.
3. Parents and guardians bear final responsibility for their children’s education, with the inherent right to teach, or to choose teachers and schools, whether institutional or not.
4. No civil government possesses the right to overrule the educational choices of parents and guardians.
5. The CNP Education Committee pledges itself to work toward achievable goals based on uncompromised principles, so that their very success will provoke a popular return to the Judeo-Christian principles of America’s Founders who, along with America’s pioneers, believed that God belonged in the classroom.
As we're about to see, they mean it. This is their proposed plan for reforming education under the Trump/DeVos regime.
Phase I- Federal Reform
There are five proposed actions for the federal government. 1. Get rid of Common Core and all other "DOE social engineering programs." Also, stop all data collection. Yeah, we still don't understand the federal role in Common Core.
2. Dismantle the Department of Education and return all functions to the states.
3. Make the case that "a Federal D.O.E. is unconstitutional, illegal and contrary to America’s education practice for 300 years from early 17th century to Colonial times."
4. This one's... odd. "Engage College Board for accountability of accuracy/thoroughness in higher education with regards to America’s founding and historical education practices." Do these people not know what the College Board is?
5. Push for school choice in all states (over voucher schemes).
Then they offer eleven strategies for achieving these goals. These include getting the DOE to declare its intention "to return complete sovereignty" to the states. With the possible exception of some necessary temporary bridge funding, stop all federal funding of education. Return all money to the states.
For the duration of its existence,Fire every single person at the Department of education "from Assistant Secretaries to the mailroom" and replace them with people who believe in the Trump/DeVos vision. Change the Department of Education to the President's Advisory Council on Education Reform.
Mobilize all manner of conservative and religious leaders to push for the dismantling of the department. Hire lobbyists "like Tom DeLay." Get the Heritage Foundation on board.
Oh, and promote the 1828 Webster's Dictionary definition of education:
The bringing up, as of a child, instruction; formation of manners. Education comprehends all that series of instruction and discipline which is intended to enlighten the understanding, correct the temper, and form the manners and habits of youth, and fit them for usefulness in their future stations. To give children a good education in manners, arts and science, is important; to give them a religious education is indispensable; and an immense responsibility rests on parents and guardians who neglect these duties.
Phase II- State/Local Level
Once the department has been torn apart and reduced to an advisory committee, we can start fixing state and local schools. CNP has seven items on that wish list:
1. Restore Ten Commandments posters to all K-12 public schools. (Do I not have to "restore" them if they were never there? And where in all this plan did we rewrite the Constitution?)
2. Clearly post America’s Constitution and Declaration of Independence.
3. Encourage K-12 schools to recognize traditional holidays (e.g., Easter, Thanksgiving, Christmas) as celebrations of our Judeo-Christian heritage. Thanksgiving is part of Judeo-Christian Heritage?
4. Implement select Bible classes, such as Chuck Stetson’s Bible Literacy Project. Because apparently the whole separation of church and state thing was just created by the Department of Education, and once that's gone, the issue will never come up again?
5. Encourage instruction on U.S. and World history from the Judeo-Christian perspective for middle school and high school history and civics classes.
6. Develop and recommend In-service training on philosophy of education for K-12 faculty based on historical Judeo-Christian philosophy of education.
7. Strongly push states to remove secular-based sex education materials from school facilities, and emphasize parental instruction.
"Just as the Christian gospel was designed to succeed by acclaim," CNP thinks these reforms should not come in the form of top-down mandates.
Far better is the promotion of a gradual, voluntary return at all levels to free-market private schools, church schools and home schools as the normative American practice. We believe such a move will benefit the public at-large, open their eyes to the deficiencies of government-run secular education and provide an attractive, superior alternative, as was once the norm in American education.
Kind of makes one wonder why, if the American norm was once all home and private schools, how we ever developed a public system. Probably more of that Godless secularism.
The Mayflower Compact
That's what the report ends with-- a quote from and the story of the Mayflower compact, quoting from a pastor David Riggs, who talks about how "these chivalrous souls" (well, just the men, of course) were dedicated to "the total cause of freedom." Well, sort of. The Puritans of Massachusetts were interested in religious freedom for themselves. For others, not so much. They put people in the stocks for celebrating Christmas (so much for the war on that holiday) and banished and even executed folks who insisted on speaking up about other versions of the Christian faith.
I have huge respect for those folks, and I am so very white that I have at least one ancestor who came over on that boat. But when we talk about the Puritan version of freedom, we're talking about "Freedom for me because I'm right and nobody else should have the freedom to be wrong." Which is an attractive sort of "freedom" when you're the one making the rules, but it's not actually freedom at all.
So who are these people?
The Council for National Policy was founded in 1981 by Tim LaHaye, then the head of the Moral Majority (and later author of the Left Behind series), Nelson Bunker Hunt, T. Cullen Davis, William Cies, and Paul Weyrich. It meets three times a year, and if you haven't heard of it, that's because they'd rather you didn't. The New York Times in 2004 described them as "a little-known club of a few hundred of the most powerful conservatives in the country," and the Center for Media and Democracy calls them a "shadowy secretive group." The Daily Kos, never a group for understatement, calls them "Sith Lords of the Ultra Right." Members are told not to discuss the group's meetings outside, and are encouraged not to even mention that they are members. When ABC attempted to profile the group, they found members mostly unwilling to be interviewed.
The group's website lists their priorities-- Limited government, traditional values (we believe thatthe Founding Fathers created this nation based upon Judeo-Christian values and that our culture flourishes when we uphold them), and strong national defense. They are listed as a "nonpartisan, educational foundation"-- a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization. That theoretically bars them from being politically active, and it's true there's not a lot of information about how they work (in 1992, the IRS briefly revoked their status, but that doesn't seem to have changed anything). But in an interview with ABC, then-executive director Steve Baldwin only half-jokingly said that "we control everything in the world."
Information about membership in CNP is not easy to come by. Some watchdog groups have occasionally grabbed some listings, and in a big coup, the Southern Poverty Law Center allegedly got their hands on the CNP 2014 membership directory.
The roster may have as many as 500 members. Membership is by invitation only. Members have allegedly included Pat Robertson, James Dobson, John Ashcroft, Oliver North, Phyllis Schlafly, Trent Lott, Ed Meese, Donald Wildmon, Wayne LaPierre, Rick Santorum, Steve Forbes, Jeffrey and Joseph Coors, Grover Norquist, and Tom DeLay. You get the idea. If you want more details, try this list. So do we actually care here?
So we have an ultra-right reclusive group of would-be policy influencers. So what. Everybody and their brothers and sisters and favorite lobbyists are writing up proposals of the "What Betsy DeVos Should Do Next" variety. Most of them are meaningless. Is this just more blather?
Mission statement: "To advance freedom by bringing together business, cultural, defense, educational, religious and public policy leaders to address the great issues confronting America ."
Vision statement: "A united conservative movement to insure, by 2020, policy leadership and governance that restores religious and economic freedom, a strong national defense, and Judeo-Christian values under the Constitution."
Values. There are seven
1) Protect and Advance Essential Liberties.
2) Promote Networking.
3) Commit to Accuracy. By which they mean, make sure you get our info out "to effectively equip conservative leaders."
4) Lead and Influence Others.
5) Practice Integrity. Which seems to mean, don't go leaking our stuff.
6) Exercise Mutual Respect. Play nice within the group.
7) Encourage Unity. That is, within the conservative movement.
There's a list of past presidents. As I already mentioned, Rich DeVos, Betsy's father-in-law, was a president first from 1986-1988, then from 1990-1993.
Mr. Ed Prince is listed on the In Memoriam page, and Elsa Prince Broekhuizen is listed as a member-- those would be Betsy DeVos's parents. That may be why Betsy's brother Erik has admitted to attending some meetings.
Also listed as members in the 2014 directory? Stephen K. Bannon, and Kellyanne Conway.
So how scary is this, really?
Honestly, hard to say. These guys are out to change the world, but they've got Rick Santorum on board, and they have something called the William F. Buckley Jr Council which, in 2014, included Josh Duggar.
On the other hand, how likely is it that Betsy DeVos is familiar with the work of a ultra-right influence-peddling group in which her husband's family and her own have been deeply involved over the years? Super likely. At a bare minimum, we have here a look at what folks in DeVos's sphere really want to see happen to public education. At worst, we have a document that is sitting in a desk drawer somewhere in the Department of Education in a folder labeled "To Do List."
Bottom line-- there's a group with an explicit plan for destroying the Department of Education and installing theocratic control over US education, and the secretary of Education as well as key folks at the White House are directly tied to that group.
So at least some scary. One more thing to keep our eyes on.
How much is whiteness worth? The answer turns out to be "a whole heck of a lot."
A new report with the unsexy title "Asset Value of Whiteness" has been released jointly by Demos and the Institute for Assets and Social Policy (Brandeis University), two left-tilted thinky tanks. The researchers used the Survey of Consumer Finances, a tri-annual data crunch sponsored by the Federal Reserve and the US Treasury Department-- so not a bunch of amateur data creators. The report is brief and in plain English and I recommend you read it, but let me hit the highlights here.
The basic message is right there in the table of contents:
Attending college does not close the racial wealth gap.
Raising children in a two-parent family does not close the racial wealth gap
Working full time does not close the racial wealth gap
Spending less does not close the racial wealth gap
What's striking-- even shocking-- about the report is not just that these things don't help, but how huge the gap remains in the face of these.
Look at this graph:
The part that leaps out is how much greater the wealth is for college-educated white households-- the median white college-educated adult household wealth is over seven times greater than the median black college-educated wealth. But the shocking finding here is that the median wealth for white high school drop outs is still higher than the median wealth for blacks who have attended college, and barely a hair less than wealth of college-educated Latinos.
This is the pattern that continues through the report. The median single-parent white family has more than twice as much wealth as the median two-parent black household. The median white household with a part-time worker has only a hair less wealth than the median black household with a full-time worker. And the average white household spends 1.3 times more than the average black household of the same income level.
This new report considers many possible explanations for the gap, which is only fair since they've disposed of the four explanations beloved by policy makers and casual kibbitzers. Entrenched systemic racism seems like a good bet. They also suggest that white families have generations to build wealth that becomes a safety net and backstop for new generations, while black and Latino families have not had many generations at all to accomplish a similar feat.
It's also worth noting that all of these figures are medians, which means anybody who wants to cherry pick exceptional outliers can do so, thereby "proving" their own thoughts about this study. Let's just agree that it's messy, and your mileage may vary, and there will always be specific cases where these four factors are either useful or worse than useless.
That said, the overall picture is hard to explain away.
So if these four factors won't bring equity and wealth, what do we try? We've just spent years working on the theory that if we just got non-wealthy non-white to score well on a Big Standardized Test, the gates of success would fling open for them. That's baloney.
In fact, what all four of these theories of action have in common is that they place all responsibiity squarely on the individual. If you're poor, it's because you didn't go to college, didn't get married, didn't get a full-time job and didn't properly save your money. You're poor because you failed. It's your personal problem. What do you want the government to do about it?
It's not an easy question. We don't really want a government policy that makes individual responsible choices irrelevant (although, we're living through proof that if you're rich enough, you can make every irresponsible choice imaginable to humans and still end up in the White House). But it's an important question because we know that wealth is its own open door-- to everything from high test scores to a good job, and certainly to college success.
So what do we do?
One of the first steps is for lots of us to recognize that we are not nearly as self made as we like to imagine, but that we are standing on the shoulders of our families and ancestors and a system that doesn't drop a lot of onerous extra weight on us. We need to recognize this not so we can just feel guilty all the time, but so that we can A) stop repeating the fairy take that we don't owe anybody anything and so Other People should just step up and grab their bootstraps and B) start figuring out a way to provide that kind of shoulder-standing platform for people who don't have one.
We can stop imagining that a good school fixes everything, and we can stop imagining that student success is a personal problem for the student and her family. The absolute very least we can do-- must do-- is make certain that schools are not making matters worse by providing less for non-white, non-wealthy communities, by treating these communities like marketing opportunities or communities that must be saved by Better People. We can stop approaching non-wealthy and non-white families as if the fact that they have less means they deserve less-- an attitude that leads to either trying to keep them from getting things they don't deserve (oh, Those People act so entitled) or to acting as if we're so awesome because we gave them something they didn't really deserve (how generous of us to give this gift to those who haven't earned it).
I'm pretty sure we're past the point where concerns about social justice are going to drive federal education policy; I expect we'll now err in the direction of bootstraps. We'll talk about "opportunities" and "access" and declare that we gave non-wealthy non-white kids the same chance to succeed as the rich kids. We opened the door and if they didn't walk through it, well, hey, that's on them. We may even hear complaints about how "entitled" and "uppity" them poor folks are acting.
So it's important that those of us who work in school, those of us who have to make choices about how to blunt the impact of policy-makers' bad policies-- it's important for us to remember that it's not just about individual choices. You can be the hardest, fastest runner of them all, but if you have to run barefoot and start a half mile behind the starting line, it's not going to be enough.
Your child sits at a desk, alone in the room. No teacher ever enters the room. An aide comes into the room periodically to give your child a quiz, or a worksheet. Your child fills out the sheet, the aide scores it. Maybe the aide gives it back to your child to do again, but the aide can't explain anything. All the worksheets and quizzes are written so that the aide, or anyone, really, can correct them. Eventually, the aide takes the paper out of the room. A few moments pass, and then the aide returns with a new standardized worksheet or quiz.
If you go to the school to see what the heck is going on, you may follow the aide to another room, maybe a huge room. In that room there are a few hundred of stacks of worksheets and quizzes. The aide brings in a completed one, and the worker in that room looks at the results and based on those, selects another paper to be carried back to the student.
"Where did all these stacks come from?" you ask.
The worker explains. "They were all written out years ago by some teacher, or at least someone expert in writing worksheets."
"Well, can I meet that person? Can I talk to the person who created all these stacks? Can I ask her how she makes sure they are right for my child?"
"Ha," laughs the worker. "She's long gone. She moved on as soon as she finished writing these out. She's never met your kid. She's never even laid eyes on your kid. Excuse me a minute." The aide comes back with a new paper. The worker scans it, looks around at a few stacks of fresh papers, grabs one, muttering, "Well, this comes as close as anything we've got."
"Comes close!?!"
"Hey, we don't have infinite assignments in here. And we stacked these up long before your kid even started school."
You think of your child, sitting alone in a room, completing sheet after sheet after sheet. "This is a terrible way to educate a child. This is a terrible way to run a school."
"Yeah," the worker replies. "I can't disagree. But just wait. Later we'll load all of these worksheets and quizzes onto a mainframe, and the computer will replace my aide and, well, me, too. But it'll be fast and shiny and computery and people will think it's genius." And he pointed to a stack of files in the corner. "And we'll do a much better job of keeping a file all about your kid."
"Honestly, do you think people will stand for that?"
"Sure. We'll call it personalized learning or competency based education. It'll be a huge hit. Just wait and see."
