ESAs and the Vibrant Marketplace

Nat Malkus (American Enterprise Institute) is in US News touting Education Savings Accounts in an article that the page editor has entitled "Building an Education Marketplace" but the url names "The Perils and Promise of Education Savings Accounts for School Choice." The latter is less poetic, but more accurate. But if you want to see what one of the long games being played in education reform is, this lays it out pretty well.

Scrooge McDuck's Education Savings Account

We've met Malkus before. Last summer he scribed a piece about charters vs. public schools, and I looked into his background. From 2009 to 2015, this senior K-12 researcher at AEI worked with American Institutes for Research, the outfit that sounds like a research organization but is in the test manufacturing business. He graduated in 1997 from Covenant College, a liberal arts Christian college in Tennessee, with a degree in historical studies and later earned a Ph.D. in educational policy and leadership from the University of Maryland. His AEI bio lists four years as a teacher.

Noting that we have choice fans in DC and that the Supremes could be on the verge of declaring the Blaine Amendments, which cement the separation of church and state, to be unconstitutional, Malkus recaps the recent history of ESAs, which mostly means Arizona, though Florida, Tennessee, Mississippi and Nevada are all giving it a shot.

Malkus has been studying up on this stuff because he has a book coming out, and he's pretty frank about some of the virtues of ESAs--

ESAs circumvent Blaine Amendments because the state does not transfer the funds to schools or education service providers; parents do.

And that leads him to a clear, concise statement of how ESAs change the choice game:

ESAs promise more than vouchers because they provide educational choice rather than school choice. Whereas vouchers work like coupons that families can use on tuition at private schools, ESAs provide funds parents can use to customize education for their child. Parents might spend their ESA on private school tuition or on a blend of education services including college courses, tutoring and special education services, to name a few. 

Malkus is excited at the prospect of what vouchers couldn't quite deliver-- "a fully-functioning education marketplace."

I'm not sure that's so exciting for anyone except the vendors who want to cash in on that "vibrant marketplace." Malkus recognizes some key questions, but he overlooks a few more keyer questions along the way. Let's take his questions first.

A key question is whether ESA funding can provide choice for all students. ESAs are state programs and thus only transfer the state's share of per-pupil public school funding to parents, but not funds from local or federal sources.

In other words, ESA funding will not get a poor student with no other resources into a fancy private school, nor allow them to assemble a piece-by-piece education program that would rank with what wealthy families could purchase from top vendors. But that is really only half of this key question, because one thing free and vibrant markets are really lousy at is providing services or goods for ALL customers. The most fundamental task of any responsible vendor of anything is to sort potential customers into two basic piles-- worth the bother, and not worth the bother. My go-to example-- FedEx and other private package delivery services do not compete for customers in isolated rural expensive-to-serve areas-- they just hand the package off to the United States Postal Service.

In short, a fully-functioning free-market education marketplace will not serve all students. Furthermore, vendors will choose which customers they wish to serve, and not vice versa. In a free market, somebody is always left behind, and that would mean a complete change of the philosophy behind American public education. It's absolutely true that some public schools have not always met this particular ideal, but to shift to pure choice means we give up even trying-- unless you want to regulate the choice system in such a way as to insure coverage of everyone, which seems to run counter to the ideal of a vibrant marketplace. And that's my point-- vibrant marketplace and education for everyone are buildings sitting on two entirely different foundations.

Another open question is whether ESA programs will be big enough to build a vibrant marketplace of education services.

No. See above. What Malkus is really questioning whether or not states will allow vendors access to enough students to really build the market, which kind of makes my previous point. 

A final question is how the state will know whether ESAs are working. 

Malkus suggests that parent satisfaction might be one measure, but that's a problem. A system like this would disenfranchise all taxpayers who don't have children, and we lose the whole democratic piece of public education. Choice systems repeatedly go back to the idea that parents are the only real stakeholders in education, and that's simply untrue-- neighbors, employers, other voters, and future customers and clients of today's students are all stakeholders in the educational system, and a choice system like this gives them no say. To his credit, Malkus seems to recognize this as an issue (both in his article and in the twitter conversation we're having even as I'm writing this piece, because the internet is a freakin' magical thing).

But this brings us back to the same old accountability debate. Either you believe that parents should be able to use their ESAs for anything from school tuition to an assortment of online courses to a pile of good books to an educational cruise to some educational games for the child's X-Box or you believe that tax dollars extracted from citizens for the express purpose of educating children should be accounted for and spent in ways that are responsible and in accordance with certain educational standards.

Critics of public education have always been quick to criticize teachers and schools that said, "Hey, we know what we're doing. Trust us," and they have a valid point. But I'm not sure, "Hey, trust the invisible hand. It would never let anything Really bad happen" is any better.

Malkus reports that Arizona has played with some exit exams, but he correctly notes that ultimately "without some mechanism for evaluating participating students' outcomes, determining whether the program is successful may be left in the eye of the beholder."

Malkus is hopeful about "the promise of school choice," and at the end of the day, I am not, particularly because choice these days is not really bothering to promise excellent education any more. The promise of school choice is now that there will be school choice. More varied and detailed and broken-up-into-bits choicier choice, which is really about lots of cool ways that vendors can finally gain access to that sweet sweet mountain of public education tax dollars.

Oh, and one other ESA question-- these are always computed based on current cost-per-pupil in a state. In ten years, what will they be? How will the amount of ESAs be adjusted, recomputed, altered, made to not simply shrink with inflation? Who will conduct those negotiations-- because I'm betting that will be part of some state-managed budget battles, and I can imagine a million ways that can end badly.

I appreciate that Malkus is asking some questions and not simply engaging in thoughtless boosterism, but I think the biggest central questions remain unanswered: "How does a choice system exist without eroding fundamental democracy and local control?" or "How does a choice system reconcile the desire for freedom from any constraints with a need for taxpayer accountability? or the biggest one of all being, "How would this system provide a better education for all students?"

Is PISA Data Useless?

Yes, if you're a regular reader, then you know I think it's rather useless anyway.

But in April this story dropped. Folks had begun a mild-tomedium freakout because the East Asian PISA math superpowers (South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, etc), the people whose program everyone else was trying to imitate, had seen their scores start to drop. 

But now Andreas Schleicher, the official in charge of Pisa, has said that this fall may not be due to a drop in the performance of these Asian powerhouses. He said he was looking into whether the decline could be explained by the fact that Pisa used computers for the main tests for the first time in 2015.

In other words, data that is clearly presented as “comparable” in the study may not be comparable at all.

Which means the whole longitudinal game of charting PISA scores over time could be ruined, all those nifty charts now meaningless.

There's another implication here as well. The Testocrats have been quietly assuming that taking a Big Standardized Test on a computer is exactly like taking it on paper. But what if that's not true? What if taking a math test involves not only math skills, but test-taking skills. And what if computer test-taking skills are not the same set of skills as pencil-and-paper test-taking skills?

What if the Big Standardized Tests aren't really measuring what they purport to measure at all, and the whole test-centered education model is built on a sham?

A Better PARCC/SBA Test Prep Program

You may recall the old SAT vocabulary lists. Dozens of test prep lists that promised to get you ready for the SAT because their creators had pored through and broken down dozens upon dozens of old SAT tests, and here they were-- the 50 or 100 or 500 words that most commonly appeared on the test.

Of course you remember these lists, because they totally worked. While the SAT allegedly tested reasoning, mostly what all those analogies and other nifty word puzzles tested was your vocabulary, and having a list of the most likely vocabulary on the test ahead of time was a great way to make your studying more direct and efficient. Cheating...? Well, that's quite a philosophical conundrum, isn't it-- if someone creates an artificial obstacle between you and a goal, and the obstacle is not only artificial, but rather unfair and designed mostly to serve their needs at your expense, is "cheating" even really a possibility? If the game is rigged and somebody else is forcing you to play it, do you have an ethical obligation to follow their rules to the letter?

But I digress.

The point is, Amplify is offering just that sort of test prep for the PARCC and SBA.

Amplify, you will recall, was going to be Rupert Murdoch's big shot at hoovering up some of those sweet sweet public education tax dollars. Instead, it limped its way to being bought by Joel Klein and other big whoopdie doo education privateers who had been brought in to run the place. Their most spectacular disaster was the Los Angeles ipad fiasco, but mostly they've been a company of high-rolling education amateurs.

So they've been doing their homework, including poring through and breaking down old PARRC and SBA reading tests.

These new-generation tests have always pretended to be two impossible things. 1) A test that is impervious to test prep, so don't even try, just go about regular educating stuff and we will accurately measure that. 2) A test of reading skills that are somehow divorced from any sort of content knowledge.

The second is a deeply impossible thing-- divorcing reading from content is like divorcing kissing from touching. It can't really be done, and so every reading test is inescapably a test of prior knowledge.

With that in mind, wouldn't it be helpful to know what prior knowledge would be helpful? Sure it would-- and the folks at Amplify know. They even have a nifty graphic:

There's your top ten content areas--  US History, Folk Tales, Human Biology, Historical Fiction, Contemporary Realistic Fiction, Classic Children's Fiction, Immigration, Astronomy and Space, Engineering, Animals & Ecology. But not sports. This is what your K-5 students should be reading about to get ready for the test.

Oh, and Amplify wants you to know one other thing:

We also found that students who had studied our K-5 Core Knowledge Language Arts^® (CKLA^™) curriculum would have prior knowledge relevant to more than 75% of passages reviewed on summative tests like PARCC and SBAC.

I'm sort of impressed by their honesty. No "CKLA provides for excellent development of language skills that will better prepare your students for college and career by meeting high standards etc etc blah blah blah." Instead, just a plain and simple "Buy our program. It's excellent test prep, because it teaches the content they're likely to be tested on."

It's not quite selling an early peek at the test, so I suppose it's not exactly cheating. It's just not exactly education, either.

Pennsylvania Recap (Call Your Legislator)

I don't usually do this, but it seems like a good moment to pause and gather up some of the more recent news from Pennsylvania, because it's becoming difficult to keep track of all the lousy ideas in Harrisburg right now. If you are in Pennsylvania, here's some food for thought for the next time you contact your elected representative (and that time should come early and often).

School Funding Emerges From Time Warp

Funding formula continues to be an issue. Last summer, we were starting to sort things out, but it remains to be seen if Governor Wolf and the GOP legislature can do a deal.

Testing Stutter Steps

The Keystones are currently paused, but that pause is just about done. Legislators need to be encouraged to push pause for, oh, forever in regards to using the lousy tests as graduation requirements. This should be an easy sell-- remember, the Keystones are norm-referenced ("graded on the curve" for civilians) which means that making them a graduation requirement absolutely guarantees that a bunch of Pennsylvanian students with passing report cards will be denied diplomas if Keystones are a grad requirement. Which legislators would like to have their names on that accomplishment?

Cutting Funding

We keep having stories like this, in which enterprising folks try to get schools taxes rolled back. Pay attention.

Erie May Close All High Schools

This piece is from a year ago, and things haven't gotten any better. Does your legislator really want to see public education ended? If not, what is he going to do about it?

Charter Costs

Before you call your legislator to tell him to keep charters from bleeding districts dry, check and see just how bad it is in your district (and look at how heavily lobbied Harrisburg is).

Future Ready Schools

Pennsylvania's plan for getting in line with ESSA. Take a look. See if you have some thoughts about how this mess could be improved.

Let's Arm Teachers

Some guys in Harrisburg think that what's really missing from schools is guns. This is a dumb idea. Tell your legislator so.

Bad Charter Reform Bill

I wrote about the first version of this bad bill last year, and it is back and still bad. It doesn't fix cyber charter funding and doesn't stop charters from being an unregulated drain on public tax dollars. Tell them to do better.

Remember That You Are Dealing with Really Bad Legislators Like This Guy

Brad Roae is about as anti-public school teacher as you can get. I wrote this piece about him last fall-- before he was re-elected, again. If you have to call him, be prepared for a less-than-warm reception.

Who the Hell Is Scott Wagner

Finally, start reading up on this guy, who wants to be the Scott Walker of PA. He has declared candidacy for Governor, and he would like to see teachers unions shut down, poor people left to starve, and public education replaced with businesses. Wagner is rich and ready and has already been doing the groundwork to help his run at the governor's office. On first glance, you are going to be inclined to dismiss him as a ridiculous cartoon. Don't. Get ready for a fight this fall, and if you're a Republican, educate yourself before the primary in a few weeks.

Did FCC Just Damage School Internet

In the wonky alphabet soup depths of policy, this thing happened in April-- the FCC decided to uncap BDS pricing, because free market competition.

Wires competing for space on free market pole

Business Data Services refers to the kind of bulk internet access sold by providers like Verizon and ATT to business and other institutional buyers. Like small businesses or hospitals or libraries or schools.

And while there is no limit on what providers can charge you for home internet, the BDS sector has always been highly regulated, based on the argument that schools and libraries and mom-and-pop businesses should not be priced out of the market.

The end of the cap allows service providers to charge whatever they think the market can bear (or even employ the time-honored practice of jacking up prices in order to drive away customers you don't want to serve). The cap removal is conditional-- it can only happen in counties where there is competition. Competition in this case is defined as "any other isp provider within a half mile of fifty percent of the buildings being served." Estimates are that about a third of the coountry will consequently stay under the old cap.

Some Democrats are not happy about this move by the FCC:

Many politicians have talked in recent months "about protecting our nation's small businesses -- the backbone of the American economy," said Commissioner Mignon Clyburn, a Democrat. "Yet it is these very businesses -- the mom-and-pop hardware store, the family-owned wireless provider, and the small rural hospital, that just drew the short straw."

Instead of looking out for "millions of little guys," the Republican majority at the FCC has sided with the interests of huge telecom providers, she added. Clyburn predicted "immediate price hikes," especially in rural areas.

"Just where does the buck stop? At the wallets of every American consumer," she said.

Can you guess who thinks this is a good idea?

"Price regulation—that is, the government setting the rates, terms, and conditions for special access services—is seductive," FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, a former Verizon lawyer, said. "Who can possibly resist the promise of forcing prices lower right now? But in reality, price regulation threatens competition and investment."

My emphasis. Yup. Just in case you missed that one in the flurry-ish wave of appointments, Trump put a former Verizon counsel in charge of the FCC. But before you get too mad(der) at Trump, note that one reason you may have missed this appointment is because Pai left Verizon in 2003, went to work at the Department of Justice for a few years, and then started working at the FCC in 2007. In 2011, Obama nominated him for the Republican commissioner spot on the FCC and the Senate approved him unanimously. So while Pai keeps getting "Trump-appointed" appended to his name, all Trump did this time was just continue a bipartisan institutional process that has been going on for a while. Now we have Pai, spearheading the attack on net neutrality and this BPS thing.

Will this ultimately make internet access more expensive for your school? Probably. Then again, the intense free market competition may drive your costs relentlessly down (if you are among the 24% of BDS customers in a two-server market). Because, see, price competition really kicks in when providers are free to charge more. Because... wait-- are we saying that because they weren't free to charge more before, they couldn't compete by charging less? I could swear that's not how the free market is actually supposed to work.

ICYMI: Wrapping Up April Edition (4/30)

Where did that month go? Here are some reads from last week. As always, I ask you to please amplify what speaks to you. "I wish I could write like that person," is what I often hear, and I feel you, but anybody and everybody can tweet, facebook, email and otherwise amplify those voices-- and if you don't push a writer's work out into the world, it doesn't matter if she wrote it. 

Deescalating School Reform Wars

John Thompson has been tireless in trying to build bridges in the school reform debates, and he continues that work with a thoughtful review of Rick Hess's new book.

Eight Questions About School Vouchers

That Betsy DeVos won't be able to answer (or would rather not)

The Untold History of Charter Schools

The "if you're only going to read one post on this list" post for the week. Like me, you probably have absorbed the Albert-Shanker-started-charters story. Rachel Cohen has done some actual research, and we're all a little smarter because of it.

When Anxiety Rules

A recently-minted NY teacher talks about what it's like to go through the EdTPA process (spoiler alert: not good).

Common Enemy

Jennifer Berkshire returns from her trip to Ohio with some serious insights about school reform in Trumplandia.

Quirk in PA Charter Law

Why are students with certain special needs the geese that lay the golden eggs in Pennsylvania's charter law? Here's a good explanation.

School Choice Profits on the Taxpayer's Dime

Carol Burris lays out the facts for Arizona on how their charter industry really works.

Desperately Searching for the Merit Pay Fairy

Jersey Jazzman continues his search for the fabled fairy of magical merit pay (spoiler alert: he fails again).

4th Best High School in New York Doesn't Exist

Yeah, about that US News great schools list...

"I Found a Jewel for You"

Nobody observes the world of littles like Teacher Tom.

Lift Your Head

In my capacity as Head Stage Manager Guy at my school, I have spent my day on duty for a concert sponsored by a local church. It makes for a long day, but the crowd is always pleasant and the featured band this year is one my kids used to listen to growing up (Audio Adrenaline, for you people both of faith and also of a certain age, though like most decades-old bands, they are now essentially a ghost band made of all-replaced parts).

At any rate, during set-up this afternoon, I ran into a former student I haven't seen in years. I'm going to call him Bob.

I had Bob as a freshman and as a junior. Bob had some real strengths as a reader and a writer, but a low level of achievement. Some days he was a real pleasure to have around-- outgoing and genial. Other days he arrived at school with a great deal anger stuffed inside. He could be that kid who tries to teach you a lesson by figuratively punching himself in the face over and over. And he would periodically disappear for many days at a time. Big on drama, low on responsibility. Occasionally really cruel and thoughtless, but with occasional flashes of real kindness and decency. Still, most days he flopped into his seat like a lanky pile of loosely associated parts, smiling at things like the sheer hilarity of me asking him to try at whatever we were doing.

As a freshman, Bob was an "at-risk" student with no real support system at home (what at my school we sometimes call "better off raised by wolves") and group of friends who shared an interest in better living through pharmaceuticals. As a junior, he was circling the drain, hard to reach and with no effs left to give. Before the end of the year, he dropped out.

That was a few years ago. Today, he approached me and stuck out his hand to say hi. I asked him how he was doing, what he was up to. In the intervening years, he has earned a GED and gone to tech school to become certified as a welder. Now he is considering leaving the area for work or joining the armed services. He says if he does that he'll use the time to leave the area and get a good start elsewhere he comes. "I've seen too many guys come back here and screw it all up," he says.

I've heard versions of this story a thousand thousand times; so has any teacher who's been at the work for more than five years. It is the umpty gazillionth piece of proof that just because a student doesn't march right through twelve years of school and get the good grades and ace the swell tests and show the correct behaviors-- it doesn't mean that young human is doomed.

You know all the stories. Kid takes six years to finish high school and one day a light bulb goes on and she says, "I'm going to make my life different than this." Or the other stories. Honor student blows up his marriage ten years later by getting caught in a motel room trading sex for drugs with a minor. And THEN gets his act together and gets into a healthy marriage with beautiful children. My director of special ed tells the story of a student with special needs who could barely pass, well, anything, but declared her intention to become a nurse and all her special ed teachers tried to gently steer her away from it and now, today, she is a By God Nurse. My director of special ed tells that story and says, "Now I never say 'never'."

These are the stories I think of when some government bureaucrat announces that we should be able to look at a child and declare definitively whether that child is on the correct direct path to College and Career Readyville. Are you nuts? Have you met some actual humans? For anyone to look at a young human and declare, "I know what path you are on " is just nuts. For many, if not most, we reach our destination in our own way, in our own time. Insisting that everyone should reach the same place on the same path in the same way is just... well, dumb.

If you had asked me years ago if I would bet on Bob, I would have balked. He had tools, but not many, and he seemed determined to trash them. And yet there he was, standing before me like a grown-ass man with his act pretty much together, confident and determined.

To imagine that we can see to the very core of another person is startling hubris. To declare that someone is certainly doomed, that their problems are inescapable solid-state fundamentals of who they are, or that we can prescribe for them what they need or have or lack-- that's just a failure to understand what it means to be human.

I've seen the same line on several t-shirts tonight. It seems like an appropriate to this string of thoughts, even with the folksy non-standard English:

Lift your head. It ain't over yet.

To give a student a test, or to sum up their status in school, to tell them, in effect, just put your head down, because it's over for you-- I can't think of a greater crime to commit against the young humans in our charge. Ignore the test. Skip the test. Forget the pronouncements about college and career readiness.

Lift your head.