Why Churches Should Hate School Vouchers

It seems clear that the wall between church and state, particularly when it comes to educational voucher programs, is collapsing like a stack of cheerios in a stiff wind. This is not good for a variety of reasons, but those reasons do not all belong to supporters of public education. Even before I was a cranky blogger, I was telling folks that religious institutions should be right out there resisting vouchers, and that if school vouchers with no regard for the church and state wall ever became law, churches would rue the day just as much as anyone, if not more.

So what's my point? Why should churches want to get that stack of cheerios back up and fortified?

It's important to remember that the separation of church and state is not just for the state's benefit-- it protects churches as well. Once Betsy DeVos and Mike Pence get their way (I'm not convinced that Trump either knows or understands any of the issues here), here's how things are going to go south.

First, tax dollars for education will still be directed by the politicians in capitals. That means that churches will have to become experienced in the business of political pandering. And this is not my prediction for the future-- it is happening right now.Caitlin Emma at Politico is reporting today on the Catholic Church's are meeting with GOP lawmakers and administration officials to see if the Trump-DeVos voucher plan can be implemented in such a way as the be financially beneficial for parochial schools.

Let that sink in. Church officials are going to try to cut a deal, with politicians, for money. In a no-walls voucher world, churches and other religious groups financially dependent on the good will of politicians will have to make sure they stay on the good side of politicians. Church leaders will have to consider "This guy is odious and spits in the face of everything we believe, but we need him to keep the money flowing to us." Did I mention that Catholic Church officials are meeting with Trump administration officials? Once several different religions and denominations get involved, just how much religious lobbying will be required to argue how the education dollar pie is sliced up?

And these are critical issues to the churches involved. Parochial schools are in trouble, with too few enrollees to keep open. My own county's parochial high school just pulled out all the stops to convince the diocese to keep the school open despite low enrollment. The diocese finally said yes-for-now, and I wonder how much of that was in anticipation of DeVosian vouchers. But that means that government becomes the decider. What do churches do when government officials say, "Well, your enrollment has dropped, so the free market says to us that your school must close." How much control of their religious schools are churches willing to trade for money?

The second issue hasn't happened yet, but here's how it's going to go.

Somebody is going to try to cash in on voucher money or make a point or indulge in performance art, and taxpayers will be horrified to learn that their tax dollars are going to support a school that promotes satanism or pushes sharia law or teaches that all white folks are evil (I am confining myself to outrageous things that will outrage people-- the list of outrageous things that people will happily put up with is a longer list).

So in the storm of outrage, taxpayers will demand that government make sure not to send voucher dollars to That School That Teaches Those Awful Things. Politicians will ride that wave, and before you know it, we will have a government agency whose mandate is to decide which churches are "legitimate" and voila-- the Government Bureau of Church Regulation.

You can say that this would be fine with you because obviously such a bureau would concentrate on shutting down Obviously Wrong Religions, and I will say that you don't know your Christian church history very well. For instance, the wacky nickname that many conservative Christians used to have for the Catholic Church-- "the whore of Babylon". Today there are still folks who consider the Catholic Church a messed-up cult and not a decent Christian church. Do you suppose this debate will be improved by involving the government. And that's before we even start to look at thornier issues of American pluralism.

Where government money goes, politics follow, and when you mix religion and politics, you get politics.*  Will a church that wants those public dollars mute its religious character to avoid problems? A study of Catholic schools in voucherfied Milwaukee suggests the answer is yes. Will taxpayers rise up when they think their dollars are being spent on a religious group they object to? That looks like a yes, too.

That's before we even start to talk about regulations and laws and rules that may or may not contradict religious beliefs.

Vouchers are a bad policy idea for so many reasons, but many of those reasons have to do with protecting the very religious institutions that, in some cases, hope to profit from them.  And rReconsidering the church tax exemption is already being brought up-- what does a church do when a politician says, "I can keep that tax thing off your back as long as your political activity is political activity I like."

Religious institutions and church-related schools should beware. Vouchers are a trap, and bad news for everyone involved. 


*I used to think I knew who first said this, but the internet has made me hugely uncertain. I can confidently report that this line did not 0originate with me.

Dear Lily. Re: Betsy DeVos & The NEA RA

Dear Lily:

Many news items came out of the NEA RA this year-- some pretty interesting, and some pretty routine, but I have one to cheer and one to complain about.

Cheer

There will be no photo op.

After years and years of making compromises in order to keep an imaginary seat at a mythical table, this statement from you is a breath of fresh air

I understand the motivations behind Randi Weingarten's attempt to play kind-of-nice with Betsy DeVos, but I think it was a doomed and fruitless effort. DeVos has told us all along who she is and what she wants, and if I'm not going to give her credit for anything else, I will credit this-- she has not wavered significantly from those goals. She is anti-union. And she is anti-public education. After decades of working toward those goals, she is not suddenly going to have an epiphany because someone got her to set foot in a public school.

NEA can call for her removal, as they sort-of called for the removal of Arne Duncan. It's not going to much matter. And critics will note that NEA is being critical of the Trump-DeVos USED in ways that they weren't (and should have been) of the Obama-Duncan USED. But just because we didn't oppose things that we should have in the past doesn't mean that every other bad ac tor gets a pass.

The Trump-DeVos department should be opposed, and the NEA is right to do so. The fact that NEA has been wrong in the past doesn't make them any less right now. Thais administration is a threat to democratically controlled public education, a basic building block of this country. We should not be playing nice with them. Thank you for indicating that we won't. Thanks also for clarifying that we will work with any legislators who are on the right side. I hope that will be the new rule-- the union has given too many opponents of public education a free pas just because they were Democrats.

Let's Talk

I told the @WashingtonPost: #BetsyDeVos is the queen of for-profit privatization of #PublicEd. RT if you agree. https://t.co/6AnBfY5I14

— Lily Eskelsen García (@Lily_NEA) July 5, 2017

Maybe you were just focusing on this aspect of DeVosian policy, which is understandable. But I've seen this careful distinction before and we need to stop making it.

I've written before that a non-profit charter is just a for-profit charter with a good money laundering system. There is no real reason to believe that n on -profit charters are any less prone to fraud, waste and general scammage that for-profits. If anything, they may be more prone because they must maintain the fiction of non-profit-hood. A non-profit operator can still employ family, still lease buildings from himself, still hire his own for-profit charter management company to run the school.

Without any sort of regulation or transparency (two things that DeVos has long been committed to opposing), non-profit charters are just as likely to waste taxpayers' public education dollars and for-profits are. It makes no sense to be critical of one and not the other. When it comes to charters, not-for-profit and for-profit is a distinction without a difference.

NEA's statement on charters is a whole other discussion (short version: too little, but at least in the right direction). Maybe I'll get to that another day, but since resolutions general have about the same weight as Presidential campaign platforms, maybe not.

Thanks again for these steps. And as always, if you decide you need to start talking to C level bloggers, my line is always open.

What Bad Bosses Say

Forbes likes listicles with a business bent, but sometimes they seem applicable to other areas. School areas. For instance, here's their piece "Ten Things Only Bad Bosses Say." Let's see what portion of this resonates. Do we hear any of these from our on bad bosses-- and note that these are absolutely Forbes ten markers for bad bosses. That I did not make up.

1. I don’t make the rules — I just enforce them

In all fairness to our superintendents and principals, this is true. They are just loaded with state and federal rules that control their lives and over which they have no control. But if you think about the many reform ideas we've been subjected to over the years, you'll notice that hardly anybody actually owns the ideas they push. Even Bill Gates didn't just say, "Y'all should adopt Common Core because it's a cool thing I found out about that I think you should do." Charteristas don 't just say, "We want these business opportunities to be available to us because we want to make money on this biz."

No, idea after idea is presented with a general stance of "research and studies show that this reform idea has to be implemented." Which is just one other way to say, "Look, I didn't make this stuff up. I'm just telling you what the research demands."

2. If you don’t want the job, I’ll find somebody who does

We've heard the message consistently for at least twenty-five years now-- teachers are easily replaceable. Any warm body will do for delivering instructional content from the box. Anybody with a college degree (or even less) can be put in a classroom. You would think the free market's invisible hand would step and across legislatures and school districts would be saying, "Teachers are special and increasingly rare butterflies-- we had better start offering more money and bennies to attract them." No, among many education policy leaders, the response to the growing teacher shortage has been simple-- "No biggy. We can find pretty much anyone to fill those jobs."

3. Just make it happen — and don’t screw it up

Here's a policy. Make it happen somehow. You can't have any money to make it happen. But we will punish either you or your students or your school or all together

4. That sounds like a personal problem

The Forbesian bad boss doesn't want to make allowances for personal appointments, family stuff, etc. I was going to ay this doesn't apply so much to education, but then I thought of the charter teachers who are expected to work 120 hours per week.

5. If I wanted your opinion I’d ask for it

Oh, lordy yes. The whole steady hammering of the modern reform movement has been performed while resolutely ignoring the professional opinions of millions of teachers. In fact, we've actually improved by raising the reform opinion of teacher input to "benign neglect" from the previous "open hostility." A few years ago the common attitude toward teachers was, "You have screwed up the whole system and everything you think and say is clearly dead wrong." At some point reformsters realized that it's hard to implement much of any reform without the cooperation of classroom teachers, so they stopped being so openly hostile. But they still haven't haven't started listening to us.

6. You’re lucky to have a job

See #2. Add the ongoing hunt for the legendary Bad Teachers. We are going to By God track them down and get rid of them, and if we haven't come up with an evaluation system that proves your a bad teacher yet, we're still working on it. Which is okay because (#2) you are easily replaced.

7. I don’t want to hear about problems — not unless you’ve got a solution

One of the rhetorical features of some reform arguments has been a shifting of the burden of proof, resulting in a conversation like this.

Reformer: It looks like you're having trouble breathing. Let me chop of your arms with a chainsaw.
Teachers: Are you nuts?! Put that chainsaw away.
Reformer: All right then-- you'd better come with an idea about what to do instead.

8. We’ve always done it this way

Yeah, we've all heard this one, and no, it's not usually the fault of reformsters. On the other hand, now that pushing charters and test-centered accountability and even the shambling remnants of the Common Core are the status quo, many reformers have become far more conservative.

9. You can be replaced in a heartbeat

It's possible that Forbes' list is a little redundant on this point. Of course, not only do many charter operators believe this one, but they actually plan based on it. Teachers can be replaced quickly and easily (just contact Teach for America for the next cohort) and they need to be, because the business model calls for a staff that churns regularly, thereby keeping costs and feistiness down.

10. Because I’m the boss — that’s why

If you're of a certain age, you may recall a time when thought leaders who wanted to sell their edu-idea would try to sell it to people who worked in education. The modern wave of reform, starting most notably with Common Core, reformers have simply bypassed the entire public ed system and used the weight of government, billionaires, regulations, and bureaucracy to impose their will on the system, augmented by well-financed PR for messaging and branding. The basic approach of modern reform has been to become either the boss, or the boss's best friend and adviser. Reform has been a top-down affair both with the "top" of state and federal government (Arne Duncan, Jeb Bush) as well as the "top" of big money and power (Bill Gates, Eli Broad), with the two slowly converging (Betsy DeVos). But modern reform has never been about collaborating with the public education system or the people who work there-- just getting people into a position to make it go where reformers ant it to go.

The intro of the Forbes article ends like this:

Here are ten things only bad managers say. If you hear these things said at your workplace, it’s time to take action and get your job search moving!

But of course for teachers, a different job within the same system will not necessarily help. We can identify our bad bosses; the real question is what do we do about them?

Wasting Tax Dollars on Advertising

Charter fans like to say that charters will improve public education by pushing public schools to compete. Here's a story that proves them half right-- some public schools apparently feel compelled to compete, but not in ways that have anything to do with educational quality.

The public school system of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, has, like many Pennsylvania school districts, has been hit hard by money being drained by charter schools-- last year the district lost about $26 million to charter schools. So the board accepted Superintendent Joseph Roy's recommendation that they take this "opportunity" to "better market" themselves. The board had previously hired a firm to help manage its social media accounts; now they have decided to hire Imagevolution, a marketing firm, to help get the word out about the public school system's successes. The goal, says Imagevolution's Randi Mautz, is to win students back from the charters.

The only vote against the proposal was from a board member who was unsure that Imagevolution is the firm for the job. Their website is under construction, but they've been around since 2006. But you can see some of their work on their facebook page. They are apparently run by a quartet of school district parents, so they're invested. They've worked with the Bethlehem Area School District Foundation, Lehigh University, and the Downtown Bethlehem Association-- so they know the territory.

They are not going to get filthy rich. The district has contracted for slightly over $3K a month for marketing help. The social media management contract (with Lehigh Valley With Love Media) was for $2K a month.

Again, none of this is huge money. But we're talking about public tax dollars spent on marketing. We're talking about enough money to have hired part of a teacher, or a small pile of educational resources. And instead, it will go to create competitive marketing. Because the free market does not foster superior quality; the free market fosters superior marketing.

The students of Bethlehem will pay an opportunity cost, because that money will not go to make their education better. It will not go to improve their school. It will go to compete in marketing with charter schools. It's a waste of the money, and I'd get on my high horse and bleat "How dare the district spend tax dollars on marketing" but of course, in the world of charter competition, marketing is a new necessity. Because, of course, the charters will also be spending public tax dollars on marketing that will in now way improve education for the students.

That's where we are now. Paying taxes for marketing. Tell me again how this competition is improving education?

Personalized Bait and Switch

Personalized Learning is getting the hard sell these days. It's marketable for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that nobody really knows what Personalized Learning is.

What it suggests is something appealing, like Individualized Education Programs for everyone. Personalized Learning fans like to trot out exemplars like Chugach, Alaska, a remote, tiny town where a school system created a system in which each student had her own personal path to graduation, with projects, content, and assessment.

While there are plenty of problems with the Chugach thing, it's a good example of what most of us think Personalized Learning would mean. An educational program custom designed for each individual learner. Custom designed like a meal at a restaurant where you can choose the protein and spices and sauces and dishes and means of cooking and order exactly what you are hungry for.

But as Personalized Learning rolls out, that's not what it's like at all.

From the College Board's personalized SAT prep courtesy of Khan Academy, through bold plans like this IBM personalized education pitch is something else entirely. This is just path-switching.

The Brand X that we're supposed to be escaping, the view of education that Personalized Learning is supposed to alter, the toxin for which Personalized Learning is the alleged antidote is an education model in which all students get on the same car of the same train and ride the same tracks to the same destination at the same time. That's not what's actually going on in public schools these days, but let's set that aside for the moment.

Real personalized learning would tear up the tracks, park the train, offer every student a good pair of hiking shoes or maybe a four-wheeler, maybe even a hoverboard, plus a map of the territory (probably in the form of an actual teacher), then let the student pick a destination and a path and manner of traveling.

But techno-personalized learning keeps the track and the train. In the most basic version, we keep one train and one track and the "personalization" is that students get on at different station. Maybe they occasionally get to catch a helicopter that zips them ahead a couple of stops. (Think the old SRA reading program.)

Pat completes the first computer exercise in the module. An algorithm (cheerfully mis-identified as "artificial intelligence" because that sounds so super-cool) checks Pat's answers and the particular configuration of incorrect answers, by which the algorithm assigns the next exercise to Pat. Rinse and repeat. Pat is still on the train, but now there's a small web of tracks that he must travel. But Pat is still a passenger on this train, choosing no part of the journey, the destination, nor the means of travel.

That is in fact one of the key ways to identify whether you've got actual personalized learning or not-- how prominent is the voice of the student. If the pitch is "Our super-duper AI will analyze student performance and assign an appropriately awesome module to enhance learning swellness," this is not actual personalized learning, but Algorthmically Mediated Lessons (h/t Bill Fitzgerald) which is not personalized learning at all.

That's the bait and switch to watch out for. The promise is a hugely flexible and open-ended, even project-based, learning that is adapted to every individual learner. The delivery more often is the chance to pay big bucks for what is essentially a proprietary library of exercises managed by a proprietary software algorithm for doling the assignments out based on a battery of pre-made standardized tests and quizzes. That is not personalized learning. You cannot have personalized learning without persons. That includes persons making the decisions about hat the students do. That includes using knowledge of the person who is the student, and not handing out materials created by someone who has never met the students (and created the exercises before the student ever stepped into the classroom).

That impersonal education is not automatically terrible, and often has a place in education-- but it's not personalized learning.

And it's worth noting that the one train, one track model was abandoned by public education ages ago. Differentiated instruction, IEP's, authentic assessment, project-based learning, and a thousand other methods have been tried and adopted by classroom teachers who routinely work to meet students where they are and craft instruction to suit their personal needs. That's one of the great ironies of the bait and switch, the algorithmically mediated lessons-- in the majority of US classrooms, when it comes to personalization, Faux Personalized Learning is actually a step backwards. The personalized bait-and-switch is about getting teachers to trade in their shiny hoverboards or rusty steam engines.

ICYMI: July Already! Edition (7/2)

Here's some reading for your holiday weekend. May it be a good one.

Arizona Replaces Teachers with Persons

One more state institutes a warm body law as a way of filling more teaching positions

Washington State is Wealthy, But Doesn't Pay for Schools

Can you guess how much rich Washington residents pay in taxes? Can anybody guess why the legislature refuses to meet its own funding requirements for education?

The Charter School Free Riding Problem

Jersey Jazzman takes a look at a little-noted phenomenon: how public schools are doing the work of recruiting teachers for charter schools.

Ohio's Third Grade Guarantee

A very effective discussion of one more state's dumb idea about "guaranteeing" third grade readers

Florida Business Leaders Can’t Enjoy Luncheon Due to Dismal Reading Scores

Floridians are also sad about reading levels. Nancy Bailey has some suggestions about what they could do if they wanted to get serious.

How Black Girls Aren't Presumed To Be Innocent

One more study lays out our oddly groundless and ultimately destructive prejudices about black children.

2017: Business of Ed Tech So Far

Audrey Watters looks at how the ed-flavored tech sector is looking at the halfway point.

Idaho Charter Schools Underserve Minority and Poor Population

We don't talk a lot about Idaho, but they've got some of the same charter school issues we see everywhere else.

Alternative Certification Paths

We need alternative paths to the classroom.

Mind you, we don't need paths that are shortcuts. We don't need an alternative path that is just a five week long truncated training that wouldn't prepare a camp counselor for a summer with jumpy ten year olds. We don't need alternative paths used by charter operators to train people to fill their own charter openings with not-too-qualified bodies. And we definitely don't need the alternative path, favored by more and more states, that is no path at all, but just dumping someone into a classroom when her only qualification is a college degree and a pulse.

Most of the alternative paths in use these days are intended to help businesses fill openings or to help politicians look like they are addressing the teacher "shortage" (a shortage that is really a lack of willingness to do what it takes to make teaching more appealing work).

These alternative paths are bad-- bad for the profession, bad for the people who follow them, bad for the schools where those "teachers" end up working.

But it would also be a mistake to suggest that if you didn't decide to pursue a teaching degree when you were nineteen or twenty, the window has closed and you can never choose teaching as a career.

Nor is it reasonable to expect a later-in-life career switcher to somehow navigate a traditional teacher education program while still supporting herself or her family.

So what would a real alternative certification path for career-changers need to look like?

* Some standard of content knowledge. Yes, even if you're a former astrophycisist who wants to teach first grade. Knowing content well enough to use it in your profession, and knowing it well enough to explain it to young humans are two different things. Maybe more than two.

* Study of developmental psychology. Explaining astrophysics to other astrophysicians is not like explaining anything to small humans. Nor are the behavioral patterns of young humans the same as those of adults. You cannot match your expectations to reality if you don't know anything about reality.

* An understanding of assessment and all the arcane arts of number-crunching involved in assessment.

* Some sort of exposure to the Big Questions of Education. A requirement to reflect and consider what we do, why we do it, and what all that means for how we do it. Look-- you're not leaning how to be a garage mechanic.

* An  introduction to the ins and outs of record keeping and ridiculous education regulation. This is one area where the career-changers previous experience with red tape and bureaucratic baloney will be helpful, as there will be no youthful idealism to scrub away.

* Field experience. This is perhaps the hardest thing to work in, because people seeking a career change cannot necessarily afford a five or ten or fifteen week span in which they earn no income. But getting classroom experience with live students is critical-- perhaps even more critical with older candidates for the classroom who can make the mistake of thinking "I can run meetings with thirty employees, so how hard can it be to handle a room full of eighth graders?"  A strong field experience is important not just in preparing the neo-teacher, but also in helping that neo-teacher decide if she's made a huge mistake.

I can't find many figures on retention of alternative certificate teachers, and what I do find lumps starter-alt-certs like Teach for America together with later-in-life career changers. I can offer the anecdotal observation that in PA, where we offered guest teacher certificates for any career-changers who want to become substitutes, more than half quit, largely because managing a classroom turned out to be far more difficult than they thought. Students are not paid to be your subordinates.

That's why a long, solid field experience is important-- you have to be in that classroom long enough for the shine of newness to wear off.

That's a broad sketch of the bare minimum, and we could get into more specifics, but the bottom line here is that just because you're a grown-up with a college degree doesn't mean a few quick chats will make you fit for a classroom. There should be a path for career-changers, but not short cuts.