Collective Freedom

The tension between individual freedom and collective action, between what the individual wants and what the community wants, between the needs of the many and the needs of the few-- that tension has been with us since Day One. Puritans came here to declare,"This will be a place where people are free to worship as they please-- as long as it's a form of worship we agree with." Southern colonists arrived declaring, "This will be a land in which every man's efforts can enrich him-- unless you're an indentured servant or a slave, in which case, your efforts are going to enrich me."

We have a Bill of Rights enumerating the rights possessed by every individual-- and a long and robust history of debate and case law determining where those rights actual stop in the name of the greater good (First Amendment does not cover yelling "fire" or even "elephant stampede" in a crowded theater, et al).

This, it should be noted, is not a tension limited to governance. To get married and become a part of a tiny family collective, you give up some of your personal freedom. That's how it works-- if you insist on acting as if you live in the land of Do As You Please, your little collective will fall apart (trust me on this). Membership in a group requires sacrifice of personal freedom.

As a nation we tend to lean toward individual freedom and away from collectivism. Even when we occasionally do Socialist things, we don't dare call it Socialism. Too much collective action and people start talking about the government "taking away my hard-earned money" or inflicting its will on our choices.

Some charter/voucher school fans like to frame the argument along these lines. The decry forcing students to go to "government" schools. Why shouldn't parents have the freedom to choose whatever school they like? Why be forced into some sort of collective (that, they claim, wastes a bunch of tax money anyway).


This framing is not accurate, and not just because no state has yet invested the kind of money or demanded the kind of accountability that would truly make all choices available to all parents. No, there's another reason this is a false characterization, a reason that charters and vouchers vs. public education is about the tension between freedom and society in a slightly different way.

There are areas of community life where we have decided to sacrifice individual freedom for the collective good (and thereby actually increase individual freedom).

Roadways. We could make every individual responsible for the roads that he personally uses-- building them, maintaining them-- but given the different resources the folks have and the interconnectedness required for roadways, we would end up with a higgledy-piggledy system that didn't really serve anyone particularly well. Back in the 19th century, folks in my community would get together and spend Saturday building a new road, a project nobody could have completed single-handedly. And it takes a national collective effort to create that marvel of the modern world-- the Interstate Highway System

Likewise, we could make every citizen form and hire her own personal army, but the resulting hodge-podge would not protect the country.

Education (surprise) is the other big example. Rather than just let each family locate their own personal tutor, communities decided that they had a stake in making sure that all children were educated (eg Puritans require a Godly community of Bible readers, therefor we need to teach everyone to read). Communities pooled resources and elected a board to manage those resources in response to community desires. The structure got stickier when we decided that since some communities didn't have sufficient resources, we would also pool resources on the state level.

As with roads and armies, the collective pooling of resources involved people who would rarely if ever use the items being produced. But their interested were still represented by their participation in the collective decision making. Even if you don't have a child in school, you can still run for school board, call board members, attend meetings and make a participatory nuisance of yourself. Everyone who helps pool the collective also has the option of participating in the collective decision-making.

Collectives require people to chip in, and they require some authority to decide how the various interests at play can be moderated so that everyone sort of gets something they kind of want. In some countries, that authority is some sort of emperor/beloved leader/tyrant. In our society, the idea is to elect folks for that job. Bottom line-- you put in some money, voice your opinion, and may or may not get exactly what you want.

Sometimes it takes the collective to get the job done. These decisions do not happen without debate. We're in the middle of an argument about whether or not health care should be such a collective effort or not. And there are always wealthy folks whose argument is something along the lines of, "We have no problem providing the roads and security that we need, and we provide it just the way we like it, so why should the government force us to be part of a collective effort by stealing our resources. And really, everybody should have the freedom to choose their own stuff the same way we do. What? They can't afford to? Well, wave this magic wand of free marketry at the problem; I'm sure those folks will be able to get what they deserve in no time at all."

Or to put it more succinctly, "I've got mine, Jack. Go pound sand."

There are several possible explanations for this. Rich folks are way hella rich. Super-rich. Buy your own city and run it the way you want rich. That and cooperation and compromise are taking a hit as shared values. Take music for a moment. Decades ago, we had to share air space. We listened to the radio station (one of only a few) we listened to music that the station believed the collective wanted. Decades ago when I chaperoned bus trips, negotiating the music we would all listen to was part of the challenge. Nowadays, we all curate our personal collection that we hear through our personal equipment. We get exactly what we personally want.

So is that all the charter/voucher revolution is? A bunch of parents just saying, "I want the school I want." And then just exercising their choice.

No, it's not. And here's why.

When it comes to bus ride music, we have done away with the collective. We don't pool resources or share decisions-- everyone just brings their own resources and makes do with that. No collective resources, no collective decisions.

But the charter/voucher revolution keeps the pooled resources part of public education. Everyone is still part of the collective resource pool. The collective decision-making is, however, gone.

Earlier this week I jumped off a post about Flat Earthers to ask charter/voucher fans how a charter/voucher system would deal with a school that was just wrong. I didn't get much of an answer. The public would never stand for it, one said-- but how exactly would the public's non-standing affect the charter school's existence? In a charter or voucher system, who steps in to say, "No, that can't be a school." I used the Flat Earth example because while we can all agree that the earth is not flat, we must also agree that there might be enough flat earthers out there to support a Flat Earth Charter school. Parents voting with their feet will not keep it from happening.

What charter/vouchers get us is collective resources managed in individual freedom mode (again, ignoring for the moment that the resources committed to such systems don't give parents anything remotely resembling the choices they are promised). By focusing on the individual parent decision, charteristas and voucherphiles try to make the argument that choice is super-democratic. It's not.

What is going on here is a bunch of parents saying, "I'm going to choose this private school for my kid, and you taxpayers have to pay for it whether you like it or not." Christian fundamentalists can spend tax dollars to send kids to a sharia law private school. Muslim taxpayers can pay to send students to a militantly anti-Islam private school. Black and brown taxpayers can pay to send white kids to a segregated private school.

Choice advocates have long made the point that education tax dollars don't belong to the public school-- they belong to the students. Neither of those is correct. The money belongs to the taxpayers. To distribute it without giving them any voice is literally taxation without representation. What charter/voucher systems continue to lack (well, one of the things they continue to lack) is accountability measures that insure taxpayers that their money is not being wasted. Is that conversation about what constitutes "waste" going to be difficult and contentious? Sure. And I wonder if part of the push behind charter/voucher systems is a desire to avoid that discussion ("I want to send my kid to a flat earth academy and I don't want to have to go through a bunch of crap to do it") But if you're going to be part of a community, city, state and nation, you can't just Do As You Please and maintain your membership.

Meet the New Boss

If there was one thing that was going to be a hallmark of the Betsy DeVos Depatrment of Education, it was going to be their studious hands-off approach. Previous departments may have used all manner of extra-legislative legerdemain to impose their will on the states (Common Core arm-twisting, Race to the Top bribery, waiver-based extortion). ESSA was born out of bipartisan grumpiness over USED's long, grabby arms, and yet, one of John King's final actions as secretary was to get himself spanked by Lamar Alexander for STILL trying to write laws from the USED offices.

"I will never do that kind of baloney," Betsy DeVos said.

"Easy to say until you have the wheel of power gripped tight in your own hand," said I. Here's a woman who has spent her whole adult life trying to impose her will on the education system. Now that she actually has the power, can she forgo actually using it?

Well, meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

And I don't mean actually meet her, because DeVos rarely does press, and when she does, it's a big nothing sandwich. 

As reported by Erica Green in the New York Times, DeVos's department has decided they will be the arbiter of adjectives, the setters of standards, the commandants of state capitals. Folks have submitted their ESSA plans, and USED is feeling its oats:

...the Education Department’s feedback to states about their plans to put the new law into effect, it applied strict interpretations of statutes, required extensive detail and even deemed some state education goals lackluster.

The department has actually decided to dictate what "ambitious" means in state education plans, a move which Mike Petrilli (Fordham Institution and the first number in every ed reporters rolodex) called "mind-boggling."

Granted, "ambitious" is a fairly useless legislative weasel-word that in this context means almost nothing. But folks were reading DeVos's early signals to mean that states would get the benefit of the doubt in any fuzzy areas. The head of the Delaware branch of the state-spanning reformster advocacy group CAN gave DeVos a pass (and he's allowed, because, somehow, he was one of the co-authors of Delaware's plan) because he admits they had shied away from being "bold and aggressive," thereby tripling the number of meaningless words in the conversation.

The Leadership Conference, a group of education reformsters dressed up as a civil rights type group (it includes Stand for Children, Democrats for Education Reform and Teach Plus, groups that have been tireless in pushing the corporate reform of public education), sent a letter arguing for retention of a mass of Obama-era criteria for evaluating state plans,demanding that the department serves as "not simply a rubber stamp of state submissions." Their preferred adjectives are "aggressive, meaningful and achievable."

This is the kind of imprecise blather you get when education policy is hammered out by amateurs. It often gives me flashbacks to working with student teachers in my classroom and some variation of this conversation:

Me: So your plan for tomorrow is to have an "ambitious" discussion about Huck Finn. What does that actually mean?

ST: What do you mean? It'll be ambitious.

Me: But what is that going to look like? What questions are you going to ask that will be ambitious? How will you draw ambitious answers out of the students, and what themes and ideas will you be looking for and how will you draw them out and what will let you know that the students have been ambitious enough to meet your goals?

ST: I don't know. Ambitious, you know? Like hard and stuff.

There are two big problems with the policy discussion this has touched off. ESSA was written by education amateurs, and now state-level amateurs will design the plans which will in turn be evaluated by the amateurs at the department. I'm betting not one of the people involved in this process would be able to walk into a class and effectively teach and ambitious lesson. So problem number one is that none of the people involved in working with this policy knows what he is talking about.

Not that specifying would help, because that would require a specific one-size-fits-all answer, which would be an answer that was wrong in the majority of the cases. That, in fact, was what we got with Common Core-- an attempt to lay out specifically what an "ambitious" education would look like, and it was junk.

The further away from the classroom education policy is set, the worse that policy will be. It will either be too specific, and tie the hands of teachers who are far better positioned to decide what will work with a specific set of students than folks who have never met those students. Or it will be too vague, which will be useless-- and then someone will try to firm it up by making it specific anyway.

Brace yourself, because I am about to agree with Neal McCluskey of the hyper-libertarian CATO Institute:

And so we remain pretty much where we were under the Obama administration in education, and where we are with every law that leaves it to regulatory agencies to fill in the meaning of crucial terms: with states, localities, and the people at the mercy of bureaucrats and secretaries.

So USED will be defining "ambitious" and "challenging" and all sorts of other words that they don't really know the meaning of in the context of a classroom, states will dance around trying to make the department happy (and, I predict, in some cases pleading for a template to follow, which takes us right back to Common Core), and by the time it all filters down to a classroom, we teachers will be trying to just get our job done without tripping over it too much. My apologies to my many progressive friends, but every day I move closer to the opinion that the best thing to do with the Department of Education is pack it in mothballs and stick in the attic, next to Grandma's old trunk.

So meet the new boss, same as the old boss, still insistent on defining adjectives and policy and rules, regulations and laws. She doesn't show Arne Duncan's predilection for talking nonsense to the public, but she's still going to tell us how to do our jobs.

What About Flat Earthers?

This week the Denver Post ran an.... intriguing? unexpected? gob-smacking? piece about the Flat Earther community in the US, which is, for some reason, centered in Colorado. And these folks are committed.

You might think that this is some sort of hipster irony thing, like the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. But take a stroll through just one flat earther youtube channel-- Globebusters-- and you'll realize that nobody means to be funny here. The international space station? A huge fake.The edge of the world? A barrier of ice. Why don't we feel the alleged speed at which we're supposed spinning with the earth's surface? And is NASA, as another flat earth-- well, I'd call it a group but it appears to be just one guy-- asserts, a secret arm of the Freemasons? And why do conspiracy theorists always have such bad spelling skills?

The Post piece offers a hint at the appeal:

“They want you to think you’re insignificant, a speck on the earth, a cosmic mistake,” Sargent says. “The flat earth says you are special, we are special, there is a creator, this isn’t some accident.”...

He and other Flat Earthers can only speculate why the global conspiracy has had such staying power for more than 500 years, or why “the top” — the uber-elite heads of governments, universities and major corporations that allegedly know “the truth” — would continue to uphold a scheme that offers little in the way of riches or strategic power.

But I'm not here to discuss the merits of Flat Earth Theory which is, after all, well-destroyed bunk.

My question is-- what do we do with these folks?

Sure, it's a free country and you can believe whatever dumb thing you want to believe. You can ignore all the scientific evidence and sense that you like, provided that you don't start clubbing people over te head or burning down buildings in the name of your beliefs. But for the world of education policy, we're going to need a better answer than that.

If flat earthers demand that their public school teach the (non-existent) controversy, should public school teachers be compelled to do so, or must they find (or rent) a sympathetic legislator first to make that happen?

What if they decide to set up their own Flat Earth Charter school? Should that be funded with public tax dollars, or even allowed/ Some charter supporters argue that whatever parents want to do should be allowed ("freedom!"), but does the society that funds education have a stake in making sure that education is not filled with falsehoods. Those Flat Earth Charter students would eventually be adults whose ability to contribute to society, function well in the workplace, and vote responsibly in elections may be compromised by the big slab of baloney rattling around in their heads. We can take the attitude that families that saddle their children with non-functional educations have made their own bed, but people who can't pull their own weight in society become a cost to it. We can say, "Let Pat try to be a Flat Earth Rocket Scientist-- if Pat can't support a family or make a living, that's Pat's problem" which is true right up until the point that Pat gets hit by a car and needs health care or collects a hundred other Pats and elects a Flat Earth city official.

I'm not going to argue that we need a system in which some government ministry decides which True Things are officially allowed to be taught. But one under-discussed issue with the charter/voucher of freeing parents to do whatever they want is that a certain percentage of parents believe Really Dumb Things and an increasing portion of our population is not so keen on things like "science" and "evidence."

So what accountability measures, what checks would we put in place so that a charter/voucher system didn't just become a patchwork mess of Teach Whatever The Hell You Feel Like? Because that can't be good for the health of the country or for the children whose education is sacrificed on the alter of the free market. The point of education, after all, is to elevate people to higher levels of understanding and skill, not to allow them to soak in the same old stew of ignorance.

My most cynical, least-charitable side says that some charter/voucher fans figure that bad people choose bad schools and get bad educations and end up poor and struggling as they should, and it doesn't matter because they'll be doing it on the other side of the big wall that separates the Betters in society from All Those Other People. But for those reformsters who truly believe that charters and choice are an important key to improving education in this country, my question remains-- what do we do about Flat Earth Charter School?

ICYMI: Stuff To Read Edition (7/9)

Yeah, I'm short a clever title this week, but I'm not short worthwhile pieces for you to read. Here we go.

On Global Teacher Prize Winner Maggie MacDonnell and What Humility Looks Like

Jose Luis Vilson talks to prize-winner MacDonnell, and we're all a little better for it. This will make you feel a little better about the work.  

Utica Charter School Allegedly Required Salary Tithe

How about yet another story about the Gulen charter chain, just in case you think this use of charter schools to funnel US tax dollars into the coffers of an exiled Turkish leader was old news. Nope. Still happening.

KIPP Schools Collected Millions in Unallowable Fees


The folks who run KIPP are millionaires, but the parents of KIPP students still get hit up for what turn out to be probably-illegal contributions. Tell me the part again about how charters do more with less.

Reform Lessons From Skeptical But Not Cynical Veterans

A winner from Larry Cuban

Has The Charter Movement Gone Awry

Apparently the discussion of the new "let's just get rid of charter accountability" book is going to drag on forever. Grab some popcorn.

The Lie; The Reply

I know you'll find this hard to believe, but there's a charter school operator in Ohio who is a big fat liar.

Beware of School Voucher Doublespeak

I'm not sure this is exactly doublespeak, but here's the NEA with an actually-useful explainer for certain voucher terminology

Charter School Refusal To Admit Students Lacking Uniforms Wasn't Its First

A NOLA charter decides that homeless students who don't come in their proper uniforms should be ejected. And they've apparently done it more than once  

CBS News Voucher Story

Yes, CBS news manages to actually catch the effect of the DeVosian voucher plan on rural schools.

Mayoral Control and Mayoral Responsibility

New York is looking at, well, the first of those again, and Daniel katz takes a look at the issues involved.

The History of Ed Tech: What Went Wrong

Audrey Watters answers the question. See what you think of her answer.

Chris Christie, The Beach, and Our Leaders' Massive School Funding Hypocrisy 

Jersey Jazzman attacks all three topics, and it's worth reading twice.

Why do we think poor people are poor because of their own bad choices?

Tip of the hat to Blue Cereal Education, a look at the psychological theorizing behind why we blame poor people for being poor.

What They Deserve

Before we get started, let me be clear-- this is not ALL conservatives, and in many cases not ONLY conservatives. But there is a thread that runs through current aspects of conservatism that ties many issues, from education to health care, together.

As has been noted to the point that we are flogging the marrow inside the stripped bones unearthed from beneath the dead equine flesh, there are a lot of people who are angry. There is a full range of sources for this anger, but I want to focus on one-- the anger that some people are not getting what they deserve. Specifically, those people are getting far more than they deserve while escaping the suffering they should be experiencing. This anger about just deserts, about people escaping the consequences their shoulders should be rightfully bowed under.

Take the arguments about reproduction. There are points on which reasonable people can disagree, but some opponents of abortion and, in fact, birth control are well beyond that. Peel back their rhetoric, and you find this rationale-- sex is dirty and only a dirty nasty woman would ever have sex for any reason other than to provide children for her husband. Women who enjoy recreational sex are Bad People, and allowing them to have abortions or even birth control is enabling their bad behavior. They should be made to suffer the consequences of their slutty activities, i.e. pregnancy and childbirth. Anything that allows them to escape pregnancy is allowing them to get off scott free, and that's just not what they deserve.

When we want to talk about getting people what they deserve, the free market often comes up. Again-- not all free market fans are righteously angry true believers. But for many the free market is a perfect mechanism for getting people what they deserve-- and no more. When some advocates for free market health care insurance start talking about choice, it can seem nuts to suggest that poor folks get crappier insurance as a consequence of their freedom-enhanced choice rather than their financial inability to buy the good stuff. But the idea here is that your socio-economic status is the result of your own choices and behavior. Rich people have more choices; that's supposed to be the point of being rich. To use government support or subsidies or tax dollars to give poor folks those same kinds of choices as rich folks is giving them something they don't deserve, that they didn't earn fair and square. (Besides, good and virtuous people who live right don't need much health care, anyway.)

The same is true for education. When (some) angry folks declare that we are spending too much money on schools in this country, they're saying that we're spending too much money on poor folks, who should get the choices they deserve-- and no more.

It's a simple formula. Success comes to people who exercise virtue, talent, and hard work. If you aren't successful, it must be because you didn't exercise those qualities. The rewards, the choices, the money, the extra homes, the nice cars, the good health care, the choice of the best private schools-- these are the benefits that accrue to the virtuous-and-therefor-wealthy few. People who want the rewards without the effort are like people who want a medal but aren't willing to train for or run the race. They didn't do the work; they don't deserve the rewards. In fact, withholding those rewards is doing them a favor, because they will be motivated to make better choices.

If we teachers are honest, we understand this way of thinking. Who among us have not sat in a lounge and complained about a student who doesn't study, doesn't do the work, doesn't make the effort, but is still upset that we didn't "give" him a better grade.

It's different, isn't it? The student could have done the work, could have studied, could have achieved better.What's the difference between the slacker in my fourth period class and slacker on welfare?

Well,  we know that while socio-economic status is not destiny, it casts a heavy shadow, most notably in the number of do-overs. Wealthy folks are entitled to extra chances because, after all, they're not Those Kind of people. Consider abortions-- safe, clean abortions will always be available to the wealthy. All we're ever really discussing is whether or not we're going to let Those People-- the poor ones, the black or brown ones, the trailer trash, the people who clearly don't deserve a break. All those signifiers help us decide what Those People really deserve.

Why do we get so caught up in deciding what other people deserve? I don't know-- and I think about this often. Some of it is simple classism and racism. Some of it is just cranky, judgy human nature. And I think some of it is sour grapes. "I've followed the rules, done what I'm supposed to do, stayed in a marriage that's iffy because I'm supposed to, stuck with a job because that's what you do, and yet I'm not ending up with the kind of happy ending a good rules follower is supposed to get," the thinking may go. "How the hell can that person who's breaking all the rules be doing well and happy?! The universe or God or the government isn't punishing Those People with what they really deserve. They haven't stayed in place, and yet bad things aren't happening to them. Maybe I'll try to fix that."

In education, we need to pay attention to this angry thread. Not just because it animates one wing of the charter biz ("We will decide what kind of school Those People in that part of town deserve") but because we're in the assessment and evaluation business, which is located in the ethical strip mall just two doors down from the judgment business. It is easy to lose the thread. I started my career working with a guy whose grading system was largely opaque because mostly he just judged his students based on his perception of their character and gave them a grade accordingly.

We are invited to make judgy calls daily. Does this kid deserve extra help or not? Does this kid deserve an extra chance to complete the assignment or not? Do I give this kid's cockamamie story the benefit of the doubt, or assume she's a liar?

Come down on the wrong side of this too many times and you can find yourself wrestling with your students, gaming your own classroom system so that you can make sure that kid gets the grade he deserves-- and no more.

We live in judgy times. Our political discourse skips straight past arguments and into the judgment phase, announced by pungent name calling. Many of our current leaders are dedicated to making sure that none of Those People get away with what they don't deserve, making sure that Those People are put in their proper place with the meager rewards they deserve-- and no more. When some folks talk about freedom to choose and equal opportunity, they mean giving everyone the same tools and the same options. Other folks mean that every person is capable of behaving properly, and if they made the choices that landed them in poverty or the hospital or a lousy neighborhood, well, they chose to exercise their personal responsibility poorly. That's we can arrive at the argument that the free market gives everyone choice, the idea that the GOP health care bill will drop 22 million people not by pushing them out, but because they will choose to get out. Sure. And just today I chose not to buy a Lexus or a mansion.

Freedom extends only as far as the choices available to you, and our economic system doles out more choices to some than to others. For some people that is a defect to be corrected and for others it is a core feature to be preserved, the distinction based on your idea of how, why and by whom those choices have been limited.

Yes, all we need to know in order to decide what somebody deserves is the entire circumstances of their lives, their parents' lives, the context of all that, and of course our own solid sense of what True Justice entails.

And man it is hard. The student who rails against the injustice of being fired just because he skipped work twelve times. The student whose stated career objective is to cash welfare checks and smoke dope-- and who follows that plan upon graduation.Or the guy who lives off his inheritance while running a grifters epic long con into the White House. It is hard not to look at some people without concluding that what they deserve is a world hurt, a house that falls out of the sky and onto their heads.

As a citizen, I sort my impulses into the desire to give someone chances and the desire to take opportunities away. The former I honor and the latter I try to deny. But as a citizen, I have little power to make either impulse real. In the classroom, I have huge power to make both real, and I have to be mindful of how I use that power every day. What they deserve is every chance I can give them.

Another Free Market Competitive Fail

Word came yesterday that my county will join the list of communities that no longer has a Sears. It has been an anchor store at our one mall since that mall opened a few decades ago. Now, come October, it will gone. And there are lessons here for education reformsters.

Coming to a mall near me

Folks have been tracking Sears' growing problems for years, and while there are a variety of diagnoses, most agree that CEO Eddie Lampert was a huge part of the problem-- if not all of it.

Lampert masterminded the K-Mart/Sears buyout in 2005 when he was just your typical hedge fundy master of the universe. Before long, the board had made him the fifth CEO since the merger, though reports are that he was running the show before he grabbed the crown. Lampert had no experience in retail, but equipped with a hedge fund manager's confidence, he retooled the company.

Here are some of the features of Lampert's version of Sears. See if any of it sounds familiar.

He did little collaboration, preferring to impose his own grand vision of how the retail chain should work. Despite his lack of retail experience, Lampert reportedly lectured veterans about how retail works. He put huge value on the opinions of outsiders.

He ignored the physical plant of stores, instead focusing his attention on a new program for guiding the whole business (the "Shop Your Way" rewards program).

He rarely met face to face with anyone, not even upper management, but prefers to manage by screen, believing that if he could collect lots of "deep data" that would tell him all he needed to know.

And most of all, he created an atmosphere of competition instead of collaboration, splitting the store into thirty divisions that had to compete with each other for resources and funding. This was disastrous, with divisions and departments undercutting each other, benefiting themselves, but damaging the store as a whole. If you want to see just how badly internal competition and divisional performance incentive system can screw up an organization, read about the death of Sears.

Oh-- and as outlined in a lawsuit by stockholders, Lampert used his hedge fundy skills to create a deal for himself by which his personal financial interests can be served by moves that are bad for the company.

So, a Bold Visionary with no actual knowledge of the institution or respect for people who work there (but confidence in his own financier background) decides to impose his own program which will be managed by boatloads of data. His own financially interests are not really aligned with those of the institution, and he decides to drive quality by pitting his employees against each other to serve their own interests. That could describe the last decade at Sears, or it could describe any big charter entrepreneur with no education background who decides to craft his own program, pit his teachers against each other for merit pay, run the whole thing by crunching numbers in a computer, and make certain that he makes bank on the business, whether it works for the students or not.

Lampert's Sears is an Ayn Randian free marketeer technocratic competition-unlocks-greatness wet dream, and it is a disaster that is slowly but surely dying. There are many lessons to learn here, but one of the biggest is that unfettered free market competition doesn't end well for the community in which it exists. Do you want to claim that schools are different? I totally agree with you-- but the business-minded reformster point all along has been that schools are just another kind of business, and they can be run in a businesslike way.Businesslike like Sears? Because that would seem to be a bad idea.

Look, you may say, Sears was a goner anyway, destined to be crushed between Amazon and Wal-mart. But that's a free market lesson, too, a reminder that in the free market there are winners and losers, and the losers have to be crushed into pieces, the people who depended on them scattered to the wind. Is that really what we want for schools? Do we want to sort schools into winners and losers and crush the losers, or is it perhaps a better aspiration to make all schools winners? I'd like to throw a party for the second choice-- let's just hope our K-Mart is still open when I go there to buy supplies.

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.