IL: DeVos Can't Stick To Script

Illinois has just joined the ranks of the education voucher states in the US after a protracted mess of shenanigans and skullduggery.

Mostly what the legislature and Governor Rauner did was use an artful combo of bribery and hostage-taking to leverage a big, fat pay day for voucher schools. If folks wanted to free up funding for schools (handy, now that the school year started), they would have to give up the voucher dollars. As protective cover, they were given a new funding system and a couple of pieces of gold for public schools.

The depressing news here is that Illinois once again shows that public schools cannot look to either party to defend public education. Democrats took the deal and voted for Voucher Christmas. Some folks called them out, but most of the press about the bill has stuck to the script-- this is an awesome win for public schools and don't pay any attention to that voucher program (which is, you know, not exactly really a voucher program). It's a compromise, a bipartisan happy day.

Except that one voucher fan didn't get the memo on how the bill was supposed to be properly spun-- Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos:

Real change and innovation in education will not come from Washington—it will come from states where parents and students demand more education options and have their voices heard. I commend Gov. Rauner and Superintendent Smith for their leadership in making Illinois the 18th state to adopt a tax credit scholarship program. By expanding choices for families and focusing funding on individual students, this program will help thousands of Illinois children succeed.

Oh, no, Secretary! You forgot to call this a compromise. You forgot to say that these "savings accounts" aren't really back door vouchers! You forgot to say what a great funding victory this was for public schools! You forgot to pretend that this bill helped ALL schools through its awesome compromisiness. You could have called it a victory on many sides... on many sides.


Part of the deal in Illinois was supposed to be that voucher fans (of all parties) would refrain from doing a victorious happy dance, that they would avoid saying out loud "We are one step closer to replacing public schools." But no-- there's DeVos, down in the end zone, doing her victory dance and spiking the ball and hollering, "In your FACE, public schools!!" Next time someone better make sure she gets the memo.

Who's College Ready?

Gail Mellow (LaGuardia Community College) turned up in the New York Times this week to challenge the classic picture of a college student.

For many of us, "college student" conjures up images of a fresh-faced nineteen year old, enjoying the chance to live independently, study hard, and maybe indulge in the sowing of some untamed oats. The modern reformy "college and career ready" picture is similar-- 18-year-olds walk across the stage, grab their diplomas, and walk straight into a college dorm. But Mellow's gathered data create a different picture. Here are some stats:

40% of US college students attend a community college.

0.4% of US college students attend "one of the ivies."

Over half of all undergrads live at home, mostly to make things more affordable.

40% of college students work thirty or more hours per week.

25% work full time while also attending college full time.

25% of all undergrads are older than twenty-five.

25% of undergrads are single parents.

Between 2011 and 2015, 20% of two-year college students lived in food-insecure households.

Now, Mellow has a dog in this fight, and he works his way around to the notion that government should give more funds to community colleges (like, you know, his).  But the broad idea of his point remains--

We don't really know what a "typical" college student looks like.

And if we don't know what a college student looks like, then how can we know when somebody is ready to be one?

Does "college ready" include "on good terms with your parents so you'll have a place to live"? Doe it mean "not pregnant"? Is some version of a gap year so normal now that a college ready student is one with a gap year plan? And should we be making all future college students sit down and take a course about how to negotiate a loan? (The answer is "yes.")

There's definitely nothing here to suggest that what students need to be more college ready is a greater ability to take a Big Standardized Test, nor do any of these issues seem to line up with the Common Core [Insert Your New Name Here] Standards. It continues to be impossible to make students "college ready" when we still have no idea what that term actually means.

Back To School Bloviating

Flipping through twitter this morning, and lo and behold, my governor Tom Wolf has offered some advice for the start of school:

Hey PA students — start the school year off right with my #BackToSchoolTips. pic.twitter.com/GKwjUMt1ZZ

— Governor Tom Wolf (@GovernorTomWolf) August 30, 2017

In case you can't see it, the advice is:

1) Get plenty of sleep.

2) Eat a good breakfast.

3) Be nice.

And he encourages Pennsylvania to have a good school year.

It's easy to just slide by this little slice of conventional, almost cliche advice, but this is where I am-- I have come to really appreciate a politician who sticks to what he knows. As a father and practicing human being, Wolf hits on three good pieces of advice that we have reason to believe he actually knows something about.

Compare this to some of the other back-to-school gubernatorial messages of the past. Like Pat McCrory of North Carolina spouting his support for teachers and his pledge to give them a raise (both, as it turns out, rather counter-factual).

Here's Gov. Steve Bullock exhorting students to "make Montana proud," and telling them to pay attention and do their homework because "it pays off." So remember kids-- there's no intrinsic rewards to education and it's not about you, anyway. Louisiana teachers got a cheery greeting from First Lady Donna Edwards that said she knows they're working hard and spending their own money, and thank you, and we've totally got your back. Five years ago Scott Walker and the Missus talked about their support for teachers and students, and how it was great that teachers were helping "get the skills they need for a career or to move on to college," because lots of these messages are just one more chance to plug the same old policy ideas.

Some messages are personal and heartfelt. Michigan's Lt. Governor Brian Calley, father of a child with autism, last year offered an encouragement to students to make friends and reach out to those who are sometimes left out.

But mostly the back-to-school format is employed as it was used by former Delaware Governor Jack Markell in 2015. It's just an opening clause. "As we welcome students back to school, I am optimistic about the year ahead... blah blah blah launch again into plugging my school reform ideas."

In fact, given the number of reformy officials who vow that they are implementing their ideas For The Children, it's remarkable how hard it is to find instances of those same officials actually addressing children, encouraging children or generally using children as anything other than a hook on which to hang their policy talking points. That is perhaps a step better than Betsy DeVos and Donald Trump, neither of whom had anything of substance to offer about the start of the school year. President's Obama and Bush I addressed school children directly during their terms (both offered remarks loosely connected to the idea of personal responsibility, and both took grief from the opposing party because, of course, politicians couldn't just say, "Gee, Mr. President, thanks for taking a direct interest in our nation's youths!")

Despite all the noise about For The Children and the please to stop politicizing education, it is remarkable how few politicians are able to put those two simple principles to work at an obvious time like back-to-school season. Talk is cheap, actions are louder, and yes, this is not That Big a Deal, but I add it to the list of actions and inactions that tell me that for all their talk, few elected officials really give a rat's posterior about education as anything other than a political game piece, a source of money for hungry corporate interests, and a nice touch for their brand.

So it's not a huge deal, but Tom Wolf's "Eat and sleep well, and be nice" struck me as a fresh, pleasant message for the children of Pennsylvania.

Free Market Segregation

The free market will never provide solutions for segregation.

Segregation is part of a functioning free market. Not (necessarily) racial segregation, but business requires sorting out the customers.

Businesses compete for customers, but they don't compete for all customers. First of all, they can't, and second of all, not all customers are created equal. Most importantly, this is part of how they stay efficient-- by not wasting marketing dollars on the wrong customers. So Lexus doesn't spend any time worrying about how their marketing plays with minimum wage workers, and McDonald's doesn't worry about how well-regarded they are by gourmands.

Businesses can most efficiently compete for customers by identifying some single features that appeal to a broad group of customers. Call it the cable effect-- after the early explosion of cable channels, what we saw was a rapid rush to the middle. Where there were once highly differentiated channels, we now have a small group of channels mostly doing versions of the same thing. It's hard to make money working a niche market.

It's also hard to be aspirational. You don't make money by giving the people what they ought to want-- you make money by giving them what they actually want. Bravo and A&E were founded on the notion that people ought to want classy highbrow culture. They've long since abandoned that notion, just as MTV had the cold, hard sense to dump its entire original reason for existing in favor of what would help them win a huge swath of audience.

The free market does not run on equal opportunity for all. Its fans get confused on this point, thinking that if a Lexus is available to anyone who can afford it, that's the same as being available to everyone. The free market does not run on principle. There are occasionally folks who declare that even though something is bad for business, they will do it because it's the right thing to do. Mostly, the free market either eats those people or converts them. Remember Google's "don't be evil" motto? Somehow when they went from plucky upstart to corporate giant, that whole thing was shelved. The free market has neither a conscience or a moral compass.

Mind you, I'm not a hard-core anti-marketer. The free market is very good for accomplishing certain sorts of things, and a couple centuries' worth of free market has, I must acknowledge,  helped build me a cushy foundation of privilege.

But the free market has no more moral quality than  hammer or a waffle iron, and when we try to reinterpret our entire culture and society in terms of the free market, when we replace th commons with the marketplace, when we turn all interactions into transactions, then we lose a moral core to our actions and become a hollow people. Government, churches, schools, community-- none of these things is made better by being recast as a business, as a market-based enterprise. You can only have one top priority; if that priority is turning a profit, then that priority is not anything else.

And the market cannot solve our great moral problems. Like segregation and inequity. As long as there are racists in our society, there will be a lucrative market for segregated schools. To expect that the free market can provide solutions to problems of social justice and equity is like expecting the free market to provide every single citizen with a Lexus-- that's simple not what the market is for. It's like trying to perform brain surgery with a chain saw. The chain saw tends more toward ripping up than careful incisions, and the free market tends toward providing any brand of injustice and inequity that can be made profitable. When the free market is made the guiding power behind education, it will favor the rich over the poor, and it will sort children into worthwhile and discards, and it will leave many, many children behind, grossly underserved or not served at all, and the degree to which public schools already do these things is the precisely the degree to which government and public education have already been infected with the free market ethos.

Why DC's Vouchers Are Failing

The DC Opportunity Scholarship Program has been one of the flagship programs in the world of voucherizing education, the only one funded by the federal government-- and its vital signs are not looking good.

2016-2017 applications to the program were up, but the number of students actually using the vouchers is down. In fact, one third of the students who received vouchers didn't use them, more than half of voucher-winners didn't use them for private school, and the total number of voucher students has dropped from 1,638 to 1,154 over the last four years.

What happened to the system that Mike Pence called "a case study in school choice success"? The folks at Future-Ed (a thinky tank at Georgetown U) looked into it and released a study of that very question.

The short answer is that everything that can be, that is likely to be, or is unavoidably bound to be wrong with a voucher program is wrong with the Opportunity Scholarship Program. It is, in fact, a test-case demonstration of why vouchers are a bad idea. Let's dive into the details.

The Politics

For DC, the problem is that the program's purse strings are held by Congress, so it is blown to and fro on the political winds. It started in 2003 under the GOP, was allowed to sputter quietly in 2009 under the Democrats, then resuscitated by the GOP again in 2011.

We don't talk about this enough with school choice, but one of the effects of choice systems is to gut local control of finances. Choice puts the purse strings in state capitals, where legislators can make decisions based on political wheeling and dealing and, unlike locally school boards, don't have to look their victims in the face when they decide that, for instance, voucher price tags will just stay static for ten years.

Enrollment (Whose Choice Was It, Again?)

The report notes that voucher use has been declining in DC for ages, and there have always been people who receive vouchers and don't use them:

This isn’t a new problem. Between 2004 and 2009, for instance, 22 percent of D.C. students receiving vouchers never used them. The most common reason cited was that students couldn’t get a spot at a preferred private school, according to a survey conducted by researchers for the U.S. Education Department. Other parents cited a lack of resources at private schools for students with special learning needs or admission to a preferred charter school. Some students simply didn’t want to leave their friends.

Emphasis mine. Once again, the basic promise of school choice-- that parents will get to choose the school they want fro their children-- turns out to be inaccurate. In a choice system, it's the schools that choose which students they will admit.

Nor did voucher students pile into the "high-performing" schools-- only 51 vouchers were used in the top schools. And while vouchers provide $8,653 for elementary students and $12,981 for high schoolers, some of DC's top schools charge in the neighborhood of $40K for tuition.

Transparency (Not)

One recurring note struck in the study is that parents did not have access to information about the quality of the schools involved in the voucher system. That was also a problem for the writers of this report-- the voucher system (Serving Our Children) wouldn't provide information about how many students attended which of the private schools in the study citing "student privacy."

Schools involved in the program are not required to tell anybody anything. The school choice notion that parents will pore through data rich reports to find the high-quality school of their dreams is itself a dream. DC public schools must publish detailed test result data:

By contrast, little information is available for parents about private school performance under D.C.’s voucher program. While Serving Our Children offers a handbook describing each of the schools involved, it does not provide information on performance. By law, private schools in the program must prove only that they are accredited and meet health and building codes, not that they are successfully educating students. The District’s elite private schools, worried about devaluing their brands, made it a requirement of their participation that they would not have to disclose test score information on voucher students—despite the use of taxpayer funding to support the vouchers.

Not only is data not available to the "customers," but voucher schools have made that a requirement. But larger studies have repeatedly shown that voucher-using students don't do better, and often do worse. Meanwhile, the report notes new voucher students opening in store fronts and shopping malls, "some relying on voucher students for more than half of their population." In other words, the K-12 equivalent of predatory for-profit colleges-- but with no information available about their actual success at schooling.

Tax Subsidies for the Not-So-Needy

There is a bit of a complication in that voucher awarding doesn't quite synch up with private school admissions. But look at how one school suggests that be handled:

One admissions officer from an elite private school told us he counsels interested students to apply in the fall and gamble that they will receive a voucher in the spring lottery. If the school really wants the student, it will offer a scholarship—then deduct the amount of the voucher from the scholarship. In such instances, the voucher program is merely subsidizing the financial aid offices of elite schools.

Church and State

As we have seen in many voucher programs, DC's vouchers are primarily a means of funneling public tax dollars to private religious schools. 47% of the vouchers went to Catholic schools; another 21% went to religious schools of other denominations.

Satisfactory Segregation

The report finds that voucher schools do better on graduation rates (it would be surprising if they didn't) and that voucher parents are more satisfied with "safety," which I suspect may translate easily into satisfaction that their children don't have to go to school with Those People's Children any more.

Conclusion

The study is pretty brutal in the end:

Congress has justified its multi-million dollar investment in the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program by claiming it gives parents the choice of a high-quality educational experience for their children. But the data on the 13-year-old program suggests there is neither robust demand for the private school choices on offer nor firm evidence of educational improvement for the students receiving vouchers. 

Far from serving as a case study for expanded federal investment in private school choice, D.C.’s experience points to the shortcomings of voucher systems with complicated admissions processes, scant information on school quality, and little access to the best schools.

There it is. Far from being a Proof of Concept system, DC's voucher program is a stark display of everything that can be, and I would argue is likely to be, wrong with a school choice system.

The Night Before

T'was the night before students, and all through my noggin
My thoughts were all stirring, like a drunken toboggan.
My artwork was hung on the corkboard with care
In hopes that my students would soon ‘nough be there.
The textbooks are nestled all snug on the shelves
It took me six hours—what? You think I have elves?
Yeah, my wife in her classroom and I in my cap
Just hoped by October we’ll get just one nap,
But up in my brainpan there rose such a clatter
I tossed and I turned thinking “What's still the matter?"
In my head I kept wondering what might ail my plans--
Did I skip a main point? Did I use comic sans?
My brain , so wrapped up in the things I can’t know
Gives a lustre of panic to my gut far below.

Would some jolly old man come, my classroom to save?
No, my admin’s a ma’m who expects I’ll behave.
So we’ll skip the poem section with deux ex Santa,
And go straight to the—crap! What the hell rhymes with Santa?
I’ve had this day many times—over three dozen
And still, night before, you’ll find me sucking lozen--
ges made to help fight nervous heartburn
As I wonder—will I see this year’s student crop learn?
Will I get them to scale the great education wall?
Or will they dash away, dash away, dash away all
Will they spark to the classics? Will my team hear me whistle?
Or will I chow down on failure tough as dried thistle?
Oh, I know it’s just jitters, those pre-curtain nerves.
When the curtain goes up, I’ll feel power and lerves.
But until then I’ll lie here with mares of the night.
Happy first day tomorrow! There’s no sleep tonight.

Tomorrow is the first day back for students, which means it's one night I'm guaranteed the Teacher Nightmare. Ordinary people have night mares about showing up in church without pants. Teachers have night mares about showing up for class without plans and the students are out of control or you can't even find your own classroom. Basically a complete professional collapse.

Tonight, despite all the preparation, despite all the experience, there's a million things we can't know until we meet the students, see what they know, see how they tick, see who will come running to meet us and who will stay back throwing rocks in our general direction. We've rehearsed many times (for some of us many, many, many times) and yet that rehearsal was only to be ready for the unexpected, not to lock everything into immutable place.

Our success will depend on our preparation, our knowledge of the material, and-- scariest of all-- our willingness to be present, to be really there with our students. Which of course means we have to be vulnerable. And so, when the fear and uncertainty hit, the most natural impulse in the world is to protect ourselves, to cover up. And yet to do that is to wall ourselves off from our students, to deny a teacher-student relationship with them, to be rigid, guarded, even defensive. All of which only gets in the way of the work.

And newbies-- here's one of the secrets they never tell you-- you will never be absolutely certain, never believe that you have everything under control, never reach a point where you are certain you have nothing left to learn or perfect or grow. (This is why I'm certain that some charter operators and school leaders like Eva Moskowitz don't know what they're talking about-- because they're 100% certain they know what they're talking about, and if you're 100% certain, then you don't understand the situation).

This year comes with extra nervousness at our house. For the first time in twelve weeks, for a few hours, we will be parting company with these guys:

I did this thirty-ish years ago, and it was hard then. To take two tiny humans that you have cared for and in whom you've invested your whole heart, and turn them over to somebody else while you go off to work. I can't tell you how many times I got all weepy over leaving my first two, and I don't expect it's going to be any better this time.

But it's a reminder-- every student who sits in my classroom was somebody's baby. I teach high school students, so they're not very babylike now, and yeah, I know not all parents are fully invested in their kids. But still. These were somebody's babies, and those somebodies mostly trust us with that precious cargo. They deserve the best I can give them, and they deserve someone who shows up 100%, and they deserve someone who watches out for them and helps them discover what it means for them to be fully human, fully themselves in the world. And when I'm in my room and they're walking it, it will hit me like a bathtub full of warm water and the nerves and the worry will just slough off.

But for right now I am going to finish up and probably not sleep, because I think I need to rewrite a couple of questions on the quiz tomorrow, and I didn't get papers set out for third period and I think I need to re-arrange the desks a little. And I never got around to picking out a shirt today. And to all a good night.

Read This Book: P. L. Thomas and Trumplandia

One of the first bloggers I stumbled across when I fell down the internet edublogs rabbit hole was P. L. Thomas. I found his writing engaging and interesting, but challenging. Thomas can write about big ideas and keep them anchored to the nuts and bolts at the same time. I've always said I like to read hist stuff because it always makes me feel smarter. We also traded some messages about classic seventies comic books, and I admire (without attempting to imitate) his biking prowess.

So it was a real pleasure to have a book by Thomas on my reading pile this summer. Trumplandia: Unmasking Post-Truth America is another hard-hitting book from the folks at Garn Press, a publishing start-up focusing on social justice.

Thomas is good at making connections, and while many of us are getting caught down in the sheer volume of post-truth muck in Trump's America, Thomas has a real gift for staying above personal arguments and focusing on ideas. Democracy, race, class, education, poetry, and the very bending of Truth itself as we've watched it be hammered on for the past few years. Thomas is ridiculously well-read, but he is also a winner of the NCTE George Orwell Award for Distinguished Honesty and Clarity in Public Language, so he never leaves you feeling like you've been buried in a hail of erudition, lost in a scholarly fog. He's clear and smart, but he writes with a transparency that opens doors for the reader rather than leaving them stranded in the foyer, thinking they don't know enough to enter. Like I said-- reading his work makes me feel smarter.

Thomas does the best of what any of us can hope for in these times-- see clearly the Kafkaesque mess that is engulfing our country (some of it new, and some of it not so new) while still seeing the virtues, the better qualities that can guide us through this mess, if we'll just embrace our natures. That makes this book a great back-to-school read. Click right now and buy a copy.