NH: Public Education under Voucher Attack

Public education is under attack in New Hampshire.

As is the case in many states (almost as if, some larger group or network is coordinating these legislative attacks in multiple states), New Hampshire is looking at the possibility of a new sort of voucher law-- the education savings account (in New Hampshire, they're now called "education freedom savings accounts") This battle is not exactly new for the Granite State, where educational tax credits, a back-door voucher approach, cropped up at the beginning of the decade without becoming a rousing success.

The bill is SB-193, and it has already passed the NH Senate and the House education committee will be considering it shortly. If you are a New Hampshire resident, here are some reasons you should care.

Scaling the Wall

Why ESAs? Because a straight up voucher system tends to violate the separation of church and state.
Your tax dollars go to support Super Conservative Evangelical Christian School or the local Catholic School (lots of church folks will say that sounds fine, but I'm waiting for the day their tax dollars are routed toward Sharia Law High School).

But the ESAs will handled by a "scholarship organization," a third party that will hold the child's voucher (and get a 5% fee, so here's a whole new lucrative business to launch). It's a pretty transparent dodger-- I can't give Pat money, so I'll just give it to Chris and Chris can give it to Pat-- but if you're only worried about looking legal and not actually being legal, it may be good enough.

But the record on vouchers is pretty clear-- look at Indiana or Wisconsin or DC and you'll see that vouchers mostly steer public tax dollars to private religious schools.

Unaccountable Tax Dollars

ESAs may be spent on private school tuition. Or educational equipment like computers. Or books. Or tutors. Or online education programs. Or pay for your SAT and AP exams.

Granted, whatever they do, they won't do much. The bill's sponsor said back in April that the voucher would be for about $4,400, and more recently published reports put it around $3,500-- neither an amount which is not going to get you into Phillips Exeter Academy (annual tuition about $47K). But whatever they do, the taxpayers aren't going to know much about it. The bill includes requirements that the number fo students be reported, and that parents be surveyed to find out how happy they are with the program, but there's no requirement that anybody make sure that taxpayer dollars aren't being spent on tutors from the Flat Earth Society or otherwise wasted.

This remains one of my puzzlements about voucher programs. Since when were conservatives the ones who wanted zero accountability for how their tax dollars were spent. And yet, that's what SB-193 calls for. Once you tax dollars disappear into an ESA, you'll never know how they were spent. You could call it magic, or money laundering.

At last April's hearing, bill sponsor Sen. John Regan's response to this point was that they have no idea how public schools are spending money now. Regan is the head of the Senate education committee, and this astonishingly ignorant comment was greeted with the sound of school chiefs' jaws hitting the floor (really? the Senate education committee has no access to detailed reports on school spending?).

Unusable Vouchers

Once again, parents will dream of being able to enroll their child in whatever school they choose. And once again, parents will be surprised to discover that they don't actually have a choice. Have a child with special disability? Want to send your child to a particular private school even though your child might not be the right race or religion? Tough. It's a private school. They don't have to accept your child if they don't want to. Thus highlighting one of the worst features of a voucher system-- taxpayers get to send their tax dollars to support a school that would refuse to educate their own child.

These vouchers will provide a nice bonus for families that can already afford private school. It will provide little or no help to the poorest and most vulnerable students in New Hampshire.

Not-very-hidden Costs

Every voucher represents money stripped from a public school system. While money may travel with the students, huge costs stay in the school district of origin, leaving that district with one of two choices-- cut programs or raise taxes.

The bill itself says it has no idea what the financial impact of the bill will be. In fact, it hilarious extends this not knowing in a chart that covers the next four years.

More Red Flags

The bill is supported by New Hampshire's Commissioner of the Department of Education, Frank Edelblut, a homeschooler businessman-turned-politician. He challenged Chris Sununu for the GOP gubernatorial nomination last year, and then threw his support behind Sununu. In return, when Sununu became governor, he handed Edelblut the education job. Edelblut has no particular background or qualifications in education, and he has been hard to pin down on issues like "should schools teach creationism?" Edelblut has been honored by one of the Koch Brothers astroturf groups, and has expressed his desire to emulate Florida, a state that ranks near the bottom the barel in educating children, but is front of the pack when it comes to letting all manner of entrepreneurs, shysters and scam artists make money in the education biz.

Edelblut thinks SB 193 is super.

On a personal note

My grandmother graduated from the University of New Hampshire in 1927 and began teaching, before she married my grandfather. She intended to settle down quietly with my grandfather, but she ended up running for local school board, and then slowly worked her way up politically until she joined the NH House of Representatives in 1961 and served for over thirty years. While she spent most of her career chairing the House Environment and Agriculture committee, she also headed up the Education Committee for a time.

She was a staunch Republican of the old school. When Chris Sununu's father John was Governor, my grandmother didn't have many nice things to say about him. Later in her career, she began to feel that the GOP was deserting her. I don't think SB 193 would have appealed to her much at all.

For many people, New Hampshire is that tiny little state you hear about every four years, but it's where I was born. I lived there until I was nine, and returned regularly because that's where all of my family's family lived. It has always been a practical, solid place to me, and it hurts to see it collapse into this sort of anti-public school privatization frenzy.

The next House Education Committee meeting is November 8th. If I were still a New Hampshire resident, I would be on the phone to my representative, particularly if he's on the education committee (and this site also gives you email links). The continued gutting of public education should be resisted vigorously>

Full Range of Reformsters Unite for Video Contest

Education Post, you may recall, is a site nominally on the progressive-flavored wing of the reformster movement and headed up by Peter Cunningham. Cunningham is an old Chicago hand who worked assistant secretary for communications and outreach in the U.S. Department of Education in the Arne Duncan Department of Education. EdPost is backed by some big money, like Eli Broad and Laurene Jobs' Emerson Collective (which has given Duncan a job). Because for a while, a bunch of billionaires were really concerned that they were overmatched in the media by a bunch of bloggers writing for free on their lunch hours. I guess the world looks different when you're a billionaire.

Given that pedigree, it is not surprising when EdPost promotes charters and choice. What's a teensy bit surprising is whom they've teamed up with this time to do it. This contest runs the full gamut of reformsters from A to B.

So maybe we actually are kind of similar

Yesterday they happily announced a sort of contest to crowd-source some school choice PR, because, you know, "better conversations." (Yes, I linked to EdPost-- it's no fair to talk about someone without letting readers see for themselves if they're so inclined.)

The Choices in Education contest has its very own website, and the premise looks similar to Jeanne Allen's "Let's Show John Oliver He's  big Doodyhead" contest from last year. Just make a video with your phone about how choice changed or your life (or why you desperately need it in your state) all in order to "elevate the story" of people's choices. Three top winners get $15K, three more get $5K, and there's a pair of people's choice awards for $5K each-- so a cool $70K. The contest encourages you to shoot the video with your phone, perhaps because they want that "real people support us" look and in part because a slick looking ad would just draw attention to the fact that reformsters have tons of money to throw around on PR stunts. I can't even imagine a world in which public schools could wave a giant wad of money around and holler, "This stack of cash goes to the people who do the best job of saying nice things about u."

But a closer look makes this contest even more interesting. First of all, instead of focusing only on charter schools, this contest is to promote a broader agenda:

There is no “one size fits all” school or educational model that works for everyone. That is why it is important for students and families to have the freedom to choose the pathway that best meets their needs, whether that is a different public school, charter, magnet, private school, virtual/blended, or homeschool.

That  moves us away from the strictly-charter advocacy and into something more closely aligned with, well, the agenda of Betsy DeVos. Plenty of charter advocates have cast a leery eye on voucher systems-- but this contest loves it all. And EdPost is promoting it.

Whose contest is this, exactly?

Well, the main address on the site is that of the Foundation for Excellence in Education, the Florida-based group that, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, was going to provide a platform to help launch Jeb Bush to the White House. FEE has actually changed its name, at least in some places, to ExcelInEd, a group that includes all the same players and still calls itself the Foundation for Excellence in Education in the fine print on its site. I bring ExcelInEd up only because they are nominally the launchers of this contest. Mostly I am just dying for them to open an Ohio branch so that we can call them EiEiO. FEE/EiE is one of the older, more well-entrenched reformy groups with a Who's Who of deep-pocketed donaters including Gates, Walton, Broad, Kellogg, Bloomberg, Schwab, News Corporation and Dick and Besy DeVos. 

Also sponsoring the contest? American Federation for Children, Betsy DeVos's advocacy group. AFC is a dark money group that has been working hard to push privatization of education in this country (for the children).  

Also? EdChoice, the advocacy group previously known as the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, the group launched by Milton Friedman. 

National School Choice Week, the Foundation for Blended and Online Learning, Agudath Israel of America, and Classical Conversations (that last group provides content materials for homeschooling parents focusing on the three C's-- classical, Christian, and community). 

So while this contest does represent more of the same old, same old, it has certainly drawn together an assortment of bedfellows. And as was the case with Jeanne Allen who used to think Trump and his administration was awful, but then she got over it, more and more reformsters, even the supposedly progressive ones, are more and more willing to align themselves with the DeVosian agenda after all. While folks in the reform movement may try to put some distance between themselves and other elements, it seems they can still bridge the tiny gaps tat sort of separate them.

In the meantime, your entry should only include you and your family members, and it has to be under two minutes. Grab your smart phone and record what you think about school choice today! Maybe you'll win $15,00o. In the meantime it's heartwarming to know that voucher vs. charter, free market vs. social justice, GOP vs. Democrats, reformsters don't have all that much trouble putting their differences aside in order to pursue the privatization of American education.

David Coleman's He-Man Woman-Haters Test

Turns out the bold new SAT test has some bold new problems, specifically when it comes to getting results for female students. David Coleman's SAT rebuild may still have a few bugs in it.

Mercedes Schneider wrote about this yesterday, but it's a story that deserves to be amplified and spread far and wide, because the implications for young women trying to get into college are troubling.

This new report comes from Art Sawyer, a test prep guru who founded and operates Compass Education Group, the leader in one-on-one test prep.

You can look at this post which is basically a research summary, light on the commentary and heavy on the wonkery. Or you can start with this post which spends less time shuffling data and more time drawing conclusions in order to ask big questions.

Sifting through the data reveals that two changes have affected the male-female ratio of high scorers. The change back to the classic 1600 scale (in place of the decade's 2400), as well as the change in how writing is scored in the test have both reduced the percentage of female top scorers. Menahiwle, fiddling with the math has actually increased female top-scoring-- but not enough to offset the other effects.

Bottom line: female students have a harder time hitting the highest band of scores on the new SAT. High performing females are now, suddenly, at an SAT disadvantage.

There are many implications for that result, not the least of which is that colleges and universities that use a hard (or hard-ish) SAT cut score may be unintentionally tilting their new freshman classes toward the testosterone side. And if they base any grant decisions on SAT scores, then women will be getting the short end of the aid stick as well.

What exactly accounts for this shift in score results. Sawyer theorizes that the handling of the writing portion (females used to outpace males on the old written section) may account for it, but he also theorizes that the SAT folks were sloppy in their test redesign, and he has some significant scolds for them, a list of actions that the College Board folks ought to take:

College Board should state the policy it took on subgroup score differences in designing the new SAT.

Sawyer says the SAT folks used to have a policy that no redesign could be allowed to make any subgroup scoring gaps widen. They either ignored or violated that policy here.

College Board should share the data it had both before, during, and after the creation of the new SAT.

College Board should explain why it stopped publishing key information.

You haven't heard about any of this because the College Board has been deliberately not talking about it. Sawyer says they should end their silence.

The further disadvantaging of female students was a foreseeable consequence of the new SAT’s change in structure and scoring.

The College Board can't pretend that they didn't know this was happening, or that such shifts weren't going to happen. Unless, and this is my thought and not Sawyer's, they were so very sloppy that they did not adequately pre-test the test, and so they didn't know.

The difference in observed results for male and female testers must not be accepted as an inevitable result of standardized testing. It is not.

Sawyer repeatedly underlines the point that this score gap is a result of test design issues, and not something that, you know, just happens when you give boys and girls a standardized test.

The SAT and PSAT are increasingly government funded, and decisions regarding them are a matter of public policy.

Ooooh! Interesting point. As SAT fees are increasingly paid for by states (because the College Board has successfully mis-marketed the SAT as a high school exit exam), this is increasingly a government-funded business, which means that they get to enjoy some government-initiated meddling. Well, maybe not under this administration, but still-- this is a matter of policy and not just private business matters.

The mission creep of the SAT and PSAT has extended the import of score result differences into new terrain.

For example, the PSAT is now used as a marketing tool for AP courses (Your PSAT scores come with a "Here's the AP course you should enroll in" blurb.) The PSAT tells if a student "has potential" for AP coursework. Do women now have less potential for AP success?

And finally, Sawyer unleashes this scorcher--

Compass’ own research on this topic should be unnecessary, because it is properly the College Board’s responsibility.

In other words, do your damn job, College Board.

Disagreeing about Education's Purpose

One way of understanding the differences between the many voices of reformsterism and public education support is to dig down to the fundamental differences of vision, the fundamental disagreements about what a school is for.

There are some obvious differences. For instance, some folks think that the purpose of an education is to create a well-rounded, self-actualizing individual who has a deeper understanding of the world and how to make one's way through it as a human being.

We also have folks who think that the purpose of education is to prepare students to get a job and please their future employers. These, unsurprisingly, are folks like the Chamber of Commerce and other representatives of the business community, who are hoping for a fuller pipeline of drones for their jobs. Should workers have a life beyond the workplace? Not their problem. This is not new-- it's been an issue since Andrew Carnegie told his factory workers that A) for the good of the company they must work twelve hours a day, seven days a week and B) they should enrich their lives with rewarding leisure activities and self-education through a local library.

And we have members of the Cult of Testing who believe that the purpose of school is to prepare students to take a Big Standardized Test. They make themselves comfortable with this narrow and cramped definition by telling themselves that the test score is a valid proxy for "student achievement" or other educational goals. They are kidding themselves.

Let's dig past that.

As charters, choice, and vouchers gain more ground in the educational world, some observers note with alarm that all of this takes us closer to a two tier system, where the folks on top get a full, rich education and the folks on the bottom get a narrow, meager, underfunded training to suit their future (possible) employers. But for some, a two-tiered system is exactly the point.

What we have here is a failure to share the same fundamental goal for education.

For some folks, the goal of education is to lift all boats, to bring all students forward, to bring every single one to a better life, to be more successful, and more fully themselves. And that is supposed to happen for every single student. Everyone should rise.

For other folks, education is about sorting the worthy from the unworthy.. It's about making sure that everyone gets what they deserve, and it sets that goal on top of a foundation stone that says not all people are equally deserving. 

The risers and the sorters will both talk about better schools for the non-wealthy and the non-white. But risers believe schools should be made to lift everyone in poor, underserved communities. Sorters believe that the system should allow those who deserve to get ahead to do so, but they assume that not everybody (probably not even the majority) will prove themselves worthy.

Vouchers and charters won't "rescue" everyone-- but that's okay, because not everyone should be rescued. Just as with welfare and health insurance for all, some folks think that the best education should be provided for everyone, and some people believe that the government has no business taking my hard-earned money to provide Nice Things for people who haven't earned it.

Sorters are drawn to a business model because the market also sorts. Do you want a Lexus? You'll have to earn it.

So at the root of the education debates, we find people who have a fundamental disagreement about what government and public education are supposed to do. For some, the role of government is to establish a system that doesn't stop the virtuous and hard-working and clever and, well, just better from getting ahead (of everyone else). Pointing out to them that vouchers and choice create a two-tiered system is like telling someone that their new haircut makes them look really attractive-- you can't be surprised when they react by being pleased.

PA: Vouchers Stopped for Now

Senate Bill 2, the bill that was intended to put Education Savings Accounts (aka vouchers) in Pennsylvania, did not make it out of committee after all.

That's the good news.  By a 6-6 vote, momentarily made suspenseful by some rules shenanigans, the bill has stalled in the Senate Education committee.

PennLive coverage also offers some clarification on one bill point. While the language of the original left the door wide open for any student who had ever spent one semester in pubic school to get a voucher-- er, Education Savings Account (in other words, if your child spent one semester in public school first grade and has been in private school for ten years since, you get a voucher today and the public school loses state money without actually losing a student)-- anyway, the main sponsor of the bill, John DiSanto (R) told PennLive that students currently enrolled in private schools would be ineligible for the vouchers. That clarification would make a tremendous difference in the financial hit to public school districts. It would also, I'd imagine, piss off the parents of current private and home-schooled students and give them a real reason to put their children back in public schools for just one semester.

But there's bad news.

The bill did not stall because opposition to vouchers rose up and smote it. The final tying vote came from Sen. Anthony Williams, D-Philadelphia, who likes school choice just fine-- but who didn't get a chance to read the bill carefully and figure out exactly what effect it would have on his constituents.

In other words, the support for a bill like SB2 is there in the education committee-- it just failed to completely organize itself this time. So stay vigilant, because this will be back again.

The Core and Bad Supervision

Here's another problem we don't discuss often enough.

Education is one of the few fields where supervisors and administrators don't understand what the vast majority of their supervisees do.

Building principals and superintendents usually come up through the teaching ranks. But they come up through a particular discipline.

You could make me a school superintendent tomorrow. You could even train me for the job for a few years. But at the end, I would have only a tangential understanding of what the elementary teachers or the math teachers or the industrial arts teachers in my district do. I mean, teaching is teaching, and I can certainly supervise the process and tell whether they're on the mark or not. But are they teaching the right content? Are they teaching it well? If the science department comes and tells me they want to try this new book series, I won't be in any position to evaluate the quality of those books. And if I've got to oversee the development of a new social studies curriculum-- well, I don't really know enough about what social studies teachers do to be able to tell whether that's on track or not.

The last almost-two-decades of ed reform have put math and reading in the spotlight. The pressure has been on to lift the quality of these programs in schools. And yet all across the country, there are math and English teachers being supervised by administrators who literally have no idea what those teachers do in their classrooms.

Enter the Common Core (or [Your Name Here]) Standards.

Administrator: I don't really know what exactly does, or should, go on in a math or English class.

Standards: Here's a handy checklist of what should be happening.

Administrator: Hey, look! Now I know exactly what math and English teachers can and should do!

The cruel irony here is that the standards were developed by people who also did not understand what math and English teachers actually do. So what we get is a tone-deaf person's ideas about how to lead a symphony orchestra.

Certainly it doesn't have to be that way. I have never worked for a principal or superintendent who was previously an English teacher, and yet plenty of them have educated themselves and consulted experts in the field (aka the people who work right here in the building) in order to build an understanding of what teaching English is about.

But I've heard and read the tales of teachers out there in the world who work for supervisors who are lazy or overwhelmed or just not very good who just grab the standards, wave them in the teacher's face, and say, "This. You're supposed to be doing this." Then they call it a day.

This is one more bad side effect of the standards-- the enabling of bad administrators who practice unthinking Management By Checklist.

Addressing Bias

It may be one of the biggest unaddressed issues in education.

Here comes yet another study that makes another variation on a point we're seeing over and over again-- white teachers have lower expectations of black students, and that has consequences for those students. Add that to the stack with studies like the ones showing that white teachers are less likely to identify black students as gifted.

This particular study appears in Education Next, the Fordham publication, so there's a natural inclination to view it with jaundiced eye, to look for the angle that benefits reformsters. But it's always important for public education advocates to remember that while many reform solutions are fake, many of the problems they address are real. Those include a widespread systemic problem with racism. I don't doubt the accuracy of the findings here.

If you are a teacher of my generation, you know about expectations. It was drilled into us that expectations were super-important, that what our students would do would depend a great deal on what we believed they could do. That belief in expectations has swung into some silly territory (the Duncan administration's belief that the power of expectations would basically erase learning disabilities), but the fundamental principle remains sound-- what we expect has a lot to do with what we get.

Tie the power of expectations to the power of implicit bias, and you have a problem-- particularly in a system in which the ratio of white teachers to non-white students is so completely out of whack.

So we could try to pick apart this study, look at correlation vs. causation, talk about just how big (or not big) an effect is presented here. But I'm not going to. First, I know I have the standard white reflex to being called racist-- my impulse for denial is up and running before my impulse to self-examine can even put its shoes on. Second, regardless of what the research does or doesn't say, I know there's an issue. Hell, most everybody knows there's an issue. So can we talk about what to do?

There have been numerous attempts to address the super-whiteness of the teacher work force, including attempts to open up alternative paths. Teach for America, in one of its rebranding redefining of its mission, decided it would work at getting non-white teachers in the classroom. But much of the research suggests that the problem is not so much recruiting as retention. And that brings us back to the uncomfortable notion that teachers of color do not end up feeling that the school is not a place that welcomes or supports or fits them. So maybe we need to shift the conversation from recruiting teachers of color to supporting and welcoming them.

And since the super-white nature of the teacher pool is not going to dramatically reverse any time in the immediate future, maybe we need to put an addendum on the discussion of teacher expectations, so that it's not just "Your expectations affect your student's achievement" but also "You probably have some implicit biases that have an effect on your expectations for your students-- particularly students of color."

This should be part of every teacher's training. Every. Teacher.

At a minimum, we need to build mindfulness into the system. One of my greatest privileges as a white guy is that I don't have to think about race unless I choose to (or unless something like a protest pushes it into my face). But I should. It should be on my mind every time I'm in front of students. It's not that difficult-- as a teacher, I'm on alert for several different classroom factors all the time, while I'm doing my job. I should also be alert to my own biases, especially the ones that I'm not always conscious of. And every one of my new colleagues should be getting that kind of training, just as they get classroom management training and test-scoring training and, God help us, aligning instruction to the damn standards training.

We can do better. And we should.